The Assassins' Gate by George Packer

war on terrorism and the basis for further action. The speech dramatically expanded the theater of the war, but it did so on relatively narrow grounds. As Wolfowitz told an interviewer after the fall of Baghdad, WMD was the least common denominator: “The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on, which was weapons of mass destruction.” Wolfowitz suggested that he himself had bigger ideas—a realignment of American power and influence in the Middle East, away from theocratic Saudi Arabia (home to so many of the 9/11 hijackers), and toward a democratic Iraq, as the beginning of an effort to cleanse the whole region of murderous regimes and ideologies. This would have been a much broader case for war than WMD and closer to the arguments of influential people outside the administration, such as Bernard Lewis, Fouad Ajami, and Robert Kagan. Resting on a complex and abstract theory, it would also have been much harder to sell to the public.
    Throughout the year, WMD remained the administration’s rationale for a war it had in all likelihood decided upon as early as November 2001. (There was a recurring locution that expressed the diplomatic doublespeak of the prewar period and that officials continued to use up to the very brink of invasion, as if the administration were being dragged against its will into hostilities with Iraq that it was doing everything possible to avoid: “If or when war becomes necessary…”) Having settled on WMD as the cause for war—if or when there was to be a war—the administration was stuck with the limits of its own argument. In July 2002, Sir Richard Dearlove, Britian’s head of foreign intelligence, reported back to Tony Blair and his top officials about meetings in Washington. According to a secret memo made public in May 2005, Sir Richard told his colleagues: “Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.”
    So when, in the late summer and fall of 2002, a high-profile campaign to convince the American public of the need for a preemptive war against Iraq began, the rhetoric had the quality of protesting too much. Just a year earlier, Iraq had been viewed as an outlaw state that was beginning to slip free of international constraints and might present a threat to the region or, more remotely, the United States in five years or so. Now, suddenly, there wasn’t a day to be lost. In late August, Dick Cheney surprised Colin Powell and other Iraq skeptics when he declared before the Veterans of Foreign Wars that the Saddam Hussein regime without a doubt possessed stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and had “reconstituted” its nuclear weapons program. Within a year, Saddam could possess a nuke—and Cheney wasn’t shy about suggesting that the Iraqi dictator might well hand one over to al-Qaeda.
    It didn’t matter that there was no strong evidence to back up the doomsday prognosis. A possible medium- to long-term threat had become a “grave and gathering danger.” Condoleezza Rice came up with an ominous metaphor, and Bush used it in a warlike speech in Cincinnati in October: the smoking gun in the shape of a mushroom cloud. The campaign of persuasion proceeded by rhetorical hyperbole, by the deliberate slanting of ambiguous facts in one direction, and by a wink-and-nod suggestion that the administration knew more than it could reveal. Conflicting and inconclusive intelligence about Saddam’s weapons programs was selected and highlighted for the