by Peter Baker
McNulty, a House Republican lawyer during Bill Clinton’s impeachment and the U.S. attorney who prosecuted terrorism cases in Virginia outside Washington, balked. “We can’t do that. We can’t give the evidence back to the defendant.” In fact, he added, “I will resign before I do it, and you can get someone else to do it.”
McNulty went to Robert Mueller, the FBI director, and Mueller agreed that he would resign as well if Bush and Cheney forced them to return the evidence.
Just like that, Bush and Cheney found themselves facing another “Saturday Night Massacre”–style situation with the deputy attorney general and the director of the FBI threatening to quit rather than follow what they considered improper orders. A compromise was reached to temporarily put the evidence in a safe, sealed from prosecutors, while a court decided whether the Justice Department had overstepped its bounds. Once again, Bush and Cheney managed to avoid a rupture.
WITH IBRAHIM AL-JAAFARI out, the Iraqis had finally agreed on a little-known Shiite leader named Nouri al-Maliki as the next prime minister. He was sworn in on May 20, a full five months after the elections. American officials knew so little about him that they used the wrong first name for him for a while until Maliki himself corrected them.
Bush and Cheney convened the war cabinet on May 26. Rice, who had been under pressure from Donald Rumsfeld to get more civilians into the effort to remake Iraq, reported that she had forty-eight more on tap to go. General George Casey, on video feed from Baghdad, was not impressed.
“Excuse me, Madame Secretary,” he said, “but that’s a paltry number.”
“You’re out of line, General,” Rice snapped.
“Well,” Bush interjected, “on that happy note, we adjourn.”
Rumsfeld was aggravated by what he saw as Rice’s breach of the chain of command. It was the first time tensions between his department and State had boiled over so starkly in front of the president. He later told Rice that she should not scold his general; if she had a problem with one of his officers, she should bring it to him.
Despite a growing sense inside the White House that the strategy was not working, there was no consensus on what to do about it. Bush was still reluctant to second-guess commanders, while Cheney was so close to Rumsfeld he seemed unwilling to challenge his friend. Rumsfeld years later said Cheney and he shared the same concerns and recalled no moment when the vice president disagreed with his approach. “Every one of us was worried, wondering about the strategy, what was being done, and asking those questions—should there be more, should there be less, should they be here, should they be there, should their mission be more this than that?” Rumsfeld said. “And those kinds of questions went on continuously from Dick and others.”
Hoping to shake up the policy, Stephen Hadley and aides like Meghan O’Sullivan, Brett McGurk, and Peter Feaver proposed a two-day summit on Iraq at Camp David, where the war cabinet could take a deeper look at the situation, a gathering modeled after Dwight Eisenhower’s famed sessions in the Solarium when he had analysts present different approaches for dealing with the Soviet Union. Similarly, Bush’s advisers hoped to put fundamental issues on the table: Was the current strategy working? How should Shiite militias be tackled? Could further outreach to Sunni insurgents defuse the uprising? Was the Iraqi government helping or making the situation worse? They prepared thick briefing books and invited outside scholars to debate the strategy in front of Bush and Cheney, including some who would advocate sending more troops and switching to a counterinsurgency approach more focused on protecting the population.
Before they could convene, a little good news intervened. On June 7, days before the Camp David session, Bush met in the Roosevelt Room with members of Congress back from Iraq. Representative Ray LaHood, an Illinois Republican, told Bush he should target Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq.
“We really got to get rid of Zarqawi,” he said. “It would be like getting Saddam.”
Bush quietly chortled at the obvious and elbowed Steny Hoyer, the House Democratic whip, who was sitting next to him.
“Why didn’t I think of that?” Hoyer whispered to Bush with a laugh.
Just minutes later, at 3:45 p.m., Hadley was summoned out of the meeting to take a phone call. On the line was Zalmay Khalilzad, the ambassador in Baghdad. They had indications that none other than Zarqawi had just been killed by two five-hundred-pound bombs dropped on a safe house near Baquba. Hadley returned to the meeting. Bush gave him a quizzical look, but Hadley waved him off, reluctant to announce something that had not been confirmed. He got pulled out again a half hour later for another phone call.
