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

by James Mann

  The idea of promoting democracy in the Middle East suffered a second setback in early 2006, when Palestinian legislative elections resulted in an unexpected victory for Hamas over the Fatah party of Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas. Through its military wing, Hamas had carried out a series of rocket attacks and suicide bombings against Israeli civilians, and it was on the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations.

  Before the vote, Israeli officials had voiced alarm about a Hamas victory, and the State Department had given some thought to urging that the vote be postponed. Bush rejected this approach. “America could not be in the position of endorsing elections only when we liked the projected outcome,” he later explained. Afterward, recognizing that the election had been free and fair, Bush accepted the results and did nothing to prevent the Hamas victors from taking office. But the United States, European governments, and the United Nations soon joined together to make future aid conditional on Hamas’s willingness to renounce violence. When Hamas refused to do so, its aid was cut off.

  From then on, Bush’s eagerness to promote the “freedom agenda” in the Middle East began to flag. In 2008, when Bush was scheduled to give a speech in Egypt on the importance of democratic change, aides drafted language in which he would draw attention to the case of Ayman Nour, a leading opposition figure jailed by Mubarak. Bush, however, ordered the speech rewritten and the reference to Nour taken out, because he did not want to offend Mubarak. Bush did open the way for new American funding in Egypt for the promotion of democracy and civil society, despite Mubarak’s evident distaste for the programs.

  Bush’s second-term interest in democracy was reflected in more indirect ways and in regions outside the Middle East. One of his most significant and little-noticed diplomatic achievements was in forging a close, strong American relationship with India, the world’s most populous democracy. India and the United States had remained at odds with one another for more than a half century amid a series of disputes over India’s ties to the Soviet Union in the cold war, over U.S. support for Pakistan, and over India’s development of nuclear weapons. In his second term, Bush proceeded to change the status quo. He negotiated a far-reaching nuclear agreement with India under which India agreed to put its nuclear reactors under international safeguards, while the United States opened the way for transfers of civilian nuclear equipment and other technology previously denied to India. The deal took four years to negotiate and implement and became the centerpiece of a new strategic relationship. Despite his low standing elsewhere in the world, in India Bush became the most popular American president since John F. Kennedy.

  Laura Bush, meanwhile, embraced the cause of democracy in Burma, where the military junta had for years repressed dissent and had kept the Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, whose party had won nationwide elections in 1990, under house arrest. In 2006, the first lady launched a public campaign for political change in Burma, writing op-ed pieces, convening conferences, appearing in the White House briefing room to criticize the junta, and eventually visiting a Burmese refugee camp in Thailand. “I wanted the people inside Burma to know that we heard them, and the junta to know it, too,” she asserted.

  Nevertheless, in Asia as in the Middle East, Bush applied his “freedom agenda” selectively and within careful limits. He maintained correct and cautious relations with China’s Communist Party leadership, downplaying the issue of democratic change in the world’s most populous nation. At one point in the fall of 2007, Bush took the unprecedented step of appearing in public with the Dalai Lama, awarding him the Congressional Gold Medal at an event in the Capitol Rotunda, to China’s considerable displeasure. Yet Bush did this as part of an implicit trade-off: China had been pressing for Bush to attend the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, and Bush announced his agreement to go during the same general time period as the ceremonies for the Dalai Lama. In the end, China was too big for his freedom agenda.

  * * *

  At the end of 2006, after replacing Rumsfeld, Bush imposed a wholesale change in military strategy for Iraq that managed to reverse the downward course of the war there. After months of internal deliberation, he approved both a short-term increase in American troops in Iraq, commonly known as the “surge,” and a shift from conventional military operations to a new emphasis on counterinsurgency. Bush later wrote that it was “the toughest and most unpopular decision of my presidency,” a remarkable assertion, considering that he had also made the decision to launch the war in the first place.

  It is difficult to exaggerate how much risk Bush took in ordering the surge. The war had been spiraling steadily downward, turning into a civil war between Sunnis and Shiites, and there was considerable domestic political momentum building for an American withdrawal. In pressing for the surge in troops, he overrode the resistance not merely of the Democrats in Congress, who had just regained the majority, and of an American public that was tired of the war, but also of senior military leaders and even his closest foreign-policy adviser, Secretary of State Rice.

  Bush’s decision was the culmination of several reviews of Iraq policy throughout the summer and fall of 2006. One took place informally within the military, where a rump group of officers began to question America’s strategy in prosecuting the war. Among the principal figures were General David Petraeus, who had developed and written a new manual on counterinsurgency for the army, and Petraeus’s own powerful mentor, retired general Jack Keane.

  To that point, America’s military strategy in Iraq had been to wage large-scale, conventional military operations against insurgents from fixed U.S. bases and, gradually, to hand over more and more of these operations to Iraqi forces. Rumsfeld had regularly used the metaphor that the United States needed to learn how to take its hand off the bicycle seat. The proponents of counterinsurgency argued that the conventional military approach created a distance between Americans and Iraqis; instead, they said, the U.S. troops should develop close ties with Iraqis at the local level, establish stability, and try to protect ordinary Iraqis from violence. Such a strategy, however, would require a large infusion of new American troops.

