Welcome to the Washington Times for this special episode of history. As it welcome to hthe Washington Times. Well talk about the iraq war, 20 years on. On march 20, 2003, president bush announced that the United States was invading iraq and wars of mass destruction. The weapons did not exist. We were not greeted add liberators. Why . Im delighted to discuss this important topic with you. Welcome to the Washington Times. This is the author of confronting saddam hussian and president george w. Bush and the invasion of iraq. Youve been working on this book quite a while. You seemed reluctant to take on this project to begin with. Why . I was reluctant for two reasons. First i was trying to finish up work that i was doing on the evolution of the cold war, topic of which ive written a great deal about. And secondly, and most importantly, i was reluctant to take it on because it was really contemporary history and the availability of primary source documents would be very limited. Im a historian who has spent his career in the archives with hundreds and hundreds of archive boxes of documents. I knew for certain, i would never have access to such documents in writing this type of a book. So i was reluctant to undertake it, till i met one. You tried to write this in the most positive light. It is danger to just rely on interviews and people memoirs. I was conscious of the in fact people were far better at spinning me. So i made a commitment to myself that if i pursued this book, i would continue my reliance on as many archival documents as i could secure. I knew i would have symptomatic access to the archives. But i also benefited, over time, by the fact that the National Security archive that is and institution, they were able to bring about the declassification of thousands of documents. Of course nothing like the totality that really exists. I also benefited greatly by the fact that the British Parliament mandated an investigation of the question of why did tony blair take Great Britain into the war in iraq on the side of george w. Bush . So there was a formal parliamentary Investigation Called the inquiry. And the result of that inquiry were thousands and thousands of pages of interviews with every single top british official, including hundreds of pages with tony blair and foreign secretary jack straw. But in the midst of those interviews, every time a Government Official liken toy blair would say, i got a memorandum from jack straw on such and such a date that said such and such, the inquiry was able, the investigating in the was able to secure the declassification of those documents. Over time, in 2014, 15, 2016, all of those documents went up on a website. So there is a lot of information about when jack straw talked to, for example, secretary of state powell or blairs National Security advisor David Manning would talk to condelezza rice. You would find out a lot of information that way. History of meetings and conversations and teleconversations et cetera. The classification process takes decades. And sometimes documents are never declassified. You think 10, 20 years well have more when it comes to iraq . No, i dont think so. I submitted many mandatory declassification requests in order to get notes of various meetings of the National SecurityCouncil Principle advisors like powell and rumsfeld and rice and the deputy National Security advisors. All of my mandatory declassification requests were denied in full or redacted or i will have not gotten the results of them. Of the intellig. It would be of the intellig. Of understanding the Decision Making process for iraq, one really needs to get a comprehensive systematic grasp of the intelligence records. It would be phenomenal useful if researchers could for example get the president ial daily briefs that were presented to president bush every single day. Those were voluminous each day . Well, they occur every day. They vary in numbers of pages. During the weeks and months after 9 11, something was presented to the president every day. Something called the threat matrix. Which enumerated the scores of threats that had been assessed just the previous day. And George W Bush was presented with this document with his briefer and the director of the Central Intelligence, george tenet. They would go over all the threats that came in on the previous day and try to assess the salience of these threats. If we could have a sense of what that was, day by day, that would help us tremendously in terms of understanding the subsequent decisive actions that were taken or not taken. Your aim in this book was to explain why things happen the way they did. It was not to write an indictment of george w. Bush and his administration or nor to let him off the hook. I praise you for that. When i picked up the book, i wanted to learn two things definitively to the extent possible. Lets admit, emotions are issti raw. 20 years is not a lot of time. Anniversaries have a way of focusing our memories back on unpleasant events and we are still living with the consequences of this disastrous war today. So i had to clear my mind and approach this with an open mind and i wanted to learn two things primarily. When and why . When was the decision to invadea iraq and why . Lets start with one. Its some people saying the decision was made pretty much after 9 11. But you say definitively that was not the case. Thats correct. A lot of people believe that the decision to invade iraq and bring about regime change in iraq was