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FRONTLINE: Truth, War and Consequences (2003)

Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon on 9/11 and the days after: go massive, hit Iraq, end states that sponsor terror.

Truth, War and Consequences (full documentary) | FRONTLINE · FRONTLINE PBS | Official · uploaded 2021-08-19 · 1:24:58
Original: youtube.com/watch?v=RMSNUX3n6yA · IPFS QmRQyBj5Vw8KykDtbzq455CAtyAzVY8EpTY4bTTiYh4yeG

What this video is evidence for

PBS FRONTLINE's 2003 documentary traces how a small group of policymakers who had wanted to remove Saddam Hussein since the first Gulf War got their chance after September 11, 2001. The narrator puts it plainly: "going to war to achieve it was not politically feasible until after September 11, 2001."

The film lays out the first days step by step, largely in the participants' own words:

• The afternoon of 9/11: Pentagon adviser Richard Perle phones President Bush's speechwriter David Frum. Perle, on camera, describes his message: "we are not going to deal effectively with global terrorism, if states can support and sponsor and harbor terrorists without penalty." That evening Bush says, "We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbored them."
• Four days later, at Camp David: according to the film, Bush tells his cabinet that if Saddam Hussein is to become a target, they need to dig up evidence that he was cooperating with al-Qaeda.
• Within days: Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz directs Douglas Feith to set up a special, secretive Pentagon office to re-examine intelligence on Iraq and al-Qaeda.

The target changes with the years, but the pattern is the one this investigation follows for Iran: the war comes first, and the case for it is built afterward.

Where this fits: see Pentagon Greater Israel Wars for the full explanation and sources.

Transcript

Machine transcription (apple-speechanalyzer) of the full 01:24:58. It can mishear names and words, so check exact wording against the video before quoting it.

The war on terror is not confined strictly to the Al Qaeda that we're chasing. The war on terror. involves Saddam Hussein. The president said the war would make the world safer. But did the Bush administration know what it was really getting into?

Their basic approach was that they couldn't really foresee exactly what was needed, so they were gonna wait until they got there, and then they were gonna make recommendations. Did the administration listen too much to this man? Saddam Hussein was a threat to the West, and he was the most dangerous threat. Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. And were we told the truth?

The administration made statements, which I can only describe as dishonest. Tonight, frontline correspondent Martin Smith travels to Iraq to investigate truth, war, and consequences. The drive from Kuwait City to Baghdad takes about 12 hours. We made our first trip in late April, just two weeks after the fall of Saddam. We accompanied Kanan Makia, an Iraqi exile, who has been at the center of efforts to topple Saddam for more than a decade.

He hadn't seen southern nor central Iraq since he was 18. This was, once upon a time, the Fertile Crescent. sometimes turned it into a desert. Along the way, US convoys were busy moving in additional equipment and troops. While soldiers manned crude checkpoints.

The roads are not secure. Bandits are a common hazard. We traveled in a convoy, with other returning a rocky exiles. Yeah, the Columbus is in. With less than 300 kilometers to go.

They paused for a picture. As we drove into Baghdad, the bombed out hoax of Iraqi tanks and anti aircraft guns littered the signs of the highways. In the city center, buildings had been blasted by missiles. others were destroyed by fire. The capital of one of the world's biggest oil producing nations was also suffering from years of UN sanctions, as well as under development and neglect at the hands of Saddam and his bath party.

I suppose the shock was to realize just how run down the city had been allowed to become by the bat. I thought of the bath as a modernizing force, an ugly, brutal, deformed kind of modernity, but modernizing nonetheless. Here I entered a city that was ramshackle, broken apart, buildings cracking at the seams, filthy, smelling garbage on the streets. It was tragic. There was a true sense of dilapidation everywhere.

On top of the dilapidation came post war looting. When you take the lid off of a repressive system of 30 years in the making, and you don't have an alternative law and order system to replace it, the population went wild. The looting had gone far beyond the stealing of furniture and air conditioners. Loters had deconstructed entire buildings, stripped out wires, insulation, plumbing, stealing any reusable resalable materials. They torched what remained.

When General J. Garner and his reconstruction team arrived, They found nearly all the buildings they needed to run post war Iraq demolished. Did you plan for looting? Well, I knew there would be looting, but I didn't think the looting... would have the impact that it did have.

17 of the 23 Ministries were gone when we got to Baghdad. And more than that, there's no communications. So, you know, I didn't know that the looting would be, I never expected it would be as serious as it was. We'd heard about shortages. We saw what it meant.

To buy a tank of gasoline, the weight could be more than eight hours. Tempers flared. We came upon this station, where one man had fired a gun in anger. The bullet hit a gas tank and an explosion and firing ensued that killed four. Including this boy's brother.

Weary residents were calling on the U.S. to either take control or go home. Couldn't the military have done a better job of putting in police patrols or bringing in more soldiers to try to tamp things down a bit. Well, you have to have some military.

Well, you're a general. What's your opinion? Well, I think, uh, you're always better off with more troops. So we didn't have enough troops. I think there's I think we could have used more troops inside Baghdad at the end of the war, yes.

There was still some looting going on when we arrived. And when we came across soldiers, they didn't seem sure of their role. Push up, push up. That child don't need to be here. Know what school deal?

Okay, that what he need to be doing. Not far than you. We filmed these G.I.s after they caught a group of Iraqis stealing wood.

We try to stop them from looting, then on the stand, so we'll take that car, and we'll crush them. United States Army, tankers, who? That's what you get when you loop. Later, the car's owner told us. I'm a taxi driver.

The car was my livelihood. You represent a culture that brought forth civilization, that your people and your land, that brought forth the codification of wall. The day after we arrived, General Garner was speaking to a political conference. Our responsibility. The U.

S. had invited 300 Iraqis, tribal sheiks, religious, business, and political leaders. Canan Makia came with his own ambitions about how to build a new Democratic Iraq. It was important, I think, for one salient fact, sort of emerged from the meeting. The sense of the mood of that meeting was, We want a government, and we want it now.

We're asking British, and United States, to both the principal system, for us, how to go through democracy, okay? And the American officials who were up there on the platform were on the edge of losing control of the meeting, because they didn't have answers. The central fact on everybody's mind was the lawlessness that had taken place, the anarchy, the breakdown. Loting was going on as the meeting took place. Loading.

And authority was needed. Here, now, immediately, instantly. Maybe. How can I? Hey.