  Another review of the military strategy was being carried out inside the White House itself. Throughout 2006, while insisting repeatedly in public that the war was going well in Iraq, Bush was secretly searching for a new approach. He asked his national security adviser, Steven Hadley, to seek out alternatives. Throughout the summer and fall, Hadley and his staff came to the conclusion that there would have to be more troops and a different strategy. These two inside and outside reevaluations of the conduct of the war were interrelated: Petraeus spoke almost daily with Meghan O’Sullivan, an aide to Hadley who handled Iraq policy. All of these reevaluations were carried out surreptitiously, so as not to undermine the war efforts or the commanders in the field.

  The only public reexamination of Iraq policy was carried out by a high-level commission called the Iraq Study Group, appointed by Congress in early 2006 to study the war and decide what should be done. By the fall, this panel of foreign-policy experts, headed by former secretary of state James Baker and former representative Lee Hamilton, was moving toward a recommendation to set a date for the withdrawal of American troops.

  After appointing Gates as the new secretary of defense, Bush led a series of top-level meetings on Iraq. With even some Republican leaders urging troop withdrawals, it seemed as though the only options for Bush were either to continue the existing course or to begin to draw down U.S. forces. Nevertheless, with Bush’s encouragement, Hadley and the NSC staffers laid out the arguments for sending more troops.

  Military leaders were decidedly unenthusiastic. When Bush first presented the ideas for a surge to the Joint Chiefs of Staff at a Pentagon meeting, all of them “unloaded on him,” according to Gates. They warned that a surge in troops to Iraq, requiring the extension of tours of duty in the war zone, would create too much strain on the army and might jeopardize its capabilities elsewhere around the world. The sen
ior American commanders in charge of the war did not favor a surge, either. “I do not believe that more American troops right now is the solution to the problem,” General John Abizaid, the chief of the Central Command, testified in Congress that November.

  For her own part, Rice argued against inserting more American troops into what she termed blood feuds among the Iraqis. At one point, with other officials looking on, Bush rebuked her. “So what’s your plan, Condi?” Bush asked. “We’ll just let them kill each other, and we’ll stand by and pick up the pieces?”

  In early December 2006, the Iraq Study Group issued its final report. It called the situation in Iraq “grave and deteriorating” and recommended that the United States withdraw its combat forces from Iraq by the first quarter of 2008. However, the report included a sentence drafted by a leading Democrat on the panel, William Perry, formerly Bill Clinton’s secretary of defense, which said that the commission could support “a short-term redeployment or surge of American forces” to stabilize the situation in Iraq before the withdrawal. Those words provided Bush with important political cover for the surge.

  In a meeting with his advisers just before the end of 2006, Bush decided to send five more brigades (more than twenty thousand soldiers) of U.S.combat forces to Iraq, with support troops bringing the additional deployment to nearly thirty thousand. In reaching his decision, he turned aside a recommendation from his own commanders in Iraq that he scale back to a “mini surge” of only two new brigades. Separately, to mollify the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Bush at the same time authorized something they had long sought: an increase in the overall size of the military.

  Bush announced the surge in a speech on January 10, 2007. “It is clear to me that we need to change our strategy in Iraq,” he explained. He appointed Petraeus as the new commander of American forces in Iraq, a personnel change designed to carry out a new strategy of counterinsurgency. He also named a veteran diplomat, Ryan Crocker, as the new American ambassador to Iraq.

  After three years of insisting that things were going well in Iraq, Bush finally admitted they were not. “The situation in Iraq is unacceptable to the American people—and it is unacceptable to me,” he said in his speech. “Our troops in Iraq have fought bravely.… Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility lies with me.”

  * * *

  Bush struggled on the home front to win enough public support for the surge to proceed. His standing in the polls had slipped so low that by December only 35 percent of Americans approved of his performance as president. With a new majority in both houses of Congress, the Democrats had the power to bring the Iraq War to an immediate close by cutting off funding for the war, if they were determined to do so.

  For the Bush White House, this potential cutoff in money for the war was a serious concern. In the spring of 2007, Congress passed a funding bill for Iraq that included a timetable for the withdrawal of forces. Bush vetoed the bill, but he was then forced to accept revised legislation that set a series of “benchmarks” for progress in Iraq. As part of its oversight, Congress required that Petraeus and Crocker come home to report to Congress in September on the situation in Iraq.

  By the summer of 2007, even Senate Republican leaders seemed to be wavering. Bush was so anxious about a loss of congressional support that he ordered his senior foreign-policy aides to hold off on travel. “I want everyone to stay home and fight the fight here,” he told Rice. “I need you and Bob Gates meeting with Congress, meeting with the press—I need you out there defending the policy and buying time.”

  The September congressional hearings turned into a showdown over the surge and the war itself. Just before they started, Bush received a bit of unintentional help from some critics of the war. The antiwar group MoveOn published an advertisement in the New York Times that questioned Petraeus’s patriotism. The ad referred to him as “General Betray-Us.” It said he was “cooking the books” for the Bush White House, supposedly concealing information that the surge in Iraq had failed. The effect was to produce a wave of sympathy for the general; the ad alienated moderate Republicans and placed Democrats on the defensive as they sought to distance themselves from the MoveOn attack.

