by Peter Baker
Those sentences became a crutch for Bush aides for years afterward to argue that he was not glossing over what was still to come in Iraq. And certainly, he was correct that “major combat operations” were over in the sense of the big army-on-army battles that ousted a government. That claim hardly seemed controversial; just a week earlier, Tom Brokaw of NBC News had prefaced a question during an interview with Bush with the phrase “Now that the war in Iraq is over.” Still, the tone of the speech conveyed triumph, portraying “the battle of Iraq”—which followed “the battle of Afghanistan”—as just another step in a broader campaign as if he were describing the gradual liberation of Europe in World War II.
And the banner, no matter how it got there, no matter what it was intended to mean, became shorthand for the day’s message. “Our stagecraft had gone awry,” Bush later concluded. “It was a big mistake.”
15
“Mr. President, I think we’ve got a problem”
Five days after the made-for-television landing on the aircraft carrier, President Bush sat down for lunch with the man he wanted to accomplish the next mission in Iraq. Across from him in the dining room off the Oval Office was L. Paul Bremer III, a former ambassador in charge of counterterrorism and former chief of staff to Henry Kissinger. Bremer was Bush’s choice to govern Iraq and transition it back to Iraqi hands.
At first glance, Bremer had a background almost designed to draw Bush’s skepticism. A product of northeast elite circles, Bremer was the son of the president of Christian Dior Perfumes and an art history lecturer, earned degrees from Andover, Yale, and Harvard, studied at a French political institute, and boasted a résumé of State Department and foreign policy experience a mile long. But at sixty-one, he still had thick, wavy hair and chiseled good looks, worked out vigorously, and, most important, exuded a take-charge energy that appealed to Bush.
From that first meeting on May 6, Bush decided to invest in Bremer. And from the start, Bremer, who went by the name Jerry, laid out a vision in direct conflict with the sketchy plans Bush had made for Iraq. While the president and his team imagined a quick handover of power and a drawdown to thirty thousand troops by September, Bremer saw a longer, much more involved process. And at that lunch just before the announcement of his appointment, he got Bush to buy into his approach.
“We’ll stay until the job is done,” Bush told him over a salad of pears and greens. “You can count on my support irrespective of the political calendar or what the media might say.”
Bush and Cheney had long planned to bring in someone like Bremer to run Iraq, but the plan was accelerated when Jay Garner got off to a rough start as interim administrator. The ease with which Hussein was dispatched had masked the challenge to come and just how unprepared the administration was to deal with it. Even before the fall of the statue at Firdos Square, the struggle for control within Bush’s team was escalating to a volatile point. Donald Rumsfeld told Garner to get rid of two people on his team, Thomas Warrick and Meghan O’Sullivan, because a “higher authority” had insisted. The higher authority, Garner later concluded based on sniffing around, was Cheney’s office, which regarded the two as insufficiently committed to the mission; Warrick had led a “Future of Iraq” project for the State Department that Cheney’s team found suspect, and O’Sullivan had authored a book before the war suggesting alternatives to force for influencing rogue states like Iraq. Eventually, Garner convinced Rumsfeld to let him have O’Sullivan, though not Warrick.
The episode underscored the divisions inside the administration. When Colin Powell sent the Pentagon seven ambassadors with experience in the region, most of them Arabic speakers, Douglas Feith, Rumsfeld’s undersecretary and one of the leading neoconservatives in the administration, rejected them. Powell was told the reason was that “we want people who are really committed and believe in what we are doing.” Furious, he called Rumsfeld and threatened retaliation. “You know,” Powell told him, “you are going to need a lot of help, and I am pulling these guys from embassies and I am pulling anybody who is not in an embassy but can help. But if you are blackballing my seven ambassadors, then I am not sending anybody.” Rumsfeld eventually accepted several people from Powell’s list.
