by Peter Baker
On the afternoon of February 16, Speaker Nancy Pelosi pushed through the House 246 to 182 a resolution opposing the surge, with seventeen Republicans breaking ranks to join the majority. But it was a nonbinding resolution. When Senator Harry Reid tried to follow suit by convening the Senate the next day for a rare Saturday session, he failed to break a filibuster. The only way Congress could force a change in the war would be to use its power over purse strings, but Pelosi had already promised to “never cut off funding for our troops when they are in harm’s way.”
Cheney left the Iraq battle behind that day for a trip to Asia, including stops in Pakistan and Afghanistan to press the governments there to do more to fight al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Along the way, he got a resonant reminder that the Other War, as some called it, remained dangerous and volatile. After landing at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan on February 26, Cheney was told that heavy snow made it impossible to fly by helicopter to Kabul to meet with President Hamid Karzai. Several aides wanted to go through with the meetings with American military and civilian leaders at the base, apologize to Karzai for missing him, and then leave as scheduled. “No, this is important,” Cheney said, deciding he would stay the night in hopes that the weather would clear by morning.
The next day, at around 10:00 a.m., Cheney heard what he described as “a loud boom” and soon found his Secret Service agents rushing into his borrowed quarters at the air base to tell him a suicide bomber had detonated himself at the main gate. Although Cheney was about a mile from the gate and never in danger, the agents moved him to a nearby bomb shelter until they were sure it was not the vanguard of a broader assault.
The Taliban later claimed they were targeting Cheney, but that seemed unlikely given the secrecy surrounding his visit and the change in schedule. Still, the vice president took it as another sign that Karzai was under siege. “They clearly try to find ways to question the authority of the central government,” Cheney, unruffled as ever, told reporters later on Air Force Two after his rescheduled two-hour meeting with Karzai. “Striking at Bagram with a suicide bomber, I suppose, is one way to do that. But it shouldn’t affect our behavior at all.”
Cheney also briefed reporters about his meetings on background, meaning they could identify him in their reports only as a “senior administration official.” Thus shielded, he took issue with media accounts suggesting that he was strong-arming Musharraf and Karzai into more robust action. “I’ve seen some press reporting says, ‘Cheney went in to beat up on them, threaten them,’ ” Cheney told the reporters. “That’s not the way I work. I don’t know who writes that, or maybe somebody gets it from some source who doesn’t know what I’m doing, or isn’t involved in it. But the idea that I’d go in and threaten someone is an invalid misreading of the way I do business.”
WHILE TRAVELING AROUND the world, Cheney kept track of Scooter Libby’s trial back in Washington. He was prepared to testify, but at the last minute Libby’s lawyers decided not to call him or to put Libby on the stand. Instead, they argued that the case boiled down to nothing more than a difference of memories about whether Tim Russert, the NBC bureau chief, first told Libby about Valerie Plame Wilson as Libby claimed and Russert disputed. Even if Russert was right, the lawyers said, Libby could hardly be a criminal for remembering differently. Prosecutors pointed to all the conversations Libby had about Valerie Wilson before talking with Russert, calling it implausible to believe he simply forgot about talking with eight other people over a four-week period.
While Cheney did not testify, the special counsel, Patrick Fitzgerald, put him at the center of the proceedings, declaring in closing arguments that “there is a cloud over the vice president.” The jury in a largely Democratic city convicted Libby on March 6. Back from his trip, alone in his office, Cheney watched television reports of the verdict and took calls from Lynne and Liz Cheney. Afterward, he headed to Capitol Hill for the weekly lunch of Senate Republicans, several of whom came up to console him. For Cheney, it was a devastating blow.
