by Peter Baker
But there was a fine line between ignoring the fickle winds of popularity and losing the consent of the governed. Cheney skated near that line with defiance. On March 19, the fifth anniversary of the start of the Iraq War, he traveled to the region to highlight the progress of the surge. During a stop in Oman, he gave an interview to Martha Raddatz of ABC News.
“Two-thirds of Americans say it’s not worth the fighting,” she told him.
“So?” Cheney answered.
Raddatz seemed taken aback.
“So?” she said. “You don’t care what the American people think?”
“No,” he said, “I think you cannot be blown off course by the fluctuations in the public opinion polls.”
The polls actually were not fluctuating; they were heading in one inexorable direction. Even with the evident success of the surge, Bush and Cheney had lost the American public on Iraq. As Cheney saw it, popular opinion should not stop them from doing what was needed to protect the country. “He believed that losing these wars was the worst possible outcome for the United States,” said John Hannah, his national security adviser. “He was convinced that we had to win, and you got the sense that he wouldn’t be swayed by bad polls or a lack of public support.” As Liz Cheney put it, “Everything else was less important, and if it meant your reputation was damaged, that was what you had to live with.”
A few days later, the situation in Iraq took a dramatic turn. Shiite militias had fled to the port city of Basra in the southeast near the Iranian border, the hub of the country’s oil industry. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had received reports of women being beaten for failing to properly cover up and even mutilated if accused of sexual indiscretions. In a brash move, Maliki ordered the Iraqi army south to take on the militias, only informing David Petraeus after the decision had been made. Petraeus was stunned at the recklessness; without any preparation, there was no way for American forces to support such an operation. “It was very, very precipitous and arguably bordering on impulsive,” Petraeus concluded. But Maliki disregarded Petraeus’s advice, even traveling to Basra personally to oversee the operation. The American fears were well-founded; Iraqi units were ill-prepared and ran out of ammunition, fuel, and other supplies, and in some cases soldiers refused to fight fellow Shiites. Petraeus ordered Special Forces, Apache helicopters, and Predator drones to follow the prime minister and give him support, but with so little coordination “we couldn’t figure out who were the good guys and who were the bad guys.”
At the White House, the national security team was in a panic. Condoleezza Rice called Bush to tell him Maliki’s government could fall. The CIA offered a grim prognosis. “Everybody here thought this was going to be a disaster,” recalled Douglas Lute, the Iraq War coordinator. Lute thought Maliki had gambled everything. “If he doesn’t get killed, he’s going to cripple himself politically because he’s going to be shown as unable to deliver.”
But Bush did not see it that way. “Don’t tell me this is a bad thing,” he said, preempting Stephen Hadley and Brett McGurk when they arrived at the Oval Office to brief him. “Maliki said he would do this and now he’s doing it.”
For the first time, the Shiite prime minister was taking on Shiite militias as the Americans had asked him to do. Bush believed Maliki, however rashly, was finally showing leadership. While he did not say it out loud, there may have been a part of the old Texan who appreciated the cowboy nature of the move; Maliki was following his gut with bold action, just as Bush believed he did.
When he sat down for a videoconference with Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker on March 24, Bush stood alone in his assessment.
“This has some potential to be dicey here,” Petraeus said with understatement. While the Americans would of course provide support, he told Bush, “you’ve got to understand there are some serious risks involved here.”
Bush said he understood the risks but saw the development as a breakthrough, not a debacle. They had to trust Maliki. “We have wanted him to step up and lead,” he said. “Our job here is to support him, not to try to convince him not to do it.” They had to make sure Maliki succeeded. “This is going to be a decisive moment.”
His team on the ground was not so optimistic. In Baghdad, Crocker, a Bush favorite whose glass-half-empty reports had earned him the presidential nickname Sunshine, turned off the microphone so he could not be heard back in Washington. “I hope it’s going to be decisive the way he hopes it will,” he told Petraeus.
It very nearly was not. Maliki’s headquarters was shelled and his personal bodyguard and childhood friend was killed in the bombardment. Shia militias in Baghdad likewise responded with force, peppering Crocker’s palace headquarters in the Green Zone with rockets, nearly a hundred in a forty-eight-hour stretch. But in the end, Petraeus scrambled enough force and Maliki showed enough fortitude that the militias backed off. Maliki reasserted government control over Basra. Suddenly what looked like a breaking point became the moment he finally became a national leader. “He came back from Basra a different Maliki,” Lute observed. Senator Lindsey Graham, who talked about it with Maliki afterward, agreed that the Iraqi prime minister was a “changed man” who “went from being docile to being John Wayne.”
WITH THE ARRIVAL of spring, Bush was preparing to head to Bucharest, Romania, for his final NATO summit. He had presided over the expansion of NATO in 2004, when seven new countries joined the alliance, including Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia, the three Baltic states that had once been part of the Soviet Union. Now the alliance was ready to offer membership to two more Eastern European countries: Albania and Croatia.