Oh, wow. Gananmakia has been involved for over 10 years with an Iraqi exile opposition group dedicated to the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. We followed him to their new Baghdad headquarters. The Iraqi National Congress was founded in 1992, the INC is headed by a former banker, Ahmed Chalabi. Before the war, Chalabi was a key player in efforts to help establish the case that Saddam was an imminent threat.

Saddam Hussein was a threat to the West, and he was the most dangerous threat that could have been envisaged in this time after, especially after September 11. But they were set up by the INC. According to top Pentagon advisor, Richard Pearl. Chalabi was, without question, the single most important source of intelligence the U.S.

had on Saddam Hussein's Iraq. He's a very capable guy. He's quite brilliant. PhD in mathematics, with a background at the University of Chicago and MIT, committed to secular democracy, and is the kind of modern, liberal, uh, leader that we would hope to see, not only in Iraq, but throughout the Arab world. People say that there are two men who are responsible for the fall of Saddam Hussein.

One is George Bush, and the other is Ahmad Chalabi. You agree? If somebody else said it, I'm not going to disagree with them. This is... Will you nag the U.

S. government for 12, 13 years to accomplish this task? Well I did. I worked very hard, because I came to the conclusion very early on that if the U.S.

is not heavily involved in helping the Iraqi people get rid of Saddam, Saddam is going to stay, and his son is going to come after. When we caught up with Chalabi, he was no longer preoccupied with making the case for war. A steady stream of visitors was coming to his headquarters. Chalabe was busy navigating post war politics. Many people that supported the war.

no longer do. Yes. They feel that they were succored. Yes, probably. They say so.

Okay? I mean, I don't, you know, I'm not... Well, I mean, you know, half the people now feel that the war wasn't justified on the grounds that it was argued for. Okay. Do you feel any?

Discomfort with that? No. Well, Adam Burdada now. They are in Baghdad now. The story of how they got here.

begins in Washington. Ever since the end of the Gulf War, a small group of influential policymakers has wanted to rid the Middle East of Saddam Hussein. But going to war to achieve it was not politically feasible until after September 11, 2001. Well, I believe there was a strong argument for looking at IRAC before September 11. What September 11 taught us is that we can wait too long in the presence of a known and a visible threat.

On the afternoon of September 11th, Richard Pearl phoned one of President Bush's speechwriters, David Frum. I had a conversation with David. And what was the content of that? That we are not going to deal effectively with global terrorism, if states can support and sponsor and harbor terrorists without penalty. The search is underway for those who are behind these evil acts.

At 8:30 that evening, President Bush spoke to the nation. He laid out his policy, echoing the words that Pearl had suggested to his speechwriter earlier in the day. We will make no distinction. Between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbored them. Four days later, the president and his cabinet gathered at Camp David to formulate strategy in the war on terrorism.

President Bush told cabinet members that if Saddam Hussein was to become a target, They needed to dig up evidence that he was cooperating with Al Qaeda. Within days, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz directed one of his deputies, Douglas Fife, to set up a special office inside the Pentagon that would examine intelligence regarding Iraq's possible connection without Qaeda. It started as a small secretive operation. It was very simple. It was clear that no one had been looking for the links of a kind that it was reasonable to consider might exist.

We didn't know whether they existed. And the evidence might have been that they didn't exist. So some people were brought in to take a look. And within a very short period of time, they began to find links that nobody else had previously understood. When it came to Iraq, the Special Intelligence Office didn't trust what the CIA, or even their own defense intelligence agency had to say, they did apparently listen to Ahmed Chalabi.

According to one Pentagon source, he visited once every other month. Across the Potomac, Greg Thielman had analyzed intelligence for the State Department for seven years. That office was largely invisible to us in the intelligence community, because they didn't play in the normal bureaucratic process of making intelligence assessments and reporting on those. What did you understand that office to be about? I'm still trying to figure out what that office was about.

The office wasn't big enough for them to really have the expertise in house, and the mere creation of the office was odd since the Secretary of Defense had the entire Defense Intelligence Agency at his disposal. So it's a little mysterious, what exactly they were doing. Let me be blunt about this. The level of competence. The Central Intelligence Agency in this area is appalling.

They had filtered out the whole set of possibilities, because it was inconsistent with their model. So if you're walking down the street, you're not looking for hidden treasure, you won't find it. Conversely, if you look for something, you will find it. simply because you are looking, and the nature of intelligence is very often vague, and things can be interpreted one way or another. Of course, there's no absolute truth in this.

It is not publicly known what intelligence was provided by the Special Intelligence office. But Frontline has learned that a report from the Czech Republic that 911 hijacker Muhammad Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague, got their attention, and was passed on to the White House. Was that report that, uh, was been pretty well confirmed? That he did go to Prague, and he did meet with, um, a senior official at the Iraqi intelligence service. in Czechoslovakia last April, several months before the attack.

But the meeting in Prague was never confirmed. In fact, the FBI established, one month later, through car rental records, that Ata was in Florida when the alleged Prague meeting would have occurred. The vice president, however, would still be citing the story over a year later. At least one occasion, we have reporting that places him in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence official a few months before the attack on the World Trade Center. I think it's very unusual the amount of influence they had.

What seems to have happened is that the conclusions or the work that they did somehow entered from the side into the policy community... At a very high level. At a very high level, in a way that was invisible to those of us in the intelligence community, producing intelligence. While the Pentagon was building a case for war. The State Department was planning for the aftermath.

In the spring of 2002, they launched the future of Iraq Project. We've, uh, organized the future of Iraq Project to draw upon both independent Iraqis and representatives of political groups in order to plan for many of the practice. this passage by closing this dam and forcing all the water to go down this way... The State Department invited Iraqi exiles to participate in working groups. on how to keep law and order in the streets and how to keep oil, electricity, and water flowing after the war.

Marsh's issue is huge, and until we go and look at the soil in some more detail. There are committees set up to consider each aspect of the future life of Iraq and how you could deal with it in the immediate days thereafter. It involved an awful lot of very bright people, many of whom have the credentials in economics, and banking, and agriculture, and so on. This was a real effort, too. This was a real effort.

plan. Right. To be there, on the ground, the day after, and ready to go. Leith Kuba, a prominent Iraqi exile, participated in three working groups. The reality is, by the beginning of 2002, Iraqis have not mobilized their expertise to map out what the issues and challenges are in Apostadam, Hussein.

everybody agreed that Saddam should go. Everybody would like to have democracy afterwards. Nobody had a clue what the challenges are ahead. So for the State Department to have started to gather Iraqis, 200 of them in 15 working groups, was a good step. Most Iraqi exiles were enthusiastic about the future of Iraq project, though some, notably Achmed Chalabi and other ANC Iraqis, were skeptical about the usefulness of a series of seminars.