Libby was not the only veteran of the Bush-Cheney White House in trouble. Alberto Gonzales was at the center of a full-blown political firestorm over the firing of eight U.S. attorneys over the winter. U.S. attorneys were political appointees serving at the pleasure of the president and could be fired at will; presidents routinely replaced them all with a change of administration. But ousting so many all at once in the middle of a term was unusual and raised suspicions of political interference. The new Democratic Congress smelled scandal, and perhaps opportunity, and immediately launched investigations. E-mails unearthed by investigators showed White House involvement and suggested political motivations. Gonzales’s chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, resigned on March 12 after it was revealed that he had not told colleagues about his interactions with the White House regarding the dismissals. The next day, the attorney general acknowledged that “mistakes were made” and took responsibility.
The burgeoning political battle was a jarring wake-up call for the Bush-Cheney White House, which had grown accustomed to working with a Republican Congress for so many years. Now the opposition was in charge, complete with subpoena authority. While a Republican Congress did little oversight of a Republican president, a Democratic Congress would lean the other way, eagerly scrutinizing every possible instance of wrongdoing, especially with an unpopular president. The change was “something of a shock to the system here,” Joshua Bolten confided to a writer at the time. “They can dictate what the conversation is about and when it’s going to be.”
With Bush’s public standing at its lowest ebb, he suddenly lost perhaps the most energetic defender he had. At 7:00 a.m. on March 27, the president received a call from Tony Snow, his indefatigable press secretary. Snow told him the cancer he thought he had beaten two years earlier was back. He sounded upbeat, but Bush grasped the seriousness of the threat. Snow, whose mother had died of colon cancer, had long said that he “felt that cancer was stalking me,” and now he would have to take leave to fight it again. Bush told him he was praying for him. Snow called his deputy, Dana Perino, at 9:30 a.m. to tell her just before she went into the briefing room for the morning off-camera “gaggle.” At the podium, she lost control as she announced the news and began sobbing before finally postponing further questions.
Snow had been a complicated figure in the White House, well liked and admired yet also the subject of quiet dissatisfaction. He had become the face of the White House, a forceful and upbeat defender of an embattled administration and a popular figure in Republican circles, to the point of campaigning during midterm elections, something no predecessor had done. But privately, some in the White House worried he was too glib and not versed enough in the details of policy. Perino and others who worked for him at times resented that he left messes for them to clean up. Yet when his cancer returned, all of that was forgotten, and he suddenly became a popular symbol of defiant heroism in a White House battered in so many ways. His cheery optimism in the face of peril became inspiring. If Snow could confront death, some figured, they could certainly put up with the slings and arrows of political tribulations.
But the arrows kept coming. A few days later, on April 1, Matthew Dowd, the political strategist who helped steer Bush to the White House twice, broke with the president over the war. He wrote an op-ed article titled “Kerry Was Right,” arguing that it was time to withdraw from Iraq, and although he could not bring himself to publish it, he gave an interview to Jim Rutenberg of the New York Times, making the same point. He expressed disillusionment with the man he had helped elect, over his handling of Hurricane Katrina, Cindy Sheehan, Abu Ghraib, Donald Rumsfeld, and most important Iraq, where his own son was deployed as an army intelligence specialist. “I think he’s become more, in my view, secluded and bubbled in,” Dowd said of Bush.
Former colleagues whispered that Dowd was bitter at the way Karl Rove had treated him and had descended into a dark place because of a divorce, the death of a premature daughter, and his son’s deployment. Bu
t while they tried to explain away his defection, word got back to Dowd that it had deeply hurt the president.
It was a raw time for Bush. When Meghan O’Sullivan came to the Oval Office only weeks after the surge to tell him she was stepping down as his deputy national security adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan, she found herself “a little crying heap.” She had spent the better part of a year arguing for a major shift in strategy; Bush did not understand why she would leave just as she had succeeded. She reassured him of her loyalty.
“Don’t worry,” she told him, “I’m not resigning to write a book.”
“You should be the one to write a book,” he told her.
