by Peter Baker
The phrase bothered even some hawks, like Paul Wolfowitz. But Bush did not care. He liked it and had no regrets. “It was not the president’s habit to feel like, let’s back off because of criticism,” Gerson reflected. Indeed, Bush grew irritated when he picked up the New York Times on January 31, two days after the speech, and saw that some aides had tried to tone down the language. On the road for a post–State of the Union trip to promote a new volunteerism initiative that would eventually become the USA Freedom Corps, Bush called Rice in Washington to tell her there would be no retreat from the line. When Ari Fleischer arrived in his hotel suite, Bush told him to quash any suggestion that the White House was backing off. Bush thought it was “quite cowardly for people to read into my intentions when they don’t know me.”
11
“Afghanistan was too easy”
The presidential limousine pulled up to the Badaling section of China’s Great Wall on a Friday afternoon in February. President Bush got out for a quick tour. He had last visited twenty-seven years earlier while his father was the American envoy. Now he was back as president, fresh from lunch with China’s leader.
Bush was taken to a section of the wall that Richard Nixon had visited in 1972 during his historic opening to the Middle Kingdom.
“Where did Nixon stop?” Bush asked his guide.
Right where you are, the guide said.
“Let’s go about a hundred yards more,” Bush said.
Bush was nothing if not competitive. He spent his youth competing against his father’s legacy, as a student at Andover and Yale, as a military pilot, as an oilman, as a candidate for Congress, almost always falling short. He finally found success as the owner of the Texas Rangers. As president, Bush prided himself on outlasting Secret Service agents on the running trail and challenged aides to earn their way into the Hundred Degree Club reserved for those who finished three miles on the ranch with the thermometer in triple digits. Later in his presidency, he would get into a reading contest with Karl Rove, measured not just by the number of books read but by the number of pages and even square inches of text.
Of course, it requires a certain competitive streak to run for president in the first place. How many people look in the mirror and conclude that in a country of 300 million, there is no one better to lead it? Once reaching the White House, a president invariably compares himself with the forty or so other men who held the office. How did Abraham Lincoln save the country? How did Theodore Roosevelt earn his way onto Mount Rushmore? How did Franklin Roosevelt take on depression and war? Bush was determined to be not just a good president but a great president. No “small ball” for him, as he put it, derisively referring to his predecessor’s strategy of advancing incremental initiatives. He came to office with expansive visions: he would transform education, Medicare, Social Security, the military, the culture in Washington even. The attacks of September 11 gave him a chance to transform the world. It was not enough to quote Franklin Roosevelt. He wanted to be the one others quoted.
On that at least, he had succeeded. His “axis of evil” phrase had reverberated across the globe. The members of the theoretical axis unsurprisingly denounced him for “political immaturity and moral leprosy,” as the North Korean Foreign Ministry put it. But American allies were also perturbed. While willing to help in Afghanistan, they were not eager for war elsewhere and saw Bush’s rhetoric as saber rattling. The European Community’s foreign policy commissioner warned America against “unilateralist overdrive.” When Bush arrived in South Korea on his way to China, he was greeted by demonstrators holding up banners that read, “Who Is in Axis of Evil? You, Mr. Bush!”
His trip to South Korea, Japan, and China was his first chance to see up close the ripple effects of his speech. The truth was he did not mind all the consternation. If three simple words had managed to focus attention on the world’s outliers and perhaps even scare them into thinking they faced possible American action, so much the better. He used the trip to calm allies without retreating from the sentiments he had expressed. Indeed, while visiting the South Korean side of the demilitarized zone, he was told that a museum on the other side exhibited axes used to kill two American service members in 1976. “No wonder I think they’re evil,” Bush said.
But it was not the North Koreans who were at the top of Bush’s and Cheney’s minds. From the start, they had seen Saddam Hussein as the nation’s central threat. The “axis of evil” speech was not a declaration of war, and there were still plenty of ways to avoid an armed showdown, but it set Bush and Cheney on a course that would dominate the rest of their time in office.
The looming confrontation brought to a head a long, complicated conflict between the Bush family and Saddam Hussein. The relationship actually began as one of pragmatic friendship in the 1980s when Hussein was at war with Iran, the main American enemy in the region, and George H. W. Bush was vice president in an administration that offered to help. Through Arab intermediaries, Bush advised Hussein to intensify the bombing of Iran, according to a 1992 New Yorker article. Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, though, proved a strategic miscalculation that put him on the opposite side of a Bush and Dick Cheney at the Pentagon.
In April 1993, after the Gulf War, the former president went to Kuwait for a hero’s welcome, and a group of Iraqis crossed the border in what was called a thwarted attempt to kill him. Among those on the trip who could have been killed were Barbara Bush and Laura Bush. George W. Bush had stayed in Texas, where he was preparing to run for governor. Some later questioned the seriousness of the assassination attempt or its connections to Baghdad, but the incident was a jarring moment for the Bush family. Running for president, the younger Bush in November 1999 said he would not repeat his father’s mistake of leaving Hussein in power. “No one envisioned him still standing,” he said. “It’s time to finish the task.” At a debate a couple of weeks later, Bush was more explicit. “If I found in any way, shape, or form that he was developing weapons of mass destruction,” he said, “I’d take them out.”
