by Peter Baker
THE POLITICAL OPERATION was quickly absorbed by another drama. Senator Trent Lott, the Republican leader from Mississippi, made remarks at a hundredth-birthday celebration for Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina on December 5 that were seen as racially inflammatory. Lott noted that his home state had voted for Thurmond when he ran for president in 1948, adding, “If the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years either.” What he did not mention was that Thurmond had run on a pro-segregation Dixiecrat ticket. Nick Calio, Bush’s top congressional liaison, viewed the comments as just political flattery, a way of buttering up an old man, not a commentary on the issues Thurmond ran on more than a half century earlier. But over the next couple days, in the glare of blogs and cable television, they took on a life of their own, and Lott was forced to issue one apology after another.
By the time Bush flew to Philadelphia a week later for a speech about faith-based initiatives to an audience that included many African Americans, Lott’s fellow Republicans were abandoning him. On Marine One heading to his plane on December 12, Bush told aides he felt he had no choice but to admonish Lott in his speech. How else would he have any credibility? If he said nothing, it would be interpreted as condoning a seemingly pro-segregation sentiment.
“People are going to think you are pulling the rug out from under him,” Calio warned him.
“We are not doing that,” Bush insisted. “We are not pulling the rug out from under him.”
“Whether we are or not,” Calio replied, “that is what people are going to think.”
Calio asked if anyone had told Lott. Bush said no, then turned to Andy Card. “Andy, you are going to need to call him right away,” Bush said, once more outsourcing personal conflict.
When Bush arrived in Philadelphia, he took the stage in front of a sign emblazoned “Compassion in Action.” About a third of the way into his speech, he raised the Lott contretemps. “Any suggestion that the segregated past was acceptable or positive is offensive and it is wrong,” he said to loud applause. “Recent comments by Senator Lott do not reflect the spirit of our country.” The applause rose, and Bush raised his voice. “He has apologized and rightly so.”
Watching on television, Lott felt sucker punched, especially by Bush’s emphasis on the words “and rightly so.” He could not quarrel with the conclusion but felt the tone was devastating. Senator Rick Santorum, who had accompanied Bush to Pennsylvania, called Lott from Air Force One. “The president just threw you under the bus,” he said.
Lott called Bush to tell him he agreed with his comments, choosing not to express any hurt over the tone.
Bush sounded oddly upbeat. “Hang in there,” he said.
He did not. Barely a week later, Lott was out as majority leader, replaced by Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, a Bush favorite. As Calio predicted, the White House was widely perceived to have cut Lott loose. Lott himself blamed Karl Rove. “I never could prove it was Karl,” he said later, “but somebody was doing me in at the White House.”
Cheney clearly disagreed with the White House and called Lott to express his concern. “It wasn’t a call from the vice president,” Lott said. “It was a call from a friend.”
THE CONTRETEMPS WAS only a temporary distraction from Iraq. In response to the UN resolution, Saddam Hussein turned in a twelve-thousand-page declaration maintaining he had no banned weapons. Cheney wanted to immediately judge it a lie and declare Iraq in “material breach” of the resolution, but Bush opted to let his government’s experts evaluate the document first. In the end, they still wound up at the same place, and on December 19 the United States deemed the declaration inadequate and a “material breach” of Iraq’s obligations. But Bush would wait for the newly readmitted UN inspectors to have a chance to work, much to Cheney’s frustration.
As Cheney pressed him to move more assertively, Bush received a call one day in December from Karen Hughes, who was back in Texas watching developments with increasing alarm. She worried that he might feel pressured into going through with an invasion even if he did not think it was a good idea simply because he had given the speech at the United Nations. “I suggested that he shouldn’t feel that he had to go to war, that there were other ways that we could basically back off of that rhetoric in an effective way,” she recalled. Bush assured her he did not feel that way. Once again, Hughes did not tell her friend directly that she opposed going to war, but in her own way she was doing what she could to head it off, offering him an exit ramp.
