Truth, War and Consequences (full documentary) | FRONTLINE

[Music] the war on terror is not confined strictly to the al-qaeda that we're chasing the war on terror involves saddam hussein [Music] 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're going to wait until they got there and then they were going to 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 [Music] down so [Music] 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 [Music] we accompanied kanan makiya an iraqi exile who has been at the center of efforts to topple saddam for more than a decade he hadn't seen southern or central iraq since he was 18. this was once upon a time the fertile crescent sometimes turned it into a desert along the way u.s 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 iraqi exiles [Music] with less than 300 kilometers to go they paused for a picture [Music] as we drove into baghdad the bombed out hulks of iraqi tanks and anti-aircraft guns littered the sides of the highways [Music] 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 [Music] i suppose the shock was to realize just how rundown the city had been allowed to become by the bat i thought of the bat as a modernizing force an ugly brutal deformed kind of modernity but modernizing nonetheless here i entered the city that was ramshackled broken apart buildings cracking at the seams filthy uh smelling garbage on the streets just it was it was it was it was tragic there was a true sense of dilapidation everywhere on top of the dilapidation came postwar 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 looters had deconstructed entire buildings stripped out wires insulation plumbing stealing any reusable resaleable materials they torched what remained when general jay 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 uh you know i i i didn't know that the looting would be as i never suspected it would be as 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 [Music] we came upon this station where one man had fired a gun in anger the bullet hit a gas tank and an explosion and fire ensued that killed four including this boy's brother [Applause] [Music] weary residents were calling on the u.s to either take control or go home couldn't the military have done a better job putting in police patrols or bringing in more soldiers to try to tamp things down a bit you have to have some military well you're you're a general what's your opinion well i think i you're always better off with more troops so we didn't have enough troops i think there's i 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 that y'all don't need to be here you know what school deal can't do that what he needs to be doing not following you we filmed these gi's after they caught a group of iraqis stealing wood we try to stop them from looting they don't understand so we'll take that car and we'll crush it united states army tankers who that's what you get when you look 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 it's your people in your land that brought forth the codification of the law the day after we arrived general garner was speaking to a political conference the u.s had invited 300 iraqis tribal shakes religious business and political leaders kanan 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 to government and we want it now we're asking british and united states to book the principal system for us how to go through democracy 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 looting was going on as the meeting took place and authority was needed here now immediately instantly 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 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 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 ahmed shalaby you agree if somebody else said it i'm not going to disagree with them this is this is well you nagged the u.s government for 12 13 years to accomplish this task well i did i worked very hard because i had i came to the conclusion very early on that if the us 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 him 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 chalabay was busy navigating post-war politics many people that supported the war no longer do yes they feel that they were suckered yes probably they say so okay i mean i don't you know i'm not this well i mean you know half the people now feel that the war wasn't justified on the grounds that it was uh argued for okay do you feel any discomfort with that no well now they are in baghdad now the story of how they got here begins in washington [Music] 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. [Music] well i believe there was a strong argument for looking at iraq 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 speech writers david frum i had a conversation with david and what was the content of that that we 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 harbor 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 feith to set up a special office inside the pentagon that would examine intelligence regarding iraq's possible connection with al qaeda it started as a small secretive operation it was very simple it was clear that no one had been looking for for 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 thielmann 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 they didn't play in the in the normal bureaucratic process of 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 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 and you're you're not looking for a hidden treasure you won't find it conversely if you look for something you will find it simply because you are are looking and the nature of intelligence is 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 [Music] 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 has been pretty well confirmed that he did go to prague and he did meet with a senior official of 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 atta 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 on 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 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 problems through 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 issue is 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 it was a real effort to plan right to be there on the ground the day after and ready to go lath cuba 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 and saddam 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 ahmed chalabi and other inc 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 kanan makia declined an invitation to participate the state department wanted to talk about how best we can collect garbage in the streets the day after liberation or how can we recruit a thousand health workers to go to this or that area um the day after and i said i didn't have anything to contribute to such questions unfortunately i i'm sure there were people inside iraq would know much better than i had to go about doing these things kanan 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 very touching moment when he uh he said that he felt that the united states had been wrong in 1991 and 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 makias 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 adviser richard haas i went to house he told me i'm seeing you only because you impressed some congressman i was supposed to meet him i don't know for half an hour we stayed 90 minutes i explained to him the strategy he said we will support an iraqi political movement that will come out endorsing democracy in iraq democratic government pluralistic government in iraq renunciation of weapons of mass destruction 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 sunnis the u.s government gave the inc cia money and contacts but in the mid nineties 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 him but we'd encourage them in the first place absolutely he attempted to build on what he thought was american support which was not forthcoming [Music] the clinton administration feared chalabi 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 that got shot down largely because i think people were afraid it would be a one-way street for military intervention our military intervention and the military our military wasn't prepared for that at that time i think that fallout was the final straw 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 the summer of 96 we had to go back to the drawing board and decide on a strategy and and we had to think of what we considered to be a real strategy to to get us to baghdad saddam is the problem he can never be part of any solution jollibee turned back to washington with 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 u.s 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 challenge 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 will be believes that despite all its money and equipment iraq didn't have the expertise to assemble a weapon [Music] bahali is more concerned with the radioactive contamination of villagers living near the looted nuclear plant to either where he worked for the last 10 years the army has now secured the gates of tuatha which had once been a major point of interest for inspectors for months the 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 because evidence that we heard from his people but we never gave this to the united states because we knew that this kind of evidence would be unacceptable and we will be why because it is not verifiable for the united states we get a piece of information from an officer so it was hearsay we believed it we knew it we did not present it but it looks as if right now i mean they 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 uh 