THE ROAD to the Iraq War began not with 9/11, nor with Bush’s election, nor even with the Project for the New American Century. It began instead with the capitulation of the Soviet Union.

Once it became clear that the Cold War adversary was going to knuckle under, the US military became extremely worried about the political sustainability of the military budget and the forward deployment of US forces around the world. For without the Communist threat, how was the US taxpayer to be persuaded to pay for garrisoning the planet? The solution that was hit upon—as early as 1988—was to inflate the threat posed by confrontation states. The idea began with talk about the “military sophistication of Third World dictators,” later morphing into the need to confront “outlaw states,” “backlash states,” and the one that really stuck: “rogue states.” The rogues’ gallery included Iran, Syria, Libya, Cuba, and North Korea. But the poster child was unambiguously Iraq, in light of Saddam’s impressive record of military aggression, chemical weapons use, and human rights abuses.

For twelve years between the two wars, a considerable portion of US diplomatic and military muscle was deployed towards the containment of Iraq; featuring not only the most brutal trade embargo in history, but also the imposition of no-fly zones over northern and southern Iraq and the de facto partition of the country; thousands of airstrikes and cruise missile strikes; and covert operations to topple Saddam Hussein. This low-intensity war on Iraq was supported by a bipartisan consensus in the United States on the threat posed by Saddam to US security interests. So when W looked to reconfigure the Middle East by force after 9/11, Iraq under Saddam offered the path of least resistance.

But the consensus did not emerge overnight. In fact, early in the Clinton administration there were significant moves towards a thaw in US-Iraq relations. The week before he took office, Clinton gave a wide-ranging interview on foreign policy in which he mused that he was not “obsessed” with Saddam.

REPORTER: But you don’t take the view that there can be no normal relations with this man or with Iraq as long as he is in power?

CLINTON: Based on the evidence that we have, the people of Iraq would be better off if they had a different leader. But my job is not to pick their rulers for them. I always tell everybody, “I’m a Baptist; I believe in deathbed conversions.” If he wants a different relationship with the United States and with the United Nations, all he has to do is change his behavior.

It was, of course, politically trecherous for a Democrat in the White House to back-off from confronting a brutal dictator that the men and women in uniform had fought not too long ago. The administration was not on the verge of bringing in Saddam from the cold, “if for no other reason,” opined Leslie H. Gleb in New York Times, than that “they know this would mean political suicide.” Still, signs of hope continued to flicker. The Pentagon said on February 3 that the Iraqis “had changed their behavior.” In mid-February, Saddam reached out to Clinton for a reset, and went out of his way to cooperate with UN inspectors. By the end of March, Clinton was saying he wanted to “depersonalize” the conflict with Iraq. New York Times reported on March 29, 1993, that

The United States and Britain have begun to move away from their insistence that the trade embargo against Iraq cannot be lifted while President Saddam Hussein remains in power.

But these early moves towards bringing Saddam back in from the cold came to naught when a plot to kill President George H.W. Bush, allegedly masterminded by Iraqi intelligence, came to light in May. The break in diplomatic momentum towards a thaw in relations was immediate and permanent. The plot therefore marked a decisive moment in the long road to the Iraq War.

THE ALLEGED Iraqi plot against Bush was in reality a fraud perpetrated by the Kuwaitis, who had been watching the emerging thaw in US-Iraq relations with increasing panic. Kuwait had arrested 17 drunk bootleggers near the Iraqi border for smuggling whiskey; a serious crime in Kuwait but a common enough practice along the Saudi-Iraqi-Kuwaiti border.

Four days later, one of the bootleggers suddenly confessed to a conspiracy to kill President H.W. Bush during the former president’s visit to Kuwait that was underway. The confession was later retracted in court and the defendant alleged that it was extracted under duress. As a consequence of the confession, the Kuwaiti police said they were able to locate a two-hundred-pound bomb in the suspect’s vehicle that had been in their custody for four days. The Kuwaiti foreign minister alleged that the defendant was a Iraqi intelligence officer and had been ordered by Saddam to assassinate President Bush.

But the Kuwaitis were not exactly known to be reliable. Kuwait had earlier moved the UNSC alleging a territorial violation by Saddam that turned out upon investigation to have been a violent dispute between smugglers. As for the foreign minister himself: His daughter had given an eloquent testimony to Iraqi crimes involving the killing of babies during the Iraqi occupation that later turned out to be fraudulent.

Still, in light of the serious nature of the allegations, the White House tasked the FBI and the CIA to investigate the matter. While some hawks in the White House, including Sandy Berger and Martin Indyk, were claiming that there was highly reliable evidence tying Iraq to the plot against Bush, official White House policy was to wait for the investigations to reach a conclusion. “We’re still in the middle of the investigation,” said George Stephanopoulos, the White House Communications Director. President Clinton himself was skeptical of the case; as was the Attorney General, Janet Reno.

