by Peter Baker
The column argued that war in Iraq could distract from the war on terrorism. “The United States could certainly defeat the Iraqi military and destroy Saddam’s regime,” Bush read. “But it would not be a cakewalk. On the contrary, it undoubtedly would be very expensive—with serious consequences for the U.S. and global economy—and could as well be bloody.” An invasion of Iraq “could well destabilize Arab regimes in the region” and mean “a large-scale, long-term military occupation.”
Bush was livid, knowing the piece would be seen as a message from his father or at least repudiation by his father’s inner circle. “He was pissed off and let anybody within shouting distance know, including Condi,” recalled Dan Bartlett. “He would just rail at her about it—knowing that it wasn’t her fault.” Rice was a Scowcroft protégée and likewise felt blindsided. She told the president that Scowcroft was just a cautious person on such matters but she would call him. Bush then called his father, who tried to calm him down. “Son, Brent is a friend,” he said. Cheney read the piece too and thought Scowcroft was stuck in the past, revealing a “pre-9/11 mind-set, the worldview of a time before we had seen the devastation that terrorists armed with hijacked airplanes could cause.”
Rice called Scowcroft and scolded him for taking his views public without talking with her first. “Brent, you know, I wish you had just come and sat down and told me those things,” she recalled telling him. Scowcroft responded that he never meant to criticize the president. He just “thought it might be helpful to calm down some of the war talk,” as Rice paraphrased him. It was a hard conversation. As Scowcroft later put it, “I got taken to the woodshed.” But the reality was that Scowcroft had felt shut out of the new administration and resorted to the pages of a national newspaper because he did not think the White House would listen to him. The headline, written by an editor, may have been blunter than he would have liked, but he did not quarrel with it. He thought the drive for war was a mistake and missed the more fundamental problem in the region, the unsettled dispute between Israelis and Palestinians. Scowcroft felt offended at the notion that the first Bush administration had failed by not taking Hussein out in 1991. “All the neocons were saying, ‘Finish the job,’ ” he said. “In fact, the president said that.” While Scowcroft denied writing the piece at the behest of the president’s father, there were those who never believed him. “The Scowcroft piece in the Wall Street Journal could not have been without HW’s approval,” said one person close to the Bush family.
The next day, August 16, Powell made his pitch to the National Security Council for the UN route, with Bush participating by video from the ranch and Cheney from his Wyoming home. Cheney understood that Bush had already decided to go along with Powell. But privately he disdained the United Nations as a feckless debating society corrupted by the likes of Hussein and incapable of taking a stand. A lengthy diplomatic campaign would only give Hussein time to expand his arsenal, find a way to hide his weapons, or, worst of all, carry out an attack on the United States or its interests overseas.
Cheney had been meditating on the meaning of September 11 and read a new collection of essays by Victor Davis Hanson called An Autumn of War. They made such a powerful impression on him that he invited Hanson for a visit. Cheney was particularly interested in the classically tragic view, from Sophocles to the American Western, that there are not always good and bad choices, but bad and worse choices. For Cheney, leaving Hussein in power was worse than the bad choice of taking him out. He had no doubts that Hussein had weapons. He remembered how wrong intelligence assessments of Iraq had been before the Gulf War. He remembered sitting in his Pentagon office listening to intelligence analysts tell him Iraq was at least five or ten years away from having a nuclear weapon, only to discover after the war that it was in fact much closer, perhaps even just a year away. The lesson he took was clear: if anything, intelligence assessments tended to underestimate the threat, not the other way around.
But Cheney was hearing from friends that Scowcroft’s view was on the rise and that the White House had better explain to the public what was so vital about Iraq. On August 18, he heard from Senator Trent Lott, the Republican leader.
“Dick, I think you may have a big problem here with public perceptions of a possible Iraq war,” Lott told him. “The case hasn’t been made as to why we should do it.”
“Don’t worry,” Cheney said. “We’re about to fix all of that. Just hold on.”
Before he could fix it, another old friend weighed in. On August 25, Bush and Cheney picked up the New York Times and found unsolicited advice from James Baker, the former secretary of state whom Cheney had first plucked out of obscurity in the 1970s and who had overseen the 2000 recount that put the current team into office. Unlike Scowcroft, Baker did not directly oppose war with Iraq, but he urged the president to seek a new UN Security Council resolution requiring Iraq to submit to no-warning inspections and “authorizing all necessary means to enforce it,” presumably including force. “Although the United States could certainly succeed, we should try our best not to have to go it alone, and the president should reject the advice of those who counsel doing so,” Baker continued. By that, he meant Cheney.
CHENEY TOOK HIS rebuttal public the next day, as he made good on his promise to Lott to fix things. He had commissioned a tough speech to deliver to the Veterans of Foreign Wars. Where Bush would edit speeches line by line, Cheney tended to accept speeches in whole or not, and when he did make changes, they were fully formed paragraphs written out neatly by hand without mistakes. This would be the longest speech of his vice presidency to date, and he wanted it right.
