Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House

by Peter Baker

  The five—Major General Bruce Lawlor, Richard Falkenrath, Joel Kaplan, Brad Berenson, and Mark Everson—were dubbed the Gang of Five, or G-5, for short, and they met several times a week with a restricted number of senior officials brought in secretly, including Card, Rice, Tom Ridge, Mitch Daniels, and Scooter Libby. On poster board, they scratched out lists of agencies and departments to merge into a single massive Department of Homeland Security, a haphazard process at times. The Federal Aviation Agency, Border Patrol, Customs Service, Drug Enforcement Agency, Coast Guard, Immigration and Naturalization Service, and Secret Service would all be moved. So would the Federal Emergency Management Agency, under Bush’s longtime aide Joe Allbaugh. But moving the FBI was an obvious nonstarter politically. Likewise, Card’s suggestion to move the National Guard from the Defense Department proved unworkable. Other agencies were thrown in without the young aides grasping what they had done. The Gang of Five assigned the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to the new department without realizing it was dedicated to nuclear weapons research.

  Word started to leak. When Allbaugh heard FEMA might be folded into the new department, he called Card and declared it a mistake because the agency needed a direct line to the White House.

  Card told him it was too late. “This thing has a head of steam on it and I don’t think it can be stopped,” Card said.

  Fuming, Allbaugh resolved to resign as soon as the change happened.

  Bush did not tell his cabinet about the radical restructuring until just before it was unveiled, whereupon furious last-minute turf battles ensued. Tommy Thompson, the former Wisconsin governor now serving as health and human services secretary, tried to keep the National Disaster Medical System and the national drug stockpile. Spencer Abraham, the energy secretary, foiled the proposed Livermore transfer once he and his team explained what the lab actually did. Donald Rumsfeld was not told about the creation of the new department until Card called the night before the announcement. “The president will announce it tomorrow, and we are going to take four, five, or six agencies of the Pentagon away and just wanted to give you a heads-up,” Rumsfeld remembered Card saying.

  Since Libby was working with the Gang of Five, Cheney knew about the plan. He harbored reservations about another big-government response to a problem. But sensing Bush’s commitment, Cheney made little protest. The president announced plans for the department on June 6. And then the real turf war began.

  CHENEY WAS LESS reticent about Bush’s other big initiative as summer arrived. With tanks out of Bethlehem, the president thought it was time for a broader strategy for the Middle East, but the vice president worried he would be undercutting Israel and rewarding Palestinian terrorists.

  The thrust behind Bush’s new effort was to change the game in a big way. He would call for a Palestinian state side by side with Israel, making an even more explicit commitment to sovereignty for the long-oppressed people than Bill Clinton had made in his peace negotiations. But at the same time, Bush planned to demand that the Palestinians get rid of their longtime leader, Yasser Arafat.

  Bush had long since written off Arafat as a liar and unrepentant terrorist. He came into office deeply skeptical, influenced by Clinton’s experience. When an intermediary came up during a UN meeting and suggested he shake Arafat’s hand, Bush had snapped, “Tell him to shake his own hand.” His suspicions only deepened when Israeli commandos stormed aboard a rusty blue cargo ship called the Karine A and found fifty tons of rockets, antitank grenades, and other explosives from Iran bound for the Palestinians. “I had to start by saying, I’m not going to deal with Arafat,” Bush recalled after his presidency. “He stiffed Bill Clinton. He’s a crook. He stole money, and he can’t deliver peace, in spite of the fact he got the Nobel Peace Prize.”

  The idea generated heated debate inside the White House. Cheney agreed they should forswear Arafat but thought they were abandoning Israel by calling for a Palestinian state almost as if it were a reward for terrorism. “He was dead set against that and very disappointed,” remembered Dan Bartlett. Colin Powell worried about it from the other end, concerned about alienating moderate Arab leaders who, while aware of Arafat’s liabilities, still considered him the most credible voice for Palestinians. But Bush believed a viable Palestinian state with new leadership untainted by the past would allow them to get beyond Arafat, and he sympathized with Palestinians he thought had been betrayed by their own leadership and Arab states. “Whoever gave a damn about the Palestinian people?” he asked in one meeting.

  Drafting the speech was torturous; it went through thirty drafts. Even then, Bush entertained doubts. One day he sat with Rice, Karen Hughes, and Michael Gerson.

  “Of the three of you in this room,” he said, “how many think I should give this speech?”

  Rice, Hughes, and Gerson all raised their hands. So did Bush.

  The debate went all the way into the weekend before the speech, when Bush finally added the line about Arafat. On a bright afternoon on June 24, Bush marched into the Rose Garden and redefined American policy for the Middle East in seventeen minutes. “I call on the Palestinian people to elect new leaders, leaders not compromised by terror,” he said, flanked by Rice, Powell, and Rumsfeld. “I call upon them to build a practicing democracy, based on tolerance and liberty.” He added, “And when the Palestinian people have new leaders, new institutions and new security arrangements with their neighbors, the United States of America will support the creation of a Palestinian state whose borders and certain aspects of its sovereignty will be provisional until resolved as part of a final settlement in the Middle East.”

