George W. Bush: The American Presidents Series: The 43rd President, 2001-2009

by James Mann

  Bush’s decision applied to treatment of prisoners by the armed forces but not by the CIA. There was a reason for this distinction, not obvious at the time. A handful of captured al-Qaeda members were not sent to Guantánamo. Instead, the CIA set up its own covert prison system around the world where it brought the most important al-Qaeda leaders for interrogation. These so-called black sites were eventually located in at least eight countries, including Poland, Romania, Thailand, and Afghanistan itself.

  The rules for interrogation had been an underlying issue during the legal debate on the Geneva Conventions, which stipulate that prisoners of war cannot be punished for refusing to cooperate. Gonzales and Addington had argued in a memo to Bush that the war on terrorism was a different kind of war and that “this paradigm renders obsolete Geneva’s strict limitation on questioning of enemy prisoners.”

  Within weeks after resolving the legal debate over detainees, Bush was confronted with the far more concrete related questions: How far could the CIA go in interrogating prisoners? What could it do to make someone talk? On March 28, 2002, Tenet called the president excitedly to report that the CIA had taken control of its first high-level al-Qaeda operative, Abu Zubaydeh, who had been captured in Pakistan with help from the Pakistani police. After answering some initial questions, Zubaydeh stopped talking, but his CIA handlers felt he was holding back on additional, useful information.

  Thus began what eventually became known as the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation program.” Tenet sought approval to use a variety of techniques to get the CIA’s detainees to talk and to cooperate with their interrogators. Bush asked the Justice Department whether the program would be violating any laws and was told that the harsh techniques would be legal, the justification coming in a series of written opinions that were later dubbed the “torture memos.” Justice Department officials turned down only one of the CIA’s proposed techniques: to bury a prisoner alive until he believed he was suffocating. Bush said he also turned down two of the CIA’s proposals. But Bush approved the other techniques, such as slapping, sleep deprivation, loud noises, and the most controversial of all, “waterboarding,” in which water is poured over a prisoner’s face until he feels he is drowning.

  Using these methods, CIA investigators got Abu Zubaydeh to provide information that helped lead to the capture a year later of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the senior al-Qaeda official in charge of the September 11 operations and, later on, the beheading of Daniel Pearl, a Wall Street Journal reporter who had been kidnapped and killed in Pakistan. When Tenet asked for permission to use waterboarding on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Bush retorted, “Damn right.” The al-Qaeda leader was subjected to waterboarding 183 times. Years later, Bush reflected, “Khalid Sheikh Mohammed proved difficult to break. But when he did, he gave us a lot.” The remarks underscored Bush’s close involvement with the interrogation program.

  When the enhanced interrogation program became public several years later, many people in the United States (including, eventually, Bush’s successor Barack Obama) maintained that waterboarding and the broader CIA program amounted to torture—and, indeed, they seemed to fit the dictionary definition of the word. Bush frequently responded to such accusations by saying, simply, “We don’t torture,” without offering further elaboration. He did not mention that there was a strong incentive to avoid using the word “torture”: it is banned by a series of laws and international treaties. In his memoir, Bush pointed out that “the most senior legal officers in the U.S. government” had assured him the CIA program did not amount to torture. Beyond that, Bush argued that the enhanced interrogation was necessary to stop al-Qaeda from mounting another attack on the United States. “Had I not authorized waterboarding on senior al-Qaeda leaders, I would have had to accept a greater risk that the country would be attacked,” he wrote.

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  In sum, over the course of the first seven months after September 11, largely in secret, Bush authorized a sweeping series of responses to the attacks that transformed the operations of America’s homeland security apparatus, its intelligence gathering and operations, and its approach to international law and treatment of prisoners. He had not only uprooted the Taliban regime in Afghanistan but also set up the legal and institutional framework for a prolonged “war on terror.”

  Robert Gates, who joined the Bush administration five years after most of these measures were adopted, later attributed them in part to what he called “the traumatic effect” of September 11 upon the entire Bush team. “I think there was a huge sense among senior members of the administration of having let the country down, of having allowed a devastating attack on America to take place on their watch,” wrote Gates, saying he based this judgment on private conversations with senior administration officials. At the time, he noted, the administration was being deluged with reports of further, imminent attacks, including rumors that a nuclear weapon might be set off in New York or Washington. Getting more intelligence and preventing another attack became “the sole preoccupation of the president and his senior team,” Gates explained. “Any obstacle—legal, bureaucratic, financial, or international—to accomplishing those objectives had to be overcome.”

  5

  Iraq

  George W. Bush had made clear from the outset that the removal of the Taliban would be merely the start, not the end, of his government’s response to September 11. “Our war on terrorism begins with al Qaeda but it does not end there,” he had declared in his speech to Congress nine days after the attacks. Powell had said that Afghanistan represented merely “phase one” of a larger campaign.

