As he explained his thinking, Armey got worked up and ended his comments with a bowdlerized line from Shakespeare he had gleaned from a country music song: “Our fears make cowards of us all.” What did he mean by this? Armey believed that Bush and other administration officials were overreacting to the country’s post-9/11 fears. It was as if they were gripped by what he later called a “he-man macho psychosis where they felt the need to go out and shoot somebody to show they’re the tough guy on the block.” Armey could tell his comments were not going over well. “I was the skunk in the garden party,” he said much later.
When Armey finished, Cheney spoke. It would be a good idea, the vice president said curtly, if Armey would not dissent from the president’s position in public. Frankly, Armey replied, I didn’t realize there was a specific White House position yet. Then Bush, according to Armey, “asked me if I would withhold any public comments until I had all the briefings. So I could understand how necessary this was.” The president was saying, wait until you’ve seen the intelligence. That would prove why urgent action—maybe even a war—was required.
Had Armey spoken up after leaving the Cabinet Room, he might have sparked a ruckus that could have complicated the White House’s upcoming efforts. But out of deference to Bush and Cheney, he agreed to hold his fire. “I won’t speak publicly about this again,” Armey promised the president, “until I’m fully briefed.”
Upon exiting the meeting, the congressional leaders stood on the White House driveway and issued brief remarks for the assembled reporters. Senator John McCain said Bush had made a “convincing case” for action. Hastert commented that he expected Congress would vote on a resolution before the elections. Gephardt, who during the meeting had indicated he was willing to work with Bush to convince Americans that Saddam’s WMDs were a real danger, said that Bush had to demonstrate to the public that “this is something that we need to do and to take seriously.” Daschle, more guarded, repeated the concerns he had raised inside: “What new information exists? What has changed in recent months or years?” He added that he was “hoping for more information and greater clarity” in the weeks ahead. Armey walked by the TV cameras, saying nothing. But he still had the same questions: Why a war? Why now?
IN A way, the White House’s answer was simple: Saddam was a ruthless dictator armed with dangerous weapons he could slip at any time to America-hating terrorists. But the idea of invading a country that had not attacked the United States—which would entail sending hundreds of thousands of American troops into the heart of the Middle East—was seen by skeptics and critics as deeply unsettling and a distraction to the fight against al-Qaeda. After September 11, 2001, the nation’s leaders did have to look ahead and consider proactive—possibly even preemptive—measures to prevent another (and conceivably worse) strike against America. But was Saddam truly a direct threat to the United States? Despite all the talk, both before and after the invasion of Iraq, of other reasons for the war (to transform the region, to liberate Iraqis, to spread democracy, to unseat a mass-murdering and repressive leader, to extend American influence in a vital area), the administration’s public push for a confrontation with Iraq was fundamentally about one issue: the danger to the United States. Yet prior to the White House’s public campaign for war, senior national security officials within the administration had conspicuously not been describing Saddam as a top-of-the-list threat.
In 2001 and in early 2002, various senior administration officials, including CIA chief George Tenet, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and Vice Admiral Thomas R. Wilson, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, had publicly said that Saddam’s military ambitions had been effectively constrained by the problematic but still-in-place sanctions imposed after the first Gulf War and by the previous UN weapons inspections. Saddam “has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction,” Powell had said during a visit to Cairo in February 2001. Three months later, while testifying to the Senate, he expanded on this point: “The Iraqi regime militarily remains fairly weak. It doesn’t have the capacity it had ten or twelve years ago. It has been contained. And even though we have no doubt in our mind that the Iraqi regime is pursuing programs to develop weapons of mass destruction—chemical, biological, and nuclear—I think the best intelligence estimates suggest that they have not been terribly successful.”