They wanted to talk about who was going to rule Iraq after the war. Initially, Cananmakia declined an invitation to participate. State Department wanted to talk about how best we can collect garbage in the streets the day after liberation, or how can we recruit 1,000 health workers to go to this or that area the day after. And I said, I didn't have anything to contribute to such questions. Unfortunately, I'm sure there were people inside Iraq who would know much better than I had to go back doing these things.

Kannan Makia has been making a case for ousting Saddam for over 10 years. Frontline first filmed him in Washington in 1992. In his books, he had exposed Saddam's history of brutality. Don't look to the United States for help. That is gone.

In the wake of the first Gulf War, he was one of the first Arab intellectuals to openly criticize America for failing to topple Saddam. The future of Iraq is in the hands of Iraqis alone today. After one of his talks, he began a friendship with Paul Wolfowitz. I was giving a talk, and he was in the audience, and I remember him seeking me out, and, uh, very touching moment when he, uh, he said that he felt that the United States had been wrong in 1991. And to have sought me out to say this thing was something special, which I took an immense liking to the man because of it.

Wolfowitz was then a professor at Johns Hopkins University. He remained a friend of Machia's and a supporter of the INC. He wouldn't have a chance to help them though, until he became Secretary Rumsfeld's right hand man. Ahmed Chalabi was also in Washington in the early 1990s. He had aggressively lobbied Capitol Hill and made friends with influential Republicans who helped him get a meeting in the first Bush White House, with National Security Council advisor, Richard Haas.

I went to Hass. He told me I'm seeing you only because you impressed some congressmen. I was supposed to meet him, for half an hour. We stayed for 90 minutes. I explained to him the strategy.

He said, We will support an Iraqi political movement that will come out, and democracy in Iraq, democratic government, pluralistic government in Iraq, renunciation of weapons of mass destruction. Ha says, if you do these things, we will support you. He said, If you get a political movement with such a program, we will support you. And that was the genesis of the INC. Under the proviso that the INC would represent all Iraqis, Kurds, Shias, and Sunis.

The U.S. government gave the INC CIA money and contacts. But in the mid '90s, when Chalabi tried to launch an Iraqi uprising, he found he had miscalculated the depth of American support. They needed support from the United States, and we refused to give it to them.

But we'd encouraged them in the first place. Absolutely. He attempted to build on what he thought was American support, which was not forthcoming. The Clinton administration feared Chaleby had misrepresented the strength and breadth of his movement, and had provided shoddy intelligence about Saddam's military. The White House ordered the CIA to abandon the operation.

I got shot down, largely because I think people were afraid it would be a one way street for military intervention. The military, our military wasn't prepared for that time. I think that fallout was the final stroke that broke the camel's back, because there were other issues to do with how the INC was run, how the money was spent, the quality of intelligence that was gathered at that time, a number of issues. But ultimately, that led to a breakdown. After '96, after the events of summer of '96, we had to go back to the drone board and decide on a strategy.

And we had to think of what we considered to be a real strategy to get us to Baghdad. Saddam is the problem. He can never be part of any solution. Jollaby turned back to Washington. For the help of friends in Congress, he lobbied for the passage of a bill, the Iraqi Liberation Act, that would make regime change in Iraq, official US government policy.

The Iraqi people know full well the horror of chemical and biological weapons. The Iraqi Liberation Act funneled millions of dollars to the INC. The Iraqi National Congress asked your help in removing the threat of Saddam's doomsday weapons from our people, from the region and from the world. Chalaby used some of the money to attract and pay defectors. He then passed them to the government, as well as to the media.

Many news organizations, including Frontline, used Chalabi's defectors in their reports. Saddam's Iraq has always been hard to penetrate. Weapons inspectors knew Saddam once used chemical weapons, but whether he still possessed any, or had programs for biological or nuclear weapons, was much harder to determine. In Baghdad, we visited Dr. Hamad al Bahali, one of the founders of Iraq's civilian nuclear program.

Dr. Bahali believes that despite all its money and equipment, Iraq didn't have the expertise to assemble a weapon. Today, Dr. Bahali is more concerned with the radioactive contamination of villagers living near the looted nuclear plant Tuetha, where he worked for the last 10 years. Salamu alaykum.

The army has now secured the gates of Tuetha, which had once been a major point of interest for inspectors. For months, a CIA Pentagon team has scoured Iraq, but it reportedly has found no evidence of weapons of mass destruction, in spite of past claims by Ahmed Chalabi and the INC. We believe that he was developing weapons of mass destruction. Based on what evidence? evidence that we heard from his people, but we never gave this to the United States, because we knew that this kind of evidence will be unacceptable, and we will be...?

Because it is not very viable for the United States. We get a piece of information from an officer. So it was hearsay? We believed it. We knew it was, we did not present it.

But it looks as if right now. I mean, the American people feel that they were told, that there were going to be storehouses of weapons on the shelf. Not by us. Well, not by us? From their own intelligence services.

You will get different estimates about precisely how close he is, we do know that he is actively pursuing a nuclear weapon. Prior to the war, the administration was reading intelligence that was often vague, sometimes contradictory, rarely definitive. But Americans need to know, I'll be making up my mind based upon the latest intelligence. Unlike the intelligence, though, the message the administration rolled out in the fall of 2002 was sharp and clear. There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.

There is no doubt that he is imagined. What was missing from all the speeches and television appearances were the caveats and contrary evidence from their own intelligence agencies. Iraqi regime could launch a biological or chemical attack in as little as 45 minutes. In a classified report circulated within the administration in late September 2002. The Defense Intelligence Agency stated that there was no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing or stockpiling chemical weapons.

Nuclear weapon. But we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud. At the same time, the Pentagon's Special Intelligence office was coming up short of proving Saddam had current and active links to Al Qaeda. As you watch this growing divergence, between what was being said by policymakers and what you knew was the intelligence. What conclusions were you drawing?

Well, the conclusion that I ultimately came to was that this was a matter of, as I've called it, faith based intelligence. They were cherry picking the information that we provided to use whatever pieces of it that fit their overall interpretation. And worse than that, they were dropping qualifiers, and distorting some of the information that we provided to make it seem more alarmist and more dangerous than the information that we were giving. The fall campaign would culminate with a speech by President Bush on October 7th in Cincinnati. Facing clear evidence of peril.

We cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun, that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud. Information from a high ranking, Iraqi nuclear engineer who had defected, revealed that despite his public promises, Saddam Hussein had ordered his nuclear program to continue. The defector mentioned in the president's speech came to the administration's attention via Ahmed Chalabi. Chalabi was also making claims about Saddam and Al Qaeda. We've learned that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb making, poisons and deadly gases.

We talked to Chalabi at INC headquarters in Baghdad. You had argued for a long time that they were tightly connected with Al Qaeda. As far back as '98, I remember meeting with you, and you told me... Yes, there were lots of connections. Yes, they were.

Well, those have not quite been demonstrated. We have very strong leads on that, and we have very strong evidence that they have. You have strong evidence that there's links between Al Qaeda. You see, the point is that... U.

S. U.S. Where are these? Where is this evidence, though?

The U.S. hands. We gave the names of the people. There were visits of Al Qaeda here.

And there was money that changed hands. Do you have any documentary evidence of any kind? Yes, there is such a document. That is a document that you could show us. Well, I've seen it, but I don't have it in my position.

They could show it to you, I think. Who can show it to me? Our intelligence people. You're intelligence people. So after this interview, we can...

I don't know if you can do it right now. Well, I mean, I think it's very important to make this, this is something you've talked about since '98, and I think it's a very important point. It's one of the points that drew America to this war. Yes. Correct?

So it's very important to establish the truth of it. Yes. So if there is such a document, It makes sense for you to share it. No? I'm not saying no, no.

I'm saying I'm somehow not getting the feeling that I'm going to see the document. Well, you are erroneous. Okay. Great. I hope to see it.

Well, we'll expect to show it to you. The document was supposed to demonstrate money changing hands between Saddam Hussein's government and Al Qaeda. After repeated requests, Frontline has still not seen the document. Were you uncomfortable? In the run up to the war and the dependence on the imminent threat, weapons of mass destruction rationale for the war.

I wasn't uncomfortable. I genuinely thought it was... I thought it was true. I held it to be a legitimate rationale. But I never held it as the primary rationale, nor did any other rocky that I know of.

It was the primary rationale for the American people. It was sold as the primary rationale for the war to the American power. It should not have been. For Makia, the cause had always been establishing a democracy in Iraq. In December of 2002, the INC came to a major Iraqi opposition conference in London.

In attendance were exiles from all the groups that make up Iraq, Kurds, Sunnis, Shias, and others. At issue was how Iraq would be ruled after the war. Cananmekia arrived with his own detailed blueprint for democracy. It carries forward a completely novel idea that doesn't exist anywhere in the Arab Muslim world. This is a completely new kind of state that we are thinking about here, a truly democratic state.

Makia's paper dealt with many subjects. We're talking here about what kind of federalism, exactly, we mean what we mean by a parliament when elections would take place. Among them, was a controversial proposal to remove Saddam's entire bureaucracy from office after the war. We're talking here about things like the debatification of Iraq, ala the denazification of journey. We're talking about...

The paper also called for the immediate establishment of a provisional government in exile. Priority rights. Protection. The moment the report came out, the State Department started taking distance from it, because it's apparently challenged a central tenet of the U.S.

of State Department policy, which was they were against the idea of a provisional government. The State Department and many other Iraqi exiles wanted to prevent the INC from rushing into a power vacuum before other Iraqis, including those inside Iraq, had a chance to organize. I think they had a very simplistic agenda that can be summed up and few words, reducing Iraq to the opposition, reducing the opposition to the INC, and that all the post Iraq planning should start from that small group, to be given all the resources, and support, to become the nucleus, for re establishing authority in Iraq. I don't think it's a good idea to try to impose the government from outside. So I was against the idea of having a provisional government composed of exiles.

There should be a process by which the Iraqi people, especially those who are inside, should have a say in any provisionable government. The United States government said, No, we will not recognize a government that is found by the opposition, which is outside the country. We want to get people from inside the country involved, and they should play aiding role in this provisional government. The INC left the conference frustrated. Canan Makia wrote in a London newspaper that the enemies of a Democratic Iraq lay within the U.

S. State Department. It's very sad to have to say. But the State Department and the CIA have consistently thwarted the President's genuine attempt, I think, to do something very dramatic in this country. The ANC's last hope was the Defense Department.

Here, top civilian officials believe the early establishment of a provisional government was a good idea. It could facilitate an early U.S. military withdrawal, an interagency debate intensified in Washington over whether America would go to war backing a Chalabi led provisional government or not. The whole government turned into two camps.

One of them is just totally opposed to Chalabi, and the other one was so pro Chalabi. And I think the problem we began to face was that, you know, everybody almost, almost forgot about the issue of Iraq, and the main focus became Chalibi. It shall be going to be the president. Shall I be going to be the head of the provisional government? Well, you know, what would it mean if Saddam Hussein Falls?

And it wasn't, what should they have been thinking about? Iraq. So much time has been wasted over who to support, Shalabi or not Shalabi? That's quite right. There's been a debilitating, um, and, uh, I think, wasteful and damaging quarrel over Achmed Shelby.

So why have you clung to Ahmad Chalabi? Why not just find somebody else? That's acceptable to both sides. No one else has been proposed who's susceptible to both sides. And the arguments against Cheleby have been without substance.

He is far and away the most effective individual that we could have hoped would emerge in Iraq. This schism within the U.S. government, a lot of it centered on you. Rightly or wrongly, yet a lot of it came down to people's evaluation of you, CIA in the state, after '96, and onwards, reviled you.

Yes, and this became all consuming. Yes, but you see, this is a very curious situation. I believe that the people who did not want to do anything against Saddam took me up as the bete noir of this, thinking that I was an easy target to discredit the entire policy. You became an extremely divisive character. Yes, well, they made me so, not I.

On January 12, 2003, Canan Makia received an invitation to meet with the president. The invitation to see the president was very sudden, and I don't know by what channels it happened. I didn't solicit it. It began with President very emphatically stating his commitment to democracy, and that this was what the United States wanted to do, and he left me with a very clear impression that he was deadly serious about it, that this was not just rhetoric, and he was committed to it personally, and in some emotional way. We all came away feeling that it's a truly important breakthrough taking place.

Though the White House backed up the State Department in opposing an INC provisional government in exile, eight days later, the president handed over the reins of post war planning to Secretaries Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz at the Pentagon. We have recently brought in a retired army general, Jay Garner, to stand up an office in the Pentagon, to begin the process of thinking through all of the kinds of things that would be necessary in the early period, and going back to... Rumsfeld did not know General J. Garner very well. They had served together on a panel on space and national security in 2000.