  The administration’s statements suggested an obvious question: if Afghanistan was phase one of the war on terror, what would be phase two? Would there be another military campaign against another failed state in which al-Qaeda had taken root, such as Yemen, the Sudan, or the Philippines? In the weeks immediately after the fall of Kabul, U.S. intelligence for a time had placed Somalia under intense surveillance in what was seen at the time as a prelude to a possible military strike. Yet none of these other countries seemed important enough to qualify as a prime target for the next phase of a major war. None had regimes as malevolent as the Taliban. It would be difficult to sustain public attention and support for a second military action if it were waged against some marginal country whose defeat might be perceived as merely cumulative, or anticlimactic, after Afghanistan. Bush had now defined his entire presidency in terms of the “war on terror”; after Afghanistan, that war needed to be reoriented with goals that were far reaching but also concrete.

  Over the course of the fall of 2001, the public statements about the war on terror by Bush and the senior officials of his administration began to change in subtle ways. At first, administration officials spoke primarily of the dangers of al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations. Then they began to call attention to the danger that such terrorist groups might acquire nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons. After a bit more time, administration officials began to voice alarms about the possibility that governments could provide weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups. Finally, they began to focus more narrowly on the handful of countries they considered dangerous. The veterans of the Bush team were thus recasting the war on terror in a familiar way, once again emphasizing the role of states rather than nonstate actors.

  In his State of the Union speech on January 29, 2002, Bush served notice to the world of this profound change in approach. He announced that his administration was targeting countries that were seeking to acquire weapons of mass destruction and might be willing to provide them to terrorists. He named, specifically, three countries—Iran, Iraq, and North Korea—branding them as an “axis of evil,” although he provided no evidence that the three of them were working together in the fashion of the Axis powers in World War II. The “axis of evil” rhetoric marked a watershed in Bush’s foreign policy; it opened what became a chasm between the United States and its European allies as European leaders quickly denounced B
ush and his speech.

  Of the three regimes in the “axis of evil,” two seemed impregnable. North Korea could respond to any military attack with a quick, massive artillery attack that would destroy Seoul. Iran, too, represented a daunting military challenge; moreover, it had strong commercial relationships with many of America’s allies, including France, Germany, and Japan.

  This recognition brought Bush back to Iraq. It was the lone member of the “axis” with which the United States already had an official policy in favor of regime change, signed into law by President Bill Clinton in the late 1990s. Foreign-policy hawks inside and outside the Bush administration had been urging a military attack on Iraq since the day after September 11, maintaining (without evidence) that Saddam Hussein’s regime bore some responsibility for what al-Qaeda had perpetrated.

  Bush had said no to attacking Iraq at the time, but he had said only that he was deferring a decision while the United States concentrated on Afghanistan. After the fall of the Taliban, as the administration considered the question of what would be the “second phase” of the war on terror, it did not take long before Bush reached the likely answer: Iraq.

  In November 2001, the president asked Donald Rumsfeld to review the battle plans for Iraq, and before the end of the year General Tommy Franks, the commander of the U.S. Central Command, visited Bush to present the first in what would become a series of increasingly refined battle plans for an invasion of Iraq. In April 2002, Bush and his wife, Laura, welcomed British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his wife, Cherie, to the new ranch house the Bushes had just completed in Crawford, Texas. Bush and Blair agreed that it was time to do something about the Iraqi president, Saddam Hussein.

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  In the aftermath of September 11, Bush saw himself as following the model of one particular American president, Harry S. Truman. Bush was not the first chief executive to feel this way: Truman has regularly been a figure of consolation for presidents who believe that while they may be unpopular during their time in the White House, they will be admired decades later. Moreover, for Bush, Truman carried additional significance: he served as president as the United States was entering a new era, and the Truman administration established not merely the institutions but the foreign-policy strategy and doctrines for a different world.

  Rice, Bush’s closest adviser, had reinforced this line of thinking. As a former Soviet specialist, she was steeped in the history of the cold war and its origins. After September 11, she, too, found it easy to fit the tasks the Bush administration was confronting into the new-era paradigm of Truman’s presidency. When Bush finished reading David McCullough’s biography of Truman, Rice persuaded him to read former secretary of state Dean Acheson’s memoir, Present at the Creation. Both Bush and Rice were convinced that after September 11 it was time to jettison old doctrines, to challenge existing assumptions, and to create new principles for dealing with the world.

  As Bush began to turn his attention to Iraq, the idea of military action was constrained by the reigning ideas left over from the cold war. The United States had elected not to wage war with the Soviet Union but to wait it out; instead of military action, American leaders had developed the doctrines of containment and deterrence. Those ideas would have weighed against military action in Iraq, as long as Saddam Hussein did not go to war first. But Bush and Rice decided that, just as Truman and his team had established new doctrines for the cold war, the Bush administration should do similarly for its campaign against terrorism.