The real question was what to do about two other former Soviet republics aspiring to membership: Ukraine and Georgia. The issue was extremely sensitive. The so-called color revolutions that toppled calcified regimes and installed democratically elected leaders in Georgia in 2003 and Ukraine in 2004 had deeply alarmed Vladimir Putin, who saw them as American-inspired attempts to establish a ring of pro-Washington allies around Russia. Further integration with the West would only prove the point.
What the two countries were asking for was not NATO membership but a preliminary step called a “membership action plan” that would require them to spend several years upgrading their militaries and solidifying democratic institutions before any decision on actual membership. But even that was enough to become one of the defining foreign policy fights of Bush’s final year. Bush found the idea enticing because it seemed to fit the freedom agenda. For once, Cheney was in agreement, though less out of romantic idealism than a hard-eyed geopolitical calculation that it was in the interest of the United States to keep Moscow from reasserting dominance over its neighbors. The louder the Russian opposition grew to Georgia and Ukraine joining NATO, the more convinced Cheney was that it was worth doing.
Germany, joined by France, opposed the idea, seeing it as unnecessarily provocative. Ukraine and Georgia were too volatile. Eastern European countries like Poland and the Baltic states, however, favored reaching out to the two former Soviet republics, mindful of their own years in Moscow’s shadow. American intelligence experts briefed Bush, Cheney, and the rest of the national security team, pressing their assessment that European opposition was too great for the United States to succeed. The briefing seemed to rub the vice president the wrong way.
“So you’re saying you’re against freedom and democracy?” Cheney asked, with a wry look on his face. He was being humorous, and Bush stifled a smirk, but it was barbed humor.
“No, Mr. Vice President,” replied Fiona Hill, one of the intelligence analysts. “We didn’t say that.”
Afterward, Cheney’s aide Joe Wood summoned Hill to complain. He thought she was leaning so far forward in her analysis of the obstacles that she was effectively taking sides.
“You’re not with the policy,” she later remembered him saying.
“We’re not supposed to be with the policy, are we?” she retorted. They were there to give their best professio
nal analysis.
The issue came to a head during a National Security Council meeting. Rice and Robert Gates expressed caution, arguing that they did not have to do this now. Gates was hardly soft when it came to Russia; an old cold warrior, he had come back from his first meeting with Putin to tell colleagues that, unlike Bush, “I looked in his eyes and I saw the same KGB killer I’ve seen my whole life.” But he did not see the virtue in provoking a confrontation. Instead, he and Rice recommended a halfway step that would encourage Ukraine and Georgia without another blowup with Germany and France.
Hadley, knowing the president was inclined the other way, called on Victoria Nuland, a former Cheney aide who was now ambassador to NATO. Speaking from Brussels on a video connection, Nuland argued that Georgia and Ukraine had done what they had been asked, conducting relatively clean elections, enacting political reforms, fighting corruption, and working to get their economies back on track. “If they want it and they’ve met the criteria, how can the United States be the ones saying no?” she asked.
Bush agreed. He wanted to push for the two countries. He hoped to make a deal with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, calculating that the French were following Berlin. “This is about me and Angela,” Bush told aides.
But during a videoconference, Merkel refused to go along. Bush resigned himself to a fight in Bucharest. As he was about to hang up with Merkel, he told her lightly, “I will see you at the OK Corral.”
As if the dynamics were not tricky enough, Putin further complicated them by inviting Bush to visit him in Sochi, a resort town in southern Russia, immediately following the NATO summit. That could be awkward depending on what happened in Bucharest, so Bush was reluctant. He also noticed the harshening of Putin’s anti-American rhetoric; at an international conference in Munich a year earlier, Putin had compared the United States to “the Third Reich.”
Bush called Putin to see if he could trust that the meeting would not be a setup. “Look, the only way I can come is if you don’t pull a Munich on me in Bucharest,” Bush told him, as he later described the conversation to aides.
Putin agreed, and Bush accepted the invitation.
Once he got to Bucharest, Bush ran into stiff resistance from Merkel. But leaders of several Eastern European countries defiantly surrounded her, arguing for a stronger statement. No one was more sensitive to Russian intimidation than those who had lived under Soviet domination for decades. In the end, while Georgia and Ukraine were not put on the official membership track, the Eastern Europeans won a formulation in the summit communiqué that actually seemed to offer more certainty: “We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO.” Will become, period, no caveats. Bush took that as a victory.
But the decision to split the difference ended up angering both Putin and his Georgian nemesis, President Mikheil Saakashvili, a young firebrand who aligned himself with the United States and went out of his way to provoke Moscow. Putin, invited as a guest to the NATO summit, surprised everyone by showing up in Bucharest early and crashing a dinner of alliance leaders. From Georgia, Saakashvili railed about Western fecklessness. Some back in Washington worried that a hornet’s nest had been stirred unnecessarily. “The Russians were furious; the Georgians were furious,” remembered Fiona Hill, the intelligence officer who had briefed Cheney. “They weren’t listening to all the admonishments to keep a cool head.”
