Bob Woodward

by State of Denial (lit)

  When was this? Rumsfeld asked.

  Six weeks ago, I answered. The question on the table was whether he agreed or not that the insurgency in the Iraq War was gaining. I was ready for a pure Rumsfeldian moment, and I was not disappointed.

  Gosh, I don't know, the secretary of defense replied. I don't want to comment on it. I read so many of those intelligence reports —I had never said it was an intelligence report— and they are all over the lot. In a given day you can see one from one agency, and one from another agency, and then I'll ask Casey or Abizaid what they think about it, or Pete Pace, 'Is that your view?' And try and triangulate and see what people think. But it changes from month to month. I'm not going to go back and say I agree or don't agree with something like that.

  He was right that there might be some changes month to month, but, as he knew, the overall assessment and trend was visibly, measurably and dramatically worse.

  I next quoted from a speech that Rumsfeld had given earlier in the year at the Truman Presidential Library in Independence, Missouri, when he told some stories about Truman as a leader standing up to the Soviet foreign minister. Could he recall any moments showing Bush as a wartime leader that were important?

  What I try to do with him is to put myself in his shoes and say, 'What would I want to know?' Rumsfeld said. He then went on to describe himself as a wartime leader—not Bush—working with General Franks to keep the president informed about the factors used in deciding on what targets to bomb in Iraq. Though the question was about Bush, Rumsfeld described how all this care in selecting targets would make the president comfortable and show that Rumsfeld and Franks had an approach that was rational and as humane as possible but as effective as possible in terms of saving American lives.

  Can you recall any moments of Bush leadership in the postwar period? I asked.

  He then went on to describe how he had sent three or four assessment teams —one every six months or so—to Iraq to take a look at how are we doing.

  I drive back at this point, I said, the president as a wartime leader, because that's the issue here.

  He's a good one, Rumsfeld said. He's a very good one. You watch him and I don't know quite how he does it. Here in this department we move across a full spectrum of maybe 180 degrees. He moves 360 degrees. He'll go from stem cell research to immigration to 15 other things in a given day. And the stuff we bring to him on a regular basis is complicated. It's new. And he has a very effective technique. ... He just keeps pinging question after question after question.

  I was getting a description of the Rumsfeld style.

  He's getting to know the people and taking their measure, Rumsfeld continued, and seeing how they handle those questions and how they answer them and how much they know and who they rely on for answers to things. And he ends up coming away with a confidence level, and he develops an ability to know how much—how long a leash he wants different people to be on.

  How long's your leash? I asked.

  Oh, goodness gracious, he replied. Don't ask me.

  I am.

  No. I have no idea, he said.

  Rumsfeld certainly knew that Bush gave him a very long leash.

  Do you feel a tug sometimes?

  He declined to answer.

  What about the notion that Cheney is the all-powerful vice president who controls the president?

  That's nonsense, Rumsfeld said. Clearly they have a good relationship. You can feel it in the room. But the president is the president, and let there be no doubt about it. The vice president isn't even slightly confused on the issue. His handling of issues when the president's in the room is, in my view, just perfect in the sense that he does not take strong positions when the president's in the room that could conceivably position him contrary to the president. ... He asks good questions. But he doesn't put the president in a corner or take away his options.

  It was a revealing comment. I wondered how Cheney's questions or comments could put the president in a corner or take away his options. Presumably if it was nonsense that Cheney was all-powerful he would be in no position to do either.

  Rumsfeld said that he believes Cheney is completely candid with Bush in private. He knows that one of the prices of proximity to the president is the willingness, the burden that goes with that is the burden of having to tell him the truth.

  I asked Rumsfeld what was the best, most optimistic scenario for a positive outcome in Iraq.

  This business is ugly, he replied. It's tough. There isn't any best. A long, hard slog, I think I wrote years ago. We're facing a set of challenges that are different than our country understands. . . . They're different than our Congress understands. They're different than our government, much of our government, probably understands and is organized or trained or equipped to cope with and deal with. We're dealing with enemies that can turn inside our decision circles. The enemy can move swiftly, he said. They don't have parliaments and bureaucracies and real estate to defend and interact with or deal with or cope with. They can do what they want. They aren't held accountable for lying or for killing innocent men, women and children.

  There's something about the body politic in the United States that they can accept the enemy killing innocent men, women and children and cutting off people's heads, but have zero tolerance for some soldier who does something he shouldn't do.

  Are you optimistic? I asked.

  Rumsfeld looked through me and continued. Three of his aides who were sitting with us at the table in his office could not help but register surprise as Rumsfeld plowed on without answering.

  We're fighting the first war in history in the new century, he continued, and with all these new realities, with an industrial-age organization in an environment that has not adapted and adjusted, a public environment that has not adapted and adjusted.

