The 12 Year Itch

The attack, as well as two more bombing raids on Iraqi military targets in 1996 and 1998, seems to have only emboldened Saddam. He continued to defy and evade U.N. weapons inspectors, finally forcing their withdrawal in 1998. He made a mockery of economic sanctions. As early as 1991 the U.N. Security Council approved an "oil for food" deal under which Iraq could export regulated amounts of oil and spend the proceeds, under U.N. supervision, on food imports. For five years Saddam rejected the program, calculating that the resulting hardship would, in time, destroy the sanctions regime entirely. He was right. "Saddam was taking his own people hostage," says Charles Duelfer, the U.S. diplomat who helped run the U.N. arms-inspection program. "It was like one of those airline hijackers in the old days: shoot a passenger every 15 minutes until their demands are met. That's in effect what he did, and the Security Council had no stomach for it."

The Clinton administration finally gave in and allowed Saddam to export more oil to alleviate his people's suffering. The strongman promptly pocketed secret kickbacks, which he used to build more palaces--and fund his secret WMD program. "We could see this happening," said one Clinton administration official, "but there wasn't a whole lot we could do about it."

The Clinton administration did make covert attempts to overthrow Saddam, but they were halfhearted. A swashbuckling CIA case officer named Bob Baer helped organize a coup plot in Baghdad in 1996 and a revolt by the Kurds in 1995, but both collapsed. The reasons for the failure are revealing. The Pentagon was extremely wary of CIA plotting. The top brass feared that stage two of any coup attempt would require the U.S. military to back the coup plotters with a full-scale invasion. Gen. Anthony Zinni, the then commander of CENTCOM, dismissed covert action against Saddam as a "Bay of Goats," a biting reference to the Bay of Pigs, the failed CIA invasion of Cuba in 1961. Skeptical of Clinton, who was regarded in the ranks as a draft dodger, the top military leadership in the years after the gulf war was extremely reluctant to commit troops and take casualties without the most fervent reassurances of support and success from the White House. National-security adviser Tony Lake found out about Bob Baer's plots in Iraq only at the last minute. "What we had always feared was about to happen," Martin Indyk recalls. "The CIA has some cowboy out there making commitments we know nothing about, to guys we know nothing about." When intelligence sources learned the plot had been compromised, Lake pulled the plug on the operation.

Baer, a spook not easily discouraged, proceeded to organize another plot under a CIA-created exile group. Iraqi intelligence thoroughly penetrated the operation, even obtaining one of the supersecret satphones that the CIA had given the plotters. On June 26, 1996, one of those phones rang in the CIA station in Amman, Jordan. It carried a message from Iraqi intelligence: "We have arrested all your people. You might as well pack up and go home." That was the end of covert attempts to get rid of Saddam. Shortly thereafter, NEWSWEEK has learned, the CIA discovered that Saddam was buying large quantities of Viagra in Amman. The spooks thought about "spiking" the dictator's sexual stimulant but rejected the idea.

By the time George W. Bush became president in January 2001, Saddam Hussein had every reason to believe he was winning his long war against the United States. At the United Nations, the French and Russians, eager for oil contracts, were pushing to do away with sanctions altogether. The U.N. arms inspectors were gone, and no one was agitating very hard to send them back. The national-security bureaucracy in Washington appeared to have no appetite for a Gulf War II. And President Bush, though he clearly harbored some animus toward the man who had tried to kill his father, seemed to have other things on his mind than getting Saddam Hussein.

There was, however, one group in the new administration bound and determined to achieve regime change in Baghdad. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and several other well-placed officials at Defense, State and the office of the vice president were ardent neoconservatives. Strongly pro-Israel, they believed that peace would never come to the Middle East until the Middle East truly changed--until the repressive Arab regimes stopped trying to deflect popular blame at their own failed policies toward hatred of the Jews. The key to this strategy was a reformed, post-Saddam Iraq. The Iraqis had a middle class and oil; liberated and empowered with free markets and the rule of law, they could become a beacon and a model for the whole region. Wolfowitz and his cohorts pushed for Bush administration support for Iraqi exiles who could foment a coup or revolt against Saddam. But the CIA, burned before, was dubious. So were the risk-averse State Department and Defense Department bureaucracies.