by Peter Baker
Then Cheney asked, “How do we know they don’t have another plutonium reactor?”
The others assured him that a plutonium reactor was much harder to hide than uranium enrichment or other nuclear activities.
No one walked out with their minds changed. “The president is being sold a bill of goods,” Edelman complained to Bolten. But Bush had settled the issue for now by blessing Hill’s mission. As long as the president was determined to explore diplomacy, Cheney would have to swallow it. But it was not the last time they would debate the matter.
WHILE THE PRESIDENT focused on a possible legacy, the rest of the country was already beginning to move on, tired of the Bush years and fixated by the race to succeed him. For Bush, it was an odd sensation. For the first time in more than thirty years, neither he nor anyone in his family was on the ballot or anticipating being on the next one. And yet it seemed everyone was running against Bush—even the Republicans.
At Republican debates, the candidates were climbing all over each other to distance themselves from him. “I’m not a carbon copy of President Bush,” declared Mitt Romney. Mike Huckabee, asked if he agreed with Bush’s vision of democracy promotion, replied, “Absolutely not, because I don’t think we can force people to accept our way of life, our way of government.” On another occasion, John McCain declared that Bush’s handling of the Iraq War had been a “train wreck.”
Bush recognized that it was a promising cycle for Democrats and expected Hillary Clinton to succeed him. At times, he chortled at the notion. “Wait ’til her fat ass is sitting at this desk,” he told aides at one point. But he respected her strength and leadership skills and hoped that, in a way, her presidency could vindicate his. Clinton, the wife of his predecessor, had staked out a hawkish position since joining the Senate in 2001, even voting for the Iraq War. While harshly critical of Bush’s handling of it, she had refused to repudiate that vote despite pummeling from the Left. During an off-the-record chat with television anchors one day, Bush recalled how Dwight Eisenhower criticized Harry Truman’s record while running for president in 1952, only to adopt the early Cold War containment strategy he inherited, in effect institutionalizing a bipartisan approach that would endure for decades. The way Bush saw it, Clinton could be the Ike to his Truman. Although she had bashed him on the trail, he felt confident she would continue the broad direction he had set.
Her main opponent for the nomination was a newly elected senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, who even before winning his seat in 2004 had exhilarated Democrats with a stirring keynote address at John Kerry’s convention declaring that “there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America.” Bush admired the young senator’s skill but seemed offended at his rise from nowhere with pretensions to the presidency. He told visitors that Obama’s remark during a Democratic debate that he would be willing to send American forces into Pakistan to chase terrorists even without Islamabad’s permission was “stunning” in its “naiveté.” On another occasion, after Obama attacked the administration, Bush arrived for a prep session for a speech fuming. “This cat isn’t remotely qualified to handle it,” Bush told aides. “This guy has no clue, I promise you. You think I wasn’t qualified? I was qualified.” Still, Bush was pleased that at a debate both Obama and Clinton refused to commit to removing all troops from Iraq in four years; the surge had changed the political dynamics enough to keep his would-be successors from boxing themselves in.
With time ticking down—Joshua Bolten had already given senior White House aides countdown clocks showing exactly how many hours were left to get things done—Bush was thinking about how to leave behind a war on terror that even a President Clinton could largely embrace. With Iraq improving by the month, he hoped to stabilize it enough so the next president would not feel compelled politically to pull out the remaining troops precipitously. He had already emptied the secret CIA prisons, negotiated for congressional authorization of military commissions for suspected terrorists, and pared back the harsh interrogation techniques that critics called torture. He was moving some prisoners out of Guantánamo in hopes of possibly closing it. He was also working with lawmakers to pass legislation explicitly legalizing the National Security Agency’s warrantless surveillance program. “He was willing to cut loose some things that weren’t going to survive and solidify things that could survive,” Rice recalled. “And that was a really important part of the calculation for him.”
STILL AT THE top of the list was Iraq. With the surge seemingly helping to turn the security situation around, the president focused on the political situation and pressed to formalize a new relationship between the United States and Iraq.
