by Peter Baker
AS THE CAMPAIGN took shape, Bush was simultaneously juggling the politics of far-off Baghdad, where the fractious Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish segments of society were overlaid with the personalities and ambitions of exiles who had returned to Iraq. Two separate yet interrelated events inflamed both Shiite and Sunni communities, putting the Americans in between lots of men with guns. On March 28, American troops on Jerry Bremer’s orders shut down a newspaper run by Moqtada al-Sadr, a radical Shiite cleric who had been challenging the occupation. In padlocking the gate, they touched off a violent and sustained backlash from Sadr and his supporters in Baghdad, Najaf, and other Shiite areas.
Then, even as American troops were trying to contain Sadr’s fighters, four security contractors from the private Blackwater firm were ambushed and killed in Fallujah, the Sunni-dominated city in Anbar Province west of Baghdad where Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and al-Qaeda followers were now based. The charred bodies of the slain contractors were dragged from their sport-utility vehicles into the street and ripped apart by a cheering mob. “Where is Bush? Let him come here and see this!” shouted a boy no older than ten as he ground his heel into a burned head. Two mutilated corpses were hung from a bridge over the Euphrates River. The desire for retaliation among the Americans was overpowering.
The marines resisted suggestions for a full-fledged assault on the city, arguing for a more targeted approach rather than risk further alienating the population. “We ought to probably let the situation settle before we appeared to be attacking out of revenge,” Lieutenant General James Conway, commander of the First Marine Expeditionary Force, recalled arguing. His colleagues split; Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez agreed, but his superior, General John Abizaid, the CENTCOM commander, thought the marines’ indirect approach had failed, and Bremer also favored a strong response. So did Washington. “No, we’ve got to attack,” Sanchez remembered Rumsfeld saying in response to the general’s concerns. “We need to make sure that Iraqis in other cities receive our message.” In Sanchez’s account, the president expressed appreciation for the military’s caution, “but then ordered us to attack.” After leaving office, Rumsfeld disavowed responsibility for the decision, attributing it to Abizaid. “Military commanders decide that, absolutely,” Rumsfeld said.
Now managing simultaneous operations against Sunni and Shiite extremists, Bush, Cheney, and the National Security Council heard from Bremer and Sanchez over a secure videoconference on April 7. Bush was in a feisty mood. He declared that Sadr’s Mahdi Army was “a hostile force” and that they could not let a single radical cleric change the course of Iraq. “At the end of this campaign, al-Sadr must be gone,” Bush declared. “At a minimum, he will be arrested. It is essential he be wiped out.”
Rumsfeld asked whether the effort should be low intensity or high intensity, and the high-intensity president interrupted. As Sanchez remembered it, Bush delivered a sharp tirade. “Kick ass!” Sanchez recalled Bush saying. “If somebody tries to stop the march to democracy, we will seek them out and kill them. We must be tougher than hell.” He went on: “Our will is being tested, but we are resolute. We have a better way. Stay strong! Stay the course! Kill them! Be confident! Prevail! We are going to wipe them out. We are not blinking.” If it stood out in Sanchez’s memory as perhaps more cartoonish than it really was, it reflected the president’s state of mind.
Yet the marine assault in Fallujah had already precipitated a crisis in Baghdad that would force Bush to blink. Members of the Iraqi Governing Council threatened to resign if it continued. Tony Blair called Bush asking him to back off, and Bremer agreed they should suspend the operation for fear of losing the government just weeks before the scheduled transfer of sovereignty. Abizaid disagreed, urging that they continue the offensive, even though it would take another two or three weeks. Cheney agreed. “The vice president was pretty adamant about continuing the attack, and he wasn’t worried about the government falling,” one participant in the discussions recalled. But Bush was. On April 8, Sanchez was ordered to halt the offensive. Once again, the marines were furious. Having launched the operation over their own objections, they now wanted to finish it. Abizaid flew to Fallujah on April 9 to tell the marine commander, Major General James Mattis, whose pants were splattered with blood. Mattis exploded.
“If you are going to take Vienna, take fucking Vienna!” he roared, embellishing Napoleon’s famous phrase.
But the order stood. “Let me say again, we’re going to stop,” Abizaid told him.
Mattis was not the only one unhappy about it. Cheney seemed to have been taken by surprise by the decision. His staff called senior military officers to ask what happened.
The Fallujah episode underscored the uncertain way Bush was managing the war from Washington. One minute he wanted to be tough; the next he was convinced the whole enterprise would unravel. His instinct was to defer to the people on the ground, but when the people on the ground disagreed among themselves, he was reluctant to mediate or insert himself. In his head were images of Lyndon Johnson picking out bombing targets during the Vietnam War, an object lesson, he felt, in what presidents should not do. “You fight the war, and I’ll provide you with political cover,” he told the generals more than once. But in this instance, his equivocation had a cost. Conway concluded, “We certainly increased the level of animosity that existed.” Along with stirring the Sadr hornet’s nest without capturing him, the Fallujah debacle led Sanchez to call those days in March and April “a strategic disaster for America’s mission in Iraq.” Taken together, he said, “our actions had undeniably ignited a civil war in Iraq.”
