Bush At War

by Bob Woodward

POWELL STILL HAD not squared his relationship with the president. During the first half of 2002, Armitage had received reliable reports that Rumsfeld was requesting and having periodic private meetings with Bush. Powell was not particularly worried, because he could usually find out what had transpired through Rice, though she had had some difficulties initially finding out herself.

  "It seems to me that you ought to be requesting some time with the president," Armitage suggested to Powell. Face time was critical, and it was a relationship that Powell had not mastered.

  Powell said he recalled his time as national security adviser for Reagan when everyone was always trying to see the president. He didn't want to intrude. If Bush wanted to see him, any time or any place, he was, of course, available. He saw Bush all the time at meetings, and he was able to convey his views.

  "You've got to start doing it," Armitage said. He was the fucking secretary of state. It wouldn't be an imposition. Better relations would help in all the battles, would help the department across the board.

  In the late spring of 2002 - some 16 months into the Bush presidency - Powell started requesting private time with Bush. He did it through Rice, who sat in on the meetings which took place about once a week for about 20 to 30 minutes. It seemed to help, but it was like his experience in the Middle East, no big breakthroughs.

  During the summer, Powell was over at the White House one day with time to kill before a meeting with Rice. The president spotted him and invited him into the Oval Office. They talked alone for about 30 minutes. They shot the breeze and relaxed. The conversation was about everything and nothing.

  "I think we're really making some headway in the relationship," Powell reported to Armitage afterward. The chasm seemed to be closing. "I know we really connected."

  IN EARLY AUGUST, Powell made the diplomatic rounds in Indonesia and the Philippines and, as always, kept in touch with what was happening at home. Iraq was continuing to bubble. Brent Scow-croft, the mild-mannered national security adviser to Bush's father during the Gulf War, had declared on a Sunday morning talk show on August 4 that an attack on Iraq could turn the Middle East into a "cauldron and thus destroy the war on terrorism."

  Blunt talk, but Powell basically agreed. He had not made clear his own analysis and conclusions to the president and realized he needed to do so. On the long flight back, from nearly halfway around the world, he jotted down some notes. Virtually all the Iraq discussions in the NSC had been about war plans - how to attack, when, with what force levels, military strike scenario this and military strike scenario that. It was clear to him now that the context was being lost, the attitudes and views of the rest of the world which he knew and lived with. His notes filled three or four pages.

  During the Gulf War, when he had been chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Powell had played the role of reluctant warrior, arguing to the first President Bush, perhaps too mildly, that containing Iraq might work, that war might not be necessary. But as the principal military adviser, he hadn't pressed his arguments that forcefully because they were less military than political. Now as secretary of state, his account was politics - the politics of the world. He decided he had to come down very hard, state his convictions and conclusions so there would be no doubt as to where he stood. The president had been hearing plenty from Cheney and Rumsfeld, a kind of A-team inside the war cabinet. Powell wanted to present the B-team, the alternative view that he believed had not been aired. He owed the president more than PowerPoint briefings.

  In Washington, he told Rice that he wanted to see the president. Bush invited the two to the residence on the evening of Monday, August 5. The meeting expanded into dinner and then moved to the president's office in the residence.

  Powell told Bush that as he was getting his head around the Iraq question, he needed to think about the broader issues, all the consequences of war.

  With his notes by his side, a double-spaced outline on loose-leaf paper, Powell said the president had to consider what a military operation against Iraq would do in the Arab world. Cauldron was the right word. He dealt with the leaders and foreign ministers in these countries as secretary of state. The entire region could be destabilized - friendly regimes in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan could be put in jeopardy or overthrown. Anger and frustration at America abounded. War could change everything in the Middle East.

  It would suck the oxygen out of just about everything else the United States was doing, not only in the war on terrorism, but all other diplomatic, defense and intelligence relationships, Powell said. The economic implications could be staggering, potentially driving the supply and price of oil in directions that were as yet unimagined. All this in a time of an international economic slump. The cost of occupying Iraq after a victory would be expensive. The economic impact on the region, the world and the United States domestically had to be considered.

  Following victory, and they would surely prevail Powell believed, the day-after implications were giant. What of the image of an American general running an Arab country for some length of time? he asked. A General MacArthur in Baghdad? This would be a big event within Iraq, the region and the world. How long would it be? No one could know. How would success be defined?

  "It's nice to say we can do it unilaterally," Powell told the president bluntly, "except you can't." A successful military plan would require access to bases and facilities in the region, overflight rights. They would need allies. This would not be the Gulf War, a nice two-hour trip from a fully cooperative Saudi Arabia over to Kuwait City - the target of liberation just some 40 miles away. Now the geography would be formidable. Baghdad was a couple of hundred miles across Mesopotamia.

  The Middle East crisis was still ever-present. That was the issue that the Arab and Muslim world wanted addressed. A war on Iraq would open Israel to attack by Saddam, who had launched Scud missiles at it during the Gulf War.

  Saddam was crazy, a menace, a real threat, unpredictable, but he had been largely contained and deterred since the Gulf War. A new war could unleash precisely what they wanted to prevent - Saddam on a rampage, a last desperate stand, perhaps using his weapons of mass destruction.