  Alarm bells immediately went off among the diplomats at the State Department, who started plotting how to undo what they saw as the damage of cutting off Arafat. The speech proved to be controversial within his own family as well.

  “How’s the first Jewish president doing?” his mother asked when they spoke next. From that tart remark, Bush assumed his mother disapproved and “that meant Dad probably did as well.”

  The first president Bush had played the Middle East down the middle and, if anything, had closer ties to Arab leaders that he sustained in the years since the White House. But the son was heading in a different direction, nursing a visceral distaste for Arafat and an equally visceral sympathy for the Israelis as victims of terrorism.

  The European allies were as upset as the State Department. “Even with our friends, I was Public Enemy Number One,” Bush observed years later. “ ‘What’d you go and do that for?’ ‘Because,’ I said, ‘I won’t deal with a corrupt thief who doesn’t care about his own people and has no commitment to the peace process. Get me a leader who respects human rights and can be a legitimate partner for peace. Until then, I’m out.’ ”

  While many argued that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was critical to the antipathy fueling anti-American terrorism and therefore critical to solve, Cheney did not see it that way. “You couldn’t wait for there to be some kind of solution between the Israelis and Palestinians and then decide you are going to get aggressive on the war on terror,” he said later. His attention remained fixed on Iraq. Even as he was losing the debate on the Rose Garden speech, the vice president was pressing Bush to bomb a suspected terrorist camp in northern Iraq.

  The CIA had obtained intelligence that a Sunni extremist group known as Ansar al-Islam was operating a chemical weapons laboratory near the Kurdish town of Khurmal in the rugged Zagros Mountains of northeastern Iraq. Analysts believed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian militant who had run an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan and fled after being wounded during the American-led assault, had taken refuge at Khurmal, joining forces with Ansar al-Islam. The camp was believed to shelter suspected terrorists. Bush was told they were developing ricin and cyanide and had tested their product on animals and even one of their own associates, who died a horrific death as his compatriots watched. One briefing paper given to the White House asserted that “Al-Zarqawi has been directing efforts
to smuggle an unspecified chemical material originating in northern Iraq into the United States.”

  The Joint Chiefs of Staff developed a plan to attack the Khurmal facility and sent it to the White House in late June, unanimously recommending a combined air-ground operation be launched on July 4. An aerial barrage would destroy the camp, followed by a helicopter raid by special operations forces entering through Turkey to kill or capture survivors and scour the site for useful intelligence and evidence of weapons production. The mission would hardly be easy; the high altitude and mountain ridges, not to mention the possibility of a dust storm, would complicate a ground operation. Military planners believed it was “doable, but challenging.” The debate at the White House was one of the most contentious to date. Cheney and Rumsfeld argued vigorously for the attack, reasoning this was exactly the definition of Bush’s new doctrine. Richard Myers told the president that the Joint Chiefs agreed.

  But Powell opposed the operation. There was no conclusive evidence that Saddam Hussein was knowingly harboring Zarqawi in the Kurdish area, which was effectively autonomous from Baghdad. What was presented as a limited strike could easily escalate, effectively opening a war that Bush had not yet decided to wage months before U.S. forces would be prepared. Moreover, Powell maintained an early strike would disrupt efforts to build an international coalition to isolate Hussein. And what if the intelligence was wrong? What would the Turks think of the Americans using their territory? What if there were civilian casualties? Shadowing the moment were memories of Clinton’s ill-fated 1998 missile strike against a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan based on questionable intelligence that it was a chemical weapons facility associated with Osama bin Laden.

  After one sharp debate over the proposed operation in June, Rice followed Bush back to the Oval Office and told him she agreed with Powell.

  Bush told her he shared the concerns and was not ready to start the war. Khurmal would have to wait.

  While he would later be accused of a rush to war, Bush at this point wanted to take time for his diplomatic strategy against Hussein to play out. Cheney thought he was making a mistake, undercutting his own Bush Doctrine of going after terrorists wherever they were found.

  FOR ALL THE jokes and insinuations about being the secret power behind the throne, Cheney actually got a moment in the big chair on June 29.

  With Bush’s fifty-sixth birthday approaching, the president agreed to undergo a routine colonoscopy, which would involve an anesthetic that would leave him briefly incapacitated. To be “super cautious” in a time of war, Bush decided to temporarily transfer power to Cheney under the Twenty-Fifth Amendment of the Constitution.

  There was little precedent for this. Since the amendment was ratified in 1967, the only other time a president had temporarily passed his powers to a vice president came in 1985 when Bush’s father stepped in while Ronald Reagan underwent intestinal surgery. Even then, as Reagan signed letters authorizing the transfer, he wrote that he did not think the Twenty-Fifth Amendment actually applied. The younger Bush had no such constitutional qualms in handing the reins to Cheney. “He’s standing by,” Bush told reporters, adding mischievously, “He’ll realize he’s not going to be president that long.”