THAT WAR WAS taking a toll on Bush’s standing at home, and there was rising pressure on him to admit the invasion had been a misjudgment. At a prime-time news conference in the East Room on April 13, Bush stumbled when John Dickerson of Time magazine asked him to name his biggest mistake since September 11. Bush considered it a trap, a way of getting him to backslide on Iraq. But his faltering inability to come up with an answer was perhaps as damaging.
“I wish you would have given me this written question ahead of time so I could plan for it,” Bush said, pausing to think. “Uh, John, I’m sure historians will look back and say, gosh, he could have done it better this way, or that way.”
Clearly flummoxed, he paused again. Watching from the side of the room, his press secretary, Scott McClellan, thought to himself, Come on, sir, this one is not difficult!
“You know,” Bush continued, “I just, I’m sure something will pop in my head here in the midst of this press conference, with all the pressure of trying to come up with an answer, but it hadn’t yet.”
He went on to reaffirm his decision to invade Iraq despite the missing weapons. “You just put me under the spot here,” he told Dickerson, “and maybe I’m not as quick on my feet as I should be in coming up with one.”
Bush knew he had blown it. Conferring with aides in the darkened State Dining Room afterward, he said, “I kept thinking about what they wanted me to say—that it was a mistake to go into Iraq. And I’m not going to. It was the right decision.”
The answer provoked an uproar about a president who could admit no wrong, and it weighed on Bush for weeks. When Adam Levine, a press aide who was leaving the White House, stopped by the Oval Office for a departure photograph, Bush raised the encounter.
“How would you answer the Dickerson question?” Bush asked.
“Mr. President, that isn’t fair. I have had three weeks to think about it.”
“I know you have, so what would you have said?”
“Well, I would have looked at him and said, ‘That’s a great question, John. You are right. I make a lot of mistakes. Laura Bush reminds me every night. You probably want to ask her because she keeps better track of them than I do.’ ”
Bush laughed because of course it was true.
While Bush acknowledged no mistakes, George Tenet became convinced that the president’s people were trying to pin them on him instead. When he p
icked up the Washington Post on April 17 to find a story about Bob Woodward’s new book, Plan of Attack, he read with exasperation that he had told the president the case for weapons in Iraq was a “slam dunk.” Tenet felt like “the guy being burned at the stake.” He took a few days off work and headed to the New Jersey shore to stew. First, he thought, the White House had hung him out to dry on the sixteen words, and now this.
From his beach getaway, Tenet called Andy Card to vent. “Andy, I’m calling to tell you that I’m really angry,” he said. He complained about the leak. “What you guys have gone and done is make me look stupid, and I just want to tell you how furious I am about it. For someone in the administration to now hang this around my neck is about the most despicable thing I have ever seen in my life.” Card said little, and Tenet concluded his relationship with the White House was broken beyond repair.
ON THE MORNING of April 29, Bush and Cheney welcomed ten members of a bipartisan commission investigating September 11 into the White House. It was a bright, sunny day, with light beaming through the windows of the Oval Office as the president and the vice president greeted their visitor-inquisitors. Bush was friendly and warm, Cheney quiet and stoic.
The White House, and especially Cheney, had long viewed the inquiry with suspicion, sure that it would turn into an exercise in finger-pointing that could only be damaging in an election year. Richard Clarke had used his appearance before the commission to accuse Bush and his team of not taking the threat of terrorism seriously enough and to dramatically apologize to relatives of the victims of September 11. The White House resisted turning over sensitive intelligence documents or letting aides to the president testify. But eventually the resistance began to look like stonewalling, and the White House agreed to send Condoleezza Rice to testify publicly and to let the commission interview Bush and Cheney—as long as they appeared together and no transcript or recording was made.
The insistence that the two do the interview jointly set tongues wagging about a president who needed to lean on his vice president, feeding into a public perception that it was Cheney who was really in charge, not just in ordering that hijacked planes be shot down on September 11, but in every phase of the war on terror that followed. “My immediate suspicion was that they want to do it together so that we don’t get them separately and their stories don’t match up, including about the shoot-down episode,” recalled Philip Zelikow, the commission’s executive director. Timothy J. Roemer, a Democratic member of the commission, said he thought it might be “a way of diluting the time we would have with the president.”
But in fact Bush dominated the session. As the commissioners settled into the couches and chairs set up in a semicircle around the president and the vice president, the panel’s leaders, Thomas H. Kean, a former Republican governor of New Jersey, and Lee H. Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana, opened the questioning for about an hour, taking Bush through the events leading up to September 11 and the day itself. Cheney said nothing unless a question was directed at him or the president asked if he wanted to add something. After Kean and Hamilton were done, the other commissioners were given ten minutes each to pose their own questions.
When one of the Democrats risked straying beyond his time, Kean gently tried to cut in, but Bush waved him off.
“This is the Oval Office,” Bush said. “I make the rules.”
Then to the commissioner he said, “Go on to your next question.”