  Among other matters, Rumsfeld was obviously upset about the Supreme Court decision a week earlier in the Hamdan v. Rumsfeld ruling that the Bush administration in effect had to respect the rights of terror suspects held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to have lawyers and trials. Rumsfeld felt they should be interrogated and kept in detention to keep them off the battlefield. The court's decision was a major blow to the Bush administration's ideas about fighting the war on terror. In the 5-3 decision, the High Court said that the administration had to adhere to due process.

  Several months earlier, on May 1, Rumsfeld had circulated a six-page secret memo proposing some fixes, entitled Illustrative New 21st Century Institutions and Approaches.

  It was almost the latest version of the Anchor Chain memos he had written in his first months as secretary in 2001—a cry from his bureaucratic and managerial heart. Not only was the Defense Department tangled in its anchor chain but so was the rest of the U.S. government, and the world.

  Like Andy Card, Rumsfeld was sensitive to the charge of incompetence. He dictated, The charge of incompetence against the U.S. government should be easy to rebut if the American people understand the extent to which the current system of government makes competence next to impossible.

  At the end of the second interview I quoted former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Any military commander who is honest with you will say he's made mistakes that have cost lives.

  Urn hmm, Rumsfeld said.

  Is that correct?

  I don't know. I suppose that a military commander—

  Which you are, I interrupted.

  No, I'm not, the secretary of defense said.

  Yes, sir, I said.

  No, no. Well...

  Yes. Yes, I said, raising my hand in the air and ticking off the hierarchy. It's commander in chief, secretary of defense, combatant commander.

  I can see a military commander in a uniform who is engaged in a conflict having to make decisions that result in people living or dying and that that would be a truth. And certainly if you go up the chain to the civilian side to the president and to me, you could by indirection, two or three steps removed, make the case.

&nbs
p; Indirection? Two or three steps removed? It was inexplicable. Rumsfeld had spent so much time insisting on the chain of command. He was in control—not the Joint Chiefs, not the uniformed military, not the NSC or the NSC staff, not the critics or the opiners. How could he not see his role and responsibility?

  I could think of nothing more to say.

  On December 11, 2003, I had interviewed President Bush and got a taste of his style and habit of denial. It was eight months after the invasion and WMD had not been found.

  On weapons of mass destruction, I asked.

  Sure, the president said.

  One of my bosses at The Washington Post had suggested I ask, Was the president misled—

  No, Bush said.

  I continued the question, —by the intelligence, or did he mislead the country?

  No.

  No, okay, I repeated his reply.

  The answer is absolutely not.

  What happened? I asked.

  What do you mean what happened? Bush asked, sounding as if he had not been the one who gave all those speeches about WMD.

  In terms of weapons of mass destruction, I explained. And the 'slam dunk' case.

  The president said that weapons inspector David Kay's initial report supported the idea that Saddam had weapons programs. I think that it's way too early to fully understand the complete history. This is intelligence, he pointed out.

  I understand, I said. Not fact.

  It was intelligence, hard-enough intelligence for the United Nations to pass several resolutions. Hard-enough intelligence for President Bill Clinton to make a military decision on this by ordering the bombing of Iraq's suspected WMD sites in 1998.

  But we have not found any weapons of mass destruction, I said.

  We have found weapons programs that could be reconstituted.

  Could be, I agree.

  A weapon could come very quickly. And so therefore, given that, even if that's the very minimum you had, how could you not act on Saddam Hussein, given his nature, Bush said.

  I mentioned that I'd spoken with Americans as I traveled around the country who thought that after 9/11 he had been the voice of realism by saying it had been a catastrophic attack, that the terrorists were killers, and that America was in for a long battle. His unwillingness to acknowledge that no WMD had been found was making him less the voice of realism.

  I disagree with that, that construct, Bush replied.

  Fair.

  Saddam Hussein had weapons, he used weapons.

  No question.

  And he hid weapons. He hid systems. He had plans, Bush went on. And so therefore—the voice of realism just lays out where we are. That's a realistic look.

  And include in there, We haven't found them yet, I said.

  He chuckled. From my perspective, I don't want people to say, ‘Aha, we told you so.' I want people to know that there is a process that's ongoing in a very dangerous part of the world. And so, frankly, I haven't heard one person say that to me, but you run in different circles than I do. Much more elite.

  I said the people I was talking about were business people.

  The realism is to be able to understand the nature of Saddam Hussein, his history, his potential harm to America.

  Clearly we haven't found bubbling vats, I said.

  Well, the president chuckled.

  But the status report, for the last six or seven months, is we haven't found weapons. That's all, I pushed one more time.

  True, true, true.

  It had taken five minutes and 18 seconds for Bush simply to acknowledge the fact that we hadn't found weapons of mass destruction.

  The person who wants the president to stand up and declare that publicly is also the person who wants to say, Shouldn't have done it, Bush said, adding, I'm probably sounding incredibly defensive all of a sudden.

  I said I would deal with what he said in my book about the decision to invade, due to come out in 2004.

  Why do you need to deal with this in the book? he asked. What's that got to do about it?