  On the intelligence side, as the president knew, the problem was also immense, Powell said. They had not been able to find bin Laden, Mullah Omar and other al Qaeda and Taliban leaders in Afghanistan. They didn't know where Saddam was. Saddam had all kinds of tricks and deceptions. He had an entire state at his disposal to hide in. They did not need another possibly fruitless manhunt.

  Powell's presentation was an outpouring of both analysis and emotion that encompassed his entire experience - 35 years in the military, former national security adviser and now chief diplomat. The president seemed intrigued as he listened and asked questions but did not push back that much.

  And Powell realized that his arguments begged the question of well, what do you do? He knew that Bush liked, in fact insisted on, solutions, and he wanted to take his views all the way down the trail. "You can still make a pitch for a coalition or U.N. action to do what needs to be done," he said. International support had to be garnered. The U.N. was only one way. But some way had to be found to recruit allies. A war with Iraq could be much more complicated and bloody than the war in Afghanistan, which was Exhibit A demonstrating the necessity of a coalition.

  The president said he preferred to have an international coalition, and he loved building one for the war in Afghanistan.

  Powell responded that he believed the pitch could still be made to the international community to build support.

  What did he think the incentives and motives might be of some of the critical players such as the Russians or the French, the president asked. What would they do?

  As a matter of diplomacy, Powell said he thought the president and the administration could bring most countries along.

  The secretary felt the discussion became tense several times as he pressed, but in the end he believed that he had left nothing unsaid.

  The pres
ident thanked him. It had been two hours - nothing of Clintonesque, late-night-at-the-dorm proportions, but extraordinary for this president and Powell. And Powell felt he had stripped his argument down to the essentials. The private meeting with just Bush and Rice had meant that there was not a lot of static coming in from other quarters - Cheney and Rumsfeld.

  Rice thought the headline was, "Powell Makes Case for Coalition as Only Way to Assure Success."

  "That was terrific," Rice said the next day in a phone call to Powell, "and we need to do more of those."

  The tip-off about the potential importance of the evening was when Card called Powell the next day and asked him to come over and give him the same presentation, notes and all.

  The dinner was a home run, Powell felt.

  BUSH LEFT FOR his Crawford vacation the next afternoon, as Iraq continued to play to a packed house in the news media. There was little other news, and speculation about Iraq filled the void. Every living former national security adviser or former secretary of state who could lift pen to paper was on the street with his or her views.

  On Wednesday, August 14, the principals met in Washington without the president.

  Powell said they needed to think about getting a coalition for action against Iraq, some kind of international cover at least. The Brits were with us, he noted, but their support was fragile in the absence of some international coalition or cover. They needed something. Most of Europe was the same way, he reported, as was all of Arabia, especially the U.S. friends in the Gulf who would be most essential for war. And Turkey, which shared a 100-mile border with Iraq.

  The first opportunity the president would have after his vacation to address formally the subject of Iraq was a scheduled speech to the United Nations General Assembly on September 12, Powell pointed out. There had been some talk about making the speech about American values or talking about the Middle East. But Iraq was topic A. "I can't imagine him going there and not speaking about this," Powell said.

  Rice agreed. In the atmosphere of continuing media discussion, not to talk about Iraq might suggest that the administration was not serious about Saddam's threat, or that it was operating in total secrecy. And Bush liked to explain to the public at least the general outlines of where his policy was heading.

  They discussed how they would face an endless process of debate and compromise and delay once they started down the U.N. road - words not action.

  "I think the speech at the U.N. ought to be about Iraq," Cheney agreed. But the U.N. ought to be made the issue. It should be challenged and criticized. "Go tell them it's not about us. It's about you. You are not important." The U.N. was not enforcing more than a decade of resolutions ordering Saddam to destroy his weapons of mass destruction and allow weapons inspectors inside Iraq. The U.N. was running the risk of becoming irrelevant and would be the loser if it did not do what was necessary.

  Rice agreed. The U.N. had become too much like the post-World War I League of Nations - a debating society with no teeth.

  They all agreed that the president should not go to the U.N. to ask for a declaration of war. That was quickly off the table. They all agreed that a speech about Iraq made sense. Given the importance of the issue, it had to be addressed. But there was no agreement about what the president should say.

  Two days later, Friday, August 16, the NSC met, with the president attending by secure video from Crawford. The sole purpose of the meeting was for Powell to make his pitch about going to the U.N. to seek support or a coalition in some form. Unilateral war would be tough, close to impossible, Powell said. At least they ought to try to reach out and ask other countries to join them.

  The president went around the table asking for comments, and there was general support for giving the U.N. a shot - even from Cheney and Rumsfeld.

  Fine, Bush finally said. He approved of the approach - a speech to the U.N. about Iraq. And it couldn't be too shrill, he cautioned them, or put too high a standard so that it would be obvious to all that they weren't serious. He wanted to give the U.N. a chance.

  Powell walked out feeling they had a deal, and he went off for a vacation in the Hamptons on Long Island, New York.

