282 e lusive v ictories
reason to doubt reports of contact between Saddam’s government and
al-Qaeda operatives or other known terrorist groups.
Frustrated by the failure of the established intelligence apparatus to
connect the dots, senior administration offi cials decided to sift through
the raw intelligence data themselves to ferret out the incriminating evi-
dence they believed had been overlooked. A working group was estab-
lished in the Defense Department under Wolfowitz’s subordinate
Douglas Feith to conduct an independent review. Grabbing hold of
fragments of information and unconfi rmed reports, Feith and company
began to amass a picture of Iraqi activities that bore a much closer rela-
tionship to the administration’s convictions. Th is ad hoc intelligence
shop passed along its discoveries to senior administration offi cials, who
saw the new fi ndings as confi rmation of their suspicions. Further, many
intelligence analysts reported intense pressure from above to report con-
clusions about Iraqi–al-Qaeda ties that supported administration
contentions.
Th e president and top offi cials next set out to prepare the American
people for military action against the Iraqi regime. In his 2002 State of
the Union Address, Bush identifi ed Iraq, Iran, and North Korea as an
“axis of evil,” an obvious throwback reference to the enemies of the
United States in the Second World War. He took care not to suggest an
explicit alliance among the three states (unlike the formal one that
Germany, Italy, and Japan had established). Rather, he intended the asso-
ciation to suggest that Iraq and the others stood apart in their determi-
nation to undermine the global order for which the United States served
as steward. Several months later, in a speech delivered on June 1, 2002, to
the graduating class at the United States Military Academy at West Point,
the president presented what became known as the Bush Doctrine:
Deterrence, the promise of massive retaliation against nations, means
nothing against shadowy terrorist networks with no nation or citizens
to defend. Containment is not possible when unbalanced dictators
with weapons of mass destruction can deliver those weapons on missiles
or secretly provide them to terrorist allies.... [O]ur security will
require all Americans to be forward looking and resolute, to be ready
for preemptive action when necessary to defend our liberty and to
defend our lives.