  I said I had to deal with it because it was an important issue.

  Later he wanted to be sure that I understood the terms of the interview—his comments were for the book and not an article in The Washington Post. In other words, I'm not going to read a headline, 'Bush Says No Weapons.' I said I would wait.

  I vividly remembered how he had told me in an earlier interview, A president has got to be the calcium in the backbone. His rhetoric on postwar Iraq was right out of that calcium in the backbone script. All the perpetually upbeat talk and optimism—from Mission Accomplished, through stay the course and when they stand up, we'll stand down, his proclamations that he'd stay on the same path even if only the first lady and his dog supported him, the talk about turning points and turned corners, and the barbs that suggested anyone who questioned his strategy in Iraq did not support the troops and instead wanted America to cut and run or surrender to the terrorists —it was the same play, over and over. His strategy was to make repeated declarations of optimism and avoid adding to any doubts.

  In researching and reporting for a newspaper series in The Washington Post and my two previous books on Bush's war decisions, I interviewed him four times—December 2001, August 2002, and finally twice in December 2003. The transcripts for the combined seven and a half hours of interviews run hundreds of pages.

  Those were the days when Bush was a popular president—post-9/11, and later during the first nine months after the Iraq invasion. As the war dragged on, as Americans and Iraqis continued to die, and as Bush's approval ratings dropped dramatically in 2005 and 2006, so did my chances of getting another interview with him.

  I asked repeatedly for the opportunity to talk with Bush. In February 2006, Dan Bartlett said he and Hadley would continue to help me but the president probably would not be interviewed. I interviewed key members of the administration many times and reviewed thousands of pages of documents. By the summer of 2006, Rumsfeld had talked with me on the record for two afternoons, but Bartlett and Hadley had gone radio-silent and would not return my phone calls.

  As early as 2005, I had learned, Hadley was leaning against further White House cooperation. He knew the issues and events I was pursuing and the kinds of questions I was asking: What is the strategy for victory in Iraq? Didn't anyone at the White House notice that the actions being implemented on the ground in the months after the invasion were almost diametrically opposed to the plan that had been briefed to Bush?

  What was Rumsfeld telling Bush? What was Cheney telling Bush? What did Bush decide? What did he neglect? When did the administration begin to realize that they were dealing with a monumental task, and that major combat was not over? When did they realize that there would likely never be weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq? Are things really as good in Iraq as the top civilian and military officials in the U.S. government keep insisting publicly?

  What's going through my mind is this is just going to be great, Hadley said sarcastically to a colleague in October 2005. My book on postwar Iraq, he said, would be published in 2006, after Jerry Bremer's book. So, let's see, this is going to be an issue. So we will go into the '06 congressional elections with a raging debate on everybody who will say politically, 'I was with the administration. I wouldn't have gone into Iraq but I recognized how important it was. And if the administration had had a plan and if they had any competence at all I would have stayed with them. But as it is they clearly didn't have one. This is an incompetent administration. Iraq is the most important issue. I support the troops. I understand the importance of the mission, but given the incompetence of this administration, as demonstrated by the Bremer and the Woodward books, we have no choice but to throw the Republicans out and bring the troops home.' I mean, this is really going to be awful.

  Hadley sighed. Later, he picked up the theme again, telling his colleague, I've got to help this president get through what is going to be a really rugged three years. And if the Democrats tak
e over the House and the Senate it's going be unbelievable after 2006.

  The president's national security adviser understandably wanted to win the 2006 congressional elections. Having the president answer questions about Iraq was conspicuously inconsistent with that goal. The strategy was denial.

  With all Bush's upbeat talk and optimism, he had not told the American public the truth about what Iraq had become.

  Remainder not proofed

  A NOTE ON SOURCES

  nearly all of the information in this book comes from interviews with President Bush's national security team, their deputies and other senior and key players in the administration responsible for the military, the diplomacy and the intelligence on the Iraq War. Officials serving at various levels of the White House staff, the Defense and State Departments, and the Central Intelligence Agency, with firsthand knowledge of the meetings, documents and events, were also primary sources. Most of these interviews were conducted on background, meaning that the information provided could be used but the sources would not be identified by name in the book.

  Several former and current officials, such as Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, spoke on the record. President Bush and Vice President Cheney declined to be interviewed for this book. Past interviews from which I drew material for this book are noted.

  In addition, critical information came from documents including memos, official notes, personal notes, letters, talking points, briefing summaries, e-mails, chronologies and calendars.

  Most sources were interviewed multiple times, by me or my assistant Bill Murphy Jr. I interviewed several sources a half-dozen or more times. Nearly all allowed us to record the interviews so the story could be told more fully and accurately, with the exact language they used.

  When thoughts, conclusions and feelings are attributed to a participant, I have obtained them from that person directly, from the written record, or from a colleague whom the person told.

  PROLOGUE

  The information in this chapter comes primarily from background interviews with two knowledgeable sources.