As Bush and Cheney turned up the pressure on Iraq in the beginning of 2002, many could not help wondering how much it was due to the president’s desire to finish what his father started—or to succeed where he had failed. “He cut and run early,” Bush once said of his father. While he steadfastly denied any personal motivations, even some of his best friends wondered if Bush targeted Hussein out of a sense of unfinished family business. “Whether he did or not, only God can tell,” said Joe O’Neill, his lifelong Texas friend. “I don’t know if we’ll ever know that.”
Still, even if that was a part of it, however subconsciously, it was not the whole picture. For one thing, Cheney and others, like Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Scooter Libby, and Douglas Feith, were vigorous proponents of action against Iraq without any paternal interest. Cheney had served in the previous Bush administration and had agreed to halt the Gulf War without marching to Baghdad on the assumption that Hussein would eventually be toppled anyway, a decision that now haunted him.
The sense that Hussein was a menace who could not be left in power was shared across party lines. Bill Clinton signed legislation declaring regime change American policy toward Iraq. Hussein was the only one in the world taking shots at American service members on a regular basis in the no-fly zones. He had flouted UN resolutions calling for disarmament and maintained a murderous grip over his people. As far as anyone knew, he still harbored ambitions for chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons far more devastating than box cutters, and he had demonstrated a ruthless willingness to use deadly gas on his Iranian neighbors and on his own people during a Kurdish uprising.
In the aftermath of September 11, Bush and Cheney fell back on the thinking of their generation, the nation-state paradigm. Going after a stateless, formless enemy like a terrorist network was unfamiliar. Going after Iraq fit more neatly into their experience. “Every one of us, our entire worldview of foreign affairs was put together in an era of great-power conflict—
good versus evil, us versus them,” said one administration official who worked on Iraq and supported action, only to regret it later. “Fundamentally, the problems we faced after 9/11 did not lend themselves to the great-power conflict model. Stateless enemy. And so people have said, why did George Bush use this language—us versus them, smoke them out, hunt them down? It’s because that’s all he knew and that’s all everybody knew.”
His success at toppling the Taliban fed the desire to hit another target. Bush did not want to be like Clinton flailing ineffectually at shadows. Taking on tyrants, rooting out terrorists, confronting rogue states with weapons of mass destruction, and perhaps even planting a seed for democracy were missions worthy of a great president. Afghanistan seemed to show that America could force change in a region swarming with people who wanted to do it harm—never mind that Special Forces were still chasing al-Qaeda fighters from Tora Bora into the treacherous mountains of Shahikot south of Kabul.
The anger over September 11 seemed to demand more. Afghanistan was not enough. While Bush and Cheney had Iraq in their sights for a long time, they were responding to public appetite for action. For the first time in more than a generation, the country was willing to be assertive overseas. A poll taken just before the “axis of evil” speech showed that 77 percent of Americans supported military action in Iraq and just 17 percent opposed it. In a separate poll, almost an identical number, 76 percent, thought Hussein provided help to al-Qaeda, and another poll released around then found that 72 percent said it was very or somewhat likely that Hussein was “personally involved in the September 11 attacks.” Memories of the Twin Towers were still fresh. “The only reason we went into Iraq, I tell people now, is we were looking for somebody’s ass to kick,” said the administration official who worked on Iraq. “Afghanistan was too easy.”
ON A CHILLY, dry day in February, Cheney sat down with his CIA briefer to go through the latest intelligence. While Bush preferred a more interactive briefing, Cheney tended to read the documents while the briefer sat quietly waiting in case he had any questions. He usually did. On this morning, Cheney found a report from the Defense Intelligence Agency, or DIA, titled “Niamey Signed an Agreement to Sell 500 Tons of Uranium a Year to Baghdad.”
The report, dated February 12, 2002, caught Cheney’s eye. Niamey was the capital of Niger, an African country with significant uranium deposits. Iraq had no civilian nuclear energy program, and the only reason it could want uranium from Africa was to fuel a bomb. The uranium would have to be enriched, no easy task and not one that Iraq had mastered. But if it were, five hundred tons by one calculation would be enough to make fifty weapons. The report was based on information from a foreign intelligence service, and Cheney asked his briefer to find out what the CIA thought of it.
By this point, Cheney was hunting for evidence that Iraq had chemical, biological, and even nuclear weapons in violation of its obligations under the UN Security Council resolutions that followed the Gulf War. For years, American intelligence agencies had assumed that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons, but they had been without a window into Iraq ever since UN inspectors left at the end of 1998 just before Clinton launched a four-day bombing attack for failing to cooperate adequately. Nothing in the interim had made intelligence analysts in the United States or Europe think Hussein had abandoned his weapons programs or his ambitions for them. The request from Cheney put the CIA on high alert to confirm the Niger report.