On the morning of November 26, he arrived at the Situation Room to sign a “declaration of principles” with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki that would commit them to negotiating a strategic agreement before Bush left office—an agreement to make an agreement. Just reaching that point had proved problematic enough, foreshadowing difficulties to come. In fact, as Bush took out a pen and signed the document before him, he did not realize that Maliki on the screen from Baghdad was passing his pen over his copies of the papers without actually signing.
At the last minute, Maliki had decided not to sign because he said he had not read the final wording of the document, but no one told Bush that the Iraqi prime minister was faking. Brett McGurk, the president’s Iraq adviser, was in the room in Baghdad and waited for the video image to disappear before accosting Maliki’s security adviser.
“Don’t screw with the president of the United States,” he said with barely controlled anger. “Review them now and sign.”
Later that afternoon, Maliki’s office called and said he had finally reviewed the papers and actually signed them. An embarrassing debacle was avoided.
With Rice’s help, Bush was also trying to make progress elsewhere in the Middle East in hopes of leaving behind a better situation for his successor. The next day, November 27, he climbed onto Marine One with Rice for the short flight to Annapolis, where they were convening the Middle East peace talks—not a “summit,” but now a “conference” instead of a “meeting,” to the irritation of the Israelis who thought it raised the stakes for the event. Elliott Abrams, the deputy national security adviser and a strong Israel supporter, had opposed the session, whatever it was called, fearing that Palestinian sovereignty would simply result in a terrorist state. But he had lost out, convinced that Rice had undergone a “remarkable change” in her approach because of disenchantment with Israel’s handling of the Lebanon War.
As Bush settled into the helicopter that would take him to the conference, officials from about forty countries were on hand for the most intense foray into the thicket of Israeli-Palestinian politics of the Bush-Cheney administration.
“Do I have an agreement?” Bush asked Rice.
“No, you don’t,” she admitted. “I’ve got them close, but you’re going to have to deliver it yourself.”
Bush sat back in his seat. “I can do that,” he said.
As the helicopter cruised toward the U.S. Naval Academy, Stephen Hadley was busy working out an elaborate orchestration to keep Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and President Mahmoud Abbas in different rooms until Bush could talk with each of them separately. When he arrived, Bush shuttled between the two leaders, making clear they had to agree on a statement or risk failure. Near the end of the seventh year of his presidency, Bush found himself doing almost exactly what Bill Clinton had been doing in his final days in office.
By the time they came upstairs, everyone was ready to deal. Aides were sent to craft the final wording, and soon they had a joint statement pledging to negotiate a full-fledged peace treaty by the end of 2008 that would resolve long-standing disputes, “including all core issues without exception.” It was yet another agreement to make an agreement, but one that, if fulfilled, would allow Bush to leave office complementing his legacy of war with a legacy of peace.
As
he prepared to announce the agreement, Bush took a look at the final document, but the type was too small. “I can’t read this,” he said.
“Why?” asked an alarmed Rice, thinking he had a last-minute objection to something in the text.
“No, I really can’t read this,” he said. “I can’t see it.”
The next few minutes were a scramble as Hadley ran around trying to find a way to reprint the document in larger type.
Finally, Bush shrugged it off. “Forget it,” he said. “They’re waiting for us. I’ll just use my reading glasses.”
As Bush enjoyed the rare moment of accord, Cheney watched with concern. The goal was laudable, he thought, but unrealistic. He was not sure whether it was worth the investment of time and energy to pursue the same dream that had eluded presidents for decades. More significantly, the vice president was aghast that Syria had been invited to the conference. While President Bashar al-Assad had only sent a deputy foreign minister, the very presence of an outlaw state undercut everything they had been working toward. Less than three months after Israeli jets demolished a secret nuclear facility in Syria, the Damascus government was being welcomed to an international gathering with no consequence for its actions.
