Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House

by Peter Baker

  “Definitely not, Mr. President,” Crumpton said. “Definitely not.”

  But Bush deferred to Franks, who argued it would take weeks to deploy significant numbers of American troops and even then they could never seal the area. Sending enough forces quickly enough to make a difference would have been a formidable challenge—commanders estimated that deploying one thousand to three thousand troops would have required hundreds of helicopter flights over a week—and still might not have stopped bin Laden from escaping. But relying on the Afghans had clearly backfired. On December 16, bin Laden and a phalanx of his fighters slipped out of Tora Bora and disappeared into Pakistan. In his desire to let the military call the shots, Bush had missed the best opportunity of his entire presidency to catch America’s top enemy.

  AS BUSH SETTLED into Camp David for the holidays, friends noticed that he seemed more distant than usual. “He was totally disengaged with anything around him other than what was happening” overseas, noticed Charlie Younger, the president’s childhood friend. “He would walk in the woods and walk with his dog, very contemplative and distant, a lot on his mind. He wasn’t his usual self even when it was time to eat.” In the eight years of his presidency, this was the only time Younger saw him this way.

  He had plenty on his mind. On December 22, an al-Qaeda follower, Richard Reid, tried to ignite explosives in his shoes on a flight bound for Miami, only to be tackled by alert fellow passengers. The country clearly was still at risk. That “had a big impact on me,” Bush said later. The same day, a courageous Pashtun tribal leader named Hamid Karzai was installed as Afghanistan’s interim president. But that only prompted Bush to turn attention again to Saddam Hussein, summoning Franks to Crawford on December 28 for an update on contingency plans to invade Iraq.

  It was a cold Texas morning, and Bush was wearing jeans, a plaid shirt, and boots when he took the general and his operations director, Major General Victor “Gene” Renuart of the air force, into a double-wide trailer that had been turned into a secure communications center. The men sat at a small oak table facing a plasma screen at the other side of the room, and with the touch of a button the screen opened into separate rectangles showing other members of the war cabinet. Cheney joined the teleconference from the second-floor study of his Wyoming home. Rumsfeld was at his home in Taos, New Mexico, while Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, George Tenet, Andy Card, and Richard Myers were in the Situation Room at the White House.

  They started with a quick briefing on Afghanistan, and Bush took the opportunity to rib Franks about reports of his recent visit. “Tommy, what’s this I hear about your dodging missiles over Kabul?” he asked.

  “Nothing serious, Mr. President,” he replied. “Been shot at before.”

  “Tommy,” he replied, “I don’t want you to go getting yourself killed. That’s the last thing we need. Got work for you, important work.”

  The “important work” Bush had in mind for him was Iraq. The military had not significantly updated its contingency plan for Iraq, Operations Plan 1003, since 1998, and it essentially advanced the same sort of strategy used in the Gulf War—an assault force of 400,000 assembled over a six-month buildup. No one thought that was suitable anymore, including Franks. The general noted that Iraq’s army had shrunk from 1 million men to about 350,000 today.

  “General Franks,” interrupted Cheney, who had overseen the last assault on Iraq. “You’ve described an Iraqi force around half the size it was when the Gulf War began. Does that mean it is only half as effective?”

  “Sir, smaller does not necessarily mean weaker,” Franks replied. He noted that the Republican Guard, while fewer in number, was still well manned and armed.

  “What do you think of the plan, Tommy?” Bush asked.

  “Mr. President, it’s outdated,” he answered. Aside from the long buildup, he said, it did not account for the fact that American weaponry was tremendously more effective than a decade earlier.

  Franks presented what he called a new commander’s concept, a four-phase plan with three different options. He could begin a ground war with as few as 100,000 troops while other forces continued to flow into the region, building up to 145,000; if necessary, the force could grow to 275,000. Tenet noted that Iraq would be significantly different from Afghanistan. While Afghanistan was a primitive land governed by tribes and warlords commanding untrained fighters, Iraq was relatively modern with an organized, equipped army. Moreover, there was no Northern Alliance for the United States to team up with in Iraq. American intelligence had burned a lot of bridges since the end of the Gulf War because of a failure to help Shiites during their 1991 uprising and various failed plots to topple Hussein later in the 1990s.

