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

by James Mann

  While Bush was not responsible for the negative ad, he did little if anything to deter this line of attack. He might conceivably have put himself above the fray and urged an easing of partisan tensions, in much the same way that he had appealed for respect for Muslims soon after September 11. He was a president preparing to go to war, yet he was unwilling to put himself above the political wrangling in order to unify the nation.

  Politically, the 2002 elections proved of immediate benefit to Bush. The Republicans regained control of the Senate and increased their majority in the House by six seats. The result was historic: Bush became the first president since Franklin Roosevelt to pick up seats in both houses of Congress during his first midterm election. However, over the longer run the 2002 campaign would prove harmful to Bush, setting the stage for years of partisan acrimony over Iraq.

  The U.N. Security Council vote came next. In October, Powell conducted what amounted to a dual series of negotiations for a United Nations resolution on Iraq. One was with the world’s other leading powers, two of which, France and Russia, were resisting the American initiative. Powell’s other negotiations were inside the Bush administration, where Cheney and the Pentagon sought a more strongly worded U.N. resolution than the State Department had proposed, with language explicitly authorizing the use of force against Iraq. Bush remained unable to stem the deep and continuing disagreements inside his own administration.

  The result was a compromise. On November 8, the Security Council approved by a vote of fifteen to zero a resolution giving Saddam Hussein a “final opportunity” to disclose his programs for weapons of mass destruction and to disarm them. France agreed to support a provision saying that Iraq would be in “material breach” of past U.N. resolutions if it did not go along. But to get the unanimous vote, Bush was obliged to drop proposed language that would have authorized “all necessary means,” the common language for the use of force, if Iraq did not comply. Thus, it was left open whether, if Saddam balked, it would be necessary to return to the United Nations for a second resolution before commencing military action.

  * * *

  The fundamental question concerning this preinvasion period is what was motivating Bush himself. Why was he driving so determinedly toward war with Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime?

  The principal reason Bush offered, both at the time and afterward, can be called the WMD argument: according to U.S. intelligence, Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, was in the process of developing nuclear weapons, and had defied repeated United Nations resolutions to terminate those programs. Before the congressional vote in October, the CIA prepared a National Intelligence Estimate concluding that these programs were active. After the invasion, it turned out that Saddam had misled the world into believing he possessed WMD that, in fact, he did not have. There seems little doubt, however, that Bush himself believed the Iraqi leader had WMD, as did quite a few other world leaders and intelligence services.

  Nevertheless, it also seems abundantly clear that Saddam’s supposed WMD programs were not the sole reason for Bush’s intense focus on Iraq. Even according to the intelligence reports, themselves faulty, the Iraqi regime had been acquiring the materials over a period of years, not suddenly in 2001 and 2002, when Bush was driving toward war. That raised the question of why Bush felt he had to act when he did.

  Furthermore, Bush and his aides from time to time gave other reasons to buttress their case for war. In one unguarded interview, Wolfowitz acknowledged that in making the case to the American public for war, “we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on, which was weapons of mass destruction.” Tenet wrote in his memoir that WMD was not the sole cause for the Bush administration’s move against Iraq and that “in my view, I doubt it was even the principal cause.”

  In seeking to explain Bush’s actions, some have resorted to armchair psychology. In one version, Bush was said to have been seeking vengeance against Saddam Hussein for an Iraqi plot to kill his father during a trip to Kuwait in 1993; the plot was uncovered by Kuwaiti intelligence and believed by the Clinton administration. In another version, Bush was said to harbor oedipal resentments toward his father and was seeking to demonstrate that he was able to topple Saddam when his father chose not to.

  Such theories are entertaining but speculative and inadequate. The real explanations lie in the realm of policy, strategy, and worldviews. Bush seems to have agreed with many (though not all) of the reasons for war advanced by the hawks around him, including Cheney, Rumsfeld, and neoconservative officials such as Wolfowitz and Lewis (Scooter) Libby, the vice president’s chief of staff. The hawks had been lobbying for action against Iraq since immediately after September 11.

  Bush rejected some of their arguments. In particular, Cheney and other hawks drew direct connections between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda and sought to blame Iraq for the September 11 attacks, although the CIA found no evidence of such links. According to Rice, at one point Cheney arranged for Libby to brief the president on the evidence. Bush listened and then said, “You just keep on digging.” In his own statements, Bush avoided trying to link Saddam to September 11.

  He was much more willing to embrace the hawks’ belief that Saddam Hussein was a uniquely “bad guy,” a tyrannical leader who should be toppled from power because of his human rights abuses and severe political repression. Bush’s father had flirted with this line of argument before the Persian Gulf War, and the younger Bush made similar claims. But this view also seems more like a secondary justification for war, since Saddam’s macabre abuses had gone on for decades, and it was difficult to make the case that they were unique when compared with those of regimes such as North Korea.