  On June 1, 2002, delivering the commencement address at West Point, Bush served notice of this new approach. Americans should be ready for “preemptive action” to protect national security, he said, adding, “We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans and confront the worst threats before they emerge.” He was effectively discarding containment and deterrence. Three months later, Rice enshrined this change in a document called the National Security Strategy of 2002. The United States “will not hesitate to act alone, if necessary, to exercise our right of self-defense by acting preemptively,” declared this formal statement of the administration’s strategy.

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  By the summer of 2002, as it became increasingly clear that Bush was laying the groundwork for war with Iraq, the simmering public debate reached a boil. The growing opposition came not merely from Democrats, peace groups, and isolationists but also from the top levels of the foreign-policy elite. In mid-August, the Wall Street Journal’s conservative op-ed page published a piece with the simple headline “Don’t Attack Saddam.” The article argued that attacking Iraq would not be the next step in the war on terror but rather a diversion from it; a military campaign against Saddam Hussein would undoubtedly be very expensive and could also be bloody.

  The author was Brent Scowcroft, no ordinary dissenter. He had been the national security adviser to Bush’s father and was the coauthor of the senior Bush’s presidential memoir. He had also been a mentor to Condoleezza Rice. His article challenged head-on Bush’s and Rice’s arguments about the need for a new strategy in a new era. “Saddam is a familiar dictatorial aggressor, with traditional goals for his aggression,” Scowcroft wrote.

  Bush and Rice were angered. Bush called his father, who assured him, “Son, Brent is a friend.” Scowcroft’s piece prompted public speculation that it was actually a veiled message from George H. W. Bush to his son about war with Iraq. However, there has never been any evidence to support that speculation. Scowcroft was fully capable of speaking on his own, with only foreign policy in mind and not the Bush family. Indeed, George H. W. Bush never spoke out against the Iraq War. (Seven months later, just after George W. Bush ordered the start of military operations, his father wrote him a letter in which he said: “You are doing the right thing … You have done that which you had to do.”)

  Nevertheless, Scowcroft’s op-ed did reflect the views of another old friend, Secretary of State Colin Powell. In early August 2002, in his longest conversation with Bush since the inauguration, Powell warned about the impact of war and the difficulties of rebuilding Iraq afterward. When Bush asked Powell how he would handle Iraq, the secretary of state replied, “Take it to the U.N.” Scowcroft made the same argument in his article, opening the floodgates for other high-level opposition to immediate military action. Over the following days, former secretaries of state James Baker and Lawrence Eagleburger also issued public warnings against war with Iraq until the issue was brought before the U.N. Security Council.

  Cheney spearheaded the other side of this debate, both inside the administration and in the public arena. In a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, he argued that Saddam Hussein was already in violation of existing Security Council resolutions and that there was no need to go back to the U.N. Doing so, he argued, would only give the Iraqi leader the time and leeway to procrastinate. “Saddam has perfected the art of cheat and retreat, and is very skilled in the art of denial and deception,” Cheney declared. Hearing this speech, Bush felt the vice president’s rhetoric was boxing him in. He ordered Rice to call Cheney and tell him the president had not yet made up his mind. Cheney soon gave a softer speech, with language dictated by Rice.

  Bush was now confronted with a decision on how to proceed: whether to move quickly toward war, as Cheney proposed, or to go the United Nations, as Powell, his father’s advisers, and Tony Blair all strongly favored. In early September, he chose the latter option, on grounds that it would help to win support from the international community and to call attention to Saddam Hussein’s continuing defiance of the United Nations. Then, if the Iraqi leader did not comply, there would be a stronger basis for war. When Blair agreed to support this approach, Bush told one of Blair’s aides, “Your man has got cojones.”

  Bush also decided to seek congressional authorization for the use of force. Throughout the fall of 2002, he and his aides sought to line up votes both in Congress and at the U.N. Security Council. In Congress, the question of timing was crucial: should the vote be held before or
after the midterm elections in November? Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle later said he scheduled the vote before the election only because Bush personally asked him to do so; Daschle said he was told that “time was of the essence.” He and other Democrats believed that Karl Rove, Bush’s political strategist, had favored a preelection vote to pressure Democrats to either support Bush or be accused of being weak on national security. Rove later said he had argued for a postelection vote in Congress because it would be perceived as uninfluenced by political considerations; he said Rice and other foreign-policy advisers did not want to wait, because a congressional resolution of support for Bush could be helpful at the Security Council.

  In the end, Bush decided to go for a congressional vote in early October, a month before the election. The Senate voted 77 to 23 and the House 296 to 133 to authorize the use of force against Iraq. Leading Democrats, among them Senators John Kerry, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and Chris Dodd and House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt, voted in favor of the resolution. In the final weeks of the midterm election campaigns, Republicans accused Democratic candidates who had opposed the resolution of weakness or even a lack of patriotism. In Georgia, an attack ad against Senator Max Cleland, a Vietnam veteran, displayed images of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, then showed Cleland voting against homeland security legislation that had also been approved that fall.