  Bush told Rumsfeld and Franks to keep working on the plan. He hoped diplomacy and pressure would force Hussein to disarm, but he said they needed to prepare in case that did not happen. “We cannot allow weapons of mass destruction to fall into the hands of terrorists,” Bush declared. “I will not allow that to happen.”

  With that, the meeting ended. While bin Laden was escaping in the mountains, Bush and Cheney were focusing on Iraq.

  THE SEPTEMBER 11 attacks managed to change the dynamics even on Bush’s domestic program at least for a while. For months before the attacks, working with his new friend Ted Kennedy, Bush had been pushing Congress to pass an education reform program called No Child Left Behind, after a campaign slogan. In exchange for an infusion of money, schools would test students in math and reading from grades three to eight and once in high school, with the goal of every child meeting basic proficiency by 2014. States would set their own standards and tests. Schools that did not measure up would face sanctions, and their students would be allowed to transfer. Kennedy, deeming it “flawed but necessary,” considered it the most important education law in a quarter century. Yet it had run into strong headwinds from left and right. Liberals did not like the emphasis on testing, while conservatives did not like Washington dictating how schools run. Republican lawmakers cobbled together a plan to derail the program with an amendment giving states more flexibility. Bush summoned the sponsor to the White House to pressure him to drop it.

  But in the weeks after September 11, Bush and Kennedy suddenly found lawmakers more pliant. “There was almost a feeling of what can we do in our area to come together?” recalled Sandy Kress, the president’s education adviser. “Oddly,” he added, remembering that Bush’s trip to Florida was to promote education reform, “the feeling of the need to come together and do something together kind of partly, as a response to this, was far more powerful than any talk we would have given that day.” With many opponents swallowing misgivings, Congress passed the plan by large margins just before Christmas in perhaps the most significant bipartisan domestic victory of Bush’s presidency. And now, on January 8, Bush embarked on a fly-around with Kennedy, John Boehner, and other legislative architects to celebrate the victory. He signed the bill in Boehner’s state of Ohio, then flew to Boston in the late afternoon to showcase his partnership with Kennedy.

  On this one issue at least, he had found his Bob Bullock. “You know,” he told a crowd at Boston Latin School, “I told the folks at the coffee shop in Crawford, Texas, that Ted Kennedy was all right. They nearly fell out.” He smiled as the crowd laughed. “But he is. I’ve come to admire him. He’s a smart, capable senator. You want him on your side, I can tell you that.” Bush went on to recall how Kennedy hosted and comforted Laura Bush during the September 11 attacks. “Not only are you a good senator, you’re a good man,” the president said, using the highest form of compliment in the Bush lexicon.

  By the time he got back to Washington, though, Bush’s mind was already drifting back to other weighty issues. Kress recognized that education, as important as it was to Bush, would recede for a time.

  “The president is in another place,” he told colleagues.

  As it happened, the fly-around with Kennedy marked the end of the post–September 11 unity in Washington. Even before
the two boarded Air Force One together, the bipartisan spirit had begun to fray. Democrats blamed Bush for not doing enough for an economic stimulus package that failed to pass, while the president took umbrage at an anonymous quotation in the New York Times attributed to a Democratic aide calling him “disengaged.” Bush’s advisers blamed that on Tom Daschle, once the president’s hope for a partner but increasingly the White House poster boy for obstructionism. Daschle attacked Bush’s economic policies in a speech on January 4, 2002, indicting him for the “most dramatic fiscal deterioration in our nation’s history.” Bush fired back the next day at a town hall meeting in California, declaring, “Not over my dead body will they raise your taxes.” It was a long time since his spontaneous hug with Daschle.

