by Peter Baker
“You mean we shouldn’t talk about democracy?” Cheney snapped.
Not if it came across as a message about Americanization, Campbell retorted.
Bush agreed to seek the resolution from the Security Council. “I think ultimately he bought the idea that this was going to be a whole lot easier if we had a coalition behind us,” Blair recalled. That was part of it, but a lot of it was Blair himself. Bush was impressed. “Your man has got cojones,” he told Campbell. As the prime minister was leaving after just six hours on the ground, Bush joked, “I suppose you can tell the story of how Tony flew in and pulled the crazed unilateralist back from the brink.”
Still, Bush and Cheney were ready to take their case to the public. Andy Card had told a New York Times reporter in an article that appeared the day Blair visited that they had waited until now because “from a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.” Now it was September, time to launch the product. When reporters from the Times called to ask what intelligence agencies knew about Hussein’s weapons, officials shared one of the most alarming conclusions found in the reports being sent to Bush and Cheney. On September 8, the Times duly reported that Iraq had bought aluminum tubes that could be used for centrifuges to enrich uranium. Officials added that the first sign of a smoking gun might be a mushroom cloud, a clever phrase Michael Gerson had come up with.
That same day, Cheney and Rice went on the Sunday talk shows and cited the story as if it were somehow independent confirmation of their case. “There’s a story in the New York Times this morning,” Cheney said on NBC’s Meet the Press. “It’s now public that, in fact, he has been seeking to acquire, and we have been able to intercept and prevent him from acquiring through this particular channel, the kinds of tubes that are necessary to build a centrifuge.” Asked if Hussein already had a nuclear bomb, Cheney said he could not say. “I can say that I know for sure that he’s trying to acquire the capability.” Rice, on CNN’s Late Edition, even used the anonymous quotation, saying, “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”
Cheney rode to the Pentagon on September 11, the first anniversary of the attacks, to join Rumsfeld in briefing three dozen senators about Iraqi weapons. Joined by George Tenet, they were so aggressive that some senators left assuming an invasion was a foregone conclusion. “It was pretty clear that Rumsfeld and Cheney are ready to go to war,” Senator Max Cleland wrote afterward in a note to himself. “They have already made the decision to go to war and to them that is the only option.”
BUSH FLEW TO New York for the UN General Assembly session the next day. One year after the attacks that had unified the world, he was returning a different figure in a different moment. Anxious about protecting his country, eager to strike out at its enemies, he had lost fifteen pounds and much of whatever innocence he had brought to the office.
The speech was in flux almost until the last minute as Cheney and Powell shadowboxed over how explicitly to ask for a new resolution. Taking the lectern, Bush saw a sea of unsmiling faces, many listening intently to bulky white devices on their ears that would translate his words into dozens of languages. Bush collected himself and launched into his talk, part persuasion, part lecture. He started with the carrot, announcing that the United States would return to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, or UNESCO, years after withdrawing amid complaints of corruption. The delegates applauded with their approval. It would be the only time they would interrupt to clap.
“Our greatest fear,” Bush went on to say, “is that terrorists will find a shortcut to their mad ambitions when an outlaw regime supplies them with the technologies to kill on a massive scale. In one place, in one regime, we find all these dangers, in their most lethal and aggressive forms, exactly the kind of aggressive threat the United Nations was born to confront.” He laid out an indictment of Iraq’s failure to abide by UN resolutions, daring the body to confront Baghdad. “We know that Saddam Hussein pursued weapons of mass murder even when inspectors were in his country,” Bush continued. “Are we to assume that he stopped when they left? The history, the logic, and the facts lead to one conclusion: Saddam Hussein’s regime is a grave and gathering danger.”
And soon he came to the point: “My nation will work with the U.N. Security Council to meet our common challenge,” he said. “If Iraq’s regime defies us again, the world must move deliberately, decisively to hold Iraq to account.”
Powell and Rice, following along in the audience, realized Bush had left out the critical line about seeking a resolution. After so much back-and-forth, a draft without the updated language had been fed into the teleprompter. All that work, all that fighting, and in the end he would skip the essential point because of a logistical screwup?
