Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House

by Peter Baker

  “Look, Mr. President, you would know this, but I feel like I need to tell you it’s pretty well-known that I didn’t support the surge,” Lute told him.

  “You’re right, I did recognize that,” Bush replied. It was an awkward moment, but Bush appreciated Lute’s candor. “I love you for telling me that,” he told Lute.

  Lute’s appointment was announced on May 15.

  CHENEY WAS ANGRY a week later as he picked up the morning newspaper and detected signs of weakness coming out of the White House. He was reading a column on May 22 by David Ignatius in the Washington Post headlined “After the Surge,” reporting that Bush was discussing a “post-surge” strategy focused on training and advising Iraqi troops, an approach that would “track the recommendations of the Baker-Hamilton report.”

  Cheney confronted Bush in the Oval Office that morning. “Whoever is leaking information like this to the press is doing a real disservice, Mr. President,” he told him, “both to you and to our forces on the ground in Baghdad.”

  This looked like caving to the Democrats and would undercut Petraeus and the commanders in the field, Cheney complained. “We have to correct this particularly with the generals in the field,” he said.

  After returning to his office, Cheney looked up to find Hadley coming in and shutting the door. Hadley said he was the one who leaked to Ignatius—and did so on orders from Bush. Hoping to shore up support on Capitol Hill, the president wanted to foreshadow a time when troops would eventually start coming home. Cheney was momentarily nonplussed. The president had not told him he would do so, nor did he admit it even after being asked about it. Once again, they seemed to be on different pages.

  The next few days brought moments of good news for Cheney. On May 23, Cheney’s daughter Mary had her first child with her partner, Heather Poe, a son named Samuel. And two days after that, Bush signed a spending bill with $95 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan stripped of the troop withdrawal clause. As weakened as Bush and Cheney were, they had stared down Congress in a test of wills.

  But then, on May 26, Cheney was aboard Air Force Two flying to New York to deliver the commencement address at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point when he noticed another leak undercutting the surge. The New York Times reported the White House was contemplating cutting combat forces in Iraq by as much as half in 2008.

  Cheney was not the only one concerned. David Petraeus raised the issue on May 30 during a videoconference.

  “Mr. President, to be quite frank about it, Ray Odierno and I were wondering what’s going on?” Petraeus asked.

  Bush reassured him. The generals had his 100 percent support.

  Cheney was not so sure. The next day, he brought Jack Keane to his weekly lunch with Bush. Keane reinforced Petraeus’s concern about the signal to commanders in the field.

  Bush brushed it off, saying it was just his advisers working on the political problem in Congress.

  Cheney countered that such talk came with a price in terms of confusing troops and risking momentum.

  Petraeus understood the president’s precarious situation and realized his scheduled testimony after Labor Day had become a deadline for the surge. “My concern was whether we could get it to work sufficiently before September 2007,” he recalled. “That was the pistol staring at us out there most importantly.”

  Petraeus was already fighting a multifront war. While waiting for the last of the surge brigades to arrive, he launched a series of special operations missions targeting insurgent leaders. But he felt constantly undercut by his superior, the new Central Command chief, Admiral William “Fox” Fallon, who was a skeptic of the surge. Fallon, who had pinned his fourth star on before Petraeus pinned on his first, resented his subordinate’s independence and personal channel to the White House and resolved to reestablish the chain of command. But Petraeus kept asking for more help, only to be frustrated at the negative response or lack of response. “Respectfully, sir, I can take no for an answer,” Petraeus wrote to Fallon in one e-mail in May, “but I can’t take no answer.” Petraeus was flabbergasted. It was the first time in his career his immediate supervisor was not supportive of what he was doing.