By that point, Garner had lost support in Washington. He had managed to get crosswise first with Rumsfeld and then with Powell by switching plans for a transition. He did not seem like a decisive enough figure, and he certainly was not seen as part of the team in Cheney’s office. Cheney moved quickly to bring in what he hoped would be a stronger figure. Paul Wolfowitz asked to be considered, but he was viewed as more of a thinker than a manager, and his bid went nowhere. Instead, Scooter Libby contacted Bremer and told him he was being considered.
After their lunch, Bush took Bremer into the Oval Office to meet with reporters. With Cheney absent, Bremer sat in the vice president’s chair in front of the fireplace as Bush hailed him as “a can-do type person.”
Then after the journalists shuffled out, Bush and Bremer sat down privately with Cheney and the rest of the national security team.
“I don’t know whether we need this meeting after all,” Bush told his advisers. “Jerry and I just had it.”
While he was only joshing, Bush had just sent a lasting signal. Bremer took from that that “I was the president’s man,” not the secretary of defense’s. Rumsfeld, ever alert to turf and chain of command, took notice too. “POTUS had lunch with him alone—shouldn’t have done so,” he jotted down in a note to himself, using the acronym for president of the United States. “POTUS linked him to the White House instead of to DoD or DoS.”
What’s more, Bush agreed when Bremer insisted he recall Zalmay Khalilzad, a White House aide with deep contacts with Iraqi opposition figures who had been named special envoy. Bremer argued it would be confusing to have two people reporting to the president. Bush styled himself as an MBA president and believed good management was to pick good people and then delegate to them. If Bremer wanted Khalilzad out, Bush would oblige him.
Powell was stunned and called Khalilzad. “Zal, what the hell happened?”
“Colin, you’re asking me?” Khalilzad replied. “I’m a poor staffer here.”
Colleagues took it as an early indication that Bremer wanted no rivals, but it cost the administration one of its most talented specialists—and one who was determined to facilitate a quick transfer of authority back to the Iraqis. As for Garner, he was asked to stay a while under Bremer, but he got the message and began packing.
Bremer arrived in Baghdad to set up a Coalition Provisional Authority six days later, wearing what would become his trademark outfit, a coat and tie with tan desert boots. On May 16, four days after arriving, he issued Order Number 1, formalizing a ban on Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party and removing tens of thousands of its members from government jobs. Garner and the CIA station chief protested to no avail to Bremer, who likened the move to de-Nazification in postwar Germany and based it on a draft given to him by Douglas Feith. A week later, on May 23, Bremer issued Order Number 2, disbanding the army altogether, not just the elite units loyal to Hussein as envisioned by the plan approved by Bush. Bremer reasoned that the army had dissolved itself, its bases effectively stripped and rendered useless. In both cases, he was trying to reassure the Kurds and the Shiites who had long suffered at the hands of Hussein’s party and security organs. Restoring the army might have touched off a sectarian backlash. “We would have had a civil war on our hands right away,” Bremer said later.
Both orders went against the grain of what Bush originally had in mind, but in neither case did he intervene, continuing the hands-off approach he established during Tora Bora. The two orders put hundreds of thousands of people on the street without jobs, many of them with weapons and military training. Bremer also allowed Ahmad Chalabi to be put in charge of de-Baathification, empowering the controversial figure to decide who kept a job and who was banned. With the passage of time, Bremer would defend his orders, saying “they were the rig
ht decisions,” and disputing the “encrusted body of mythology around them.” But he eventually concluded that his mistake was handing the party-purge process to Chalabi, who used his authority at times indiscriminately.
After just two weeks, Bremer was asserting control and settling in for an extended transition. In his first report to Bush on May 22, Bremer wrote that he had made clear to leaders of Iraq’s various tribes and parties that “full sovereignty under an Iraqi government can come after democratic elections, which themselves must be based on a constitution agreed by all the people. This process will take time.”
Bush gave his approval the next day, making clear he had switched from a quick-handover strategy to a longer occupation. “You have my full support and confidence,” he wrote to Bremer. “You also have the backing of our Administration that knows our work will take time. We will fend off the impatient.…”
Among the impatient were those asking where the weapons of mass destruction were. While it had been just weeks, so far none had turned up, and inside the White House there was a growing anxiety about the political dangers if they never did. On the same day that Bush appointed Bremer, White House officials picked up the New York Times to find a column crystallizing that hazard in a way no one would immediately recognize.