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 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 what was missing from all the speeches and television appearances were the caveats and contrary evidence from their own intelligence agencies the 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 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 policy 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 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 them the fall campaign would culminate with a speech by president bush on october 7th in cincinnati facing clear evidence apparel 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 gasses 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 the point is that u.s u.s where are these where is this evidence though new as 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 yeah well i 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 or intelligence people your intelligence people so after this interview we can my i don't know if you can do it right now 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 if there is such a document it makes sense for you to share it now i'm not saying no no i'm saying that i can't i'm not 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 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 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 iraqi 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 people it should not have been for makia the cause had always been establishing a democracy in iraq [Music] 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 [Music] at issue was how iraq would be ruled after the war 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 mckea'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 i'll have the denaturation of germany we're talking about the paper also called for the immediate establishment of a provisional government in exile protection the moment the report came out the state department started taking distance from it because it apparently challenged a central tenant of the us of 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 in 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 a 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 formed by the opposition which is outside the country we want to get people from inside the country involved and they should be play aiding role in this provisional government the inc left the conference frustrated 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 cia have consistently thwarted the president's genuine attempt i think to to do something very dramatic in this country the inc's last hope was the defense department here top civilian officials believed 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 cholibi-led provisional government or not the whole government turned into two camps one of them is just totally opposed to celebrity and the other one was so pro chelabi and and i think uh the problem uh we began to face was that you know everybody almost almost uh forgot about the issue of iraq and being and and the main focus became celebrity shall be gonna be the president shall be going to be the head of the provisional government uh will you know what will 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 shalaby or not shallopy i that's quite right there has been a debilitating and i think wasteful and damaging quarrel over akhman celebi so why have you clung to akhman shalabi why not just find somebody else that's acceptable to both sides no one else has been proposed who's acceptable to both sides and the arguments against chellaby have been [Music] 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's 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 up took me up as the bet 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 kanan 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 uh he left me with a very clear impression that he was deadly serious about it that this was not just rhetoric and 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 reigns 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 uh in the early period and going back 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 and trusted 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 uh it wasn't well received it wasn't well received but not only in the pentagon it wasn't real well received in portions of the uh of the executive branch either but you know i have run into i've 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 it they did put a big effort and i think there was a mistake that we didn't use that i mean i agree with that and and it was my intent to use that but we didn't and why didn't we use the i don't know i don't know the answer that i was i was just told you know it's just the decision been made they're not going to do that and who told you that i got that from the secretary and i don't think that was his decision secretary rumsfeld 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 though 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 going to hire them and 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 need to do i mean they know how to fix roads and how to fix bridges they know how to move rubble around they're all 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 thing so that was that was a good concept this is meet the press with tim russert 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 preparing another assumption was that iraqis would greet the americans as liberators an assurance they got from the inc we do believe we will be greeted as liberators i've talked with a lot of uh of iraqis in the last several months myself had them to the white house president i have met with them with various groups and individuals uh people who've devoted their lives from the outside to trying to change things inside iraq and like kanan makia who's a professor at brandeis but in iraq he's written 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 makia 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 lawlessness you're going to need to establish the rule of law you're going to have to deal with prisoners for example robert imparito 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 than the conflict did 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 and their basic approach was that that they couldn't really foresee exactly what was needed so they're going to wait until they got there and then they were going to 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 adviser condoleezza 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 cancelled we received no explanation [Applause] 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 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 greg thielmann 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 in the intelligence bureau were all of one accord that this was 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 uh 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 it was really a shock to me when the president gave it such visibility in in january of two thousand three some of the sources are technical such as intercepted telephone conversations eight 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 weapons stores sodom hussein has chemical weapons sodom hussein has used such weapons and evidence of an active nuclear program sodom 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 uh not a difficult uh assessment for us to arrive at ultimately that uh the department of energy experts were correct in seeing these tubes as being not well suited for uranium enrichment centrifuge rotors but we're in fact for something else bin laden met with a senior iraqi intelligence official in khartoum 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 uh 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 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 [Music] 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 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 they are proceeding with it coalition forces were meeting only token resistance there is no question but that that regime is not going to 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 shias long oppressed by saddam the plan was to allow iraqis to participate in their own liberation in some form another and of course the state department was dead against it everybody was dead against it they were irritated at the fact that uh chellaby was being flown in and it took the personal intervention of friends of mr charlie in the pentagon to make it happen the orders came from under secretary doug feith in the pentagon if chalabi 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 is participate in the liberation of iraq and also to show that we i can operate in on iraqi territory without much u.s help my point was that the united states government should recognize an arab a provisional government on any liberated territory of iraq that was outside the kurdish area [Applause] 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 warlords in this country you know each one having his own medicine so this was ahmed shall be acting like a warlord well but on a very small scale of course but i mean the whole idea of having you know our militias 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 chaliby 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 to my mind if you can sort of get a snowball rolling if you can get the local support and locals want to join the force and that type of thing then it perhaps becomes another matter but that was not happening at all the us army removed chalabi and his fighters to a nearby military base and kept him out of the fighting a disappointed chilaby 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 