NOT INVITED AT all was Iran. The day after the summit opened, Bush and Cheney sat down with intelligence officials who briefed them on a new report on Iran’s nuclear program that was about to radically alter their campaign against Tehran. After years of assuming that Iran was trying to build a nuclear bomb, the intelligence agencies had made a startling about-face: the new report concluded that while Iran did have a program to develop nuclear weapons in the past, it was shut down in the fall of 2003 just after American troops overthrew Saddam Hussein next door in Iraq.
Bush and Cheney had received updates about this evolving assessment in the months during which the report was being prepared, but it was still shocking. Starting in 2006, Bush had been participating in what aides called “deep dive” sessions with Iran analysts, digging into what was known and not known about the Islamic republic’s nuclear quest. By June 2007, the intelligence agencies had assembled a nearly complete draft of a new National Intelligence Estimate about Iran’s nuclear program still predicated on the judgment that it was actively seeking weapons.
Then, with Bush pressing for more information, the intelligence agencies came up with something new—a series of intercepted phone calls and e-mails, including some involving Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, Iran’s preeminent nuclear scientist, complaining that his funding and work had been frozen by the government. Bush was told about the intercepts by Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, during a morning briefing in August. Could it be? Bush asked if the intercepts could be an elaborate ruse to throw the Americans off track. But intelligence analysts went back and rescrubbed more than a thousand pieces of evidence while figuring out exactly what would be involved in creating a deception like that, only to conclude that the program really had been shut down. Michael Hayden, the CIA director, and his deputy, Stephen Kappes, even convened a murder board to grill analysts about their data.
Why Iran would have halted weapons design in 2003 became a subject of intense debate within the intelligence community. Some officials credited the Iraq invasion, reasoning that with more than 100,000 American soldiers just across the border, the mullahs in Tehran must have been intimidated. But when Hayden voiced that theory to the analysts, he was shot down. “Sir, that is an interesting theory,” he was told, “but there is no evidence.” Instead, the analysts said it was likelier that Tehran shut down weapons design after an opposition group exposed to the outside world Iran’s undisclosed nuclear facility in Natanz in 2002.
The final study presented to Bush and Cheney on November 28 reported that Iran halted its weaponization program in 2003 “primarily in response to international pressure” and that the intelligence agencies were “moderately confident” that “Tehran had not restarted its nuclear weapons program as of mid-2007.” But it added that “we do not know whether it currently intends to develop nuclear weapons.” Sophisticated readers understood the report did not mean Iran had given up its aspirations for nuclear weapons. The bomb-making program was the least challenging part of the development of nuclear weapons and the easiest to resume. Iran was still working to master the more difficult science of enriching uranium, the real key to any weapons program; once it succeeded at that, it could restart the bomb-making program that would put the newly enriched uranium to use.
But the report was not written for the general public. Now Bush and Cheney were in a bind. McConnell and Hayden did not want to release the report on the principle that intelligence should remain classified, but if it were ever to leak, it would look as if the administration had covered up evidence undercutting its campaign against Iran. If released as written, on the other hand, it would shatter the international coalition even as they were poised to pass a third round of sanctions at the UN Security Council. Just five years after mistaken intelligence helped lead to war in Iraq, the credibility of American statements would be brought into question. Even after he had been told of the intercepts, Bush in October had publicly warned of the possibility of “World War III” if Iran’s nuclear ambitions were not thwarted; this report would make it look as if he were again exaggerating evidence to wage war on a Muslim country.
Cheney suggested simply rejecting the report, but that was quickly dismissed as implausible. Rewriting the report, even just to clarify that the new finding did not mean Iran was not pursuing nuclear weapons through uranium enrichment, would also be unthinkable because, no matter how clean the motives, it would be perceived as manipulating the intelligence.
“This is a disaster,” Stephen Hadley told Bush. “I don’t think we can make any changes to this NIE.”
“You’re right,” Bush said.