The column, by Nicholas Kristof, bore the headline “Missing in Action: Truth.” Noting that no weapons had been found in Iraq, Kristof suggested the White House had ignored evidence that they were never there. Reprising the sixteen words in the State of the Union about the Niger intelligence, Kristof reported that “the vice president’s office asked for an investigation of the uranium deal, so a former U.S. ambassador to Africa was dispatched to Niger.” The ambassador reported that “the information was unequivocally wrong and that the documents had been forged.”
Kristof was referring to the former ambassador Joseph Wilson, whom he had met days earlier at a Democratic conclave. Wilson, the unnamed source in the column, had exaggerated to Kristof some of the details: he had never seen the documents he supposedly debunked, for example, and congressional investigators later concluded that the results of his trip were not as unequivocal as he averred. Even so, Kristof’s reference set in motion a chain of events that would call into question the administration’s credibility on the central justification of the war, sow division and mistrust within the White House, and permanently damage the friendship between Bush and Cheney.
BUSH AND CHENEY left Iraq to Bremer while they focused their energies on pushing through the latest tax cut package. After their internal debate, Bush had agreed to seek $726 billion in breaks; Cheney had won on the dividend tax cut and accelerating the 2001 cuts but lost on capital gains so that Bush could give small businesses a bigger break and extend unemployment benefits for the jobless.
As the legislation progressed on Capitol Hill, Cheney’s friend Representative Bill Thomas, chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, had slipped the capital gains tax cut back into the bill. But while Republicans controlled both houses again, they were swallowing hard at Bush’s bottom line. House Republicans pared it back to $550 billion while Senate Republicans, with just a two-vote majority, deferred to their moderate wing and capped it at $350 billion. The gulf between the houses grew so deep that Thomas and his Senate counterpart, Charles Grassley, were at loggerheads, forcing Bush to intervene.
On May 19, Bush and Cheney hosted Thomas, Grassley, and other Republican leaders on the Truman Balcony of the White House. Cheney had his back to the balcony as Speaker Dennis Hastert launched a direct assault on Grassley. “Mr. President,” he said, “I think we’ve got a problem.” Hastert said Grassley had locked himself into a position and should be barred from talks between House and Senate. Hastert noticed Cheney with “his slight little smile” as Grassley’s face grew redder.
It fell to Cheney to broker the deal. He spent the next few days shuttling between Thomas and Grassley and other leaders until they finally agreed on a $350 billion package, meeting the Senate’s bottom line but adopting some of the ideas of the House plan. Once again, Cheney’s tie-breaking vote was required to push it through the Senate on May 23, while the House approved it the same day.
Cheney was deeply involved in another argument with fellow Republicans at the same time, this one inside the administration over environmental regulations. For more than two years, he had been pressing Christine Todd Whitman, the EPA administrator, to approve a new interpretation of clean air rules that would allow utilities more leeway to upgrade their plants without having to install expensive new pollution scrubbers. Whitman had put off revising the so-called New Source Review rules as long as she could but lost a war of attrition when Andy Card finally ordered her to sign it.
Rather than do it, she handed in her resignation on May 21. For public consumption, she said she was eager to spend more time with her family. But the regulations and Card’s order, at Cheney’s behest, were the final triggers. “It just got to the point where I said I just can’t sign this, and that’s when Andy called me in and said do it, and they had every right to order me to do it,” she recalled. “I didn’t exactly stall it for two and a half years, because there really were a lot of questions and a lot of backing and forthing. Andy thought I was stalling, but I wasn’t consciously—well, maybe a little bit, but mostly because I didn’t want everyone to make a mistake. I thought they were going down the wrong path, and I felt if I just could have a little more time to help him see that there was a way to do this” and provide the certainty industry wanted “but not to let the really bad actors who had been knowingly gaming the system get out.”