Yet, with two months to go before the war began, Rumsfeld entrusted Garner, with full responsibility for post war politics and reconstruction. Much of the future of Iraq project was set aside. What was the attitude in the Pentagon towards the work that had been done by the State Department? It wasn't well received. It wasn't well received.

But not only in the Pentagon. It wasn't well received in portions of the executive branch, either. But, you know, I have run into it. I talked to a number of people in the State Department, and they're bitter about the fact that their project was just ignored. You know, they put a big effort into that.

They did put a big effort. And I think there was a mistake that we didn't use it. I mean, I agree with that. And it was my intent to use that. But we didn't.

And why didn't we use the... don't know. I don't know the answer to that. I was just told, you know, it was just a decision been made. We're not gonna do that.

And who told you that? I got that from the secretary. And I don't think that was his decision. Secretary Rumsell? Mm hmm.

So all the work that was done in the future of Iraq project did not show up in any of your, not in so far as I could determine. Did you talk with your colleagues about why we're not using this material? I did, and the consensus of my colleagues was basically, uh, that it was part of the ideological food fight between the State Department and the Defense Department. The Pentagon's plan for post war Iraq assumed that once Saddam, his sons, and top lieutenants were gone, the remaining soldiers, policemen, and bath party bureaucrats would cooperate with U.S.

authorities. I briefed the president the second week in March. Our plan, then, is we were going to use most of the army, the Iraqi army for reconstruction. We're gonna hire them. And make them, for the lack of a better word, reconstruction battalions, and use them to help rebuild the country.

Did that seem like a good plan to you? Great plan, yeah. Because they had the skill set to do everything I thought we needed to do. I mean, they know how to fix roads. They know how to fix bridges.

They know how to move rubble around. They're all trained to a certain degree. They know how to take orders, they have a command and control system over them. They have their own transportation, you can move them around, that type of thing. So that was a good concept.

This is Meet the Press. With Tim Rossard. If your analysis is not correct, and we're not treated as liberators but as conquerors, and the Iraqis begin to resist, particularly in Baghdad, do you think the American people are prepared? Another assumption was that Iraqis would greet the Americans as liberators, an assurance they got from the INC. I do believe we will be greeted as liberators.

I've talked with a lot of Iraqis in the last several months myself, had them to the White House. President and I have met with them, various groups and individuals. People who devoted their lives from the outside to try to change things inside Iraq. And like Karan Makia, who's a professor at Brandeis, but in Iraqis, read great books about the subject, knows the country intimately, is a part of the democratic opposition and resistance. The read we get on the people of Iraq is, there's no question, but what they want to get rid of Saddam Hussein, and they will welcome as liberators, the United States, when we come to do that.

While the administration was listening to Machia, they were ignoring the warnings of others. In February 2003, Richard Pearl invited an expert in post war situations to make a presentation at the Pentagon. This expert warned about the potential for post war violence. The thrust of it was that it was very likely that in a post conflict situation, in Iraq, there was going to be a lot of violence. You're going to have a period of General Wallaceness.

You're going to need to establish the rule of law. You're gonna have to deal with prisoners, for example. Robert M. Perito, an official on President Reagan's National Security Council staff, has studied post war problems in Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor, and Haiti. In all these places, he pointed out, there was widespread looting.

The same thing happened in Panama. As soon as the fighting ended, mobs went into the street of Panama City and destroyed Panama City, looted the city, did more damage to the Panamanian economy. Then the conflict, and so my presentation was largely about the kinds of forces that we would need in order to deal with that kind of violence. And those lessons were ignored. We had meetings with people on garner staff and people, you know, in the administration.

Their basic approach was that they couldn't really foresee exactly what was needed, so they were gonna wait until they got there, and then they were gonna make recommendations. Mr. Speaker, the president's cabinet. We wanted to ask the administration's top officials about planning for post war Iraq. We approached Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, National Security Advisor, Condolizer Rice, and Vice President Dick Cheney.

They all declined. A brutal dictator, with a history of reckless aggression, with ties to terrorism, with great potential wealth, will not be permitted to dominate a vital region and threaten the United States. We scheduled an interview with Wolfowitz's deputy, Douglas Fife, but just hours before we sat down, the White House intervened. The interview was canceled. We received no explanation.

Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard, and VX nerve agent. We wanted to ask questions about WMD, but also about the broader rationale for the war, questions about oil, and about the prospects of an Iraqi democracy. Those close to the administration talk of an ambitious set of goals. There's no question that liberating Iraq, from this vicious tyrannical regime, was thought by many of us to be a good thing in itself. And the added benefits, if one could bring a democratic political process to Iraq, of shaping opinion in the Arab world, which is woefully devoid of democratic political institutions would also be a good thing.

There are five different methods. The public case, though, rested on imminent threat. The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. The White House has since admitted that the 16 words about uranium yellow cake from Africa were a mistake. What they have not explained is how something that had been investigated 12 months earlier, at the request of the vice president, could have still made it into a state of the Union speech.

We know, for instance, Greg Thielman had investigated rumors of African uranium sales to Iraq a year before the president's speech. As I recall, it was a human intelligence report that came to the United States. In this case, our specialists, who were weapons intelligence experts, and the African experts, and the Middle Eastern experts, and the Intelligence Bureau, were all of one accord, that this was a bad story. And then, in January, you hear the president talking about it. That's right, and it was a big surprise to me, because I left government at the end of September, in 2002.

So I had no indication, in the fall, that this story had any life on it at all, was really a shock to me when the president gave it such visibility in January of 2003. Some of the sources are technical, such as intercepted telephone conversations. 8 days after the President's state of the Union address, Secretary Powell would present the administration's case to the UN. I cannot tell you everything that we know, but what I can share with you when combined with what all of us have learned over the years is deeply troubling. The Secretary laid out Al Qaeda links.

Iraq today harbors a deadly terrorist network... Evidence of chemical and biological weapon stores. Sodom Hussein has chemical weapons. Sodom Hussein has used such weapons. And evidence of an active nuclear program.

Saddam Hussein already possesses two out of the three key components needed to build a nuclear bomb. He has a cadre of nuclear scientists with the expertise, and he has a bomb design. Though he did leave out mention of the Niger uranium story. The crux of Powell's nuclear case was that Iraq was procuring aluminum tubes and other vital parts of a uranium enrichment facility. Most U.