Whatever doubts Bush harbored were fueled just a few days before Christmas. In the face of Hussein’s continued denials, Bush asked the CIA to lay out its best case that Iraq really did have banned weapons. On December 21, with much of Washington out Christmas shopping, Bush and Cheney took their places in the seats in front of the fireplace in the Oval Office. Condoleezza Rice, Andy Card, Scooter Libby, and George Tenet watched from the sofas as John McLaughlin, the deputy CIA director, presented the intelligence.
Where Tenet was a cigar-chewing backslapper, McLaughlin was a professorial agency veteran, as dry in his manner as his boss was exuberant. As he went through the material, he noticed that he did not seem to be persuading anyone. “I was very careful in the presentation,” he said later. “I wasn’t trying to sell anything. I was basically saying, this is what we think we can confidently say.”
Bush was not impressed. “Nice try,” he told McLaughlin. “It’s not something that Joe Public would understand or would gain a lot of confidence from.”
The president turned to Tenet. “I’ve been told all this intelligence about having WMD, and this is the best we’ve got?”
“It’s a slam dunk,” Tenet told Bush, and then repeated the phrase.
Bush took comfort from Tenet’s confidence, later calling it “very important” to him. Tenet, however, felt his comment was taken out of context and that he meant that sharpening the public presentation would be a slam dunk, not the intelligence itself, a conclusion McLaughlin shared. It was a subtle distinction, and Tenet had offered strong assurances on other occasions. But in any case, Bush asked some lawyers on his staff to frame the material the way they would in court. The same day, he received a vaccination for smallpox in solidarity with all the troops he had ordered vaccinated.
For a brief moment, Bush confronted uncertainty. After months of barreling toward a seemingly inevitable conflict, he turned to Rice in the Oval Office and directly asked her the question he had not posed to most of his other advisers.
“Do you think we should do this?” he asked abruptly.
Rice felt the weight of the moment.
“Yes,” she said. If Hussein did not respond, they would have no choice.
With troops already pouring into the Middle East in preparation for possible action, Bush retreated to Camp David for the holidays. He talked privately with his father. While even the former president’s friends believed he opposed the aggressive policy, Bush later wrote that his father backed his approach.
“You’ve got to try everything you can to avoid war,” he quoted his father telling him at Camp David. “But if the man won’t comply, you don’t have any other choice.”
Just as his father wrote him and his siblings a heartfelt letter on the eve of the Gulf War, the younger Bush now sat down to write to his twin daughters.
“I pray that the man in Iraq will disarm in a peaceful way,” he wrote. “We are putting pressure on him to do just that and much of the world is with us.”
“PEOPLE WILL GREET the troops with sweets and flowers.”
Bush and Cheney were meeting in the Oval Office on January 10, 2003, with three Iraqi dissidents, who were reassuring them that American forces would be welcomed if they invaded. Kanan Makiya, author of the book Republic of Fear, was painting a picture that resembled the Americans liberating Paris from the Nazis.
How long would American troops have to stay?
Two or three years, the dissidents estimat
ed.
That was longer than the six months Bush had told members of Congress but still a reasonable time frame as far as he was concerned. It was all beginning to feel more real, more inevitable. If diplomacy were ever really an option, by now it felt like a box-checking exercise to get to the war everyone knew was coming.
The day after meeting with the Iraqi dissidents, Cheney summoned Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the longtime Saudi ambassador, to the White House. The vice president asked Donald Rumsfeld and Richard Myers to join them. Just as he had done with Colin Powell before the Gulf War, Cheney gave Bandar a secret heads-up on the war plan.
“The president has made the decision to go after Saddam Hussein,” Cheney told Bandar.
Rumsfeld was surprised. That was the first time he had heard it put that definitively.
Bandar was skeptical. “Is Saddam going to survive this time?” he asked.
“Bandar,” Cheney said, “once we start this, Saddam is toast.”
After Bandar left, Rumsfeld raised Cheney’s comment with the vice president. “This is the first time I have heard that,” Rumsfeld remembered saying. But Cheney was mum about how he knew that and what the president had told him. Rumsfeld just assumed Bush had clued in his vice president in a way he had not done with the rest of the team yet. “He obviously knew what he was talking about,” Rumsfeld later reflected.