actually made even before 9 11, that is to say the neocons in the Administration LikePaul Wolfowitz joined the administration with the intent to bring about regime change through an evasion of iraq. Those notions exist in the literature regime changes they are but not going for war for. Thats the issue. There was a rhetorical commit mitt. A legislative commitment to bring about regime change. A piece of a resolution passed by congress under bill clinton that the administration itself endorsed to bring about regime change. That was a rhetorical commitment in essence with some Financial Support behind it to assist exile groups inside the United States. But what i found in my research because i systematically looked at this proposition, was that there was no agreement prior to 9 11 whatsoever to really do anything concrete to bring about regime change in iraq. In fact policymakers discussed what to do with regards to Saddam Hussein prior to 9 11. And they simply couldnt resolve what to do. The pros and cons of various tactical actions were very complicated and they could not agree on it. So nothing whatsoever had been resolved prior to 9 11. After 9 11, some policymakers like Paul Wolfowitz and donald rumsfeld, the secretary of defense, suggested to president bush that he turned his attention to iraq. But i show in my book that initially president bush rejected those notions. Was just days after 9 11 when this happened. And i believe president bush did tell them, listen, if youre going to talk to me about an iraqal qaeda nexus relationship or whatever. You have to find evidence for. Wolf is wolfowitz directed douglas five to set up an office of special plans inside the pentagon. In a very and nefarious sounding name to look for this evidence. There were people early on trying to find something on Saddam Hussein. Thats why some people today even at the time thought that war was decided pretty early here. Yes. There are many people who focus on the creation of the office of special plans and that did happen in inside the office of the secretary of defense. But the most important thing rs for you and for readers to know about this is that its the cia and president bushs briefers told him in the days after 9 11 that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9 11. I have to agree with that. I have found no evidence to suggest that president bush eg believed that Saddam Hussein had anything to do with 9 11. However he was told and it is a fact that the iraqi regime led by Saddam Hussein was gloating over 9 11. Expressed satisfaction and gratification that 9 11 had happened. Saddam husseins newspapers in t baghdad published articles more or less praising the fact that 9 11 had occurred and that the United States deserved this. No other government, i think around the globe, expressed gratification and pleasure with 9 11. So top policymakers in the United States were immediately informed about Saddam Husseins praise of the event. And this was one of the fact theres that drew policymakers attention to iraq in the aftermath of 9 11. Of course there were other very important factors. His history with weapons. He did use chemical weapons in the past. In the war with iran in the 1980s. He attacked the kurds in the north of the country. In order to understand why attention gravitated to iraq, why the president s attention gravitated to iraq, in the weeks and months after 9 11 you need to understand the confluence of several critical events. First of all, one needs to he understand that there was enormous apprehension in policymaking circles about the likelihood of a follow on attack in the United States. There was a widespread belief that another it tack was imminent. That another attack of significance dimensions and may be even greater dimensions would occur. So the evidence of an impending subsequent attack was on the present. Second, you need to understand that when American Forces moved into afghanistan, American Special forces moved into afghanistan and and along with the Northern Alliance displaced the government to, the taliban government in kabul. And forced al qaeda terrorists to flee from their Training Camps, evidence was found in those Training Camps that al qaeda was indeed seeking weapons of mass destruction and hoping to develop chemical and biological weapons or to acquire them. It was incontrovertible evidence of that that emerges in october and november and december of 2001. At the same time, im talking about a confluence of events here. At the asame time one needs to recall that in the United States there was a great fear of anthrax. That envelopes and letters containing anthrax spores circulated in the mail. Several postal workers were killed. These envelopes turned up in the Senate Office building. Congressional buildings were closed down. The Supreme Court itself was forced to move its deliberations to another location. In the middle of october, there were sensors inside the white house that went off suggesting that there was a toxic substance inside the white house. All of this suggested that there was the likelihood or possibility of a biological or chemical attack taking place in the United States. At the same time, we are talking about confluence of circumstances. At the same time there were real ports, intelligence reports coming in that Saddam Hussein was either restarting or accelerating his biological and chemical weapons programs. We now know in retrospect that much of this information was ill informed. It