AS BUSH TRIED to get a handle on Iraq, another challenge arose out of public view. In mid-April, Israel asked to show secret material to Bush, and Meir Dagan, the director of the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad, arrived in Washington. Aides diverted him to sit down instead with Stephen Hadley and Elliott Abrams. Cheney showed up as well. Dagan had startling news: Syria was building a nuclear reactor with help from North Korea. He had aerial images of the facility and pictures of North Koreans helping out—including none other than the North Korean negotiator sent to the six-party talks.
Shortly after the visit, Bush took a call from Israel’s prime minister, Ehud Olmert.
“George, I’m asking you to bomb the compound,” Olmert told him.
“Give me some time to look at the intelligence and I’ll give you an answer,” Bush replied.
Cheney had long suspected Syria of nuclear ambitions and now finally had proof. The next time he saw Michael Hayden, the CIA director admitted as much. He walked in, sat down on the couch, and said, “You were right, Mr. Vice President.”
Bush wanted more information and options. A special task force was called “the Drafting Committee” on White House schedules so no one else would know its subject. Bush personally approved the list of officials who could be told about the situation. During one early task force meeting in the Situation Room, Bush dropped by unexpectedly and warned its members just how critical it was to keep quiet.
“If this stuff leaks,” he told them, “I’m going to fire all your asses.”
IN APRIL, CONFLICT with the Democrats over the surge came to a head. Bush had invited Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Harry Reid to meet in the Cabinet Room on April 18, but there was no middle ground. Democrats were prepared to authorize the money Bush had requested for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan if he followed a timetable for withdrawing troops. Pelosi pressed him to accept the deal.
To Reid, who had made little secret of his antipathy for Bush, the president looked “impatient and spoiled,” while Cheney across the table “slumped in his chair, silent.”
Reid pointedly told Bush that he was presiding over another Vietnam, where another president kept sending more troops just to avoid being known for losing.
“Mr. President, this war cannot be won militarily,” he said. “It is wrong to continue to send soldiers into a war that cannot be won militarily.”
Bush bridled at the comparison. “If you think this is about my personal legacy, you’re wrong,” he told Reid. “I strongly reject that. You don’t know what motivates me.”
The surge, Bush insisted, could succeed.
The meeting broke up, and no one shook hands on the way out. The next day, Reid told reporters that “this war is lost.” Bush was angry at the defeatism. Even some Democrats thought Reid went too far; Senator Carl Levin, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, “chewed my ass” for demoralizing troops, according to Reid.
Bush saw it as crass politics. Just as the Democratic Congress was determined to come after him on the war, so was it intent on going after his friend Alberto Gonzales. Summoned to Capitol Hill to explain the U.S. attorney firings, on the same day as Reid’s “lost” remark, Gonzales turned aside help from colleagues like Karen Hughes who wanted to help him prepare. As a result, with the cameras trained on him, Gonzales came across as woefully in over his head or, worse, dishonest. Sixty-four times, he said he could not remember details of the decision. Sixty-four times, his faulty memory was wrapped around his neck.
Still, while some advisers wanted the president to intervene and ease out Gonzales, Bush seemed disengaged from anything other than Iraq. Other issues received his attention in due order but did not animate him as much as they once did. When Bush flew to New York to visit a Harlem school and promote his education program on April 24, he brought along New York congressmen on Air Force One, including Representative Charles Rangel, the Democratic chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. The White House was in the midst of tough negotiations with Rangel over trade agreements, and it would have been an opportune moment for Bush to weigh in. But Bush made no such effort, chatting with Rangel instead about baseball. “He talked a lot about the Rangers,” Rangel said afterward. “I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about.”
After arriving in New York, Bush was backstage when another local congressman, Peter King, a Republican, introduced him to a soldier who had been injured in one eye. Bush teared up and asked the young man to take off his dark glasses so he could see the wound. “He actually touched the eye a little,” King said later. “It was almost as if he felt he had to confront it.”
As they headed back to Washington a few hours later with the televisions aboard Air Force One tuned to the New York Mets game, King mused that Bush must be feeling the weight of his office.