well i was in washington and uh i was visiting the vice president and then i was told suddenly to rush over that was somebody wanted to see me and it was the president scond 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 um and it was it was it was a it was a moment of of what can i say real joy for me and for him and obviously for everybody concerned and we we felt we were being vindicated [Music] meanwhile looting of the country spread [Music] thank you thank you 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 uh you know right out of uh i don't know the birth of jesus uh and and the contrast is just remarkable uh so when when troops entered baghdad and there was a level of looting uh i 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 the 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 perrito had told the pentagon would happen secretary rumsfeld 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 to to live their lives and and do wonderful things and that's what's going to happen here stuff happens i think you know there were all these these remarks that he made and that struck me as is irresponsible is a pretty harsh word but 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 us military consistently 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 uh and secure uh the key elements of the city uh we could have 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 meanwhile general garner and his office of reconstruction and humanitarian assistance orha remained holed up at the hilton hotel in kuwait you're ready to go but you're on hold what happened well the centcom wasn't going to let us go in until they they felt that the environment was permissive enough for us to get in there i mean they didn't want to put the oraha team in there and get 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 a window of time which the transition from a military mission to a political military mission was open and in that into 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 whenever like our ministerial team our government team we couldn't move people around baghdad unless we had armed humvee in front of it and harmed umv 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 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 suny 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 [Applause] 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 when there's the second event then you grasp that that there had been enough ill will created and [Music] 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 bremmer our country will be sending one of our best citizens he's a man with enormous success it was very quick because i was basically over here about ten days later he's a can-do type person effectively i had only a week to get ready for the job not only behalf of our country but on behalf of the people of iraq who deserve a free and democratic society good luck to you ambassador paul bremmer 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 counter-terrorism chief in the 1980s and a protege and business partner of henry kissinger bremer moved quickly to reassert u.s control security was tightened 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 got to do we got to go out find the criminals on property on prisons on banking and on the press and much to the dismay of politicians like ahmed chalabi bremer delayed the establishment of an iraqi-led government jalabi flew to washington and complained to his friends on the hill and in the pentagon thank you senator how is it going is it really moving you see senator i don't understand general garner complained too but privately pilloried for being soft garner was criticized most heavily for retaining bathist technocrats who ran the machinery of the government with ghana was that he was employing baathists in senior positions he disagreed with him entirely disagreed with him not unhappy to see him go well i was happy to see the policy reversed he was working with the wrong iraq we're talking about the iraqis who brutalized traumatized this nation for 35 years shortly i will issue an order on measures to extirpate baptist and baptism from iraq forever ambassador bremer ordered a policy of complete debathification thirty to forty thousand baathists were banned from holding any public office so they scrapped the old plan that you that you were working with yeah it got scrapped and all that happened in about a week how did 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 1600 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 leaning parties there's a dangerous dangerous convergence the 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 these videos put out the language is kai the language now so there's a very interesting sense in which all of that is coming home to roost that's an irony yes in fact the war itself brings al qaeda to iraq when it wasn't here before well i thought that 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 the luya 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 going to be blocking this road any idea it's 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 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 when you conduct the decisive combat operations at the beginning of 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 uh threats against the coalition which are blended in to the population after a landmine seriously wounded two u.s soldiers in downtown baghdad our cameraman rushed to the scene and witnessed this shootout [Applause] soldiers were exchanging fire with some men in the building on the right [Applause] then for no apparent reason the soldiers began firing in our direction [Applause] 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 yes he was just here in bystanders [Music] 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 by some of the roughness perhaps necessary perhaps not of our raids very delicate balance you've got to award it it is a delicate balance and it's not one that i call myself it's a it's a call of the tactical commander and i don't my my business isn't second guess the military guys we hope that they always act in a prudent fashion but one which after all has its goal protecting our forces first and achieving their objective and doing that with the 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 [Music] in one of baghdad's wealthiest neighborhoods we came upon this scene after another raid by task force 20. at the beginning they surround surround a house here who surrounded it the american soldiers so the american soldiers surrounded the 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 oppositional 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 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 demathified army and police force can be deployed back up okay you wait until he gets up yeah where's the treasure everyone's got to stop pushing act civilized there's no rush to get in here these people will be here for months okay we filmed these men standing in 120 degree heat some are former soldiers in saddam's army trying to get their jobs back unemployment is currently running at over 50 percent 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 a hundred billion dollars 100 billion dollars big money ambassador bremer is only talking about the cost of reconstruction the cost of military occupation has been estimated at another four billion dollars a month bremer says there is no choice the us 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 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 we can if the us 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 don't we can develop a police force quickly are you saying that if the americans pull out tomorrow you'd be okay no there will be fighting in iraq there will be a lot of bloodshed but we will not abandon the situation we will fight and i believe we will win chanaby is worried that more violence against foreigners will threaten america's long-term commitment [Music] on august 19th a blast at the united nations mission in baghdad killed special envoy sergio vieira demelo and 22 others i do not know who they are and which god they pray to but what they did will not save their cause nor their god get out of here [Music] [Applause] 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 since this bombing and another in september the u.n 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 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 the 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 [Music] [Applause] what's at stake here the future of 25 million people in iraq are they going to live as 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 going to make those things happen and we will i guess the problem is that americans cautioned 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 i don't know you know i'm not a politician i'm just trying to do this job i 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 kanan mckia 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 makia 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 a 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 fundamentally big thing this is a huge engagement american prestigious at stake american credibility is a 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 [Music] 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 super cell 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 [Music] support for frontline is provided by u.s news and world report trust for over 70 years a commitment to playing it straight getting it right u.s news and world report trust matters frontline is made possible by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you thank you [Music] you