A couple days later, the CIA briefer gave Cheney the agency’s assessment, which was more skeptical than the DIA report. The CIA analysis noted that the “information on the alleged uranium contract between Iraq and Niger comes exclusively from a foreign government service report that lacks crucial details.” Moreover, it said, “some of the information in the report contradicts reporting from the U.S. Embassy in Niamey.” Niger’s uranium mines were operated by a consortium led by the French government, which was unlikely to permit an illegal sale to Iraq. The analysis named the Italians as the foreign intelligence agency that provided the tip, a red flag in the intelligence community since Italy’s was not the most highly regarded spy agency in Europe. Back at CIA headquarters, analysts decided to send the husband of one of their own, Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador with contacts in Niger, to see if he could unearth more.
WHILE ALL THIS took place out of public view, Bush and Cheney had challenges on the domestic front. The steel industry was hurting from foreign competition, and the White House, despite its free-market philosophy, was debating whether to step in. During the 2000 campaign, Bush and Cheney had promised to help steelworkers in West Virginia, a normally Democratic state that then went Republican.
Karl Rove was focused as well on larger steel-producing states like Pennsylvania and Ohio, states that were key to any Electoral College victory in the future. But most of the economic team, including Paul O’Neill, Glenn Hubbard, and Mitch Daniels, the budget director, opposed a steel tariff as a sellout of principle. “If you can’t do the right thing when you’re at 85 percent approval,” Daniels said at a meeting on February 11, “then when can you do the right thing?”
Cheney’s own staff peppered him with op-ed articles arguing against steel tariffs. One from the Wall Street Journal sent to the vice president on January 25 argued that tariffs would be “dangerously protectionist.” A memo sent to him on February 28 summarized six editorials opposing tariffs. Hubbard showed Bush a map of states that would be affected by resulting higher costs to consumers. “I’m no politician, but I would dispute that it was a good idea even politically, and was clearly a bad idea economically,” he recalled arguing.
But Bush and Cheney were united. On March 5, Bush imposed quotas of up to 30 percent on most imported steel, what he called “temporary safeguards” to offset subsidies from foreign governments. While reaffirming his free-market ideals, Bush said in a written statement that “sometimes imports can cause such serious harm to domestic industries that temporary restraints are warranted.” He and Cheney hoped to use the move to win congressional authorization to negotiate new free-trade agreements without line-item interference by lawmakers.
BUSH HAD TAKEN to keeping a chart of top al-Qaeda figures in his desk, and as they were captured or killed, he would draw a big X through them. On March 28, after a gunfight, American and Pakistani agents captured Abu Zubaydah, a man considered the highest-ranking al-Qaeda operative seized since the attacks the previous fall. Zubaydah was shot in the chest, groin, and thigh as he tried to escape but was being treated by American doctors. For Bush, the chart was looking better.
A moment of triumph, though, quickly became a moment of decision. Figuring out what to do with a captured terrorist would prove to be a defining moment for Bush and Cheney. In the six months since the World Trade Center was destroyed, the president and the vice president had thrown out the old rule books when it came to prisoners in this twenty-first-century war. Now the CIA had concluded that ordinary interrogation techniques were not enough and asked Bush for permission to use abusive methods.
Amid concern about more attacks like September 11, and worse, Bush and Cheney considered traditional law-enforcement-style questioning inadequate to the threat. It would take months for the CIA and the Justice Department to figure out how to introduce a new, more brutal form of interrogation and to justify it under the law. But in the end, at Cheney’s urging, Bush approved all but two of the proposed techniques. Whatever it takes, the people at Ground Zero had told him. Now he was doing whatever he thought it would take to protect the country. At what cost would not become clear for some time.
In a secret overseas prison, Bush’s order had tangible consequences. CIA officers strapped Zubaydah to a board, inclined his feet slightly above his head, covered his mouth and nose with a cloth, and then poured water over it for up to forty seconds to simulate drowning. Then they did it again. And again. All told, Zubaydah would be waterboarded eighty-three times over the next month.
Zubaydah talked. In the years to
come, Bush and Cheney, backed by intelligence officials, would claim that Zubaydah provided critical information that led them to the capture of Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a top aide to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of September 11, and José Padilla, an al-Qaeda plotter in the United States. But his case was a touchstone for a debate that would last for years. FBI agents said Zubaydah was already cooperating under normal questioning before they were shunted aside by CIA operatives with their board and hood and that he said nothing after waterboarding that could not have been gotten out of him anyway. Some claimed Zubaydah was mentally unstable, citing diaries that seemed to feature multiple personalities. George Tenet disputed that, saying such a conclusion was overblown and the diaries reflected a literary device Zubaydah was using.
Either way, Zubaydah’s case had taken Bush and Cheney down a road to what the vice president had called the “dark side.” While waterboarding eventually captured the public imagination, or horror, it was just one of several harsh methods. Detainees were stripped nude, forced to stand for prolonged periods, deprived of sleep for days on end, put on a liquid diet, slapped in the face or belly, and doused with water. A memo drafted largely by John Yoo at the Justice Department but signed by Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee determined that such actions did not constitute torture under the law as long as they did not result in pain equivalent to organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or death. The CIA came up with the euphemistic phrase “enhanced interrogation techniques” to describe them.