  The Iraq debate continued to dominate Washington, making it hard for Bush to get traction on anything else. With his Social Security and tax reform ideas dead, Bush was pushing again for a grand bargain on immigration. With the support of John McCain on the right and Ted Kennedy on the left, the president figured it was his best chance for a domestic legacy in his final two years in office. But he found it difficult to rally his own party. No longer afraid of their unpopular president, conservatives roared their opposition to Bush’s immigration plan, decrying it more fulsomely than ever as amnesty. Frustrated, Bush unloaded on his erstwhile allies during a speech at a border patrol training facility in Georgia on May 29, saying critics “hadn’t read the bill” and were opposing it because “it might make somebody else look good.” Addressing thousands of trainees at a sunny outdoor ceremony, Bush turned testy. “If you want to kill the bill, if you don’t want to do what’s right for America, you can pick one little aspect of it. You can use it to frighten people.”

  He pressed on a couple of other initiatives at the same time. On May 30, Bush proposed expanding PEPFAR, the anti-AIDS program, which had put lifesaving medicine in the hands of millions of Africans and was rapidly becoming one of the great successes of his administration. He proposed doubling the funding to $30 billion over the next five years, seeing it as a worthy legacy, proving that his presidency was not all about war. The day after that, he reached out to overseas allies alienated by his renunciation of Kyoto with a call for new international talks on climate change.

  The crisis atmosphere in the West Wing had taken its toll on Bush’s inner circle. His closest aides had been with him longer than White House officials typically stayed and were drained. In late May, Dan Bartlett told the president he was stepping down. After thirteen years at Bush’s side, Bartlett knew the president as well as any adviser, literally growing up with the governor turned president. But with a third child on the way, Bartlett believed it was time to move back to Texas.

  After letting Bush know, Bartlett announced his decision during an Oval Office meeting of senior staff members. Alluding to his testy encounter with Cheney over disclosure of his shooting incident to a local Texas paper, Bartlett turned to the vice president and joked that he was going to leak his resignation to his neighborhood newsletter. “He didn’t laugh,” Bartlett recalled.

  A few days later, a federal judge sentenced Scooter Libby to two and a half years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Cheney was incensed. Bad enough to convict his former aide on trumped-up charges, but to put him behind bars for longer than many violent criminals seemed like a travesty. Cheney’s camp wasted little time lobbying the president. “Pardon Him,” read the headline on an editorial posted barely an hour after the sentence was handed down on the Web site of National Review, the conservative journal with friends in the vice president’s office. William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, accused Bush of abandoning Libby. “So much for loyalty, or decency, or courage,” the magazine lectured. It added, “Many of us used to respect President Bush. Can one respect him still?” Several Republican presidential candidates debating that night in New Hampshire said they would consider a pardon. Bush, traveling in Europe, found an escape hatch; as his lawyers assured him, there was no need to act as long as Libby had legal avenues to avoid reporting to prison. The judge delayed the sentence until hearing arguments.

  ON THE DAY Libby was sentenced, the president arrived in Prague for a democracy conference. Bush was discouraged. He had committed his presidency to working toward “ending tyranny in our world,” and yet the march of freedom, as he termed it, seemed stalled. Just as aggravating was the sense that his own government had helped stall it.

  For all of Bush’s high-flying rhetoric, he had yet to impose his will on the bureaucracy, much of which viewed his inaugural visi
on as simplistic, naive, and messianic. Badgering foreign governments about how they treated their citizens got in the way of development projects, trade deals, military cooperation, and other priorities. And Iraq haunted the effort, seen, rightly or wrongly, as an extreme example of forcing democracy on other countries.

  Even small gestures generated resistance, sometimes from Bush’s own friends. The president wanted to invite oppressed Chinese church leaders to the White House, only to run into objections from Clark Randt, a college friend he had made ambassador to Beijing. Randt argued the timing was not right. Bush aides like Michael Gerson and Elliott Abrams, who were leading promoters of the democracy agenda, came to believe the timing would never be right for diplomats who cared more about managing relations than changing the world. As a small concession, Bush agreed to hold the meeting in the residence rather than the Oval Office. When he finally met with the Chinese activists, he ended the session by calling for a prayer. Cheney looked visibly uncomfortable as everyone held hands.

