'Chain of Command': What Geneva Conventions?

• Originally published in the New  York Times on October 17, 2004 [here ]

By MICHAEL IGNATIEFF
 

• The Road From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib.

By Seymour M. Hersh
394 pp. HarperCollins Publishers. $36.95.

CHAIN OF COMMAND'' is the best book we are likely to have, this close to events, about why the United States went from leading an international coalition, united in horror at the attacks of 9/11, to fighting alone in Iraq and, in Abu Ghraib, to violating the very human rights it said it had come to restore.

According to Seymour M. Hersh, whose revelations this spring about the Abu Ghraib scandal have matched in impact his breaking of the My Lai story in 1969, this fatal declension was a direct consequence of presidential decisions taken long before combat in Iraq. The war on terror began as a defense of international law, giving America allies and friends. It soon became a war in defiance of law. In a secret order dated Feb. 7, 2002, President Bush declared, as Hersh puts it, that ''when it came to Al Qaeda the Geneva Conventions were applicable only at his discretion.'' Based on memorandums from the Defense and Justice Departments and the White House legal office that, in Anthony Lewis's apt words, ''read like the advice of a mob lawyer to a mafia don on how to . . . stay out of prison,'' Bush unilaterally withdrew the war on terror from the international legal regime that sets the standards for treatment and interrogation of prisoners. Abu Ghraib was not the work of a few bad apples, but the direct consequence, Hersh says, of ''the reliance of George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld on secret operations and the use of coercion -- and eye-for-an-eye retribution -- in fighting terrorism.''

The resort to torture also flowed from the administration's fantasies of liberating Iraq and its failure to anticipate Iraqi resistance. Once this resistance began to claim American lives in the summer and autumn of 2003, the administration believed it had to let the dogs loose -- literally -- at the prison at Abu Ghraib. Torture and humiliation became the fallback response to the failure to plan for occupation. Bush may have neglected to anticipate Iraqi resistance, but Saddam Hussein did not. According to Ahmad Sadik, an Iraqi Air Force brigadier general in signals intelligence Hersh interviewed in Damascus in December 2003, Hussein had ''drawn up plans for a widespread insurgency in 2001, soon after George Bush's election brought into office many of the officials who had directed the 1991 gulf war,'' stockpiling small arms around the country. Insurgency divisions were set up under the command of Izzat al-Douri and Taha Yassin Ramadan, Hussein's lieutenants. If this is true, and if, as Sadik told Hersh, he was interviewed by American intelligence after the fall of Baghdad, it is genuinely astonishing that the administration did not see the insurgency coming.

We now have two major accounts of the road to war in Iraq, Hersh's ''Chain of Command'' and Bob Woodward's ''Plan of Attack.'' Hersh is the anti-Woodward. Woodward is official scribe to the inner sanctum, and his access -- to Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Powell -- gives his account real authority, but at a price. In Woodward's world, everything is what the principals say it is. In Hersh's world, by contrast, nothing the policy elites say is true actually is. Sy Hersh would be persona non grata in that inner sanctum, because unlike Woodward, he is not inclined to take dictation from presidents. What Hersh lacks in privileged access, he makes up for in unparalleled sources throughout the Washington bureaucracy, among the secret army of spooks, bureaucrats and bag carriers in the F.B.I., State and Defense. ''Chain of Command'' is a whispering gallery peopled by phantoms: a ''former U.S. ambassador in the Middle East told me,'' ''one recently retired senior military officer . . . said at the time,'' ''a high-ranking intelligence official similarly noted.'' Hersh has sources not just in Washington, but also in Syria, Turkey, Pakistan and Israel. In his introduction, David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, where Hersh has been writing steadily about national security and intelligence issues and Afghanistan and Iraq, assures readers that Hersh's tips are verified by the magazine's editors. The problem is not accuracy, I think, so much as whose agenda Hersh may be furthering without meaning to. Are C.I.A. operatives talking to him to cover the agency's lamentable failures? Are State Department people spinning him because State is so obviously out of the loop on key decisions?

Hersh has vacuumed up all their doubts and anger at the policy they were charged to execute. Put Woodward together with Hersh and an abyss opens up, dividing the decision elite's view of the road to war -- ideological, pristine, hard-edged and clear -- and the foot soldiers' view -- messy, incompetent, confused and sometimes downright immoral.

Hersh's reporting is not faultless -- he never really established, at the time, just how flawed the weapons of mass destruction intelligence truly was, and he allowed himself to accept the conventional wisdom of the early days of the invasion, that the United States would get bogged down because it lacked sufficient troops. The problem turned out not to be the execution of the combat phase, but the lack of preparation for the occupation phase.

At a few points, a reader is left wondering: so how would Hersh control the abuses he so tellingly illuminates? Take the case of the Hellfire missile strike on a Qaeda leader named Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi, while he was driving in a car in Yemen. Hersh equivocates, admiring the precision of the strike but not addressing the hard question: if the technology exists to eliminate a genuine and correctly identified terrorist cadre, how do you keep the practice under legal and political control so that targeted killing does not degenerate into a Vietnam-style Operation Phoenix program?

At the end of the book, Hersh confesses that he still hasn't got the whole story. ''There is so much about this presidency that we don't know, and may never learn,'' he writes. ''How did they do it? How did eight or nine neoconservatives who believed that war in Iraq was the answer to international terrorism get their way? How did they redirect the government and rearrange longstanding American priorities and policies with so much ease? How did they overcome the bureaucracy, intimidate the press, mislead the Congress and dominate the military? Is our democracy that fragile?''

Yes, our democracy is that fragile. Checks and balances in the American constitutional system are functioning poorly. With some creditable exceptions -- Senators Byrd, Kennedy, Biden come to mind -- Congress did not subject the case for war to critical scrutiny. The courts deferred for too long to presidential authority, and only now with the recent Supreme Court decision, on the rights of enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay, that ''a state of war is not a blank check for the president,'' have they begun to claw back some of their prerogatives of judicial review. Nor, in the lead-up to war, did the press, Hersh included, subject the administration case on weapons of mass destruction to the critical scrutiny it cried out for. They were taken for a ride, and so were we.

What we have learned since, however, about the secret war fought in our name and to our discredit, we owe to reporters, chief among them Sy Hersh. This book reminds us why tough, skeptical journalism matters so much: it helps to keep us free.

• Michael Ignatieff is the Carr professor of human rights at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government and the author of ''The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror.''