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On Sept. 8, 2002, a New York Times front-pager -- headlined "US Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts" by Judith Miller and Michael Gordon -- got the juggernaut rolling downhill to war. Their piece featured some aluminum tubes that they mistakenly thought could be used only for nuclear centrifuges (when they were actually for conventional artillery). Iraq's provocative behavior, wrote the Times, has "brought Iraq and the United States to the brink of war."
Or as NSC Advisor Rice summed it up on the Sunday talk shows later that day, "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."
But it was clear the fix was in even earlier. The British "Downing Street Minutes" of July 23, 2002, show that Tenet told his British counterpart, Richard Dearlove, that -- as Dearlove described the message to Prime Minister Tony Blair -- that "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."
However, despite the obstacles, Richard Myers, like so many of us, took a solemn oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic. For many of us who wore the uniform and took "duty, honor, country" seriously, it is hard to give Myers a get-out-of-jail-free card when it comes to blame for the Iraq War.
No matter the odds against success, his duty was to go directly to the President and make the case. If he was rebuffed, he should have quit and gone public, in my view. (How long has it been since anyone of high rank has quit on principle?)
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs quitting over plans for an unnecessary war? Not even The New York Times and The Washington Post -- as fully in the tank as they were for the Iraq War -- would have been able to suppress that story in 2002. And, had Myers gone public he might have succeeded in injecting slippery grease under the rollout of Card's "new product."
Imagine what might have happened had Myers gone public at that point. It is all too easy to assume that Bush and Cheney would have gotten their war anyway. But who can tell for sure? Sometimes it takes just one senior official with integrity to spark a hemorrhage of honesty. However the outcome would have turned out at least Myers would been spared the pain of looking into the mirror every morning -- and thinking back on what might have been.
A Modern Rumsfeld General
This was not the first time that Myers, who served as JCS chairman from 2001 to 2005, was derelict in duty by playing the toady. He had acquiesced in Bush's and Rumsfeld's approval of torture in February 2002, even before going along with a gross violation of international law -- launching the attack on Iraq absent any imminent threat and without the required approval by the UN Security Council.
On torture, the seldom mentioned smoking gun was a two-page executive memorandum signed by George W. Bush on Feb. 7, 2002, in which the President declared that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions did not apply to Al Qaeda and Taliban detainees. Instead, they would be treated "humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of Geneva," the memo said, using vague and permissive language that, in effect, opened the door to torture and other abuses. Gen. Myers was one of eight addressees.
On May 11, 2009 Myers was in Washington peddling his memoir Eyes on the Horizon and spoke at a Harvard Business School Alumni dinner. I seldom go to such affairs, but in this case I was glad I had paid my dues, for here was a unique opportunity to quiz Myers. I began by thanking him for acknowledging in his book "the Geneva Conventions were a fundamental part of our military culture." Then I asked what he had done when he received Bush's Feb. 7, 2002 memorandum unilaterally creating exceptions to Geneva.
"Just read my book," Myers said. I told him I had, and cited a couple of sentences from my copy: "You write that you told a senior Pentagon official, Douglas Feith, 'I feel very strongly about this. And if Rumsfeld doesn't defend the Geneva Conventions, I'll contradict him in front of the President.' Did you?"
Myers claimed that he had fought the good fight before the President decided. But there was no tinge of regret. The sense the general left with us was this: if the President wanted to bend Geneva out of shape, what was a mere Chairman of the Joint Chiefs to do?
Pushing my luck, I noted that a Senate Armed Services Committee report, "Inquiry Into the Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody," had been issued just two weeks earlier (on April 23, 2009). It found that Myers had abruptly aborted an in-depth legal review of interrogation techniques that all four armed services had urgently requested and that he authorized in the fall of 2002. They were eager to get an authoritative ruling on the lawfulness of various interrogation techniques -- some of which were already being used at Guantanamo.
Accordingly, Myers's legal counsel, Navy Captain Jane Dalton, had directed her staff to initiate a thorough legal and policy review of interrogation techniques. It had just gotten underway in November 2002 when Rumsfeld's general counsel, William James Haynes II, ordered Myers to stop the review.
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