Only after the meeting did Hadley go into the Oval Office at 4:35 p.m. to tell Bush, Cheney, Bolten, and Rice the news. They needed to wait to be sure of the identification. Bush offered a restrained response to the possibility that the most potent enemy in Iraq might be gone. “That would be a good thing,” he said simply.
It was not until after 9:00 p.m. that Bush received word that fingerprints, tattoos, and scars matched. It was indeed Zarqawi. General Stanley McChrystal, head of special operations forces in Iraq, had personally gone to the bombing site to ensure it was Zarqawi’s broken frame pulled out of the wreckage shortly before he died.
Bush announced the news the next morning, June 8, then called Hoyer. “God, I’m so glad that Ray made that suggestion,” Bush said.
And he called LaHood to tell him how prescient he was. “Hey, you might go down in history,” the president joked.
Zarqawi had been the terrorist Bush declined to bomb in mid-2002 against the advice of Cheney and Rumsfeld for fear of starting a war too soon. He had gone on to become the key figure fomenting sectarian strife in the new Iraq, as lethal a foe as any since the September 11 attacks, responsible for more American deaths in Iraq than any other individual. Finally killing him, however belatedly, was the biggest symbolic victory since Hussein’s capture two and a half years earlier. “I was just giddy,” Rice recalled. Yet there was no euphoria in the Oval Office. Bush was sober.
“You don’t seem happy,” O’Sullivan noted.
“I’m not sure how to take good news anymore,” he said.
BUSH’S TEAM HEADED to Camp David for their Iraq summit on June 12. Cheney flew by helicopter from his weekend home in St. Michaels, Maryland, landing at Camp David with his mind swirling with questions about the viability of the Iraq venture. O’Sullivan’s staff had been up until 3:00 a.m. preparing briefing books, and she hoped the meeting could be a turning point that would force a reappraisal and new strategy.
The war cabinet gathered in Laurel Lodge and sat on one side of a conference table facing screens showing Abizaid, Casey, and Khalilzad in Iraq. Casey reported that the situation had “fundamentally changed” and was no longer just an insurgency against Americans but had become a broader internal struggle for political and economic power. The longer the Americans were there, the longer Iraqis would depend on them to solve their problems, and so he recommended keeping the current strategy to transition responsibility to Iraqi forces. “My view was always we had to draw down,” he said later. “For us to be successful, we ultimately had to leave Iraq.”
Then four military experts were asked to give presentations: Frederick W. Kagan, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute; Robert Kaplan, a longtime roving correspondent and writer; Eliot Cohen, a historian at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies; and Michael Vickers, a senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
Kagan offered a robust argument for reversing course and adding more troops to implement a counterinsurgency strategy. Iraqi forces were not ready to take over, he said, and until Iraqi civilians felt secure and trusted their government, the strife between Sunni and Shia would continue. The success of the war was too important to wage anything less than a full-fledged effort. This was the message that O’Sullivan, McGurk, and Feaver wanted Bush to hear. Vickers, who had met separately with Bush two weeks earlier,
presented the opposite theory. As a young man, he had been an architect of the CIA’s successful proxy war against Soviet troops in Afghanistan, a role later popularized in the book and movie Charlie Wilson’s War. Now he urged a similar approach with Iraqis in the lead. He distributed a four-page paper maintaining that “it is highly unlikely that American forces, even with growing Iraqi security force assistance, will be able to defeat the insurgency within the next 2–3 years.” Therefore, the United States should shift to “an indirect approach,” withdrawing all but forty thousand troops that would serve as a quick-reaction force supporting Iraqis who would take the lead “no later than summer 2008.” Rumsfeld, for one, found Vickers’s case “to be persuasive.” Worried about just that, Feaver had added Cohen to the list of speakers to bolster Kagan’s side.