  Further, Bush seemed to be influenced by the hawks’ belief in the importance of demonstrating America’s continuing military power, especially in the Middle East. Cheney and several other administration officials had served in the Pentagon during the Gulf War, and they had witnessed how, in the immediate aftermath of that conflict, other nations in the Middle East either rushed to support the United States or avoided antagonizing it. Bush and the hawks also hoped that a successful campaign against Iraq might prompt other countries with growing nuclear capabilities, like North Korea, Iran, and Libya, to abandon their programs. This view was vindicated in the case of Libya, to Bush’s considerable satisfaction; Muammar Gadhafi began to give up his nuclear program in the year after the American invasion of Iraq.

  The justification for war that Bush wholeheartedly shared with Cheney, the other hawks, and Rice was that Saddam Hussein should no longer be allowed to remain in power because he might someday provide weapons of mass destruction to terrorists. This was their collective, post–September 11 mind-set and their justification for war in its essence. Under this line of thinking, it did not matter that there was no evidence the Iraqi leader had ties to al-Qaeda or any involvement in the attack on the World Trade Center, because Saddam and al-Qaeda might somehow find each other in the future. Nor did it matter that Saddam’s regime and his behavior had changed little over the previous decade. September 11 itself was believed to have changed the situation, turning the same Iraq and the same Saddam Hussein into a greater threat. Many challenged this theory, raising fundamental questions about its validity. (For example, even if Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction and even if he would consider giving them to al-Qaeda, might not a policy of deterrence cause him, in the interests of self-preservation, to decide against doing so?) But it seems clear that this line of argument reflected what Bush believed.

  In Tenet’s account, Bush and his incoming team had originally underestimated the threat from terrorism because none of them had been in government at the time of the al-Qaeda attacks of the 1990s. After the planes hit the World Trade Center towers, however, the opposite was true. Bush and many of those around him feared that there might be another al-Qaeda attack and that they would be blamed for having failed to prevent it.

  Having experienced that day, they had
become convinced that previous rules and long-standing doctrines no longer applied. Cheney dismissed Scowcroft’s Wall Street Journal article as reflecting a “pre-9/11 mindset.” Bush fully agreed. “Before 9/11, Saddam was a problem America might have been able to manage,” he later wrote. “Through the lens of the post-9/11 world, my view changed.… The lesson of 9/11 was that if we waited for a danger to fully materialize, we would have waited too long.”

  * * *

  Once Bush won the congressional and U.N. Security Council resolutions in the fall of 2002, the momentum of events moved steadily toward war. Saddam Hussein might have averted it by ending his charade and acknowledging that he didn’t have the nuclear weapons program most governments thought he had. Chances are that Bush would not have believed him, even after the most intrusive inspections inside Iraq; U.S. intelligence had been saying otherwise. In December, Bush asked the CIA for a briefing to help prepare the case he could make to the American public about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, and Tenet, in what he later claimed was an offhand comment, infamously said that the case was a “slam dunk.” A few years later, after the war did not turn out well and no WMD were found, Tenet came to believe that Bush and Cheney used the “slam dunk” line to shift the blame to the CIA for the war they had been determined to wage.

  Throughout the winter Bush ordered a steady series of deployments to Kuwait and other locations near Iraq. This buildup might have itself persuaded Saddam to back down, but he apparently misjudged. After he was captured in late 2003, Saddam told FBI debriefers that he had not believed the United States would carry through on its threats to disarm him.

  Nevertheless, while the mobilization failed to convince Saddam, it contributed to the momentum toward war. Bush and his aides recognized that the troops could not sustain the mobilization for a long period. “It wasn’t possible just to stand still, since doing so would leave our forces vulnerable in-theater without sufficient logistical support,” Rice reflected afterward.

  Rumsfeld had goaded the military to develop a war plan based on speed, mobility, and fewer troops, effectively discarding the “Powell doctrine” of the previous two decades that called for the use of overwhelming force. In invading Iraq, Bush would eventually dispatch approximately 240,000 American troops, fewer than half the number his father had sent in the Persian Gulf War. Bush stayed in close touch with the developing military preparations but paid far less attention to “softer” issues such as how to maintain stability outside the fighting areas and in the postwar period. In early 2003, Rice arranged a military briefing for the president on the subject of “rear-area security”—dealing with Iraqi civilians behind the lines while the fighting continued. Bush opened the session by telling the generals: “This is something Condi has wanted to talk about.” Rice felt that after the president’s introduction, which seemed to distance himself from the issue, the military no longer took the meeting seriously.

  * * *

  During the buildup of forces, Bush attempted once again to obtain some sort of United Nations authorization for the use of force, the issue left open after the Security Council resolution in November. He assigned Powell, the member of his administration with the highest standing in the international community, to present to the United Nations an overview of the evidence against Iraq. The secretary of state did so on February 5, 2003, based on the CIA’s flawed intelligence. To skeptical European governments, it was not convincing. In short order, the powerful trio of President Jacques Chirac of France, Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder of Germany, and President Vladimir Putin of Russia joined together in opposition to military action in Iraq.

  Nevertheless, Bush decided to ask the U.N. Security Council to approve a second resolution, stating that Iraq had not complied with the earlier one and specifically authorizing the use of force to compel it to do so. The position of the United States was that no such resolution was necessary because Iraq had failed to comply with the earlier resolution. But Bush went back to the U.N. at the behest of Tony Blair, whose government seemed to be in jeopardy because of his support for military action.