  Sitting on a couch in a lounge at the Eucalyptus Cabin at Camp David, Bush signed identical letters to Speaker Dennis Hastert and Senator Robert Byrd, president pro tempore of the Senate, the two next in the line of succession behind Cheney, informing them that he would “transfer temporarily my Constitutional powers and duties to the Vice President during the brief period of the procedure and recovery.” Alberto Gonzales, the White House counsel, took the letters by golf cart to the Willow Lodge, where the Camp David communications center faxed them at 7:09 a.m. Colonel Richard J. Tubb of the air force, the White House physician, then performed the procedure, finishing at 7:29 a.m. without finding any polyps. Bush awoke at 7:31 a.m., got up soon thereafter, ate a waffle, and played with his dogs. He signed another pair of letters to Hastert and Byrd “resuming those powers and duties effective immediately” and had them faxed at 9:24 a.m. Cheney spent two hours and fifteen minutes as acting president, mostly at the White House holding national security meetings, but took no publicly recorded actions.

  BUSH’S NEW BEST friend increasingly seemed to be Tony Blair. As Bush mapped out a strategy for taking on Iraq, Blair was a full partner. Indeed, if Bush had failed to find his Bob Bullock in Washington, arguably he was finding him in London. “Here you have this liberal Labour leader, Tony Blair, and you have this conservative Republican from Texas, George Bush, and they see exactly eye to eye on the threat in Iraq,” noted Karen Hughes.

  Blair’s team was sensing that summer that Bush’s mind was already made up. “There was a perceptible shift in attitude,” the British intelligence chief reported to Blair and his team, according to a July 23 memo. “Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.” The same memo summarized the foreign secretary’s report: “It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran.”

  Bush would later deny that, but indeed every meeting on Iraq through the spring and summer had focused on how to attack Iraq—where they would send troops, who would be with them, how long it would take. With Cheney driving the conversation, little if any discussion was devoted to whether they should and what the consequences would be. When Richard Haass, the director of policy planning at the State Department, expressed concern to Condoleezza Rice that war with Iraq would dominate the administration’s foreign policy, she brushed away his concerns, saying the president had made up his mind, a comment he took to mean that a “political and psychological Rubicon” had been crossed even though it would be months until military action began. “They were really beating the drums,” recalled someone in the skeptic camp. Indeed, the British had a point; Bush decided to deal with North Korea through negotiations that included its neighbors in what would become known as the six-party talks. With Iraq, talks were not the goal.

  Colin Powell decided to confront the issue one-on-one with the president. “I really have to see the president,” he told Rice. “I have to do it alone without all the warlords in the room.”

  A meeting was set for August 5. Powell, returning from a trip to Asia, scribbled his points on a pad of paper through a long flight over the Pacific.

  At 4:30 on the day of the scheduled meeting, Bush, Cheney, Powell, and the rest of the national security team received an update from Tommy Franks on Iraq. Donald Rumsfeld insisted no one take notes and collected the handouts afterward. Franks was planning a light-footprint invasion that would use far fewer troops than during the Gulf War a decade earlier and rely instead on speed and the much more advanced technology wielded by the modern military.

  The discussion then turned to postwar planning. Cheney later recalled that Bush looked at George Tenet and asked how the Iraqi people would react to an American invasion. “Most Iraqis will rejoice when Saddam is gone,” Tenet said, by Cheney’s account. That was almost identical to the prediction Cheney would later make publicly, a forecast that would become a symbol of hubris. Cheney included the conversation in his memoir after leaving office to make clear he had a basis for his forecast, or at least to spread the blame.

  After the meeting, Bush brought Powell over to the White House residence for dinner, then invited him to the Treaty Room on the second floor, a private study that had been used in the past for cabinet meetings and the signing of the treaty ending the Spanish-American War. Laura had stocked it with furnitu
re from Ulysses S. Grant’s era so Bush could use it as a home office.

  Bush listened as Powell ran through the points from his notepad: the consequences of an invasion, the cost to international unity, the possibility of oil price spikes, the potential destabilization of Saudi Arabia and other allies in the region. It would suck all the oxygen out of Bush’s term. And most important, it would mean Bush would effectively be responsible for a shattered country, for twenty-five million people and all their hopes and aspirations.

  “If you break it, you are going to own it,” Powell told Bush. “It isn’t getting to Baghdad. It is what happens after you get to Baghdad. And it ain’t going to be easy.”

  Bush asked what he should do.

  “We should take the problem to the United Nations,” Powell said. “Iraq is in violation of multiple UN resolutions. The UN is the legally aggrieved party.”

  “Even if the UN doesn’t solve it,” he added, “making the effort, if you have to go to war, gives you the ability to ask for allies or ask for help.”

  But Powell also noted Iraq might give in, in which case Bush would have to take yes for an answer, even if it meant Hussein remaining in power.

  Bush was struck by Powell’s intensity and signaled that he was open to talking about it. “Colin was more passionate than I had seen him at any NSC meeting,” Bush recalled.

  ON AUGUST 15, ten days after dinner with Powell, Bush was at his ranch scrolling through newspaper clips when he came across an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by Brent Scowcroft, his father’s close friend and former national security adviser. “Don’t Attack Saddam” read the headline.