S. experts think they are intended to serve as rotors in centrifuges used to enrich uranium. We started out being agnostic on this, but the more that we got into it, It was not a difficult assessment for us to arrive at, ultimately, that the Department of Energy experts were correct in seeing these tubes as being not well suited for uranium enrichment centrifuge rotors, but were, in fact, for something else. Bin Laden met with a senior Iraqi intelligence official in Khartum. If one goes back, that very long presentation.

Point by point, one finds that this was not a very honest explanation. You had this very tenuous link made between Saddam and Osama bin Laden in the remarks of Secretary Powell when his own terrorist officials, and virtually everyone else in the U.S. intelligence community, said, There is no significant connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. I have to conclude Secretary Powell was being a loyal Secretary of State, a good soldier, as it were, building the administration's case before the international community.

My fellow citizens. At this hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger. Go, go, go! Against the advice of some top military commanders at the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld believed that Baghdad could be taken and the country secured with a small mobile force. Hey, someone, give me one more.

Initially, the plan seemed to be working. Things are going very well. General Franks and his team are first rate. They're enormously capable. They've got a plan.

The mood at the Pentagon was upbeat. And, uh, they are proceeding with it. Coalition forces were meeting only token resistance. There is no question but that that regime is not gonna be there in the future. After U.

S. troops moved into southern Iraq, Ahmed Chalabi was flown by the U.S. military to the town of Nazarea. It was hoped that he could launch an uprising of Shia's long oppressed by Saddam.

The plan was to allow Iraqis to participate in their own liberation in some formula. And, of course, the State Department was dead against it. Everybody was dead against it. They were irritated at the fact that, uh, um, Cheleby was being flown in, and it took the personal intervention of France, of Mr. Cherobi in the Pentagon, to make it happen.

The orders came from Undersecretary Doug Feith in the Pentagon. If Cholabi, a secular Shia, could lead Iraqis into battle, it would give him local credibility. Jalabi arrived with 700 troops from his own militia. It was called Operation Crescent Rising. What I want to do was participate in the liberation of Arab, and also, to show that I can operate on Iraqi territory, without much US help.

My point was that the United States government should recognize an Arab provisional government on any liberated territory of Arab that was outside the Kurdish area. At first, a crowd of several thousand came to see what this largely unknown exile, Chalabi, had to say. It seemed to be going well. But the State Department and uniformed military vigorously opposed the idea of marching Chalabi and his free Iraqi forces into Baghdad. Other Iraqi politicians were also opposed.

I thought it was a show of force. I do not like to have war gods in this country, you know, each one having his own militia. So this was Achmed Shalabi acting like a warlord. Well, but on a very small scale, of course. But, I mean, the whole idea of having, you know, abmalitias going around, this is we can't we can't start a democracy that way.

The generals were unimpressed by the people's response to Chalabi and his army. My overarching observation is that those folks were generally not well received. People are not responding to them like we might have hoped. They never were significantly engaged. They never significantly contributed, at least in my mind.

If you can sort of get a snowball rolling. If you can get the local support, and locals want to join a force in that type of thing, then it perhaps becomes another matter, but that was not happening at all. The U.S. Army removed Chalabi and his fighters to a nearby military base and kept him out of the fighting.

A disappointed Chalabi was left sitting in the desert without transportation. He wouldn't get to Baghdad until five days after its fall. The statues are coming down? Where are you? But I was in Washington, and I was visiting the vice president, and then I was told suddenly that to rush over that somebody wanted to see me.

I was the present. And Lisa Rice was there, and the vice president was there, and we had just seen the pictures of the statue come tumbling down. The present was very emotional and happy. And I remember telling him, I was off by two weeks, Mr. President, but it happened, because I said to the President, back in January, that the U.

S. forces would be greeted with sweets and flowers. And, of course, they weren't in the first two weeks. So, uh... And, uh...

it was, it was a moment of, of, of, what can I say? Real joy for me and for him, and, obviously, for everybody concerned, and we felt we were being vindicated. Okay, okay. Meanwhile, looting of the country spread. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Voy. At first, the military took a passive attitude. I saw the opulence of the palaces. Getting to and from there, though, you fly over these mud huts, that look like something, you know, right out of, I don't know, the birth of Jesus, and the contrast is just remarkable.

So, when troops entered Baghdad, and there was a level of looting, I think I understood, so long as the Iraqis were taking office furniture out of the government buildings and the regime, headquarters, locations, those types of things. And we watched it for two or three days, I think, pretty much with that attitude. This was not normal. It's not a sign of liberated people. I think it's a sign of people who sense there is no authority.

Iraqis are used to military coups, when they take place, they tune into their radios, and they obey orders, and people know exactly how to respond to it. Instead, there was a day, two days, and three days of no authority. It was what Robert Perito had told the Pentagon would happen. Secretary Rumsfield made these now famous remarks about, this is what happens when you allow people the freedom to act on their instincts. Stuff happens, and it's untidy, and freedom's untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes.

and commit crimes and do bad things. They're also free to live their lives and do wonderful things, and that's what's gonna happen here. Tough happens, I think. There were all these remarks that he made. And that struck me as...

Irresponsible is a pretty harsh word, but basically, you're responsible. We could have been ready. U.S. military forces that were there on scene stood by and watched.

Why? Because they had no instructions to intervene, and two, because there is this feeling, and has been on the part of the U.S. military constituently, that the U.S.

military doesn't do police. It doesn't do policing functions. And you think you could have stopped it? I think so. I think, uh, if we had been told to stop the looting and secure, uh, the key elements of the city, uh, we could have brought the force to do that.

Did you get on the phone and say, Why aren't we defending these buildings? Why are we letting this country be looted? Nope. You didn't do that? Nope.

Meanwhile, General Garner and his Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, Orha, remained holed up at the Hilton Hotel in Kuwait. You ready to go, but you're on hold. What happened? Well, the Sentcom wasn't gonna let us go in until they felt that the environment was permissive enough for us to get in there. I mean, they didn't want to put the Orha team in there, you got them all shot up on the first day.

Do you think that was the right decision? No, it was the wrong decision. It was the wrong decision. Why? Basically, there was a window of time, which the transition from a military mission to a political military mission was open, and in that window, one needed to have all of the civilian staff present, to the maximum extent possible, and beginning to function.

So, but you're sitting down in Kuwait unable to get any of this work underway. That's correct. Finally, U.S. Commander Tommy Franks relented and flew Garner into Baghdad.