While Bush had never directly asked his team the fundamental question of whether they should go to war, he realized as the time approached that he would need to lock down their support. None was more critical than Powell, the one person in government with stature rivaling the president’s. Bush asked his secretary of state to stay behind after an Oval Office meeting on January 13.
“I really think I’m going to have to do this,” Bush said as they settled into the wing chairs.
“You’re sure?” Powell asked.
Yes, he was.
“You understand the consequences,” Powell said.
He did. “Are you with me on this?” Bush asked. “I think I have to do this. I want you with me.”
Powell had tried to slow the Bush-Cheney war drive and give the president off-ramps to avoid an invasion if possible. He had expressed misgivings about the way the confrontation was being handled. But he had never flatly opposed going to war with Iraq, and he did not in this moment of truth either.
“Yes, sir,” he said, “I will support you. I’m with you, Mr. President.”
Bush was pleased. “Time to put your war uniform on,” he said.
Still, Bush agreed to play out the diplomacy a little longer. He was running into fierce resistance from France and Germany. When the French foreign minister declared that “nothing today justifies” war in Iraq, Powell felt “blindsided” and “was livid.” Rumsfeld fired back by dismissing “Old Europe” as opposed to New Europe, meaning the recently liberated countries of Eastern Europe that, fresh from Soviet domination, were more willing to take on another totalitarian regime.
Bush decided to make one more effort to convince the world of Iraq’s perfidy, and on January 27 he asked Powell to present evidence to the United Nations. He envisioned a moment like when Adlai Stevenson confronted Soviet envoys with evidence of the deployment of nuclear missiles in Cuba.
“We’ve really got to make the case and I want you to make it,” Bush said. “You have the credibility to do this. Maybe they’ll believe you.”
Like Bush, Cheney was all too aware that Powell exceeded both of them in international credibility. “You’ve got high poll ratings,” he told Powell after discussing the presentation. “You can afford to lose a few points.”
But first, Bush had his own moment on the stage. On the night of January 28, he entered the House chamber glad-handing lawmakers along the aisle as he made his way to the rostrum for his State of the Union address. This would be yet another of those speech-of-a-lifetime moments that he liked to mock, but this speech of a lifetime was a genuine turning point, one leaving little doubt about the looming confrontation with Iraq. Indeed, editors at the New York Times initially wanted their story on the speech to say that Bush had, in fact, effectively declared war, until its correspondents in Washington convinced them to tone down the language and stick to what he actually did say.
As he had in Cincinnati three months earlier, Bush laid out his bill of particulars, asserting that the Iraqis at one point had materials sufficient to produce more than twenty-five thousand liters of anthrax, more than thirty-eight thousand liters of botulinum toxin, and as much as five hundred tons of sarin, mustard, and VX nerve agent. He claimed Iraq at one point had several “mobile biological weapons labs,” specially equipped trailers designed to produce germ warfare agents. Following Cheney’s lead, Bush contended that Hussein was again on the trail of nuclear weapons, citing the much-debated aluminum tubes. And he uttered 16 words that would later overshadow the other 5,400: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”
That was the same claim George Tenet had gotten taken out of the Cincinnati speech. But when the State of the Union draft was distributed to top advisers the day before, Tenet handed it off to his staff.
BUSH AND CHENEY planned to meet with the generals two days later to go over the war plan. This would be one last chance for the nation’s highest-ranking officers to express misgivings.
Bush strode into the Cabinet Room, where he found the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the regional commanders all smartly decked out in uniform. As one person in the room remembered it, the president started out with a full-throated embrace of his defense secretary, who had come to see him right before the meeting. “Don Rumsfeld has my full support,” the president said. “I think he’s doing a great job.”
Then he turned to the topic of the day. “Do any of you have concerns about the war plan?”
At least some in the room got the message. Bush was backing Rumsfeld against any revolt by the uniformed leaders.