  IT WAS FOUR days later when I went to Crawford, Texas, for my final interview with President Bush on August 20, 2002. A number of his closest aides had suggested I interview him in Crawford, the place he feels most comfortable. It was 11 months after the terrorist attacks. He and Laura Bush had built a beautiful, small, one-story home in a secluded corner of their 1,600-acre ranch. Their home overlooks a man-made lake. It was his vacation, and the president was dressed in jeans, a short-sleeved shirt and heavy, working cowboy boots. He seemed relaxed and focused.

  Most of my questions dealt with the war in Afghanistan and the broader war on terrorism. His answers are fully reflected in this book. But he made a number of points worth contemplating now.

  I asked the president whether he and the country had done enough for the war on terror. The possibility of another major attack still loomed. But the absence of an attack reenforced the sense of normalcy. Washington and New York City 2002 could not have been further from London 1940 or America after December 7, 1941. He had not put the country on a war footing, demanded sacrifices from large numbers of citizens, or taken what for him would be the unthinkable and draconian step of raising taxes or repealing his 2001 tax cut. Was it not possible that he had undermobilized given the threat and the devastation of September 11?

  "If we get hit soon again," I asked him, "big, spectacular - people are going to look back and say, we did a lot but we didn't do enough?"

  "The answer to your question is, Where do you mobilize? We're mobilizing in the sense that we're spending," Bush said. He mentioned big budget increases for the FBI, CIA, firefighters and others, the first responders to terrorist attacks.

  I said that someone had mentioned to me that there were only about 11,000 FBI agents but nearly 180,000 United States Marines. Could not some of those Marines, some of whom are excellent intelligence officers and security experts, be assigned to airports and other vulnerable, potential targets? He was spending most of his time on the issues of the war and homeland security. Rice was spending probably 80 percent of hers. Where was the rest of the government?

  "It's an interesting question," he replied. "The answer is, if they hit us hard, the answer is no" - that he did not do enough. "If they don't hit us hard, the answer is, we did it right."

  I said that I had talked with Karl Rove who said that ultimately the war would be measured by the outcome. "Everything will be measured by results," Rove had said. "The victor is always right. History ascribes to the victor qualities that may or may not actually have been there. And similarly to the defeated."

  Bush agreed but he said the problem was that the war had turned into a kind of international manhunt. The terrorists had to be chased one by one. It was not just to satisfy what he called "a public blood lust." At the same time, he knew the importance of getting bin Laden - "decapitating" the al Qaeda leadership.

  He was of the view that there was no convincing evidence of whether bin Laden was alive or dead. He wondered about the absence of communication from him, not a single taped message. "All

  I know is that he is a megalomaniac," Bush said. "Is he that disciplined that he can be quiet for now nine months?"

  "Why have they not struck again?" I asked. "Maybe we're pretty good at what we're doing," Bush said. But maybe not. The investigators had established that the September

  I1 attacks had been at least two years in the planning. Perhaps, he suggested, he had underestimated the other side, that they spent more time on their long-range efforts, that what might happen right now had been in the works much longer.

  The president raised a more chilling prospect. It was the gravest worry of the FBI, that members of al Qaeda, "cold, calculating killers" he called them, had buried themselves into American society, hanging out in garden apartments or anywhere else, waiting for their prearranged m
oment to strike. "Maybe there's a planning cycle of four years," he said.

  I WANTED TO attempt to understand the president's overall approach or philosophy to foreign affairs and war policy. The Taliban had been deposed, but possibly bin Laden and certainly many in his al Qaeda network had escaped. Other terrorist attacks were expected. The United States now had some 7,000 troops on the ground in Afghanistan, which was still a dangerous, unstable place. Karzai was in continual jeopardy even with American Special Forces acting as his bodyguards.

  The theoretical pronouncements Bush had made about not nation building have been discarded almost wholesale in the face of the need to keep Afghanistan together. He was at times acting like the Afghan budget director and bill collector.

  "If I have asked once, I have asked 20 times, I want to see the cash flow projections of the Afghan government," Bush said. "Who owes money? I wrote a letter the other day dunning these people over in Europe for money." He learned it only costs $500 a year to pay a trained Afghan soldier. "I said it makes no sense to train people for a military and then not pay them."

  Until that day in Crawford, I had not heard the sweeping aspirations Bush has for his presidency and the United States. Most presidents have high hopes. Some have grandiose visions of what they will achieve, and he was firmly in that camp.

  "I will seize the opportunity to achieve big goals," Bush told me as we sat in a large room in his home with the breeze comfortably blowing through the screens. "There is nothing bigger than to achieve world peace."

  Action was not just for strategic purposes or defensive purposes, he said. "You see, it's like Iraq," he said. "Condi didn't want me to talk about it." He and Rice, who was sitting with us during the interview, laughed. "But wait a minute," he continued. "Just as an aside, and we'll see whether this bears out. Clearly, there will be a strategic implication to a regime change in Iraq, if we go forward. But there's something beneath that, as far as I'm concerned, and that is, there is immense suffering."