Addressing the aging warriors in the Nashville convention hall, Cheney dispensed with any of the caveats about Iraq. “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction,” he said. “There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.” He went beyond simply asserting that Hussein had chemical and biological weapons. “We now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons,” Cheney said. He added, “Many of us are convinced that Saddam will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon.”
As a result, he went on, there was no point in sending inspectors back in, even though that was exactly what Bush was thinking about doing. “Against that background,” Cheney said, “a person would be right to question any suggestion that we should just get inspectors back into Iraq, and then our worries will be over. Saddam has perfected the game of cheat and retreat, and is very skilled in the art of denial and deception. A return of inspectors would provide no assurance whatsoever of his compliance with U.N. resolutions. On the contrary, there is a great danger that it would provide false comfort that Saddam was somehow back in his box.”
When Powell heard about the speech, he erupted in anger and called Rice. “Condi, anybody look at this speech?” he demanded, and took her halting answer to mean not really. “He is undercutting the president before the president has tossed the pitch.”
Rice agreed Cheney had gone too far. “I will fix it,” she told Powell.
The president, vacationing in Crawford, was aggravated too. “Bush was hot about it; he was not pleased,” Ari Fleischer said later. “It wasn’t him. It wasn’t Bush’s point of view.” But the president chose not to confront Cheney, instead telling Rice to do it.
“Call Dick and tell him I haven’t made a decision,” he told Rice.
She walked back to the Governor’s House, the separate building where she stayed while at the ranch, and got the vice president on the phone. “The president is concerned that your speech is being read as a decision to skip the UN and challenge Saddam unilaterally,” Rice recalled telling Cheney. “It’s cut off the president’s options.”
The vice president agreed to soften the language in a follow-up speech to veterans of the Korean War in San Antonio three days later and told her to call Scooter Libby with the exact language she wanted. She did and later claimed he
read it verbatim in the next speech.
But the new wording was only slightly less dismissive of the diplomatic route: “Many have suggested that the problem can be dealt with simply by returning inspectors to Iraq. But we must remember that inspections are not an end in themselves. The objective has to be disarmament.” Cheney added, “With Saddam’s record of thwarting inspections, one has to be concerned that he would continue to plot, using the available time to husband his resources, to invest in his ongoing chemical and biological weapons programs, and to gain the possession of nuclear weapons.” Powell did not find the revised version much more to his liking.
At the same time, George Tenet was upset that the speech had never been cleared with his agency and felt the assertions “went well beyond what our analysis could support.” But he never challenged Cheney, reluctant to insert himself into policy making—a reluctance he would come to regret. “I should have told the vice president privately that, in my view, his VFW speech had gone too far.”
12
“A brutal, ugly, repugnant man”
What are we talking about Iraq for? Where is this coming from?”
Karen Hughes watched Vice President Cheney’s speech from her kitchen table in Austin. President Bush’s longtime confidante and muse, she had just recently left her White House job and returned to Texas to spend more time with family. But she remained a key outside adviser to the president and did not like what she was seeing.
As a political specialist, Hughes had not been part of the months of deliberations in the Situation Room or privy to the planning Donald Rumsfeld and Tommy Franks had been conducting at the president’s request. To her, the intense focus on Iraq seemed totally out of the blue. The whole idea of going to war with Iraq struck her as a distraction. She did not see the connection to September 11 that Cheney did, and to her it seemed as if Bush were being steered down a path toward a dangerous confrontation.
She called the president in Washington to express her concern. What’s going on? she asked. Why is Iraq suddenly so prominent on the agenda?
He told her there were plenty of reasons that he needed to take on Saddam Hussein, not just the connections with terrorists Cheney saw. If she was so troubled by the prospect, he said, then she should get together with Condoleezza Rice, who could walk her through the reasons.
Hughes agreed to do that, and soon she met Rice for dinner. Rice knew how much Hughes cared about Bush and recognized that she needed to reassure the Texas adviser. She laid out for Hughes a series of factors driving the focus on Iraq: It was the only place in the world where American airplanes were being shot at as they enforced the no-fly zone. Hussein had a history of bullying neighbors and using chemical weapons on his own people. The last time America went to war with him, intelligence agencies discovered he was further along in his nuclear program than they had known.
In light of September 11, Rice said, the United States had to reassess threats. Tolerating someone as dangerous as Hussein no longer seemed tenable.
Hughes was impressed by the arguments, but they did not completely convince her. If Bush really was heading toward confrontation with Iraq, then she wanted to make sure he kept as much flexibility as possible so he was not railroaded into a war he did not really want.
She was not the only old friend from Texas who worried as they watched Bush barreling down the road to a clash with Hussein. His lifelong friend Joe O’Neill was among those in the president’s longtime circle who agreed that Bush had to attack Afghanistan after September 11 but considered invading Iraq a bad idea. They worried he was being pushed into it. Yet these friends generally kept their doubts to themselves. “I didn’t volunteer it,” O’Neill recalled. “It’s not my job.”
The drive to war accelerated after Labor Day as the president and Congress returned to Washington. On September 4, Bush summoned congressional leaders to ask for a resolution of force against Iraq. Some in the room were surprised, having assumed the White House had no intention of seeking congressional input. But now the president was in effect putting them on the hook, forcing them to choose one way or the other—confront Hussein or not?
