Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House

by Peter Baker

  BUSH OPENED 2007 preparing for the most explosive move of his presidency. Despite his decision at Crawford, the speech announcing the surge included brackets where the number of new forces would be inserted. Surge advocates were frustrated that the two-brigade option still seemed to be alive. “We’ve decided to be a bear,” Crouch protested to Stephen Hadley. “So let’s be a grizzly bear.”

  But George Casey seemed to have enlisted Nouri al-Maliki and passed word to Washington that the Iraqi leader would only accept two brigades. When Hadley brought the news to Bush on January 4, shortly before a secure videoconference with Maliki, the president snapped.

  “Enough! Does the guy want to win or not?” he demanded. Aides were not sure whether he meant Casey or Maliki. “I’m building a plan to win this thing. We’re not going to short-change it. Tell him that.”

  “You might want to tell Maliki that,” Hadley offered.

  Bush headed out the door toward the Situation Room. “I’m about to,” he said. “So let’s go.”

  Mumbling to himself while walking down the corridor, Bush seemed exasperated. “If we’re not there to win, why are we there?” he asked out loud.

  On the videoconference, Bush asked that both sides clear the room so that he could have a private confrontation with Maliki.

  “I’ll put my neck out if you put your neck out,” Bush told him.

  Maliki agreed.

  The speechwriters were told to take out the brackets and insert five army brigades for Baghdad plus two marine battalions for Anbar Province. It was the final purge of the old strategy as well as the beginning of a new mentoring relationship between Bush and Maliki. For months to come, Bush would make a point of talking with Maliki every week, nudging him into demonstrating more leadership.

  The next morning, Bush made his nomination of Petraeus official. At five feet nine and 150 pounds, Petraeus was surprisingly slight for such a commanding figure. He was legendarily driven, survived a bullet to the chest during a training exercise, and embodied the modern ethos of scholar-soldier. He had led a division in the invasion of Iraq and later returned to train Iraqi troops. He stirred resentment in the Pentagon for his high profile; when Newsweek put him on the cover with the headline “Can This Man Save Iraq?” Donald Rumsfeld “went ballistic” on a conference call and snapped, “It is not for David Petraeus to save Iraq.” But Petraeus saw from the start what Rumsfeld and others had not. “Tell me how this ends,” he remarked to Rick Atkinson, a journalist traveling with him during the original invasion in 2003, a comment that came to define the war: Now it would be up to him to figure that out.

  For Bush, there was now the matter of the speech announcing the surge. His advisers debated the best venue. There was talk of the Map Room, but Laura Bush noticed a grandfather clock in the background and thought if it was ticking in the middle of the speech—or frankly, if it was not—it would be a bad metaphor. She suggested the Library instead, deeming it warmer than the Oval Office with its bookshelves and fireplace.

  On a morning before the speech, Bush found himself alone in the Oval Office with Meghan O’Sullivan. Bush was about as isolated as a president could be, and his staff felt compelled at times to offer encouragement.

  “Mr. President,” O’Sullivan ventured, “I know you feel really alone right now, but I want you to know that you are not alone. I am standing there with you.”

  If Bush was amused or irritated to be getting a pep talk from a young aide, he did not show it. “Thanks, thanks,” he said simply, and then walked out the door.

  The address was drafted to acknowledge the mistakes made in Iraq while vowing to fix them. More than any speech Dan Bartlett had gotten Bush to give, this would be when the president would most forthrightly admit errors and take responsibility while pivoting to demand that the country not give up yet. It was a hard balance to strike. Too far one way would embolden those ready to pull out; too far the other would only fuel the narrative that Bush was detached from reality.

  As Bush practiced, the tension in the room was unlike that before any address he had given. If ever there were a speech with his presidency riding on it, this was it. He had to buy time for Petraeus to build up forces, shift the strategy, and make enough visible progress to keep Congress from cutting off funding. Seventy-three percent of Americans thought the war in Iraq was going badly, 61 percent opposed the idea of sending significantly more troops, and 54 percent wanted to withdraw all American forces immediately or within twelve months.

