I deliberated on how to break the news to the Security Council without overly embarrassing Washington or London. On the flight to New York, consulting with Jacques Baute and Laura Rockwood, I finally decided to use less sensational terminology, describing the documents as “not authentic.” But of course the message was clear: the Niger uranium sales allegation, a keystone of the U.S. and U.K. case insisting that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program, was based on a fraud.
The United States was clearly unhappy when I reported this conclusion to the Security Council. It compounded our earlier debunking of the aluminum tubes issue. Colin Powell, who always kept his cool and was unfailingly courteous to me, reacted at the council meeting somewhat peevishly, pointing out that the Agency had “missed Iraq” in 1991.
The reaction in the media was disheartening. The major media organizations at the time had completely bought into the WMD claims by the U.S. administration. Yet our findings were discounted on the grounds that they were unimportant. The Washington Post, on March 1, referred to the Niger documents as “one secondary bit of evidence,” declaring that it was “not central to the case against Saddam Hussein.” Not to be outdone, the Wall Street Journal on March 13 published an editorial pointedly titled “Bush in Lilliput.” “Mr. ElBaradei,” they wrote, “made a public fuss last week about one British-U.S. claim that turns out to have been false, but which was in any case peripheral to Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.” Neither newspaper bothered to mention that, less than two months earlier, the Niger uranium sale had been significant enough for the president of the United States to feature it in his State of the Union address. The coverage in the New York Times was similarly dismissive. On March 8, the Niger issue was mentioned in passing in a cover story focused on the “UN Split.” The next day, the story was covered more fully (“Forensic Experts Uncovered Forgery on Iraq, an Inspector Says”)—but relegated to page 13.
Efforts on the diplomatic front seemed equally ill-fated. When the Arab states met at an emergency summit before the war, on March 2, in Sharm el-Sheikh, it erupted into a circus of petty disagreements and name-calling. There were serious proposals on the table about sending a delegation to Iraq to offer possible solutions that could avoid a war. Some wanted to urge Saddam Hussein to resign. The ruler of the United Arab Emirates at that time, Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan, wanted to offer Saddam Hussein asylum as a face-saving way out.
Other Arab leaders, however, appeared to be supportive of the war. They clearly loathed Saddam Hussein and hoped an invasion of Iraq would get rid of him altogether. Early in the inspections process I had met with the president of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak, who obviously had a personal grudge against Saddam Hussein; he kept saying that Saddam had double-crossed him during the first Gulf War, when he invaded Kuwait after giving Mubarak assurances to the contrary. I briefed Mubarak about our activities in Iraq but also tried to direct the conversation to a relevant broader theme, urging him to lead a movement of modernization and moderation in the Arab world. “If that were to happen,” I said, “Egypt would get support pouring in from every front, both politically and economically.”
Mubarak and I spoke again about Iraq when I asked him to intervene with Saddam Hussein to improve his cooperation with the United Nations. Mubarak mentioned that he had received a letter from Saddam saying, “Do not worry; everything is okay.” He also passed on a bit of information. “I know that Saddam has biological weapons,” Mubarak told me, “and he is hiding them in the cemeteries.” It was the first and last time I heard that rumor.[10]
With such sentiments at work, inevitably the Arab Summit devolved into a series of virulent arguments. Sheikh Zayed’s asylum proposal somehow did not get put on the agenda. For this reason the sheikh and his delegation were furious with the secretary-general of the Arab League, Amr Moussa. The idea of sending a delegation to Iraq was aborted altogether. Without a united position, the leaders of the Arab world in the end had almost no say or influence in a war launched at the heart of their region—other than, in some cases, to provide bases and facilities for U.S. troops.
Even the most experienced and pragmatic politicians seemed unable to leverage diplomatic influence. French president Jacques Chirac had voiced strong disagreement with the Bush doctrine of “you’re either with us or against us.” His candor was in evidence when Blix and I met with him in mid-January at the Elysée Palace and complained that we were not getting much information from Western intelligence agencies regarding Iraq’s alleged WMD programs. Chirac was astonishingly candid. “You know why you don’t get the information,” he declared. “It is because they don’t have any.”
In fact, French intelligence experts had been telling Blix and me they were sure that Iraq was continuing to keep “small quantities” of chemical and biological weapons. The head of the French intelligence agency happened to be present at our meeting, and his face dropped at Chirac’s casual remark. Chirac paid no attention, taking his bluntness one step further: intelligence agencies, he said, were in the habit of first reaching their conclusions and then building the supporting arguments. By this time, his intelligence chief was studying the carpet intently, avoiding eye contact.
To my ears, it was refreshing to hear a leader of Chirac’s stature speak so openly what we at the Agency were thinking. He said the threat Bush had made to the Security Council—that the United Nations would become irrelevant if they did not adopt a resolution to use force—was complete nonsense. If the United States decided to move on its own, Chirac said, “It will be the U.S. that will be regarded as an outlaw, and not the UN.” Unfortunately, in the United States at the time, Chirac’s stance on Iraq was marginalized, even derided.[11]
Soon after that encounter, in early February Blix and I met with British prime minister Tony Blair at his modest office at Downing Street. He saw each of us separately: Blix first, then me. This was unusual; most of our interactions at that level were conducted jointly. Blair was relaxed and informal, with his jacket off. When he came out after seeing Blix, he jokingly called out, “Next!” as if I were at the dentist.
The tone of the meeting was positive. I voiced to Blair my concern that going to war with Iraq over WMD would ignite regional tensions. “The perception in the Middle East,” I explained, “is that the focus on Iraq is not because of weapons of mass destruction per se, but because Iraq is a Muslim and Arab country, and therefore is not allowed, like Israel, to have such weapons.” I echoed something Chirac had said: that the eagerness to take action on Iraq would not sell well in the face of doing nothing about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I also mentioned the criticisms I had been hearing about the disparity in treatment between Iraq and North Korea.
Blair expressed understanding of my points and shared my concerns about inaction on the Palestinian issue. He recounted that Bush had promised he would address the Palestinian situation once the “matter of Iraq” was settled.
It was Jack Straw, the British foreign minister, who explained the British rationale: they were trying to give full support to the Americans in public, he said, in order to be able to influence U.S. decisions privately. This view remained consistent: it would be much more dangerous to have the United States act on its own, and by “hugging” the Americans, Britain had a better shot at controlling their actions. Frankly, I did not notice a whiff of British influence over U.S. policy during the Blair administration. It always seemed to be a one-way street, with the British acting as spokespersons or apologists for U.S. behavior.
10
In President Bush’s memoir,
11
Many U.S. leaders characterized the French position on the Iraq war as disloyalty; members of Congress went so far as to demand that French fries and French toast on the House cafeteria menu be renamed “freedom fries” and “freedom toast.”