As late as March 19, 2002—two months after Bush had pronounced Iraq part of an Axis of Evil along with Iran and North Korea—DIA chief Wilson, in little-noticed testimony before the Senate armed services committee, had not even listed Iraq as among the five most pressing “near-term concerns” to U.S. interests. Years of UN sanctions, combined with the American military presence in the region, had succeeded, Wilson said, in “restraining Saddam’s ambitions,” and his military had been “significantly degraded.” Saddam’s army was much “smaller and weaker” than during the Persian Gulf War and was beset by manpower and equipment shortages and “fragile” morale.
Wilson also testified that Iraq possessed only “residual” amounts of weapons of mass destruction, not a growing arsenal. He made no reference to any nuclear program or to any ties Saddam Hussein might have to al-Qaeda. “I didn’t really think they had a nuclear program,” Wilson said years later. “I didn’t think they were an immediate threat on WMD.” And the State Department, in its annual report on global terrorism released in 2001, had offered scant signs of Iraqi support for terrorism beyond Baghdad’s backing of the Mujahedin-e-Khalq, a militant group of Iranian exiles seeking to overthrow the Tehran regime. It too made no mention of any known connection between Saddam’s government and Osama bin Laden.
These views were in sync with those of the spy service of the White House’s closest ally, Britain. At the time of Admiral Wilson’s testimony, British and American aides were intensely discussing what to do in Iraq. According to British documents that surfaced in 2005 (collectively known as the Downing Street memos), the British government assumed Bush was heading toward war in Iraq. Prime Minister Tony Blair and his aides were expressing support for military action in their conversations with their American counterparts, but they had reservations about portraying Iraq as a growing WMD threat. On March 22, 2002, Peter Ricketts, political director of the British Foreign Office, sent a memo to Foreign Secretary Jack Straw that laid out these concerns: “[E]ven the best survey of Iraq’s WMD programmes will not show much advance in recent years on the nuclear, missile or CW/BW (Chemical Weapons/Biological Weapons) fronts: the programmes are extremely worrying but have not, as far as we know, been stepped up.”
Ricketts also noted that “US scrambling to establish a link between Iraq and Al Qaida is so far frankly unconvincing.” He concluded, “We are still left with a problem of bringing public opinion to accept the imminence of a threat from Iraq.” Blair’s aides were keen on orchestrating a scenario in which Saddam would refuse new WMD inspectors. That would, one memo said, be a “powerful argument” for a war.
Months later, elder statesmen quite familiar to Bush also questioned whether Saddam posed an urgent threat. During the summer of 2002, James Baker, secretary of state under Bush’s father, publicly argued that the Bush administration ought to work through the United Nations and seek the return of inspectors, who could determine if Saddam truly did possess weapons of mass destruction and was building nuclear weapons. (Secretary of State Colin Powell had been advocating this approach within the administration.) Then Brent Scowcroft, who had been national security adviser for the first President Bush, weighed in with a Wall Street Journal op-ed that appeared under the headline “Don’t Attack Saddam.” He wrote, “An attack on Iraq at this time would seriously jeopardize, if not destroy, the global counter-terrorist campaign we have undertaken.” It seemed as if the friends of the president’s father were saying to the son, slow down. And in a speech in Florida, retired Marine General Anthony Zinni, the president’s special envoy to the Mideast, signaled that the military was not in favor of a w
ar in Iraq. “I can give you many more priorities,” said Zinni, who as commander of CENTCOM, the U.S. military’s central command, had overseen all U.S. troops in the Middle East between 1997 and 2000. He noted that a war would be expensive, stretch the military, and antagonize America’s allies. It would interfere with efforts to defeat al-Qaeda and end up requiring the United States to keep troops in Iraq “forever.” He added, “It’s pretty interesting that all the generals see it the same way, and all the others who have never fired a shot and are hot to go see it another way.”
In mid-August, Trent Lott had become concerned about the way the public debate was going. Bush had “made clear his intentions to wage war on Iraq in several of our private meetings,” Lott later wrote in Herding Cats: A Life in Politics. But he feared popular opinion was not yet with the president. So he phoned the most ardent hawk of all—the vice president—and said that he didn’t believe the “predicate” for war had been established. “Don’t worry,” Cheney replied. “We’re about to fix all that. Just hold on.”