Some of the chiefs had been worried about Tommy Franks’s light-footprint plan. At one point, they had given him enough of a hard time that he dismissed them to their faces as “Title X motherfuckers,” referring to the statute creating the Joint Chiefs. But here in front of Bush and Cheney, they expressed confidence in the plan.
The only one who offered real concerns was General Eric Shinseki, the army chief of staff. He ticked off several issues that worried him, including flow of forces, supply lines, and the lack of a northern approach from Turkey, which so far had not agreed to let American troops use its territory to attack Iraq. Some in the room considered his comments to be relatively minor and not a challenge to the thrust of the war plan. Others saw them as more significant; while delivered in a mild-mannered way, Shinseki’s critique undercut the fundamental strategy. “It’s the only time in my life where I felt like you could hear the hinge of history turn,” said Kori Schake, an NSC official in the room. “The president clearly didn’t know what to do.” So he thanked Shinseki and moved on.
Bush met the next day, January 31, with Tony Blair, who flew in from London to press the president to seek a second Security Council resolution explicitly declaring Iraq in material breach and authorizing war. The Bush team did not think it was needed, relying on the “serious consequences” language of the November resolution. For once, Cheney and Powell were on the same side. But Blair made a strikingly personal case that his government was at risk of falling. Besides, he argued, it “would give us international cover.” Bush agreed, overruling Cheney’s objections and promising to “twist arms and even threaten” to get the votes, according to notes taken by the British side paraphrasing him.
During their discussion, Bush made clear he had decided to go to war regardless of what the inspectors found or the Security Council decided. Indeed, he told Blair he had tentatively set the date: March 10. “This was when the bombing would begin,” David Manning, a foreign policy adviser to Blair, wrote in a five-page memorandum summarizin
g the meeting. As a result, Manning wrote, “Our diplomatic strategy had to be arranged around the military planning.” Blair indicated that he was “solidly with the President and ready to do whatever it took to disarm Saddam.”
Much of the discussion concerned justifying the war, possibly even deceiving the world with a manufactured provocation. “The US was thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in UN colours,” Manning wrote, attributing the idea to Bush. “If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach.” Bush predicted the Iraqi army would “fold very quickly” and the elite Republican Guard would be “decimated by the bombing.” Choosing optimism over history, Bush “thought it unlikely that there would be internecine warfare between the different religious and ethnic groups,” Manning wrote.
The stakes for Powell’s presentation to the United Nations had just gone up. It was not enough to put on a compelling case; it had to be so powerful that it would convince France and other skeptical Security Council members to back a second resolution. Powell was handed a forty-eight-page draft compiled by Cheney’s staff, led by Scooter Libby with the help of John Hannah, Neil Patel, and Samantha Ravich, outlining not just alleged weapons but also Hussein’s ties to terrorism and human rights abuses. The idea was a two- or three-day presentation. Powell scanned through the report and quickly rejected an extended show. Instead, he would speak for an hour or two, focused largely on weapons. After all, that was the subject of prior resolutions; that was the argument that had sold Richard Gephardt and many Democrats.
Powell handed the Cheney draft to Lawrence Wilkerson, his chief of staff, and asked him to go to the CIA to vet it. Skeptical of Cheney’s war fever, Powell wanted everything to be airtight. Wilkerson went to Langley with Hannah and others to go through the draft. But he quickly concluded it was thin. After six hours, he threw the document on the table. “This isn’t going to cut it, ladies and gentlemen,” he exclaimed. “We’re never going to get there.” George Tenet suggested they discard the Cheney draft and use the National Intelligence Estimate. By now, Powell had concluded that the Cheney draft was “a disaster” and “incoherent,” so he personally went to Langley for three nights, two of them with Rice in tow. The State Department’s intelligence unit sent him a memo identifying thirty-eight allegations that were “weak” or “unsubstantiated” and later identified another seven. Overall, thirty-one of the forty-five weak assertions were taken out. But that meant Powell agreed to make fourteen allegations that his own specialists thought were flimsy, including the claim about aluminum tubes.