  Bush knew all that as he ran through the text given him by his speechwriters. He fiddled with sections he thought should be clearer, and aides interrupted at times to tell him he was mumbling one passage or another. After one too many suggestions from the staff, Bush told them to stop. He ran through the speech in its final form. Usually, when Bush was done with a practice, he simply bounded away from the lectern and headed off to the next thing on his schedule. This time, though, he just stopped and stared down at the text amid a surreal silence in the room. What exactly was going through his head was anyone’s guess, but to aides it seemed as if he were a man on a mountain all by himself, desperately trying to get down.

  It only lasted perhaps twenty seconds before Hadley spoke up and said, “Let’s go.” Bush looked up from his reverie.

  “All right,” he agreed, “let’s go.”

  WHEN THE RED LIGHT on the camera came on that night, January 10, Bush, as he often did, looked uncomfortable, stiff, and small, “wound tightly,” as J. D. Crouch put it, not the robust figure his advisers saw in private. But Bush tried to connect with the frustrations of the country while pleading for more time. “The situation in Iraq is unacceptable to the American people—and it is unacceptable to me,” he said. “Our troops in Iraq have fought bravely. They have done everything we have asked them to do. Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me.”

  He laid out his plan to send 21,500 more troops—it would later grow to 30,000—to carry out a strategy aimed at protecting the civilian population. The change in strategy was as important as the number of troops, he explained. Bush dismissed calls to leave Iraq, arguing that letting the enemy win would hobble the United States for years. “We carefully considered these proposals,” he said of recommendations to withdraw, “and we concluded that to step back now would force a collapse of the Iraqi government, tear the country apart, and result in mass killings on an unimaginable scale. Such a scenario would result in our troops being forced to stay in Iraq even longer, and confront an enemy that is even more lethal. If we increase our support at this crucial moment and help the Iraqis break the current cycle of violence, we can hasten the day our troops begin coming home.”

  Aides were disappointed. On paper, the speech was coherent and compelling, but Bush’s delivery was not. The speech did not have “a lot of persuasive power,” Matthew Scully, the speechwriter who had left the White House but came back during this period to help with the next State of the Union address, told colleagues. J. D. Crouch thought the crushing tension and enormous stakes came through in the president’s presentation. “Watching his facial expressions, I think you can really see that his heart was in it but his mind was telling him this is going to be bad,” Crouch remembered. “Not that he didn’t believe. It is like, ‘I have to do this, it is the right thing to do, I am going to see it through. But no one is going to stand up and cheer.’ You could see it on his face.”

  To sell the plan, Bush spent the next day surrounded by uniforms. In the morning, he bestowed a Medal of Honor posthumously to a marine who had saved his colleagues by falling on a grenade, tearing up as he presented it to the slain man’s family. Then he flew to Fort Benning, Georgia, where he joined camouflage-clad army soldiers in the chow line and made his case again for the surge.

  He seemed listless, and so did his audience. At one point, he prepared to meet more families of dead soldiers. As he was about to enter the room, he paused, bowed his head for a moment in seeming prayer, and steeled hims
elf before stepping inside. On Air Force One on the flight back to Washington, he remained cloistered in his cabin, preferring to be alone rather than visit the staff as they had been told he would.

  When he returned to the White House, Condoleezza Rice stopped by to check in. She and Robert Gates had been on Capitol Hill testifying on behalf of the surge.

  “So how did it go?” Bush asked Rice.

  “Not very well,” she said, sitting by him in front of the fire. “We have a tough sell.”

  That barely covered it. The questioning had, in fact, been brutal. Senator Chuck Hagel, the outspoken Republican maverick, accused her of not telling the truth, while condemning the surge as “the most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam.” Senator George V. Voinovich, another Republican, told her he had supported Bush and “bought into his dream” but “at this stage of the game, I don’t think it’s going to happen.” Overall, the reaction to Bush’s speech had been almost uniformly negative. Bush aides knew most Democrats would hate it but thought some might be supportive; instead, Democrats universally condemned Bush for ignoring the message of the elections, and Hagel and Voinovich were not the only Republicans jumping ship. House Republicans were collecting signatures on a letter opposing the surge.