was coming from suspect informers. A person who was codenamed curveball. But at the time of course, whats important is that at the time this was not known. So you have information coming in suggesting that Saddam Hussein was involved in restarting or accelerating these programs. Programs that we knew that he once had had an weapons that he had been willing to use against his own people. So its this confluence of circumstances that led president bush in late november and early december, to say we need to prepare war plans for iraq should it be necessary to take action. One of the things we now know that we really didnt know as until recently was how exasperated president bush was over the fact that when he came into office, there was no war plan to deal with the talib and and al qaeda in afghanistan. In fact, after 9 11 when he was eager to take action in afghanistan, he was extraordinarily exasperated by the fact that there were no plans to deal with this situation. The Defense Department and the Central Intelligence agencys hurried to develop some type of improvised idea to deal with the telly band. To disrupt the Training Camps of al qaeda but no such plans existed. What is clear now is that bush wanted to have plans in place to deal with iraq should he find it necessary to do so. But it did not mean one of things i emphasize in my book, is that it did not mean he was committed to going to war. The attention on iraq intensifies after the taliban falls in afghanistan. Like, whats next in our war on terror . The Party Declared a war on terror. They are creating a set of circumstances of their own per day putting the country on war footing but the final decision is january and february of 2003 shortly before the invasion exit begins is when george bush says go. Right . Thats pretty much true. Nobody can really tell you when the final decision was made. This was a process. Its a long process. One of the problematic aspects of the decisionmaking process was that there never were meetings that either discussed one, the pros and cons of invading iraq to begin with. The fundamental issue of should we invade iraq. Or the perspective benefits outweigh the prospective liabilities. Such a meeting in which these things and issues should have been discussed were never systematically discussed. Nor was there a formal meeting of any sort in which there was resolution about, now we are going to war in iraq. Such a meeting took place in late february between bush and his top military people and wish he asked them, are our warplanes this is late february when a lot of our american combat troops had arctic been deep lloyd and vessels deployed. He makes it look like war is inevitable. He makes it look like war is inevitable. And perhaps it was by late february of 2003 for a lot of other reasons as well. But at that time president bush did convene his top military people and say our we ready. And they say yes, of course were ready. Nobody questioned the fundamentals of whether the United States had a omright to preemptively invade another country. Whether they lied about the intelligence or not, your argument is that they did not like. Well get to that in a moment. We will return to some public statements that were made. I think we tackled when but the why here is also very important. For what reasons. And you downplayed the role of ideology or missionary zeal is the term you use in your book. When you just touched on this about some of the Decision Making process here. The reasons why. You say fear, excessive confidence in American Power and hubris. Not spreading democracy not ideology or other factors. I discussed the basic motives for going to war. Motives are different than goals. The overriding motive for going to war was fear about a perspective attack again, in the United States. Fear about american National Security. Shortterm and longterm. There were two aspects to this fear. There was the short term aspect in which president bush clearly was worried that Saddam Husseins allege weapons of mass destruction. His chemical or biological weapons, might find their way into the hands of terrorists. Perhaps al qaeda terrorist or other terrorist. He was certainly very concerned about that prospect. He was also concerned as were many of his leading advisors about the intermediate and long term problem that if sanctions failed, if the existing if the existing regime of sanctions and containment failed, and if Saddam Hussein restarted or accelerated his programs of weapons of mass destruction, which he had been very much committed to in the he 1980s and the 1990s, if he did these things, in the intermediate term, he would develop weapons of mass destruction and with those weapons he would be able to in the words of american policymakers, blackmail the United States. In other words the very presence of weapons of mass destruction, chemical or biological or after five or 10 years, nuclear weapons. The very presence of those weapons would force the United States to self deter in a crisis in the middle east. In american policymakers did not want to face the prospect that they would be paralyzed in the long run by the presence of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a dig tater like Saddam Hussein. So there is the shortterm fear of another of a perspective attack inside the United States and in intermediate term fear that American Power will be circumscribed or constrained in the intermediate and longterm. I want to backtrack replete about th