Cheney was happy to see her go. They had known each other since their days under Donald Rumsfeld in the Nixon administration. But as with Paul O’Neill, they had drifted apart ideologically and personally. “A lot of people I’ve talked to that have known him, that knew him and worked with him over the years, say there’s been a change—whether it was the heart attacks or the working in Halliburton or the combination of the two, but it was a different person who came back in the government than the one they’d known before,” Whitman reflected years later. “But I never knew him well enough to make that kind of distinction except that I felt before, he was more approachable.”
In the midst of everything else, Bush was busy with reconciliation on another front. After years of estrangement from his alma mater, the president took another step toward peace with Yale University by hosting a reunion for his class of 1968 at the White House. Some of his classmates opted to stay away in protest of the war, an echo of the antiwar passions also roiling campus during Bush’s day. But for the president, it was a chance for closure of sorts, to come to terms with the elite side of his multifaceted heritage and put to rest some of the demons that had haunted him since his youth.
It was also a night when the compassionate side of his conservatism was on display. Among those in the receiving line that evening was Petra Leilani Akwai, who had been known in college as Peter Clarence Akwai before undergoing a sex-change operation in 2002. Dressed in an evening gown, Akwai nervously waited her turn.
“Hello, George,” she said when presented to the president. “I guess the last time we spoke, I was still living as a man.”
Bush did not flinch. “But now you’re you,” he replied, leaning forward with a warm smile.
BY LATE SPRING, it had been nearly two months since the fall of Saddam Hussein, and Bush was still waiting to find the weapons he had been assured were there.
“What if we don’t find them?” he asked one day.
“Oh, we’ll find them,” Condoleezza Rice reassured him.
Yet no one was taking the lead in the search. Sitting with his war cabinet, he described how he had asked Jerry Bremer and Tommy Franks who was in charge.
“They went—” Bush said, pointing his fingers in opposite directions to indicate the buck-passing he detested.
He turned to George Tenet. “As a result,” Bush said, “you are now in charge, George.”<
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Tenet and his slam-dunk certainty had gotten him into this, Bush reasoned, so he should be the one to prove they had been right. Tenet hired David Kay, a former UN weapons inspector who had gone into Iraq after the Gulf War and established himself as one of the premier experts in the field. Like others, he had believed before the war that Iraq had weapons and accepted the challenge.
The pressure to find them only increased. As more media inquiries came in, Cheney was becoming exercised by the story of the unnamed ambassador’s mission to Niger supposedly sent at his behest. He had never heard of any such trip or any results from it, and yet he was being accused of ignoring evidence that contradicted his assumptions about Iraq’s weapons program.
Finally, Cheney picked up his secure phone and pushed the button that connected him directly to Tenet.
“What the hell is going on, George?” Cheney asked.
In Cheney’s memory, Tenet was embarrassed and said he had not known about the trip until the media accounts. In the course of the conversation, Tenet noted that the ambassador’s wife “worked in the unit that sent him.” He promised to get more information.
Cheney was flabbergasted. He had spent years as a consumer of intelligence and had never heard of an envoy being sent on a trip by his wife, with the director in the dark. “It sounded like amateur hour out at the CIA,” Cheney concluded.
Cheney received a call from Scooter Libby, who was preparing to return a call from Walter Pincus of the Washington Post. Cheney passed along what he had learned from Tenet and then said in what Libby remembered as “sort of an offhand manner, as a curiosity,” that the ambassador’s wife worked in the counter-proliferation division of the CIA. Libby, who was taking notes, jotted that down with his blue pen: “CP/his wife works in that divn.” Libby also scrawled down the salient talking points: “1) didn’t know @ mission, 2) didn’t get report back, 3) didn’t have any indication of forgery was from IAEA.” Libby called Pincus and passed along those points but did not mention the wife. Pincus’s story on June 12 recounted the still-unnamed ambassador’s trip, questioned the sixteen words from the State of the Union, and reported that the vice president had not known about the trip or received any report about it.