“Saddam Hussein is a serious threat to the United States, to his neighbors, and to the people who disagree with him inside Iraq,” Bush told the leaders. “Doing nothing is not an option and I hope Congress agrees.” He added that he planned to press the United Nations to sign on as well. “Saddam Hussein has stiffed the United Nations Security Council,” Bush said. “He sidestepped, he crawfished. He has no intention to comply. If the UN wants to be relevant, they need to do something about it. The fact that the world has not dealt with him has created a bigger monster.”
After ten minutes, he opened up the floor. The lawmakers asked him what new evidence of banned weapons the United States had and whether military action would be unilateral. Bush said there was plenty of evidence and that he would prefer to have the backing of the United Nations but would go it alone if necessary.
“I will be with you on condition we level with the American people—we have to stay a while,” Senator Joseph Biden, the Democratic chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, told him.
“You’re right,” Bush responded.
“If you can get it done without staying,” Biden added, “we’ll give you the Nobel Peace Prize. I’ll support you for president.”
“I don’t know whether that will help me or hurt me,” Bush joked.
But other Democrats were upset. Senator Tom Daschle recognized that the timeline would mean Congress would be debating war right before the election. Remembering Karl Rove’s comments on taking the war to voters, Daschle suspected political motivations.
Even a Republican leader thought war with Iraq was a fool’s errand. “If you invade Iraq, you’re going to win the war in two or three weeks and then you’re going to own the place and you’ll never get out of it,” Dick Armey, the House majority leader, told him. “It’ll be such a burden on your presidency you’ll never be able to complete your domestic agenda.”
Bush tried to reassure Armey. “Will you just hold your fire until we have a chance to fully brief you?” he asked.
Armey agreed.
Later that day, Bush sent Rumsfeld to Capitol Hill to brief the Senate. About two-thirds of the members showed up, but the session was “a disaster” that might have “destroyed all of the good will and ground work that the president accomplished during his meeting this morning,” a White House aide wrote in a memo that night. “I found myself struggling to keep from laughing out loud at times, especially when Sec. Rumsfeld became a caricature of himself.” He refused to share even the most basic intelligence, the aide wrote. “There is a lot of clean up work to do here.”
BUSH, CHENEY, AND the rest of the national security team gathered at Camp David on the evening of September 6 in preparation for a meeting the next morning about the president’s upcoming speech to the United Nations. It was almost a year to the day since the fateful Camp David meeting that set the administration’s course in Afghanistan. Now the team was back in the Maryland mountains to figure out what to do next.
While Powell had won the day by convincing Bush to go to the world body, the unsettled question was whether he would ask for a new resolution. That was a rat hole Cheney wanted to avoid. Tying their hands to the bureaucratic morass to win what he called “yet one more meaningless resolution” was a mistake, one that would only give Hussein more time. When the team sat down in Laurel Lodge, Cheney argued that inspectors would not be Americans and could be fooled by Hussein, muddying the waters. Powell maintained that a resolution was needed to show the world that the United States was willing to do everything possible before turning to force. Then if war did come, Powell said, they would be in a stronger position to build a broad coalition. Bush did not make up his mind at that moment, but issued a dire conclusion. “Either he will come clean about his weapons,” he told the group, “or there will be war.”
In years to come, some in the war cab
inet, including Donald Rumsfeld and George Tenet, would say there was never a single moment when the national security team debated the fundamental question of whether going to war was a good idea, nor any point when Bush asked his advisers directly whether he should attack Iraq. Indeed, the discussion at Camp David that day focused largely on tactics. Yet others saw it as the turning point, the juncture at which Bush resolved to go forward. “It was very much on everybody’s minds that you don’t give this speech and then not follow through,” Dan Bartlett said. Whatever reservations anyone harbored, no one in the room challenged the core judgment that Iraq was worth a war. “In neither this meeting nor any other I attended did any of the president’s advisers argue against using military force to remove Saddam from power,” Cheney said later. “Nor did anyone argue that leaving Saddam in power, with all the risks and costs associated with that course, was a viable option.” Rice, who would clash with Cheney on so many other issues, agreed on that point. “There was no disagreement,” she said. “The way ahead could not have been clearer.”
For Bush, the decision on how to proceed with the United Nations was sealed that night when he and Cheney had dinner with Tony Blair, who flew from Britain for the sole purpose of convincing the Americans to seek a resolution. Blair told Bush and Cheney that winning a Security Council endorsement would make it easier to forge a true international coalition and expressed fear of the consequences of the United States and Britain going it alone. Cheney looked “very sour throughout,” Blair’s adviser Alastair Campbell recalled. The British were struck that the vice president attended all the meetings, including the one normally restricted to the leaders, which brought home “as never before Cheney’s influence in the Bush administration.”
During the session that included aides, Campbell told Bush they needed to understand anti-American sentiment around the world; a lot of it was jealousy, he said, but some was fear of American power. The rhetoric from Washington had not helped.