Da 3 a 6 mesi prima dell'IRAQ - gzibordi
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By: GZ on Lunedì 17 Giugno 2002 04:42
La storia di prima pagina del WALL STREET JOURNAL spiega in modo molto dettagliato come si sia arrivati già da mesi alla decisione di rovesciare Saddam Hussein e come il conto alla rovescia sia già iniziato.
In termini pratici il tempo necessario per l'intervento è stimato da più parti in 3-6 mesi (6 secondo il WSJ, 3 mesi secondo Debka) perchè richiede truppe di terra oltre che l'addestramento delle forze kurde e irachene dissidenti.
Oltre a quello scritto qui ci sono anche notizie del fatto che l'ultimo viaggio in Palestina di funzionari CIA e del governo aveva, sotto la copertura di dover parlare di Israele e la Palestina, come scopo vero di incontrarsi al confine con la Giordania con esponenti del Congresso nazionale iracheno che organizzano l'opposizione e altri dettagli simili e convergenti si trovano su stratfor o debka nelle ultime due settimane.
Può darsi che negli hedge fund si tengano più informati della media degli investitori su questa vicenda
June 14, 2002
How Bush Decided That Hussein
Must Be Ousted From Atop Iraq
By CARLA ANNE ROBBINS and JEANNE CUMMINGS
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
WASHINGTON -- In the chaotic days after Sept. 11, as several of his top advisers argued over whether to launch a strike on Iraq, President Bush sided with those urging restraint.
There was, after all, no real evidence that Saddam Hussein's regime had anything to do with the terror attacks. And President Bush wanted to keep the focus on al Qaeda, the Afghanistan-based terrorist group that engineered the deadly hijackings.
But now, a showdown with Iraq appears nearly inevitable. What happened?
In late October, the president received a series of chilling briefings that persuaded him that Iraq posed a major threat to America. U.S. intelligence agencies, he was told, had begun picking up warnings of an even more spectacular attack -- one that, according to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, could "make Sept. 11 look like child's play by using some terrible weapon." Other officials say the warnings came shortly after the U.S. identified four Pakistani scientists who appeared to have coached Osama bin Laden's terror organization in a quest to acquire nuclear weapons or material.
Putting two and two together, the administration in the last few days of October sent private notices to Washington police and congressional intelligence committees about the threat of a "dirty bomb" that uses conventional explosives to spew radioactive material. And, just as it had done immediately after Sept. 11, the White House again decided to keep Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney separated, to make sure that at least one would survive any such attack.
The attack didn't come. Nor, again, could Iraq be linked to any nuclear plot. Nevertheless, the knowledge that al Qaeda was aggressively searching for weapons of mass destruction -- and wooing outside support -- transformed the president's thinking about America's enemies, and the horrors that could unfold if any of them made such weapons available to terrorists. As Mr. Bush and his advisers ticked off likely candidates, Iraq topped the list of countries with both an arsenal of chemical, biological and perhaps nuclear weapons, and the apparent will to use them.
"It's not because you have some chain of evidence saying Iraq may have given a weapon to al Qaeda," Ms. Rice says, as she recounts the evolution of Mr. Bush's thinking. "But it is because Iraq is one of those places that is both hostile to us, and, frankly, irresponsible and cruel enough to make this available."
Beyond U.S. policy toward Iraq, the episode helps explain why the White House has begun a fundamental reassessment of national-security doctrine. During the Cold War, the U.S. relied on the threat of massive retaliation to deter attacks from hostile countries. But Sept. 11, and all the U.S. has learned since about the terrorists' appetite for devastating weapons and their utter lack of concern for their own survival, has persuaded Mr. Bush that sometimes the U.S. will have to strike first against its enemies.
"If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long," Mr. Bush told graduating cadets at West Point two weeks ago.
While Mr. Bush didn't mention Iraq by name, it increasingly looks like the proving ground for that new approach. In private, the president has asked the Pentagon's top brass what it would take to oust Saddam Hussein militarily. In public, he regularly warns Americans of the danger he sees. Speaking in Germany late last month, he called a potential Iraq-al Qaeda alliance "a threat to civilization itself."
U.S. officials say no final decision has been made on whether to move militarily against Iraq. Military commanders have told Mr. Bush that the task could require some 200,000 troops, and, given the strains of the Afghan campaign, about six months to get troops and weapons ready. Key civilian leaders in the Pentagon and the White House argue that the job can be done smaller and faster. The debate is likely to continue throughout the fall, officials say, before the president decides what course to take.