  The divisions within the administration grew personal. The advocates gave the professional diplomats derisive nicknames. Christopher Hill was called “Kim Jong Hill,” while Richard Boucher, an assistant secretary of state who oversaw central Asia, was dubbed “Boucherbayev,” a play off Nursultan Nazarbayev, the autocratic leader of Kazakhstan. John Bolton, whose recess appointment as UN ambassador had expired, referred to the foreign service officers at the State Department’s Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs as the “EAPeasers.” The professionals were equally scornful of the true believers, viewing them as ideologues. “You can’t solve all the problems of the world,” Robert Zoellick, deputy secretary of state, lectured Gerson. The conflict persisted in part because Bush himself was conflicted. While he deeply believed in his inaugural aspirations, he repeatedly found himself compromising with allies like Egypt and Saudi Arabia because of other imperatives. The ascension of Hamas in Palestinian elections also cast a shadow, a reminder that popular will in many parts of the world did not favor the United States.

  Bush went to Prague at the invitation of Natan Sharansky, the Israeli politician whose book on democracy had inspired him after the 2004 election. Sharansky was disappointed in Bush and hoped to reinvigorate his vision. As Bush met privately with opposition leaders from authoritarian societies, he voiced his own exasperation. “You’re not the only dissident,” he told Saad Eddin Ibrahim, a leader in the resistance to President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt. “I too am a dissident in Washington. Bureaucracy in the United States does not help change. It seems that Mubarak succeeded in brainwashing them.” Bush used the conference to prod his own administration, ordering American ambassadors in unfree nations to meet with dissidents and boasting that he had created a fund to help human rights defenders.

  But two months passed without the State Department sending out the cable ordering diplomats to reach out to opposition figures. Frustrated, Elliott Abrams took matters into his own hands and leaked the State Department’s failure to follow up to Jackson Diehl of the Washington Post. Only after Diehl made inquiries did the State Department suddenly rush to send out the cable ordered by the president.

  Returning to Washington, Bush had lunch with Condoleezza Rice, who broached the idea of holding a Middle East peace conference. Since taking office, Bush had avoided the endless shuttle diplomacy between Israelis and Palestinians that had flummoxed other presidents. But with time running short on their administration, Rice believed the moment was ripe to try.

  “How do we keep expectations from getting out of control?” Bush asked her. “What if we can’t get an agreement?”

  Rice said it was worth the risk.

  Bush told her to develop a plan. “And can we call it a meeting?” He was allergic to the word “summit,” with all its grandiose and probably unattainable implications.

  “Fine with me,” Rice said. “It’s a meeting.”

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  “Revolt of the radical pragmatists”

  Does anyone here agree with the vice president?”

  No hands went up.

  The issue of the Syrian nuclear reactor encapsulated all the competing forces of the second term—preemptive war, diplomacy, weapons of mass destruction, and the freedom agenda. And it exposed the widening rift between President Bush and Vice President Cheney in dramatic fashion. The president was reluctant to once more provoke the world with unilateral military action, while the vice president saw it as a test of whether his partner still held to the principles they shared in the days after September 11.

  Now more wary of easy intelligence, Bush chose to explore the question only after a methodical review. He gathered his national security team in the Yellow Oval Room in the White House residence at 6:50 p.m. on June 17.

  Just how good was the intelligence, anyway? he asked.

  “It’s about as good as it gets,” said Mike McConnell, director of national intelligence.

  There was no doubt it was a nuclear reactor. On that, the intelligence agencies had “high confidence.” There was convincing, though not indisputable, evidence that the North Koreans were helping the Syrians, so the agencies rated that at “medium confidence.” As to whether the reactor was part of a weapons program, the agencies had not found elements that would be definitive, like a plutonium reprocessing operation or a warhead development program, so they had “low confidence” about that. Having said that, Michael Hayden, the CIA director, noted there were no lines connecting the reactor to a power grid. Analysts could not conceive of another explanation for the plant. “Of course it’s a weapons program,” Hayden said.