In the midst of the discussion, Bush got more good news. Karl Rove received word that he would not be indicted. Rove was on a plane around 4:00 p.m. about to take off for New Hampshire when his lawyer called to tell him the prosecutor had informed him no charges would be brought. For Rove, it was a powerful relief. While he had maintained a public stoicism about the investigation, “behind the mask, the whole thing was scaring the hell out of me.” Now pumped up, Rove went on to deliver a red-meat speech to a Republican audience that night, accusing Democrats like John Kerry and John Murtha of “cutting and running” in Iraq. “They may be with you at the first shots,” he said, “but they are not going to be there for the last tough battles.”
At Camp David, Bush excused himself after a long day of discussion. It was late, and everyone assumed he was heading to bed. The next day would be key—a day of closed meetings just with the senior team and a handful of aides as they wrestled with what to do next. But Bush did not go to bed. Instead, he slipped into a car for a short ride to the helipad, where he boarded Marine One and took off for Andrews Air Force Base, flying through the night without lights. With his top advisers at Camp David, it was the perfect cover for another secret trip to Iraq, a “brilliant fake out,” as Joshua Bolten saw it. The normally taciturn Cheney was left behind to filibuster since the rest of the team did not know about the trip.
The next morning, June 13, O’Sullivan was at Camp David on the phone with McGurk back in Washington preparing to brief Bush when their colleague Charles Dunne ran into McGurk’s office at the White House and announced that the president was on television in Baghdad.
“Meghan, um, where’s the president?” McGurk asked.
“He’s here,” she said. “We’re about to get started.”
“Charles said he just landed in Baghdad.”
“What?” she asked, then quickly hung up.
She headed to the main lodge and found J. D. Crouch. It still had not sunk in until he confirmed what had happened.
“The president’s not here,” Crouch told her. “The president’s in Baghdad.”
Bush was at the Green Zone palace with Khalilzad and Nouri al-Maliki. He had flown into the city on an army helicopter that shot off flares to distract heat-seeking missiles. Casey and Khalilzad presented him with a stone from the house where Zarqawi was killed. “He was pumped up about” Zarqawi’s death, Casey recalled. Bush took Maliki’s measure and was impressed. “I sensed an inner toughness,” he concluded.
He also met with Casey, who told him about his plan to launch Operation Together Forward using counterinsurgency techniques that had succeeded in the city of Tal Afar along the Syrian border.
Bush saw a contradiction—true counterinsurgency requires a sizable troop presence—but Casey and Abizaid kept advocating a drawdown.
“I have to do a better job of explaining it to you,” Casey said.
“Yes, you do,” Bush replied.
But with Zarqawi dead and a new prime minister in place, the stealth trip set back any serious revision of strategy. The bare-it-all Camp David session Bush’s advisers anticipated turned out to be just cover for the trip. Cheney, who had grown unsettled about the current strategy, had hoped “to make a big case for how badly things were going,” including charts with violence and a discussion of counterinsurgency, according to one adviser. But Bush, sensitive to his commander in the field, returned to Washington willing to give him a chance to turn the corner. “Troop levels will be decided upon by General Casey,” Bush told reporters. It was a formulation he had leaned on repeatedly; one study found that he had said troop levels would be decided by ground commanders thirty times in 2006 alone. Joshua Bolten later recalled, “We came away from that trip with a lot of optimism, which was genuine. But it was masking what was going on underneath.”
The rump group of insurgents inside the White House pushing for change was disheartened. “What I thought would have started a zero-base review of the strategy miscarries back into debates about implementation on the margins,” reflected Feaver. O’Sullivan returned to the White House deeply upset, convinced that their summit had become a “PR session” that “didn’t tackle any of the pressing issues of the moment.”
27
“Make damn sure we do not fail”
President Bush was in the Oval Office on the morning of June 29 meeting with the visiting prime minister of Japan when Dan Bartlett and Tony Snow interrupted. The Supreme Court, they told him, had just determined that the Geneva Conventions applied to detainees at Guantánamo and threw out the military commission system, ruling that Bush had overstepped his authority. Harriet Miers came downstairs to give the president a “drive-by briefing” before he headed to the East Room for a joint news conference with Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi. “I will protect the people,” Bush told reporters, “and at the same time conform with the findings of the Supreme Court.”