This focus on Iraq was far from preordained. In his first nine months in office, in fact, Mr. Bush hadn't made Iraq a top priority, and an interagency review on the country was languishing on Sept. 11. Immediately after the terror strikes on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, Mr. Bush had actually overruled advisers who wanted to take on Iraq along with Afghanistan in the first wave of the new war on terrorism. "I don't know about the hypothetical, of what we would have done if we'd had absolute evidence that Iraq was involved," says a senior official, but with the threat of more attacks to come "it made a lot of sense at that moment" to focus on taking down al Qaeda.
The picture is quite different from the common assumption that Mr. Bush's prime motivation is to settle an old score for his father, who drove Iraqi forces from Kuwait but failed to do away with Saddam Hussein. That bit of family business appears to have little to do with Mr. Bush's current attitude.
Even in the first weeks after Sept. 11, Iraq didn't figure prominently in Mr. Bush's thinking, particularly after Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet reported there was "no evidence" Iraq was involved. On Sept. 20, when the president made a now-famous speech to a joint session of Congress calling for a global war on terrorism, he pointedly made no mention of Iraq.
But soon afterward, other fears started growing, reaching a peak in the last 10 days of October.
Sometime after Sept. 11, U.S. intelligence agencies learned that two Pakistani nuclear scientists, members of a pro-Taliban Islamic charity and experts on nuclear fuel, had traveled to Afghanistan to meet with Mr. bin Laden. Pakistan's secret service picked up the two in the third week in October, and news of their arrests has become public. After their release, the two were kept under surveillance.
Serious Concern
But there was another, perhaps more-serious concern. U.S. officials now say they were even more worried about two other scientists, veterans of Pakistan's nuclear-weapons complex and associates of the first two scientists. One of them was already suspected of trying to sell weapons designs to unsavory clients. While the U.S. had no information that they, too, had traveled to Afghanistan, analysts were worried that they had still managed to pass on critical information about how to build weapons to al Qaeda. U.S. officials declined to comment on their current whereabouts.
These nuclear fears jumped dramatically in late October, officials say, when U.S. intelligence began picking up intercepted conversations and other warnings predicting an even more spectacular attack to come. The warnings mentioned specific windows of time. But they didn't refer to specific weapons or locations. Analysts assumed the target was either Washington or New York City. The onset of anthrax mail attacks a few weeks earlier only fed that anxiety.
Some intelligence analysts cautioned that the statements might be empty boasting, especially at a time when U.S. bombers were pounding Afghanistan daily. But the reports that al Qaeda had gotten coaching from Pakistani nuclear experts led others to theorize something far more terrifying: that al Qaeda had already managed to smuggle in a so-called dirty bomb, a conventional explosive wrapped with radioactive material, or possibly even a small nuclear weapon -- although the latter was considered far more difficult to acquire and less likely to have occurred.
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By the last few days of October, the White House was so persuaded about the danger that officials quietly informed local police in Washington and the Congressional intelligence committees of the dirty-bomb threat.
Mr. Tenet, the CIA director, testified in 1999 that Mr. bin Laden had declared it his religious duty to acquire weapons of mass destruction. Now, during the last 10 days of October, Mr. Tenet gave several new briefings to the president and his top aides at the White House about al Qaeda's desire to acquire such weapons and what the group might be planning.
As part of his late October briefings, Mr. Tenet discussed which other countries had the capability and the malice to help al Qaeda acquire weapons of mass destruction. And for that, Iraq topped the list.
Visitors to the White House at the time reported privately that Mr. Bush seemed haunted by a nuclear threat. At one of his morning intelligence briefings he told his advisers, "We have to be thankful that on Sept. 11 they didn't have a weapon of mass destruction instead of an airplane," recalls one participant. And every day for at least two weeks he ended those meetings exhorting the group, "We have to make sure that this doesn't happen."
In early November, in a speech broadcast to a European antiterrorism summit, Mr. Bush made his first public mention of the danger, warning that al Qaeda is seeking chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.
There was another bit of troubling intelligence emerging. Czech intelligence officials reported that Sept. 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta had met an Iraqi agent in Prague in April of 2001. That presented a possible Iraqi connection -- not a nuclear one, but one tied to a terrorist who had just targeted the U.S. mainland. U.S. intelligence officials said the Czechs had no hard proof to back up the claim.
All told, the environment was becoming more welcoming for key officials at the Pentagon, as well as members of Vice President Cheney's staff, who already were eager to target Iraq. With the Taliban suddenly crumbling in Afghanistan, the idea of waging a similar small war in Iraq "stopped looking unthinkable," says an official who is still skeptical. Shortly after Sept. 11, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld hosted a meeting of his Defense Policy Board, an advisory panel that includes former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, former Vice President Dan Quayle, former Speakers of the House Newt Gingrich and Tom Foley, and former CIA Director James Woolsey.