Cheney started the “fix” on his own. On August 26, 2002, he delivered a speech at a national convention of Veterans of Foreign Wars in Nashville, Tennessee, that was laced with frightening rhetoric. “The Iraqi regime has in fact been very busy enhancing its capabilities in the field of chemical and biological agents,” Cheney said. As for the nightmarish prospect of a nuclear-armed Saddam, the vice president declared, “We now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons…. Many of us are convinced that Saddam will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon.” And, he added, “a return of inspectors would provide no assurance whatsoever of his compliance with UN resolutions. On the contrary, there is a great danger that it would provide false comfort that Saddam was somehow ‘back in his box.’ ” Inspections, Cheney was arguing, would actually make the United States less secure.
Cheney didn’t offer any evidence to back up his claims about Iraq’s WMDs. But his assertions were bold and clear: “There is no doubt he is amassing [WMDs] to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.” If, as Cheney insisted, Saddam was building and stockpiling WMDs to deploy against the United States and weapons inspections could not address this grave threat, there was only one option: military action. Cheney did not say so explicitly. But there was no mistaking where he stood. The big question was whether he was speaking for himself or for the White House.
Another part of the “fix” Cheney promised Lott was the White House Iraq Group. Created that summer by White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, the WHIG was a collection of senior staff members who met regularly in the highly secure Situation Room to discuss how best to promote the White House’s message on Iraq. Among its members were National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, her chief deputy, Stephen Hadley, Scooter Libby, White House communications chief Karen Hughes, chief speechwriter Michael Gerson, and Karl Rove. “There was a recognition,” one WHIG member subsequently said, that it would be “difficult to communicate” the Bush policy on Iraq.
On one occasion, Rove entered the Oval Office with polling data showing the public’s doubts about an Iraq invasion. “The public isn’t buying it,” he told the president, according to a White House official who attended the meeting. Bush exploded: “Don’t tell me about fucking polls. I don’t care what the polls say.” But Bush sought his political strategist’s advice. “If there is a way to make the case more clearly, you tell me what it is,” Bush said. The White House official thought this exchange was significant. Soon afterward, the WHIG campaign ramped up. “They started stretching it,” the White House official said. “We were in a selling mode.”
With the WHIG set up, the White House was working on the congressional leaders—as a prelude to a dramatic public relations offensive to sell the American public on the war. And the calculations did include a political element. It was clear from meetings in the Oval Office, this White House official said, that Bush wanted to use his political strength to prod Congress on Iraq—to give its members “backbone,” as the president put it at one point—and that his clout would be at its zenith in the weeks before the November election.
Bush’s aides knew that many Democrats (regardless of what the polls said about Iraq) would not want to defy a popular president—at the risk of being portrayed as soft on national security—prior to the elections. In that sense, “Daschle was right,” this official said. The campaign calendar was driving the timing of the vote on Iraq. “The election was the anvil and the president was the hammer. That was when we had the most leverage.”
THE day following Bush’s meeting with the legislators in the Cabinet Room—a day on which a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll noted that 58 percent of Americans believed that Bush had not “done enough to explain why” he might “take action in Iraq”—Cheney went to Capitol Hill to conduct his own briefing.
Cheney had arranged a special session with the Gang of Four, the four top leaders of Congress, Hastert, Gephardt, Lott, and Daschle. Normally allergic to sharing sensitive intelligence with Congress, the vice president now wanted to persuade the most senior congressional leaders that the White House had undeniable evidence that Saddam presented a direct and dire threat to the United States. The previous afternoon, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had held a closed-door briefing for the entire Senate—a session that had been deemed a failure by the White House. Rumsfeld had arrogantly hurled tautologies about the limitations of intelligence and had failed to provide any details to back up the administration’s claim that Saddam was developing nuclear weapons. Lott left Rumsfeld’s briefing midway through. Democrats marched out and complained to reporters that it had been a waste of time. But now Cheney had with him highly classified intelligence on Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction—information so sensitive it could be shared only with a very few.