He set up shop at the former headquarters of Saddam's Republican Guard. Even still, Garner and his team were unable to get to work. What happened is we put an incredible requirement on the military when we got there. The ground rule was that we couldn't move one of, like, our ministerial team or our government team. We couldn't move people around Baghdad, unless we had armed Humvee in front of it and armed Humvee behind it.

The Army didn't have enough Humvees or soldiers to drive them. And not only could the reconstruction team not get around Baghdad, they couldn't call out of the palace. Phones were down. because of U.S.

missile strikes on many of Baghdad's telephone exchanges. The United States is the greatest political, military, economic, cultural entity the planet has ever seen. We are particularly gifted at things like telephones and air conditioning. We couldn't seem to translate our capability into action on the ground. And that proved enormously frustrating.

Garner's team was also coping with growing violence. On April 28th, in the Sunni town of Fallujah, U.S. soldiers opened fire on a crowd demonstrating against U.S.

troops who were occupying a local school. Within a few minutes, 17 Iraqis were dead, and 70 wounded. Two days later, in Fallujah another crowd gathered to protest the American violence. U.S.

soldiers fired into the crowd again. Three more Iraqis were killed. Hands When there's the second event, then you grasp that there had been enough ill will created. And a failure to understand what was really at issue in Iraq, and what was at issue in Iraq, was not our absolute control, but our ability to get Iraqis to share our vision. The administration concluded that Iraq urgently needed more law and order.

They scrambled to find a replacement for Garner. I had a call from somebody in Secretary Rumsfeld's office on a Wednesday afternoon. Must have been in early May. In selecting Jerry Bremer, our country will be sending one of our best citizens. He's a man with enormous experience.

It was very quick, because I was basically over here about 10 days later. He's a can do type person. Effectively, I had only a week to get ready for the job. Not only to have of our country, but on behalf of the people of Iraq, they deserve a free and democratic society. Good luck to you.

Ambassador Paul Bremer arrived in Baghdad on May 12th. Bremer would take another run at formulating U.S. policy. The coalition forces did not come to colonize Iraq.

We came to overthrow a despotic regime. That we've done. Now, our job is to turn and help the Iraqi people regain control of their own destiny. Bremer, a former ambassador to the Netherlands, had little Middle East experience, but he was a State Department counterterrorism chief in the 1980s, and a protégé and business partner of Henry Kissinger. Bremer moved quickly to reassert U.

S. control. Security was Titan. Street patrols were stepped up. The hunt for Saddam was accelerated.

Looters were to be shot on site. Are they weapon trained? Bremer issued decree after decree. That's what we've gotta do. We got to go out, find the criminals...

on property, on prisons, on banking. Hey. And on the press. Shut up, please. And much to the dismay of politicians like Ahmed Chalabi, Bremer delayed the establishment of an Iraqi led government.

Chalabi flew to Washington and complained to his friends on the hill and in the Pentagon. Thank you, sir.. How is it going? Is it really moving? You see, Sarah, I don't understand.

General Garner complained, too, but privately. Jay Garner, how are you? Pilloried for being soft. Garner was criticized most heavily for retaining Bathist technocrat who ran the machinery of government. Hello, Sergeant.

J. J. Garner. The problem with Ghana was that he was employing Bathists in senior positions. You disagreed with him?

Entirely. Disagreed with them. Not unhappy to see him go. Well, I was happy to see the policy reversed. He was working with wrong Iraqis.

We're talking about the Iraqis who brutalized, traumatized this nation for 35 years. Shortly, I will issue an order on measures to extirpate Bathist and Bathism from Iraq forever. Ambassador Bremer ordered a policy of complete debathification. 30,000 to 40,000 bathists were banned from holding any public office. So they scrapped the old plan that you were working with.

Yeah, it got script. And all that happened in about a week's period. How'd you feel about that? I thought it was a mistake at the time. By alienating large numbers of people and not using them or utilizing them was not a smart move.

By doing that, you have made those people part of the problem, instead of the making them part of the solution. They have become part of the organized crime, part of the snipers shooting at the Americans, and part of the people who see no place for them in future Iraq. And that was not the idea. Over the summer, sabotage increased. Power plants and oil pipelines became regular targets.

At least one, sometimes two, American soldiers were being killed every day. More than 1,600 American soldiers have been wounded since the war began. Over 300 have died. Much of this sabotage is planned. And it's not resistance to occupation as the Arab satellite stations are presenting it.

It's mafia like tactics by the remnants of the bath party, which are quickly fusing into fundamentalist Islamists, Wahabi, leaning parties. It's a dangerous, dangerous convergence, a very Al Qaeda, Saddam connection, which got so discussed before the war is materializing before our very eyes. I see it in the leaflets that this video in put out. The language is guide the language now. So there's a very interesting sense in which all of that is coming home to roost.

That's an irony. In fact, the war itself brings Al Qaeda to Iraq when it wasn't here before. Well, that's your way of spinning it. That's not my way of seeing it. These are rare pictures of Task Force 20, A joint Army CIA strike force, whose brief is to find Saddam.

We caught up with them in the town of Tuluya, just as a raid was underway. We were prevented from entering the town by soldiers providing support for the task force. How long are you gonna be blocking this road? Any idea? I can't say so.

It's obviously a major operation, though. so. Where are you from? I'm from Tennessee. Deluya is a frequent target of raids.

It is located in the heart of the Sunni Triangle, where most of the fighting between Americans and Iraqis is taking place. Afterwards, we went to talk to the villagers. The raid had apparently come up empty. Do many people in this area do support Saddam? You don't like Saddam, what do you think of the Americans?

The army mounts scores of raids each week, chasing an elusive enemy. Defining the enemy now in this part of the campaign is a challenge. When you conduct the decisive combat operations at the beginning of the land attack, your enemy is far better defined, and it's easier to distinguish friend and foe. The situation that we're in now is you have threats against the coalition, which are blended in to the population. After a land mine, seriously wounded, two U.

S. soldiers in downtown Baghdad. Our cameraman rushed to the scene and witnessed this shootout. Soldiers were exchanging fire with some men in the building on the right. Then, for no apparent reason, the soldiers began firing in our direction.

A man standing five feet from our cameraman was shot and killed. The soldiers thought the man had shot at them. Afterwards, they asked witnesses what happened. 60 diesel, man? Yes.

He was just here in bystanders. He wasn't a shooter, he was just gonna stay on the side. Hey, let's go. One of the problems that I'm sensing is the more incursions into various neighborhoods. The more leery Iraqis become, especially when they see sons, fathers, sisters, killed by some of the roughness, perhaps necessary, perhaps not, of our raids.