  Peter Wehner grew so alarmed he sent an e-mail to Joshua Bolten, Karl Rove, and Dan Bartlett on January 12, warning that the presidency was on the line. Wehner envisioned moderate Republican senators like Richard Lugar and John Warner marching to the White House to tell Bush no one would support the war anymore and it was time to get out, not unlike Barry Goldwater and other Republicans finally telling Richard Nixon to resign. “The country was tired of the war, and that was clearly our last chance,” Wehner remembered. “Everybody knew this was the last bullet in the chamber.”

  For the president, it was, as Laura Bush later put it, “the loneliest of George’s decisions.” Rice saw the isolation as well. “It’s such a lonely job,” she said. “Nobody, no matter how close you are to the president, he carries that burden in many ways alone.” This was never more true than during the run-up to the surge decision. Almost no one, it seemed, supported it, at least at first, not the outgoing commanders in Iraq, not the Joint Chiefs of Staff, not the Iraq Study Group, not the Iraqi prime minister, not Congress, not the public, not even his secretary of state and closest adviser. Against odds, thanks to Hadley’s orchestration, Bush had managed the process so that the Joint Chiefs ostensibly had come around with the promise of increases in army and marine corps manpower, Maliki had bought in, and Rice had swallowed her concerns. But papering over differences was not the same thing as forging unity. On this, Bush had Cheney, Hadley, John McCain, Jack Keane, and not many more.

  When he felt sorry for himself in those dark days, Laura reminded him that he chose to run for president. “Self-pity is the worst thing that can happen to a presidency,” Bush told the writer Robert Draper. “This is a job where you can have a lot of self-pity.” He tried to avoid showing it to his staff or the country. “I’ve got God’s shoulder to cry on,” he said. “And I cry a lot. I do a lot of crying in this job. I’ll bet I’ve shed more tears than you can count, as president. I’ll shed some tomorrow.”

  A little more than a week after the surge announcement, Bush invited to the Oval Office a dozen aides who helped fashion the new strategy, including Hadley, J. D. Crouch, Meghan O’Sullivan, Brett McGurk, Peter Feaver, and William Luti. He thanked them and posed for photographs. But he lingered afterward and seemed in a rare contemplative mood. He talked about Abraham Lincoln, pointing to the bust in the office and remembering how rough that presidency was.

  “Thinking about what Lincoln went through lends some of that perspective to things,” he said.

  He noted that he had just read a Lincoln biography and during the darkest days only two groups supported the sixteenth president, the evangelicals, although they were not called that at the time, and the army. “You know, I am no Lincoln,” aides remembered Bush saying, “but I am in the same boat.”

  He moved on to Iraq. “I know the decision’s unpopular, the decision to surge,” he mused. “I made mistakes and said so in my speech. All of the mistakes, they rest right here, with me. But you know what? There’s great pressure not to lead—not to act. There’s pressure to say, ‘Oh, well, this is too damn hard, too risky, let’s not do it.’ ”

  He continued, “People say Bush needs to see the world as it is. Well, I’ve been here six years now and I see the world as it is, maybe better than most.” Aides later remembered Bush gesturing with each word. “The world as it is, that world needs America to lead. You know why? Because nothing happens if we don’t lead.”

  For Bush, the Decider, there was no greater sin than giving into nothing happens. For three years, yes, he had passively deferred to generals and advisers, seized by his perception of Lyndon Johnson’s mistake during Vietnam. But after the war deteriorated drastically, he finally asserted his own judgment over the commanders and made a decision that would determine the remainder of his presidency and the ultimate outcome of his Iraq project.