Joining Cheney for this exclusive presentation was George Tenet, who had been staff director of the Senate intelligence committee before being tapped by Clinton to run the intelligence community. Tenet, a consummate bureaucratic player, had risen through the years by being an effective and efficient staffer who served his bosses well—by keeping them happy. And after Bush took office, Tenet, a cigar-smoking sports fanatic with a rough- and-ready manner, convinced Bush to retain him and then managed to avoid dismissal after the 9/11 intelligence failure. Tenet had bonded with Bush and became “extremely loyal” to him, according to A. B. “Buzzy” Kron-gard, the CIA’s executive director. “It was beyond professional loyalty.” (Bush had reciprocated by, among other things, ensuring that Tenet’s wife was invited to functions of Cabinet member spouses—a small courtesy that Clinton had never extended the CIA chief.) But some CIA officers later griped that Tenet had gotten too close to the White House, that he had acted as if he were still a congressional staffer overly concerned with pleasing his employer—in this case, the president.
After the four lawmakers, Cheney, and Tenet gathered in the House intelligence committee briefing room inside the Capitol dome—a supersecret chamber routinely swept to guard against foreign eavesdropping—the vice president and the CIA chief began a highly classified show-and-tell. They displayed aerial photos of what appeared to be new construction at what Cheney said were Iraqi nuclear weapons sites. They showed drawings of what Tenet described as mobile biological weapons laboratories—tractor trailers that brewed deadly toxins and that could easily be hidden from international inspectors. They shared snapshots of unmanned aerial vehicles—sleek, pilotless drones said to be capable of carrying chemical and biological weapons great distances. The range of these UAVs, Cheney explained, had been enhanced; they could strike Israel. “That was the thing that spooked us all,” Lott later recalled.
Lott was sold. Any doubts he had harbored were gone. He left the room thinking, We have to take Saddam out.
Daschle, once again, was torn. He wasn’t sure what to make of the photographs. In and of themselves, they didn’t mean anything. You couldn’t see much: they were blurry pic
tures of buildings or warehouses that could be anything. He later admitted that he was “embarrassed” that he hadn’t challenged Cheney. Daschle had once been a photo analyst intelligence officer in the Air Force. It had been his job to interpret photos. But here was Cheney telling the four leaders of Congress what they were looking at.
Daschle didn’t trust Cheney. But the Senate majority leader wanted to grant Cheney and Tenet the benefit of the doubt on fundamental questions of national security. A part of him was also worried: What if they’re right about this?
THAT same busy day, Tenet appeared in a secret session before the Senate intelligence committee. The CIA director highlighted the latest intelligence on Iraq—the agency’s conclusion that Saddam was rebuilding his nuclear program, its estimate that there were 550 sites where WMDs were stored, its assessment that Iraq had developed UAVs that could deliver biological and chemical agents, perhaps to the U.S. mainland. After Tenet finished his briefing, Senator Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, and Senator Bob Graham, a Florida Democrat and the panel’s chairman, asked to see the National Intelligence Estimate on the Iraqi threat.
An NIE is the summation of the intelligence community’s knowledge on any given issue, its most comprehensive assessment of an important subject. NIEs are supposed to be used by policy makers to render major strategic decisions. But the request from Durbin and Graham was met with “blank stares” from Tenet and his deputies, according to Graham. Tenet conceded that no NIE had been prepared. The Democrats were stunned. Bush was heading toward war, and the White House hadn’t asked the CIA to produce an NIE on the most pressing national security question of the moment. For Graham and the Democrats, this was incomprehensible. The Democrats requested that Tenet assemble an NIE, but the CIA director said his people were too busy with other matters.
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