  Ehud Olmert came to Washington two days later and pressed his case over lunch with Bush and Cheney. The vice president then joined Olmert for dinner that night at Blair House across the street from the White House, and the two kicked staff out for a long private session in which the Israeli leader pleaded for American action. The prospect of a nuclear-armed Syria right on the border was unacceptable, Olmert said. In Cheney, at least, he had a receptive audience.

  The national security team reconvened in the Yellow Oval Room to debate the matter. Condoleezza Rice, now bolstered in her struggles with Cheney by a new ally in Robert Gates, argued for a diplomatic solution—blow the whistle on the Syrians publicly and take them to the International Atomic Energy Agency and from there to the UN Security Council to pressure Damascus to give up the plant. If they refused, there would be a better foundation for a military strike. Without that, a surprise attack on another Arab country could trigger a wider regional war and endanger American troops in next-door Iraq, where they would be targets for retaliation. It was also a complicated juncture in the talks with North Korea. Around the same time, Christopher Hill was making a surprise visit to Pyongyang, and a few days after that UN inspectors returned to North Korea for the first time since 2002.

  Elliott Abrams, the hawkish deputy national security adviser, felt the diplomatic route advocated by Rice and Gates was ridiculous because the IAEA would never muster the wherewithal to shape events. The moment the Syrians knew their secret was out, it would be much harder to launch a surprise strike. Instead, he advocated letting the Israelis bomb the plant, reasoning that it would help them restore their military reputation following the inconclusive Lebanon War of 2006.

  Cheney was the only one to make the case for the United States to bomb the facility itself. To him, it came down to American credibility. After North Korea tested its nuclear bomb in October 2006, Bush had drawn a red line, warning of dire consequences if Pyongyang were caught proliferating nuclear technology. Well, Cheney argued, they had just been caught. Bush’s warning had to mean something; otherwise what was the point? If America did not follow through, he said, then the mullahs in Tehran certainly did not have to worry about defying the world on Iran’s nuclear program.

  Bush listened carefully but seemed disinclined to go along. He even rolled his eyes, according to one report. Several in the room said they did not recall that, but as one particip
ant said, “If not literal rolling of eyes, there was figurative rolling of eyes.”

  That’s when Bush asked for a show of hands and saw none.

  It was a far cry from the days when Bush’s first instinct was to “call Dick” after the no-fly-zone retaliation against Iraq in 2001 or to clear the room to talk with Cheney alone before launching the strike that opened the Iraq War in 2003. This time, Bush made Cheney offer his case in front of everyone else and then, whether meaning to or not, forced the vice president to confront his own marginalization. On the way out, Abrams apologized to Cheney for leaving him isolated.

  As he had repeatedly in the second term, Bush sided with Rice, who thought Cheney’s idea of a strike “was, to put it mildly, reckless.” Bush would go the diplomatic route. The catastrophic intelligence failure in Iraq still weighed on him. How could he attack a target if the intelligence community was saying it had “low confidence” that it was part of a weapons program? The minute he did that, there would be news stories about him again disregarding evidence to go to war. Instead of rallying the international community against a mutual threat, Washington would have much of the world up in arms.

  Bush later called Olmert from the Oval Office to tell him his decision. “I cannot justify an attack on a sovereign nation unless my intelligence agencies stand up and say it’s a weapons program,” Bush told him.

  “That’s very disappointing to hear,” Olmert told Bush. “We told you at the beginning that at the end of this process that the reactor has to go away, so the reactor is going to go away.”

  Olmert made clear he would not sit back and wait for the IAEA. For Israel, this was an existential issue. If America would not act, Israel would.

  Bush made no real effort to talk him out of it and hung up. “This guy’s got balls,” the president remarked to aides.