The very Serious Paul Wolfowitz

Q:After 9/11, there were people like Richard Clarke, who was at the National Security Council, who said that there were people - and he specifically mentions you and your boss Donald Rumsfeld - who immediately started diverting attention away from al Qaeda toward Iraq. That you viewed this as an opportunity to deal with what you regarded as the unfinished business of Iraq…

A:No one was arguing to divert attention from al Qaeda and Afghanistan. That was clearly part of the problem. The question was whether Iraq was also part of the problem. And we could spend an entire show going into the historical detail. But I think the important thing is to say, well, we had this experience. Was there a way to avoid this war? Was it necessary? And what did we learn from it? 

And I think it's important that the reason this has been so painful and lasted so long and cost 4,000 American lives – and I've spent a lot of time with wounded soldiers and their families and with families of the fallen. I understand the pain involved, or at least, well, as best as someone who hasn't experienced directly can. But the reason it was so difficult and lasted so long is it took us so long to understand that we were dealing with an insurgency, that to deal with an insurgency, you need a counterinsurgency strategy. 

Instead, we were out trying to kill terrorists. But the essence of counterinsurgency, which is known to people as the surge, but it wasn't primarily about putting in more troops – it was primarily about using them in a different way – is that you have to get the population on your side. And you can't get the population on your side unless you undertake to protect them, because taking on these killers is dangerous.

And if we had not forgotten everything that we learned about counter-insurgency 30 years earlier in Vietnam, I believe this would have turned around much more quickly. Look how quickly it turned around in 2007, when things had already spiraled wildly out of control. The insurgency had grown. We had sectarian conflict. So I think that is the fundamental mistake. And we can talk about others and whether they contributed or not. I think it's those, you can argue are round or flat. But the success of counterinsurgency is quite clear.

A major focus for Wolfowitz and others in the Pentagon was finding intelligence to prove a connection between Hussein and Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist network. On the day of the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center,Wolfowitz told senior officials at the Pentagon that he believed Iraq might have been responsible. "I was scratching my head because everyone else thought of al Qaeda," said a former senior defense official who was in one such meeting. 

Over the following year, "we got taskers to review the link between al Qaeda and Iraq. There was a very aggressive search." In the winter of 2001-02, officials who worked with Wolfowitz sent the Defense Intelligence Agency a message: Get hold of Laurie Mylroie's book, which claimed Hussein was behind the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and see if you can prove it, one former defense official said. 

The DIA's Middle East analysts were familiar with the book, "Study of Revenge: The First World Trade Center Attack and Saddam Hussein's War Against America." But they and others in the U.S. intelligence community were convinced that radical Islamic fundamentalists, not Iraq, were involved. "The message was, why can't we prove this is right?" said the official.

When the Pentagon’s internal think tank decided in 2004 it needed a better understanding of Al Qaeda, it turned to an unlikely source: the terrorism analyst Laurie Mylroie, who was known as the chief purveyor of the discredited idea that Saddam Hussein was behind Sept. 11 and many other attacks carried out by Al Qaeda. Mylroie was paid roughly $75,000 to produce a 300-page study, “The History of Al Qaida,” for the Defense Department think tank, known as the Office of Net Assessment, a DOD spokesman tells us. 

The study, which is dated September 2005, was posted on an intelligence blog last month. It documents the development of Al Qaeda and spends many pages dancing around the theory that has defined Mylroie’s career — that key Qaeda leaders acted at the behest of the Iraqi regime. She also argues that group-think among U.S. analysts has obscured the true nature of the terrorist group.

Those who know Mylroie’s work are shocked that the Pentagon would hire her. “I think that she has zero credibility on these issues,” says terrorism expert Peter Bergen, who dubbed Mylroie “a crackpot” in a 2003 Washington Monthly profile. Once an assistant professor at Harvard, Mylroie made her name as a Middle East expert in the 1980s. But after the 1993 WTC attack, she became convinced that evidence ignored by virtually everyone else proved Saddam was sponsoring Al Qaeda. She expanded on that theory after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing (which she linked to Iraq) and September 11 (ditto), culminating in the book Study of Revenge: The First World Trade Center Attack and Saddam Hussein’s War against America, published by the American Enterprise Institute in October 2001. 

Mylroie’s allies in the Bush Administration included Iraq hawks Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and others. “The elaborate conspiracy theories she had propounded—dismissed as bizarre and implausible by the U.S. law enforcement and intelligence communities—would have enormous influence within the administration,” reported David Corn and Michael Isikoff in their book Hubris. 

In the 2005 Pentagon study, Mylroie floats the idea that 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohamad and Ramzi Yousef, who planned the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, “are the trained agents of a terrorist state, the expertise and other resources of which enabled the militants to conduct attacks they were incapable of carrying out on their own.” She also suggests that that state is Iraq. The study was not a one-shot deal for Mylroie. TPMmuckraker previously reported that Mylroie produced reports on Saddam Hussein for the same DOD office as late as 2007.