  Tension between the White House and the Senate Democratic leader rose even further when Cheney called one day in January. The vice president was concerned about Senate hearings into what happened before September 11 and pressed Daschle to rein them in.

  “This would be a very dangerous and time-consuming diversion for those of us who are on the front lines of our response today,” Cheney told him. “We just can’t be tied down with the problems that this would present for us. We’ve got our hands full.”

  Cheney had a legitimate point; hearings would consume enormous time at a perilous moment. But they also represented a profound political risk. Washington loved finding a scapegoat, and there was plenty of potential for second-guessing how the government failed to stop the deadliest attack on American soil.

  Democrats knew that too, and if the vice president’s resistance to inquiry invariably involved a mix of substantive and political calculations, so did the opposition’s interest in investigating. And to the extent there was any hesitation to inject politics into national security, that faded on January 18 when Karl Rove addressed the Republican National Committee’s winter meeting in Austin.

  “Americans trust the Republicans to do a better job of keeping our communities and our families safe,” Rove told the party faithful. “We can also go to the country on this issue, because they trust the Republican Party to do a better job of protecting and strengthening America’s military might and thereby protecting America.” On the one hand, Rove’s statement was unremarkable—the president’s chief political strategist talking to a political audience about an upcoming election and an issue that historically had been a Republican strength. But coming just four months after the attacks, Rove’s remarks gave the impression that the White House was using the war on terror for partisan advantage. Democrats reacted with equal parts outrage and eagerness to accuse the other side of politicizing the war. A “shameful statement,” declared Richard Gephardt. “Nothing short of despicable,” exclaimed Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic National Committee chairman.

  INSIDE THE ADMINISTRATION, Bush was mediating another intense clash. Cheney and other advisers were debating what to do with prisoners captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere. With no appetite to bring them to American soil, where they might be given rights by American courts, the Bush team settled on the navy base on the tip of Cuba, a legal no-man’s-land where prisoners could theoretically be held beyond the reach of judges. Some might be put on trial in the military commissions Cheney had gotten Bush to authorize in November, but others might not be, and the vice president did not want judges second-guessing the White House’s decisions.

  Hooded, chained, and clad in orange jumpsuits, the first twenty prisoners arrived on the sunny, warm island after a long flight from Afghanistan on January 11. Navy engineers had hastily assembled several dozen outdoor cells made from chain-link fences on a cement slab, an open-air prison that came to be called Camp X-Ray. Pictures of their arrival were beamed around the world, signaling a new era. Whatever the legal wisdom behind choosing Guantánamo, releasing photographs of those first arrivals backfired, searing an image of a crude and even barbaric place, an image that would linger long after modern, humane facilities were constructed.

  Bush decided after their arrival that neither al-Qaeda nor Taliban captives would be covered under the Geneva Conventions, adopting the reasoning of a forty-two-page memo drafted by John Yoo at the Justice Department and dispensing with the thirty-seven-page rebuttal from William H. Taft IV, the top lawyer at the State Department and great-grandson of a president, who called Yoo’s factual assumptions and legal analysis “seriously flawed.” Both Richard Myers, at the Pentagon, and Colin Powell, traveling in Asia, were alarmed when they learned of Bush’s decision. The general and the retired general were deeply invested in the notion of laws of war. That the United States, which had done more than any nation to institute international standards, would simply toss them aside when they were inconvenient struck them as unwise and potentially even dangerous to American troops if they were ever captured. Powell made his case in the Oval Office with Bush, who agreed to let the issue be debated before the full National Security Council.

  Soon after, Bush and Cheney sat down with the National Security Council to discuss detainee policy. Powell and Myers teamed up to argue for Geneva. Even if fighters were not deemed prisoners of war under Geneva’s definition, they should have hearings to determine whether they qualified. Cheney and his allies were appalled that what they saw as a slavish devotion to process would prevent them from interrogating prisoners who might have information that would stop another September 11. Al-Qaeda was not a party to Geneva, and its fighters did not wear uniforms or constitute a legitimate army waging legal warfare. Cheney’s team adopted Yoo’s analysis that while Afghanistan had signed Geneva years ago, the country had since become a failed state and therefore no longer constituted a party to the conventions, a novel interpretation not explicitly envisioned by treaty provisions.