But in May and June, a number of reports in the Washington Post and the New York Times, citing anonymous officials (probably Indyk), claimed that there was strong evidence pointing to Iraqi sponsorship of the assassination attempt. By late June, the President had lost all control of the media narrative. Finally, on June 24, the FBI report came out and provided what the White House considered to be sufficient evidence of Iraqi complicity. Clinton ordered a barrage of 23 cruise missile strikes on the headquarters of Iraqi intelligence—to near-universal applause in the media. On that day, any possibility of bringing Saddam in from the cold vanished into thin air.

Seymour Hersh’s report debunking the government’s evidence appeared in the November 1, 1993 issue of the New Yorker. A big part of the forensic evidence tying the bomb to those known to have been put together by Iraqi intelligence, outlined by Madeline Albright, was that the remote-control firing device found in the Kuwaiti car bomb has the same “signature” as previously recovered Iraqi bombs. Hersh spoke to a number of forensic bomb experts.

[All seven experts] told me essentially the same thing: The remote-control devices shown in the White House photographs were mass-produced items…

 The fact that the two devices were similar is simply not that significant, I was told by Donald L. Hansen, a twenty-eight-year veteran of the bomb squad of the San Francisco Police Department, who has served as the director of the International Association of Bomb Technicians and Investigators… and is widely considered to be one of the top forensics experts in the field. “They’re very generic devices… If these circuit boards are what they’re hanging their signature issue on, they’re really stretching the envelope.”

The FBI also concluded that the defendants were not coerced after their arrest, despite their testimony in court that they were indeed beaten and forced to confess. The only American reporter at the Kuwaiti trial, Miriam Amie, reporting for the German news agency DPA, told Hersh that the main suspect, Wali al-Ghazali, showed up on the first day of the trial with “a fresh scar on his forehead and a blackened nail on his thumb.” James E. Akins, former US Ambassador to the Saudi Arabia, told Hersh:

Either the investigators were idiots or they were lying. It boggles the imagination. There’s no way the Kuwaitis would not have tortured them. That’s the way the Kuwaitis are, as anyone who knows the Kuwaitis or the Middle East can tell you.

Meanwhile, back on May 23, 1993, Boston Globe reported that it had obtained a copy of the CIA Counter Terrorism Center’s report concluding that the alleged plot was a Kuwaiti fraud.

Kuwait, the report says, “has a clear incentive to play up the continuing Iraqi threat” to Western interests, and hence may have “cooked the books.”

To support this contention, it cites US diplomatic reports earlier this year that the Kuwaiti government was expressing “frustration” that the Western coalition was not taking a tougher line against Saddam Hussein and concern that the Clinton administration might abandon Kuwait in favor of better relations with Iraq.

Usually rabbit holes have a way of ending with Seymour Hersh’s reporting. Not this time. The FBI’s forensic investigation in the alleged Iraqi bomb plot was led by Frederic Whitehurst, a forensic chemist specializing in explosive residue analysis, described by the New York Times as the agency’s “top bomb-residue expert,” who provided expert testimony in the O.J. Simpson trial among many other high profile cases. He later became America’s first FBI whistleblower exposing extensive forensic fraud at the FBI crime lab.

During the investigation into alleged misconduct at the FBI crime lab it emerged that Whitehurst’s superior, J. Christopher Ronay, had misreported Whitehurst’s findings in the alleged Iraqi plot to kill Bush. The 1997 DOJ enquiry reported that,

Whitehurst alleges that he compared the explosive material in the main charge of the Bush device to explosive materials in known Iraqi devices and told Explosives Unit Chief J. Christopher Ronay that the explosives were different. Whitehurst claims that Ronay purposely misinterpreted these results in order to link the explosive material to Iraqi agents. Whitehurst further asserts that very possibly his results were changed to support the retaliatory missile strike by the United States.

Neil Gallagher, Chief of the FBI Counter Intelligence Section, told the DOJ that

The FBI could not connect these explosives chemically or say that they came from the same shipment, sources, or country.

Yet, the DOJ enquiry continues,

Subsequent reports on the matter tended to ignore such chemical differences. Moreover, even after the missile strike, the FBI and CIA continued to report simply that PE-4A plastic explosive had been identified in the Bush device and other Iraqi explosive devices, including those from Southeast Asia.

Thus: The FBI misreported the findings of the agency’s top bomb residue expert, mistook the congruence of mass-produced remote-control firing devices as the signature of a common Iraqi source, and took confessions extracted from suspects using torture at face value. Meanwhile, the CIA’s accurate conclusion that the plot was a Kuwaiti fraud was simply ignored. Hersh again:

When Clinton finally acted, on the afternoon of Saturday, June 26th, he was not leading the nation, as was widely assumed and reported, but merely following the path of least bureaucratic and political resistance.