As Powell and Rice grew agitated, Bush recognized the omission and ad-libbed it. “We will work with the U.N. Security Council for the necessary resolutions,” he said.
His advisers were relieved. But wait a minute. Had he said resolutions, plural? Did that extra letter commit them to coming back to the council more than once? That could be a problem.
Just as important, though, were two sentences that followed. “The Security Council resolutions will be enforced—the just demands of peace and security will be met—or action will be unavoidable,” Bush went on, picking up the text again. “And a regime that has lost its legitimacy will also lose its power.” It was all but a declaration of war dressed up in an ultimatum: Bow to these demands, or our forces will topple your government. In the most public of forums, the president of the United States had signaled the coming showdown as clearly as he could.
Twenty-five minutes after he had begun, Bush wrapped up and looked out at the audience knowing he had not won it over. “It’s like speaking to the wax museum,” he observed afterward. “No one moves.”
THE DRIVE FOR war was not helped when Bush saw on September 16 that Lawrence Lindsey, his top economics adviser, had told the Wall Street Journal that it could cost $100 billion to $200 billion. In fact, Lindsey was just thinking out loud, not offering a formal projection. He was actually saying that war costs would not have a major economic impact and would be worth it to protect the country from future attack even if it cost between 1 percent and 2 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product, which at the time would mean $100 billion to $200 billion. The Gulf War had cost 1 percent of gross domestic product, and Vietnam between 1.5 percent and 2 percent.
But the raw numbers looked enormous compared with predictions by other officials. Lindsey realized his colleagues “were furious” that he was so off message. “At that time, message discipline on Iraq was the functional equivalent of radio silence,” he later concluded. Bush himself was edgy the next time he saw him. “So, Lindsey, you’re estimating the cost of wars I’m not even planning yet?” Bush asked. Publicly, the White House tried to shoot down his statements. Mitch Daniels, the budget director, was sent out to say that the Lindsey numbers were “likely very, very high.”
The issue complicated Bush’s campaign to win support in Congress. On September 19, he met behind closed doors with nearly a dozen House members from both parties at the White House, and Representative Howard Berman, a California Democrat, asked if Daniels would be willing to spend the money needed for nation building after Saddam Hussein was toppled.
“Mark my words—yes, we will spend the necessary money,” Bush responded.
Several other members urged him to emphasize the threat in his speeches.
“I am well aware,” Bush said. “He tried to kill my dad.”
With those private words, Bush hinted at the complicated mix of motivations driving him. But he was also thinking bigger than simple retribution. The next day, the White House released a new National Security Strategy, building on the president’s West Point speech on preemption. Defeating global terrorism was among the eight goals, as to be expected, but it was the second one listed. Number one was “champion aspirations for human dignity.
” Many missed the point: Bush was increasingly defining his mission beyond just confronting threats to American security. That evening, he hosted Republican governors for dinner in the State Dining Room. With no reporters present, Bush condemned Saddam Hussein as “a brutal, ugly, repugnant man” but then alluded to the broader agenda. “I’m gonna make a prediction,” he told the governors. “Write this down. Afghanistan and Iraq will lead that part of the world to democracy. They are going to be the catalyst to change the Middle East and the world.”
At the same time Bush and Cheney were lobbying lawmakers for bipartisan support, they were also waging a fiercely partisan campaign to win the upcoming midterm elections. Just as Karl Rove had forecast, they were taking their national security case to the American public and winning. One of their most cutting arguments concerned the proposed Department of Homeland Security, an idea Bush opposed for nine months after Septem- ber 11 but now supported, although he was bogged down in a dispute over collective bargaining rights for its employees. Bush wanted to run the department with as little red tape as possible, while Democrats defended the interests of organized labor, a core constituency. To campaign audiences, though, Bush cast it as a sign of Democratic weakness.