After the NATO summit, Bush visited Putin in Sochi. It was their twenty-eighth and final meeting as presidents, with Putin preparing to step down in favor of his handpicked successor, Dmitry Medvedev, while taking up the post of prime minister. Some in Cheney’s office later worried that Bush had not been firm enough in warning Putin not to take action against Georgia. Others came away from discussions with the Georgians fearing that Saakashvili had interpreted his talks with Bush to be a “flashing yellow light” subtly supporting him in any military confrontation with Moscow. Bush’s staff sent further messages trying to disabuse anyone of such misimpressions, but in the dangerous international game of telephone it was unclear what was being heard.
WITH THE ARRIVAL of spring, the Bush and Cheney camps were wrestling over one last domestic initiative. Bush was itching to do something enduring on climate change, while Cheney viewed it as political pandering with disastrous consequences for the economy.
In the seven years since he renounced the Kyoto climate change treaty and disavowed his campaign promise to impose a cap on power plant emissions, Bush had rarely made the issue a cause. While investing billions of dollars in research and new technologies, he had resisted government mandates that environmentalists insisted were necessary. Bush privately bristled at what he considered sky-is-falling alarmism by the liberal, elitist Hollywood crowd.
But ever so gradually, his views had evolved. He found the science increasingly persuasive and believed more needed to be done. The end of his presidency loomed, and he did not want to be known as the president who stood by while a crisis gathered. Now he bristled not at the Hollywood types but at the notion that he did not care. In the past eighteen months, he had cited the danger of climate change in his State of the Union address for the first time, convened a conference of major world polluters to start working on an international accord to follow Kyoto, and signed legislation cutting gasoline consumption and, by extension, greenhouse gases. He even invited his old rival Al Gore for a forty-minute talk about global warming.
Advisers like Joshua Bolten, Henry Paulson, and Condoleezza Rice were now pushing for more aggressive action, possibly even a version of the so-called cap-and-trade system promoted by his critics, a system in which emissions were limited but polluters could purchase credits to offset them from more efficient energy producers. The White House staff had secretly developed models for a cap-and-trade system for discussion purposes. Jim Connaughton, chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality and Bolten’s brother-in-law, and Ed Lazear, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, were assigned to produce a policy that addressed the climate concerns without major economic damage. Their review came to be referred to as “Conazear.”
Rice, for one, “wanted something more robust on climate change,” especially since John McCain supported a cap-and-trade system just as his two Democratic opponents, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, did. “We were arguing that the U.S. is going to get into this in a big way in the next administration,” said David Gordon, Rice’s policy planning director. “They’re going to take credit for it. Why don’t we set the thing in motion? We won’t get it all the way so you won’t have to take too much on, Mr. President, but why don’t you have part of your legacy being really setting this up?”
Bush concurred. In conversations with aides, he agreed to cap power plant emissions as he had promised in the 2000 campaign, in effect reversing his reversal in the letter Cheney had him sign in the early months of his presidency. But he wanted to structure it in a way that would not drive jobs overseas. Connaughton and Lazear, working with Keith Hennessey, the president’s national economics adviser, developed what they called a hybrid model. The government would impose a market-based cap that would reduce emissions as far as possible without making the cost of compliance so expensive that firms felt compelled to relocate. Then, to get the rest of the way to long-term targets, the government would offer financial incentives to encourage industrial polluters to voluntarily curb emissions further. They called it cap and trade with a safety valve.
To Cheney, it seemed that Bush was reversing himself on cap and trade not out of a genuine reevaluation of the policy but out of concerns over legacy and politics. If the president really wanted to do something on climate change, Cheney aides said he should simply impose a tax on carbon emissions. While not enthusiastic about taxes, they argued that it would be the more economically rational way to approach the problem because it would motivate industry to clean up smokestacks without having the government effectively managing a major sector of the economy. And to the extent that a carbon tax would i
ncrease energy prices, the government could turn around and give it back to consumers through tax credits. “We had an extremely robust debate over it,” remembered Neil Patel, the vice president’s domestic policy adviser.
Others in the White House fought the idea too. Ed Gillespie thought that it was way too late in the administration and that the president was far too weak politically to make anything actually happen, but it would alienate the remaining base supporters they still had. He felt strongly enough to bring his concerns to Bush in a one-on-one conversation. But while Cheney and Gillespie could not stop the policy, they did not give up. Bush wanted the speech announcing his new strategy written in a flexible enough way that it would not simply prescribe a solution but outline principles and invite lawmakers to introduce their own ideas. That instruction opened the door to a complex drafting and editing process. Advocates of the new strategy like Connaughton wanted to use the phrase “cap and trade” in the speech, but Cheney and his allies managed to cut it out on the argument that it would close the door to collaboration with Republicans in Congress. “There were a lot of questions whether to say ‘cap and trade,’ and the reason we didn’t is it was so specific as to a particular market-based approach as to not allow room or space for Republicans in particular but also the industrial-state Democrats to get involved in the design of a proper market-based approach,” Connaughton recalled. “Maybe we were too intellectual about it, and there’s some that clearly wanted to say ‘cap and trade’ and there’s some that clearly did not want to say ‘cap and trade,’ but the reality is our proposal was based on the combination of a market-based mechanism and incentives.”