That defused much of the tension, and Bush gave no appearance of being rushed. Despite the strictures White House lawyers had tried to put on the session, they had actually blocked out the entire morning on the president’s schedule so he could give the commission as much time as it wanted. In doing so, he could appear magnanimous and not defensive. “Every time we asked a specific question to the president, he thoroughly answered it or honestly said, ‘Here’s what I recall,’ ” Roemer said.
On the shoot-down order, Bush backed Cheney’s account that he had obtained permission from the president first. None of the logs or notes taken that day confirmed such a call, but Bush and Cheney were firm in their mutual recollection and attributed the lack of documentation to the confusion of the day. “I just think it was the fog of war and the communications scramble that morning,” Cheney said later. “I think there were calls that weren’t recorded.” Some of the commissioners remained unconvinced, though. While the vice president had no power to issue a military order on his own, few could fault him if he had taken the initiative in the most exigent of circumstances to prevent the destruction of the White House. But some commissioners assumed that the president and the vice president were unwilling to fuel the impression that Cheney was really the dominant member of the tandem, acting on his own.
At one point, Fred Fielding, a Republican commissioner who would later serve as Bush’s White House counsel, asked about issues surrounding the Twenty-Fifth Amendment that dealt with the succession of power. Bush replied that his relationship with Cheney was like that of no other president and vice president because there was no political rivalry. “The vice president isn’t interested in my job and I’m not interested in his,” Bush said.
As they answered questions, though, Bush left little doubt that he was in charge on this day at least. He used no notes and was in full command of the details. “The commissioners go in expecting that Cheney is going to do a lot of talking, except for the few people that know the two men,” recalled Zelikow. Instead, “Bush utterly dominates the conversation. The commissioners didn’t expect that, a lot of them, especially the Democrats. They had the caricature in their head of Bush, and they didn’t understand that the caricature is not quite right.” In the end, “Bush probably did 95 percent of the talking. Cheney just stayed silent, which I think he is totally content to do.”
So rather than Cheney guarding Bush, it was Cheney who was protected from questioning.
18
“When are we going to fire somebody?”
This is going to kill us,” Alberto Gonzales said quietly as he watched the images on his White House television.
On the night of April 28, the CBS show 60 Minutes II aired photographs of Iraqi detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison being abused by American soldiers. The photographs were depraved in every way. Several showed Iraqi prisoners stripped naked and blindfolded or hooded, with American soldiers posing next to them smiling or flashing thumbs-ups. One showed naked Iraqi prisoners stacked on top of each other in a pyramid. The most horrific image, one that would be seared into the consciousness of the world as a symbol of American hypocrisy, showed an Iraqi forced to stand on a box of military rations, his head covered with a sandbag and wires attached to his fingers and genitals. He was told if he fell off the box, he would be electrocuted.
President Bush had been told about the Pentagon investigation back in January but had never seen the photographs until now. He felt angry and blindsided. “I had no idea how graphic or grotesque the photos would be,” he recalled. Bush understood pictures like this would be interpreted around the world as evidence that the Americans were no better than Saddam Hussein.
Investigators found a broad pattern of abusive behavior at the prison. In a report marked “Secret/No Foreign Dissemination,” Major General Antonio M. Taguba concluded that military police had kept detainees naked for days at a time, forced groups of male prisoners to masturbate while being photographed or videotaped, placed a dog chain around a naked detainee’s neck so a female guard could pose with him, used unmuzzled military dogs to intimidate detainees and once bite a prisoner, forced male detainees to strip and wear women’s underwear, and punched, slapped, and kicked detainees. The abuse did not occur during interrogations, but some guards said they were encouraged by interrogators and believed it helped soften up detainees for later questioning.
At 10:00 a.m. on May 5, Bush met with Rumsfeld, who handed him a handwritten letter. “Read this,” the secretary said.
Mr. President,
I want you to know that you have my resignation as Secretary of Defense anytime you feel it would be helpful to you.
Don Rumsfeld
Rumsfeld told the president that there had to be accountability and the furor would just grow until there was a sense that the government had taken it seriously.
Bush agreed. “Don, someone’s head has to roll on this one,” he said.
Well, Rumsfeld responded, you have my resignation.
The meeting broke up without a decision.
Rumsfeld’s letter was not precisely a letter of resignation; it was an offer to resign if the president wanted him to. Generously, it could be read as an honorable act taking responsibility; more cynically, it could be seen as forcing Bush either to support him or cut him loose. Bush saw it as the latter.
“Pretty smooth move by the crusty old guy,” Bush told Dan Bartlett. “He called my hand.”
Bush thought about accepting but worried about pushing out a defense secretary in the middle of a war and knew Cheney would resist. Moreover, the notion of tossing aside advisers because of a media furor always rankled Bush.
Bush called Rumsfeld at the Pentagon.
“I don’t accept your resignation,” he said.
“I just don’t want to put more rocks in your knapsack,” Rumsfeld replied.
Bush asked whether someone else should be fired, like Richard Myers.
“You’d be firing the wrong guy,” Rumsfeld responded.
Bush was not willing to let it go. That afternoon, Bartlett popped into the Oval Office. The Washington Post had figured out how long Rumsfeld had known about the pictures before Bush found out.