Channel: FRONTLINE PBS | Official

Views: 2,243,238

Keywords:

Id: RMSNUX3n6yA

Length: 84min 58sec (5098 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 19 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

[removed]

[u/villain304]

Frontline’s YouTube channel just killin it these last few weeks

[u/DrDankDankDank]

What consequences? No one that started that war ever suffered any. And now the god damn media is trying to rehabilitate that war criminal George bush’s image. SMH

[u/The_wooden_anus]

Greed.
It was all about money.

[u/angryratman]

Saddam started to sell oil in Euros.

[u/TheBigCore]

https://youtu.be/ZJXaFuDcOx0?t=62

You say yer life's a bum deal

'N yer up against the wall...

Well, people, you ain't even got no

Deal at all

'Cause what they do

In Washington

They just takes care

of NUMBER ONE

An' NUMBER ONE ain't YOU

You ain't even NUMBER TWO

• Frank Zappa's "The Meek Shall Inherit Nothing"

[u/[deleted]]

A) congress never declared war.

B) cheney and bush's (and company) lies started the Iraq "war".

C) Afghanistan had nothing to do with any of this, other than having oil and a really great place for "defense contractor" hog trough feeding (Halliburton - et al).

D) if trump had wanted to stop the war he would have done so somewhere in the four years he kept saying he would. He didn't stop the "war" at the behest of his wealthiest donors (the death merchants) - they let him "make a treaty" with no intent whatsoever of following through on it.

[u/SwagAntiswag]

Because the US government is a terrorist organization who wants to make sure they have as many military bases around the world while destabilizing those countries and killing innocent people. Did I miss something?

[u/monsantobreath]

I'm not gonna watch it unless this documentary actually addresses the evil that was the invasion from conception, not that it was just messed up by bad planning.