  Bush, Rice, and Powell were hoping to persuade France and Russia to abstain from the resolution rather than veto it and then to win support for military action from most of the other nations on the fifteen-member Security Council. They tried, but did not even come close, and the failures underscored the lack of international support for military action. Bush had taken office promising to improve America’s ties with Latin America, but the leaders of Mexico and Chile turned down his personal appeals. He had worked hard to develop a relationship with President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan, but Musharraf, too, rebuffed Bush’s pleas. It was a stinging diplomatic defeat for the United States and for Bush.

  On March 16, as it became clear that he could not line up the votes, Bush met Blair and another ally, Prime Minister José María Aznar of Spain, in the Azores and decided it was time to abandon the effort. If the United Nations would not approve a second resolution, there would be military action without one. They would instead go to war with a “coalition of the willing.” Bush wasted little time. The following day, the United States withdrew its Security Council resolution and Bush, in a televised address, issued a final ultimatum to Saddam Hussein to leave the country within forty-eight hours or face an attack. The Iraqi leader stayed put.

  Bush made one last-minute effort to avoid war, seeking instead to assassinate Saddam. The CIA reported it had gotten a tip that the Iraqi leader was sleeping at Dora Farms near Baghdad. The Bush team ordered warplanes to bomb the site, but it turned out that Saddam hadn’t been there. Years later, Bush offered a summary of what happened that underscored his deeper bitterness about intelligence failures: “The operation was a harbinger of things to come. Our intent was right. The pilots performed bravely. But the intelligence was wrong.”

  * * *

  The military invasion was launched on the following day, March 20. The campaign against Iraqi forces went as smoothly and quickly as Bush, Rumsfeld, and U.S. military leaders had all planned. Within three weeks, American troops captured Baghdad. Saddam Hussein fled into hiding. As a small crowd of Iraqis cheered, an American M-88 tow truck, equipped with a crane, tore down a large statue of Saddam in the capital.

  Bush was exhilarated, his mood triumphal—unwisely so, by his own later acknowledgment. In the weeks following the fall of Baghdad, his public appearances took on a jaunty, swaggering tone. On May 1, guided by navy pilots, he landed a military jet aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and announced the end of combat operations in Iraq. Behind him, in a location perfectly lined up for television cameras, was a large banner that read MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. Bush insisted he hadn’t known this sign would be there and that this was the work of his staff. Years later, in his memoir, Bush admitted, “It was a big mistake.”

  * * *

  America’s mission in Iraq, it turned out, was far from over. In the coming months Iraq descended into sporadic looting and disorder, then to wider chaos, and then to an insurgency against American forces and to sectarian conflict that verged on civil war. It would be eight and a half more years before American troops left Iraq, and they left behind a country less stable and far less oriented to American policies in the Middle East than the Bush team had envisioned when they launched the war. There was one notable success: in December 2003, American forces found Saddam Hussein hiding in a hole not far from his ancestral home in Tikrit. But despite searching the country intensively, they could find no evidence of weapons of mass destruction or of an active program to produce them.

  Despite the sixteen months of planning and preparation, Bush and his senior advisers had operated on a series of faulty assumptions. This series of misjudgments, taken together, turned the Iraq War into a strategic mistake of historic proportions.

  The failed diplomacy at the United Nations was the result of these misjudgments. Throughout the administration’s campaign against Saddam Hussein, it was assumed that America’s inter
national support would be greater than it turned out to be. When allies in Europe and friendly governments elsewhere initially opposed the war, Bush’s advisers believed that, in the end, they would line up behind the United States, or at least not openly oppose it. Even in the final weeks before war, the administration overestimated how many countries would be willing to support it at the United Nations.

  Bush and his team also vastly underestimated the costs and duration of the war. Before the conflict started, Lawrence Lindsey was pilloried for estimating that the war might cost as much as $100 billion. In fact, that supposedly high estimate was too low by a factor of twenty: in 2013, ten years after the start of the military intervention in Iraq, direct U.S. government expenditures for the war had surpassed $2 trillion. At the time the war started, the estimates of how long the United States would remain in Iraq were in the range of a couple of years. Instead, American troops stayed in Iraq for nearly nine years, suffered 4,500 fatalities, and departed under circumstances that fell far short of the stable, democratic Iraq that Bush had envisioned.

  One major reason for these faulty estimates was a misjudgment about how Iraqis would respond after the invasion. Four days before the start of the war, in an interview on Meet the Press, Cheney was asked whether he thought the American people were prepared for a long, costly, and bloody battle with significant U.S. casualties. “I really don’t think it’s likely to unfold that way, because I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators,” he replied. There is no sign that Bush disagreed with this judgment. Cheney’s assertion was arguably valid for some Iraqis for a short time, in the weeks immediately following the fall of Baghdad. After that, however, the “greeted-as-liberators” line rang increasingly hollow, as the United States found itself unable to stabilize Iraq.