For two days, the group debated an attack against Iraq. Ahmed Chalabi, who leads the Iraqi National Congress, the exile group with the most sway in Washington, was invited to speak and, when asked to leave the room during the private discussions, he toured the clean-up efforts in the burned-out wing of the Pentagon. At the end of the meeting, several members of the advisory committee were convinced an attack was warranted, according to three members of the group.
Perhaps more important, Mr. Cheney became more convinced of the need to act on Iraq. The vice president, who was secretary of defense during the Gulf War, always seemed more concerned about the Iraq legacy than Mr. Bush. At a celebration dinner after the 2000 presidential campaign, he privately told a group of friends that the new White House team may have a rare historic opportunity to right a wrong committed during a previous term -- the mistake of leaving Saddam Hussein in place atop the Iraqi government. He also hired a staff filled with Iraq hawks.
But in the early months of the administration Mr. Cheney had other priorities to focus on, including energy policy and managing relations with Congress. And in the days after Sept. 11 he was one of the key voices cautioning the President against taking on too many fights at once. During his weeks in seclusion, though, Mr. Cheney began boring in on Iraq.
At one point, he invited to a private dinner Bernard Lewis, a Princeton University scholar who is a Middle East expert with hard-line views on Iraq. Mr. Lewis, in an interview, won't discuss the dinner in detail, but explains his view that the U.S. was guilty of "betrayals" of the Iraqi people when it failed in both 1991 and 1995 to adequately support uprisings against Saddam inside Iraq. Mr. Lewis argues that opposition groups opposed to the Iraqi leader are viable, and provide the best hope for a stable democracy in the Arab world. The worst the U.S. can do now, is show weakness or delay. "I am afraid we are just wobbling dangerously all over the Middle East," he says.
Meanwhile, Iraqi opposition groups themselves began pressing harder to turn the administration. Mr. Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress, brought defectors to Washington with reports of new Iraqi weapons programs and terrorist training camps. The hawks at the Pentagon were particularly troubled by the presentation offered by Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haidari, a concrete contractor, who told U.S. authorities in December that he had helped build dozens of Mr. Hussein's latest weapons labs, and that they were scattered throughout Baghdad underneath homes and mosques. Mr. Saeed came out of Iraq with work orders to back up his claims. Other officials, however, said they found the defectors' presentations so well-rehearsed that they suspected they may have been embroidering the facts. Still, the stream of stories added to the gathering momentum.
'Axis of Evil'
Finally, soon after Christmas, Mr. Bush and his advisers started discussing ideas for the president's late-January State of the Union address. The president made clear early on that he wanted the speech to highlight the dangers of terrorists acquiring weapons of mass destruction, as well as list the countries that might help them. The most memorable line from that speech was Mr. Bush's depiction of Iraq, Iran and North Korea as part of an "axis of evil." Not only are these states seeking weapons of mass destruction, Mr. Bush warned, "they could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred."
Looking back, U.S. officials now say they may well have overestimated al Qaeda's access to weapons of mass destruction and the extent of the help provided by the Pakistani scientists. By late fall, American troops were on the ground in Afghanistan and sorting through al Qaeda labs, offices, houses and caves. What they found was less than originally feared, though still frightening. Designs for nuclear weapons were "rudimentary, the sort of thing you'd draw on a cocktail napkin," says one intelligence official. U.S. troops found no sign that al Qaeda had managed to acquire chemical or biological weapons or any nuclear material.
And, crucially, U.S. officials recently concluded, after an exhaustive review, that they have no hard evidence to confirm the report that Mr. Atta, the Sept. 11 hijacker, actually met an Iraqi intelligence official in Prague last year.
Officials also warn, though, that they can't be certain that Mr. bin Laden or his top aides, who still haven't been found, don't have weapons or their components hidden somewhere else. The information gathered in Afghanistan from documents, computers, books and research notes demonstrates al Qaeda's enormous appetite for such weapons, an appetite likely to be satisfied given enough time.
In any case, the turn toward Iraq has been made. Just last week, for example, Mr. Rumsfeld left for a trip to the Middle East, specifically saying he would be raising with foreign leaders the nuclear threat from Iraq. At the end of the week Mr. Cheney added to the drumbeat vowing that "a regime that hates America and everything we stand for must never be permitted to threaten America with weapons of mass destruction."
While Mr. Bush is adamant about a regime change in Iraq, aides say the administration is still far from deciding how to make that happen. "I made up my mind that Saddam needs to go. That's about all I'm willing to share with you," Mr. Bush said in an interview with British journalists in April.
