Decision Points

agents. He had a nuclear weapons program that was about two years from yielding a bomb, much closer than the CIA’s prewar estimate of eight to ten years. When his son-in-law defected in 1995, Saddam acknowledged that the regime had been hiding a biological weapons program that included anthrax and botulinum toxin.
    To keep Saddam in check, the UN imposed strict economic sanctions. But as outrage over Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait faded, the world’s attention drifted. Saddam diverted nearly two billion dollars from the Oil-for-Food program—which the UN had created to provide for the basic humanitarian needs of innocent Iraqis—to enrich his cronies and reconstitute his military strength, including programs related to weapons of mass destruction. As children starved, he launched a propaganda campaign blaming sanctions for the suffering.
    By 1998 Saddam had persuaded key trading partners like Russia and France to lobby the UN to loosen the restrictions. Then he forced the UN weapons inspectors to leave the country. The problem was clear: Saddam had never verified that he had destroyed all of his weapons from the Gulf War. With the inspectors gone, the world was blind to whether he had restarted his programs.
    The Clinton administration responded by launching Operation Desert Fox—a four-day bombing campaign conducted jointly with Great Britain and aimed at degrading Saddam’s WMD capabilities. In a primetime address from the Oval Office in December 1998, President Clinton explained:
    The hard fact is that so long as Saddam remains in power, he threatens the well-being of his people, the peace of his region, the security of the world. The best way to end that threat once and for all is with a new Iraqi government—a government ready to live in peace with its neighbors, a government that respects the rights of its people. …
    Heavy as they are, the costs of action must be weighed against the price of inaction. If Saddam defies the world and we fail to respond, we will face a far greater threat in the future. Saddam will strike again at his neighbors. He will make war on his own people. And mark my words, he will develop weapons of mass destruction. He will deploy them, and he will use them.
    The same year, Congress overwhelmingly passed and President Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act. The law declared a new official policy of the United States: “To support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and to promote the emergence of a democratic government.”

    By early 2001, Saddam Hussein was waging a low-grade war against the United States. In 1999 and 2000, his forces had fired seven hundred times at our pilots patrolling the no-fly zones.
    For my first eight months in office, my policy focused on tightening the sanctions—or, as Colin Powell put it, keeping Saddam in his box. Then 9/11 hit, and we had to take a fresh look at every threat in the world. There were state sponsors of terror. There were sworn enemies of America. There were hostile governments that threatened their neighbors. There were nations that violated international demands. There were dictators who repressed their people. And there were regimes that pursued WMD. Iraq combined all those threats.
    Saddam Hussein didn’t just sympathize with terrorists. He had paid the families of Palestinian suicide bombers and given sanctuary to terrorists like Abu Nidal , who led attacks that killed nineteen people at an Israeli airline’s ticket counters in Rome and Vienna, and Abu Abbas , who hijacked the Italian cruise ship
Achille Lauro
and murdered an elderly, wheelchair-bound American.
    Saddam Hussein wasn’t just a sworn enemy of America. He had fired at our aircraft, issued a statement praising 9/11, and made an assassination attempt on a former president, my father.
    Saddam Hussein didn’t just threaten his neighbors. He had invaded two of them, Iran in the 1980s and Kuwait in the 1990s.
    Saddam Hussein didn’t just violate international demands. He had defied sixteen UN resolutions, dating back to the Gulf War.
    Saddam Hussein didn’t just rule brutally. He and his henchmen had tortured innocent people, raped political opponents in front of their families, scalded dissidents with acid, and dumped tens of thousands of Iraqis into mass graves. In 2000, Saddam’s government decreed that people whocriticized the president or his family would have their tongues slashed out. Later that year, an Iraqi