“My wife loves you,” King said, “but she doesn’t know how you don’t wake up every morning and say, ‘I’ve had it. I’m out of here.’ ”
Bush recoiled. “She thinks that?” he said. “Get her on the phone.”
King dialed the number and got voice mail.
Bush left a message: “I’m doing okay. Don’t worry about me.”
A day later, the House passed a spending bill with $95 billion to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and mandating a troop withdrawal by March 2008 as urged in the Baker-Hamilton report. The Senate concurred the following day. Bush vetoed the bill on May 1.
Democrats were not the only ones Bush had to worry about. On May 8, a group of moderate House Republicans came to see him. Sitting in the second floor of the White House residence, with Barney lying in the middle of the floor, they lashed out. Representative Tom Davis told Bush that his approval rating was down to 5 percent in part of his suburban Virginia district.
“Why did you replace Rumsfeld the day after the election?” Davis asked Bush. Doing it earlier might have changed enough races to have held the Senate.
“Yeah, I’ve heard that,” Bush said.
“Had you done this thing right, you might have saved some guys,” Davis said.
The lawmakers warned Bush that time was running out on Iraq and asked him about the Baker-Hamilton approach.
Bush said he would like to draw down troops but needed the surge to tamp down violence first.
The session was unusually blunt, what Davis later called a “brutal, come-to-Jesus meeting,” and it angered Karl Rove, who thought the president deserved more loyalty.
“You guys aren’t coming back,” he snapped at Representative Mark Kirk, one of the organizers of the session.
WITH MEGHAN O’SULLIVAN leaving, Bush agreed it was time to restructure how he managed the wars. So much was riding on the surge that it was not enough to simply have it be just one of Stephen Hadley’s many duties. So the two of them decided to appoint a full-time war coordinator with the heft to finally bring more cohesion to the fractured interagency effort. Unlike O’Sullivan, a deputy national security adviser who reported to Hadley, the new “war czar” would report directly to the president. Moreover, the czar would have “tasking authority” to issue instructions to various agencies, so if David Petraeus called to say he needed something and was having trouble getting it, the new official would have the clout to cut through the bureaucracy and get it done.
The idea underscored Hadley’s self-effacing pers
onality and genuine commitment to making the Iraq policy succeed; few Washington power brokers willingly give up power. But it also suggested just how dysfunctional the system had become that four years after the Iraq invasion Bush was still trying to figure out how to manage it. The solution itself was unwieldy; the new czar would be equivalent in rank to Hadley but would have the title of deputy national security adviser under Hadley, who himself would still play a role in war policy. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was hard to find anyone to take the job. Seven retired generals approached by the White House refused to be considered, including Jack Keane, one of the intellectual authors of the surge. Some of them voiced concern about Bush and Cheney. “The very fundamental issue is they don’t know where the hell they’re going,” General John J. “Jack” Sheehan, a retired marine officer, said publicly after turning down the job. “There’s the residue of the Cheney view—‘we’re going to win, al-Qaeda’s there’—that justifies anything we did. And then there’s the pragmatist view—how the hell do we get out of Dodge and survive? Unfortunately, the people with the former view are still in the positions of most influence.”
By that point, the surge troops were only beginning to flow into the theater in force, and casualties had spiked. In April, 104 American troops were killed, and in May the number rose to 126, the highest monthly total since 2004. Rebuffed by Keane and the other retired generals, Bush began looking at active-duty officers, particularly Lieutenant Generals Douglas Lute, who had served in the first Gulf War and in Kosovo and was now chief operations officer of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and John Sattler, the marine commander during the second battle of Fallujah in 2004 and now chief strategic planner for the Joint Chiefs. In the end, Lute impressed Bush and Hadley the most—which was all the more remarkable because he had been an outspoken opponent of the surge. Bush knew that but did not care as long as Lute would follow the policy that had been set. Bush did not even raise the issue during his interview with Lute, leaving it to the general to mention it just to be sure it was on the table.