  “The president himself was the guy who was the firmest on the surge,” said David Gordon, an intelligence analyst who participated in the White House committee on Iraq. “For a lot of the others of us in the group, I think a lot of people came around to the view that you’ve got to do the surge before you can move to the next step. So a lot of people ended up, I think, supporting the surge less because they believed in it but more as a step to the Baker-Hamilton approach. But President Bush got it right.”

  INTRIGUINGLY, IT WAS the first and perhaps only time on a major issue in the second term when Cheney came out on the winning side while Rice was on the losing side. Yet Cheney was not the driving force behind the surge, the way he had been behind the initial invasion in 2003. Only when his friend Donald Rumsfeld was pushed out did Cheney feel liberated enough to exert himself again. By that point, Bush already knew where he was headed. Cheney proved to be a secondary player fortifying the president, not the author of action.

  “Bush was very seriously in the driver’s seat there,” O’Sullivan recalled. “Cheney was part of the process, but this was a Bush-led process.” Another official involved thought Cheney “was kind of a nonentity” at that stage in the administration. That is too strong, but it underscored the changing perception of the vice president in the halls of the West Wing. He was becoming more like a regular vice president.

  Plenty of other issues were not going Cheney’s way. Even as Bush raised the stakes in Iraq, he gave more rope to Christopher Hill to negotiate with North Korea. On January 16, Hill hosted a lavish meal in Berlin for a North Korean delegation, complete with boozy toasts, and the next day came up with the outlines of a deal that Rice called Bush to approve without running it by Cheney. The vice president was angry, wondering how they could toast an outlaw regime just three months after it set off a nuclear test.

  Bush also decided to submit the NSA surveillance program to the jurisdiction of the secret foreign intelligence court, the same court David Addington joked about blowing up. And the president embraced an energy plan for his State of the Union calling for a 20 percent reduction in the projected use of gasoline over the next decade through a dramatic expansion of ethanol and tougher fuel economy standards for new cars. Cheney, the old oilman, “thought that was a mistake,” deeming ethanol unrealistic given the required subsidy and undesirable side effects like food shortages, Neil Patel recalled. Cheney showed up at one meeting with a digitally altered picture of Al Hubbard, the president’s economics adviser, driving a tiny Shriner car to show “what the U.S. auto fleet is going to look like if you approve this policy.”

  Then there was Scooter Libby, whose trial opened in federal court on January 23, raising tension in the vice president’s office, where former colleagues watched with concern for him and for what it might mean for the boss. Among those on the defense team’s witness list: Richard Bruce Cheney.

>   WHILE BUSH AND Cheney were in agreement on the surge, they were taking different approaches rhetorically. In the State of the Union address just hours after the Libby trial started, Bush reached out to opponents, appealing for support for the surge. With just 33 percent of Americans approving of his job performance, only twice before had any president taken the lectern in the House for a State of the Union in weaker condition in the polls—Harry Truman during the Korean War in 1952 and Richard Nixon in the throes of Watergate in 1974. Moreover, opposition to the troop surge had actually grown since Bush announced it, now reaching 65 percent.

  Addressing the new Democratic Congress with the newly sworn-in Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, sitting over his left shoulder, Bush pleaded for patience. “I respect you and the arguments you’ve made,” he said. “We went into this largely united in our assumptions and in our convictions. And whatever you voted for, you did not vote for failure. Our country is pursuing a new strategy in Iraq, and I ask you to give it a chance to work.”

  Sitting over his right shoulder, though, was Cheney, who wanted nothing to do with the contrition strategy. The day after the State of the Union address, he went on CNN and pugnaciously rejected any argument that they were failing in Iraq—as the president himself had concluded.

  “With the pressures from some quarters to get out of Iraq, if we were to do that, we would simply validate the terrorists’ strategy that says the Americans will not stay to complete the task, that we don’t have the stomach for the fight,” Cheney told Wolf Blitzer. He dismissed congressional resolutions opposing the surge. “It won’t stop us,” he vowed. “And it would be, I think, detrimental from the standpoint of the troops.” Cheney went on to describe the Iraq War as a success because Saddam Hussein had been ousted.