  In two days of hearings, Petraeus and Crocker offered low-key testimony in which they contended that the surge was beginning to work. Casualty figures had increased when the surge started in early 2007, as the additional American troops entered the fighting, but by the summer they had begun to drop. Petraeus testified that the security situation was improving sufficiently that by mid-2008 he thought combat forces could be cut back to their pre-surge level. Senators Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton—all members of the Foreign Relations Committee who were running for the Democratic presidential nomination—questioned various aspects of Petraeus’s testimony. At one point, Clinton told the general that his reports “really require the willing suspension of disbelief.”

  Yet neither they nor other Democratic leaders were willing to take on the responsibility for cutting off the money for the war, particularly at a time when a new strategy and new leadership had brought the first signs of progress. Bush had won this political battle: the Petraeus-and-Crocker hearings marked the end of any serious congressional effort to defund the war. After the hearings ended, Bush gave a televised speech promising that, over time, the American forces would scale back and shift the combat operations to Iraqi forces. For their part, the Democrats increasingly turned their attention away from Congress and toward winning the next presidential election.

  In the summer of 2008, the surge ended, as Bush withdrew the last of the five additional combat brigades he had sent to Iraq. Its impact on the course of the war had been striking. There had been 112 American fatalities in the month of December 2006, when Bush decided on the surge, and 126 the following May, after the surge had increased the fighting. But then the figures dropped steadily and dramatically to the point where, in July 2008, there were just 13 American fatalities, the fewest since the start of the war in March 2003. Over that same time period from the end of 2006 to mid-2008, Iraqi civilian deaths dropped from 1,629 per month to 321.

  * * *

  During his final year in office, Bush negotiated with the Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki two written agreements that paved the way for the United States to remain in Iraq for a time but also set a deadline for removal of all American forces by the end of 2011. Bush accepted this deadline reluctantly. In the past, whenever the Democrats in Congress had proposed a fixed timetable for withdrawal of troops from Iraq he had objected strongly. This time he persuaded himself that a deadline was acceptable, because if conditions changed the Iraqis could always amend the agreement and ask the Americans to stay there. In 2011, the Obama administration sought an extension of the agreement to permit a small-scale American presence, but Maliki and the Iraqis objected. As a result, U.S. troops left Iraq according to the timetable Bush had negotiated just before leaving office.

  Ironically, during the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama and his aides occasionally pointed to the actions of George W. Bush to make their case against John McCain, their Republican opponent. McCain was running as a hawk on foreign policy; he opposed fixing a time for removing American forces from Iraq, and he also criticized strongly the idea of negotiating with Iran. The Obama forces portrayed McCain as more conservative than Bush, because Bush set a deadline for withdrawal in Iraq and launched diplomatic initiatives with Iran and North Korea.

  After Obama took office, critics on the left complained that his foreign policy sometimes appeared to be more a continuation of the Bush administration than a repudiation of it. Aides to Obama responded that if so, they were an extension of Bush’s last years in the White House, not his early years. They drew the distinction between Bush’s second term and his first.

  It was a valid point. During his second term, Bush did operate differently. He moved increasingly away from his earlier reliance on Cheney, with his penchant for military power and unilateralism. Instead, B
ush gave much greater leeway for Rice to pursue diplomatic initiatives that Cheney opposed. Yet Bush did not rely entirely on Rice, either. When she opposed the surge in Iraq, Bush went ahead anyway, choosing an unconventional strategy of counterinsurgency that even his own top military leaders had opposed.

  When Bush took office in 2001, he had been far too willing to accept the advice of others. In his final years, he had become what he should have been earlier: a hands-on president willing to question what others told him and to become personally involved in both strategy questions and policy details.

  None of this undid the damage he had caused by the military intervention in Iraq. One final episode before Bush left office embodied all the passions and tumult the war had engendered. In December 2008, Bush made a last visit to Iraq to sign the agreements he had negotiated with Maliki. During his final press conference there, an Iraqi journalist suddenly threw one of his shoes at Bush, and then the other. After artfully dodging the shoes, Bush made light of the incident. “If you want the facts, it’s a size-ten shoe that he threw,” he told reporters.

  8

  “I’m Going to Be Roosevelt, Not Hoover”

  By the final year of his presidency, George W. Bush’s life in the White House had settled into a series of daily routines. He brought his senior cabinet aides into the Oval Office to give him updates on the economy and on the war in Iraq, talking to them over his regular breakfast of cereal and fruit, or during a quick routine lunch of carrots, a chopped apple, and a hot dog.

  A new presidential campaign was under way, but Bush was not involved. His party’s candidate, John McCain, was keeping his distance; Bush was simply too unpopular to help him. The McCain campaign arranged for Bush to appear before the Republican National Convention by video rather than in person. Throughout that summer, Bush stayed in the background; his principal public event was to visit Beijing for the 2008 Summer Olympics. He did not believe his final months in office would be particularly eventful, either. “As September opened, we expected a harsh presidential campaign but an otherwise calm fall,” wrote Laura Bush.