Not if Vice President Cheney had his way. He was not ready to conform. The decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld not only overturned the military commissions that Cheney persuaded Bush to approve that autumn day shortly after the September 11 attacks but also represented a direct blow to the core of the Bush-Cheney war on terror. For nearly five years, Bush and Cheney had waged war largely as they saw fit. If intelligence officers needed to eavesdrop on overseas telephone calls without warrants, Cheney arranged for Bush to authorize it. If the military wanted to hold terrorism suspects without trial, Bush and Cheney agreed to let it.
The two had operated on the principle that it was better to act than ask permission, convinced that protecting the country required the most expansive interpretation of presidential powers. If they were later forced to retreat from controversial decisions, they reasoned, it was worth the price to prevent what in those early hours and days seemed like a certain “second wave” of attacks. Better to “push and push and push until some larger force makes us stop,” as David Addington had memorably put it. For years, that had worked. Now the Supreme Court in the latest and broadest of a series of decisions on the war on terror was interposing itself as a larger force.
Cheney and Addington argued for legislation that would overturn the Supreme Court decision. Addington drafted a one-page bill that would strip the court of its jurisdiction over the matter and affirm the president’s power to do what he had done. From their point of view, it was outrageous for the Supreme Court to second-guess a wartime commander in chief, especially when it had backed Franklin Roosevelt’s military commission scheme to try Nazi saboteurs.
The vice president’s move generated a sharp debate. John Bellinger, the State Department’s top lawyer, considered resigning if the president sought to reverse the court. “I was just shocked,” he said later. “It was just unbelievable to me that anyone would urge the president to overrule the court.” His boss, Condoleezza Rice, who had been circumvented by Cheney on the original military commission order, agreed. So did Karen Hughes, now undersecretary of state in charge of repairing America’s image in the world. She had concluded that the Guantánamo prison and perceptions of how detainees were treated were overpowering her efforts to win the war of ideas. As far as she was concerned, “we’re not going to get anywhere as l
ong as we have this big public relations black eye.”
The issue came to a head at a meeting in the Oval Office.
“Mr. President, you cannot overturn the Supreme Court,” Rice pleaded.
On Cheney’s side were Miers and Alberto Gonzales, who argued that the president should not surrender his powers.
Five years after Bush had readily agreed to sign the military commission order when Cheney brought it to him in 2001, he was no longer willing to go along. “I’m not going to overrule the Supreme Court,” he declared.
When someone worried that because of the ruling, international tribunals would try to pick it up and apply the Geneva Conventions to American detainees, Bush brushed it off. “I’m not worried about international tribunals,” he said.
Instead, Bush decided to work with Congress to approve a military commission system that would meet the court’s guidelines and have buy-in from the elected legislature as well. Some on his staff wondered whether it would have made sense to do that in the first place rather than waste so many years asserting unilateral authority. Either way, this time Bush decided to send Stephen Hadley to Capitol Hill from the start. Cheney was sidelined.
AS SPRING PROGRESSED, Bush found himself increasingly focused on Russia, which was set to host its first Group of Eight, or G-8, summit. To Vladimir Putin, hosting the summit was a validation of his country’s reemergence on the world stage, but to critics it reflected badly on the West to give such a prominent stage to a country that did not meet the group’s democratic standards. Having promised a freedom agenda favoring dissidents over despots, Bush found himself pressured at home by John McCain and others to boycott the summit. Bush had no intention of snubbing Putin, but he was in an awkward position. “I think we are headed to a firestorm with Putin,” Bush confided in Tony Blair.
Among those who thought Bush was on the wrong side of history was Cheney, who had been skeptical of Putin from the beginning. While Bush pondered how to nudge Putin without sacrificing their friendship, the vice president privately launched his own effort to add backbone to American policy. He invited Russia specialists to his office to discuss options for pressuring Moscow, and a Russian opposition leader, Vladimir Ryzhkov, was secretly brought in to meet with the vice president without the Kremlin finding out about it. “He thought the Bush administration had gone too far in embracing Putin,” recalled Michael McFaul of Stanford University, one of the scholars Cheney consulted.