Very delicate balance, you've got a reward. It is a delicate balance, and it's not one that I call myself. It's a call of a tactical commander, and I don't... My business isn't second guessed the military guys. We hope that they always act, you know, prudent fashion, but one, which, after all, has its goal, protecting our forces first, and achieving their objective, and doing that with a minimum collateral damage to either people or property.

The administration has been critical of the press for being too negative. Much of Baghdad is, again, bustling with everyday commerce. But with a guerrilla war. violence occurs randomly. The city, for all its resilience, remains on edge.

In one of Baghdad's wealthiest neighborhoods, we came upon this scene after another raid by Task Force 20. At the beginning they surround a house here. Who surrounded it? The American soldiers. Uh huh.

So the American soldiers surrounded a house, and then, then, a car entered the branch? Yes, they shoot at it. During the raid, drivers of two cars apparently confused by impromptu roadblocks were stopped by gunfire. The driver intended to stop, not to do anything. The American troops shoot him directly.

Five people were killed. In this car was one man. Down the street, a man, his wife, and child. A pedestrian was also killed. The victims all lived in the neighborhood.

and were returning home. There is a major difference between military and police. Soldiers are trained to deal with soldiers. They're trained to deal with opposition armies. They're not trained to deal with civilians.

There's a different ethos here. Police are trained to deal with civilians. They're trained to interact on a whole different basis. And so while soldiers are trained to, as one officer said, shoot people and break things. Police are trained to preserve and protect.

It's expected to take a year before a fully de bathified army and police force can be deployed. off. Back up. Okay, you wait until he gets up. Yes, yes.

Where's Treasure? Prison. Everyone's gotta stop pushing. Act civilized. There's no rush to get in here.

These people will be here for months, okay? I did far. We filmed these men standing in 120 degree heat. Some are former soldiers in Saddam's army, trying to get their job. back.

Unemployment is currently running. at over 50%. The aftermath has proven to be far more complicated than the Bush administration had predicted. It's also far more costly. Our economic advisors think that repairing Iraq's infrastructure will cost $100 billion, $100 billion, big money.

Ambassador Bremer is only talking about the cost of reconstruction. The cost of military occupation has been estimated, had another $4 billion a month. Bremer says there is no choice. The U.S.

will stay in Iraq as long as it takes to rebuild. In mid July, Bremer appointed a 25 member Iraqi governing council. But Bremer remains the real authority in Iraq. Where do you want to sit, Mr Chairman? Dominating the council are exiles, prominent among them, Ahmed Chalabi.

He wants the U.S. to turn over more power to the council on finances and security, and he has begun to distance himself from his American patrons. We really don't need continued occupation. We need security.

We need security, but if the U.S. pulls out, we have to have our own plans. You have plans but you have nothing on the ground. You do not have a police force.

Well, we can develop a police force quickly. Are you saying that if the Americans pull out tomorrow, you'd be okay? No, there would be fighting in Anak. There be a lot of bloodshed. But we will not abandon the situation.

We will fight, and I believe we will win. Chalabi is worried that more violence against foreigners will threaten America's long term commitment. On August 19th, a blast at the United Nations mission in Baghdad, killed special envoy Sergio Viera de Mello and 22 others. I do not know who they are, and which God, they pray to, but what they did will not serve their cause, nor they are God. Get out of here.

Mr. Ambassador, it appears their goal is to simply make it too painful. for those trying to rebuild this country to stay. Well, if that's their goal, they have misjudged their people. With this new kind of massive attack, how can you secure the city in this country?

We have to work very hard to do our best to find these people before they attack and to deal with them. And we will. you go. Since this bombing, and another in September, the UN has paired back its mission in Iraq from 650 to just 50 international workers. Last month, in New York, President Bush came to the U.

N. to appeal for money and troops from the international community. Chalabi came to represent Iraq. Hello. Hello.

But just days earlier, he had angered U.S. officials by lobbying France and Germany for their support for a speedy transfer of sovereignty to Iraqis. He spent his press conference trying to patch up differences with Washington. We, Iraqi people, are grateful to President Bush, and to the United States, Congress, and the people of the United States, for helping us to liberate our country from the scourge of Saddam Hussein.

What's at stake here? The future of 25 million people in Iraq. Are they going to live, as we have promised them, in freedom, in a robust economy, at peace with their neighbors, with an ability to provide for their kids? For the United States, what's at stake is holding good to our word that we were gonna make those things happen, and we will. I guess the problem is that Americans, uh, caution that this aftermath would be difficult, and that we didn't sign up for a humanitarian mission.

We signed up to rid ourselves of an imminent threat. Was the war wrongly sold? I don't know. You know, I'm not a politician. I'm just trying to do this job.

I have absolutely no question that this was, by anybody's terms, a just war, by theological, moral, political terms. If ever, a three week war ever brought about such enormous benefits to 25 million people, this was the war. Cananmakia began his career as an architect before he became an author and human rights activist. We followed him here to what was once the Museum of Gifts to President Saddam Hussein. Soon, Machia hopes to turn this building into a museum of remembrance, to catalog the torture and murder of tens of thousands of Iraqis by Saddam and his regime.

Makia is also still hoping to participate in drafting a new Iraqi Constitution. He expects America to make good on its promises to help rebuild his country. The question Americans have is, at what cost? Americans were sold to war based on imminent threat, weapons of mass destruction, and now, there are many Americans who feel that they've been suckered into something, that is, perhaps, too great, too costly. Well, then it's my duty and the duty of others, Iraqis, Americans, other people who don't think that to convince them, they were not suckered into anything irresponsible, that this is a fundamental, the big thing.

This is a huge engagement. American prestigious at stake, American credibility at stake, an American commitment to its own values. Its own sense of what it's all about is at stake here. And the benefit will be that the rest of the Middle East will suddenly have something upon which to cement itself, a hope, for the future, which it doesn't have at the moment. Those are real benefits, very tangible, very real, benefits that can come from the success of this experiment.

You call it an experiment. Yes, and I'm not ashamed of calling it that. Next time on Frontline. Right here in our neighborhood, we have terrorists. Six American citizens.

We must prevent first prosecute second. Arrested in the name of Homeland Security. One by one, the terrorists are learning the meaning of American justice. Were they really a threat? We were definitely no superstar.

I'm not a terrorist. I love my country. My family lives here. Chasing the sleeper cell next time on Frontline. To order frontline's truth, war, and consequences on video cassette or DVD, call PBS Home Video at 1 800, play PBS.

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Last Updated: 2026-09-27