Bush passed along the new report to Prime Minister Olmert while he was in town for the peace conference, and Cheney told Minister of Defense Ehud Barak. But they kept the bombshell news from other participants at the conference, not to mention their European allies, as they tried to figure out what to do. After a weekend of debate, the administration released a declassified version of the report’s key judgments on December 3. An uproar ensued. “It was a huge blow, huge blow,” Hadley recalled. Chancellor Angela Merkel had been planning to meet that very week with German industrial leaders to press them to stop doing business with Iran; as soon as she heard about the new American intelligence report, the meeting was canceled.
Bush tried to do damage control, calling other leaders in the coalition to make clear that the report did not change anything and to solicit support for more sanctions. On December 4, he reached Vladimir Putin. It was a measure of how deeply concerned Bush was about losing Russian support against Iran that he buttered up Putin about just-held regional elections that had been widely condemned as unfair.
“The results give us a reason to rejoice,” Putin said of the elections.
“You are popular,” Bush said. “People like you a lot.”
“Other parties did well,” Putin said.
“You’re being modest,” Bush said.
Bush turned to his real purpose in calling, the Iran report. “I’m worried people will see this and want to change policy,” he explained. Bush noted a program that once existed could be easily reconstituted. He hoped Russia would send a firm message to Iran that there is a “better way forward.”
Putin said he would. “In the waiting room, I have the new Iranian national security adviser,” he told Bush. “I will take into account what you told me.”
Bush reached Hu Jintao on December 6 and made the same argument. “A country that had one can restart one,” he told the Chinese president.
Hu said the report demonstrated that the international community had been successful in pressing Tehran. “We will urge the Iranians to come back to negotiations,” he told Bush.
AS WINTER SETTLED IN, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s many fo
es in Baghdad were plotting to push him out, and some White House officials agreed he should go.
Among them was Cheney, who said the idea “merits our consideration” and favored replacing him with Adel Abdul Mahdi, a Shiite leader who had served as vice president and whose fluent English had helped make him many friends in the administration. Brett McGurk, who had watched Maliki fake signing the agreement with Bush, wrote a memo to Bush declaring Maliki “a significant impediment to our vital objectives in Iraq” because of his governing style and recommending that if his enemies moved against him, “we should not stop it.”
But Gates argued against getting involved, foreseeing nothing but problems heading down that road. Bush agreed. “I know there are people in this room who believe Maliki needs to go,” he told advisers in the Situation Room on December 17. “That’s not our policy. We’re in the middle of the damn surge. It took six damn months to choose Maliki and form a government. Something like that now would be totally destabilizing.”
Instead, he sent Rice to Baghdad to tell Maliki to shape up while she blocked the move against him. Sitting down with the prime minister, Rice was as blunt as she had ever been. “You’re a terrible prime minister,” she told him. “Without progress and without an agreement, you’ll be on your own, hanging from a lamppost.” Then she met his adversaries and said a change in government would cost them American support.
Amid the international intrigue, Bush continued to fence with the Democratic Congress. He vetoed expansion of a children’s health-care program and threatened to veto a bill passed by the House banning the CIA from using harsh interrogation techniques. He refused to send top aides to testify about the U.S. attorney firings, prompting the Senate Judiciary Committee to approve contempt citations against Joshua Bolten and Karl Rove.
But in a rare bipartisan breakthrough, Bush and the Democrats came together on energy legislation that, while not as ambitious as many wanted, represented one of the most significant steps since the oil crises of the 1970s. The measure raised fuel economy standards for cars and light trucks to an average of thirty-five miles per hour by 2020, the first such increase in twenty-two years. It also required a dramatic expansion of ethanol production and began phasing out incandescent lightbulbs. While formulated differently, it tracked the goals Bush had set out in his State of the Union address. A bipartisan commission estimated the law would reduce projected oil consumption by 2.8 million barrels a day by 2020 and reduce projected carbon dioxide emissions by 4 percent. “The legislation I’m about to sign should say to the American people that we can find common ground on critical issues,” Bush said at a signing ceremony on December 19, flanked by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. “And there’s more we can accomplish together.”