  “We have an image to uphold around the world,” Powell countered. “If we don’t do this, it will make it much more difficult for us to try and encourage other countries to treat people humanely.”

  Myers seconded him on moral terms. “Mr. President,” he said. “You’ll notice that everybody here’s with a lawyer. I don’t have a lawyer with me. I don’t think this is a legal issue.”

  But John Ashcroft now advanced the Yoo analysis, saying Afghanistan was no longer a real nation and al-Qaeda and the Taliban were essentially a “coalition of pirates.”

  “Would you apply the Geneva Conventions to Iraq?” Bush asked Ashcroft.

  “Yes, Mr. President,” Ashcroft said. Iraq was a legitimate nation.

  “But you can say that Saddam Hussein is a pirate too,” Bush said.

  Cheney said the Taliban and al-Qaeda were not lawful combatants. “We all agree that they’ll be treated humanely,” he said. “But we don’t want to tie our hands.”

  In the end, Bush backed off the original interpretation somewhat, but his compromise made little practical difference. He signed an executive order on February 7 finding that while Geneva did not apply to al-Qaeda terrorists, it did cover the war against the Taliban government. But Bush then determined that even under Geneva’s own definitions, Taliban soldiers across the board were illegal combatants and therefore did not qualify as prisoners of war. The United States would treat detainees, “to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of Geneva,” he ruled, language that gave the government all the wiggle room it needed to write its own rules.

  Bush was preparing to thrust the issue of war onto the national table in an even more dramatic way. With his State of the Union address coming up, he asked his speechwriters to outline a doctrine for a new age when the United States must confront terrorism and unconventional weapons like chemical, biological, or nuclear arms. Michael Gerson assigned David Frum to come up with a line or two about Iraq. Frum thought about the alliance between terror states and terror organizations, and for whatever reason it made him think about the Axis powers of World War II. He scribbled down the phrase “axis of hatred” to describe the modern-day nexus confronting the United States. Gerson liked
it but, playing off a favorite Bush word, changed it to “axis of evil.”

  At first, Iraq was the only country named, but Condoleezza Rice and Stephen Hadley worried that would make it look as if the president were ready to go to war with Iraq. So the speechwriters added Iran, the sponsor of Hamas and Hezbollah, and North Korea, an aspiring nuclear state suspected of spreading dangerous weapons and technology to rogue nations. Hadley then had second thoughts about including Iran, since there were stirrings of democracy there. “No, I want it in,” Bush said. “I want to turn up the pressure on Iran.” Gerson made no objection. “It didn’t seem particularly controversial to use these as examples of state sponsors of terror,” he said. Powell and his deputy, Richard Armitage, read the speech and had no problem with the phrase either.

  On the evening of January 29, Bush strode into the House chamber and delivered perhaps the most memorable line of his presidency. “States like these and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world,” he said. “By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States. In any of these cases, the price of indifference would be catastrophic.”

  When Bush finished to applause, his staff thought the major takeaway would be his commitment to “the non-negotiable demands of human dignity” in the Muslim world, including rule of law, free speech, religious tolerance, and women’s rights. To the extent that anyone picked up on “axis of evil,” they misjudged what would provoke controversy. “We were more focused on the ‘evil’ part of it as opposed to the ‘axis’ part of it,” Dan Bartlett said later. The word “evil” consistently rubbed some on the left the wrong way. It never dawned on them that the word “axis” would become the issue. They meant an axis between rogue states and terrorists, not a link between three disparate countries nor a target list. “The reason it was an axis was not because they were in alliance. The reason it was an axis was because they were all three separately doing the same thing, both pursuing weapons of mass destruction and supporting terror,” Hadley said later. “We thought it was a figure of speech, and nobody thought that somebody would think that we were alleging that they were actually in league with one another.”