“The Senate is more interested in special interests in Washington and not interested in the security of the American people,” he declared in a speech in New Jersey on September 23. Democrats were livid. Tom Daschle marched to the Senate floor two days later to denounce Bush’s comments as “outrageous, outrageous.” But Republican candidates picked up the theme. In Georgia, the Republican challenger, Saxby Chambliss, ran an ad attacking Senator Max Cleland, the incumbent Democrat who had lost three limbs at Khe Sanh in Vietnam. The ad showed pictures of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, then reported that Cleland voted against Bush’s homeland security proposals and therefore lacked “the courage to lead.”
THE DAY BEFORE Daschle’s speech, Cheney slipped into his official car for the short drive to Capitol Hill. Arriving at his office on the House side, he met with Dick Armey, the skeptical Republican leader.
“Now Dick, when I lay all this out for you and you see all this evidence, I know you’re going to agree with me,” Cheney said.
Armey could not help noticing that Cheney said he would agree “with me,” not “with the president.” For a half hour, Cheney laid out the case, showing photographs of aluminum tubes and satellite images of structures he called weapons facilities and walking Armey through the history of the Gulf War and UN inspections. Most ominously, Cheney warned that Hussein might be able to miniaturize weapons and put them in a suitcase. And he emphasized again what he saw as the links between Iraq and al-Qaeda.
Cheney grew grim and laid out the worst-case scenario. “Dick, how would you feel if you voted no on this and the Iraqis brought in a bomb and blew up half the people of San Francisco?”
Armey was suitably scared but still dubious.
“You’re going to get mired down there,” he predicted.
No, Cheney said. “It’ll be like the American troops going through Paris.”
In the end, Armey felt he had no choice but to go along. It was a fateful decision. Had the Republican majority leader opposed the authorization of force, it would have freed other nervous Republicans and given cover to Democrats to oppose it as well. Cheney had accomplished his mission. But it would ultimately destroy his relationship with Armey, who came to feel betrayed. “I deserved better than to have been bullshitted by Dick Cheney,” he said years later. “I can’t definitively say that Cheney purposely lied to me, but if you demonstrated it to me, I wouldn’t be surprised.”
That same day, the British government released a dossier accusing Iraq of possessing banned weapons and went beyond even what the American intelligence agencies had been saying. Among other things, the dossier asserted that Iraq had sought “significant quantities of uranium from Africa” and claimed that some of Hussein’s chemical and biological weapons “are deployable within 45 minutes of an order to use them.” That meant mortars and other battlefield tactical weapons, but many assumed from the breathless media coverage that it referred to missiles that could reach London or Washington.
The CIA had warned the British against those claims, but Bush would eventually adopt both of them. “According to the British government, the Iraqi regime could launch a biological or chemical attack in as little as forty-five minutes after the order were given,” he said in the Rose Garden on September 26, despite the skepticism of his own CIA.
In a closed meeting with eighteen lawmakers just before heading out to the Rose Garden, Bush had also embraced another unfounded assertion. “Saddam Hussein is a terrible guy who is teaming up with al-Qaeda,” he told the lawmakers, ignoring the lack of any hard evidence of such an alliance.
One of the lawmakers asked him what would happen after Hussein was toppled, and Bush seemed to almost dismiss the concern.
“Nothing can be worse than the present situation,” he said. The “timeframe,” he added, “would be six months.”
Later that day, he flew to a fund-raiser in Texas and repeated publicly what he had told lawmakers privately a week earlier about his family’s relationship with Hussein. “There’s no doubt his hatred is mainly directed at us,” Bush said. “There’s no doubt he can’t stand us. After all, this is the guy that tried to kill my dad at one time.”
BUT DID HE have the weapons Bush and Cheney said he did? While they were stretching the case, the reports sent to the president and the vice president suggested Hussein did have at least some weapons. Cheney, a voracious consumer of intelligence since his service on the House Intelligence Committee, even went to the CIA headquarters nearly a dozen times with aides to dive more deeply into the agency’s information. At times, George Tenet thought, Cheney and Scooter Libby knew the agency’s material better than it did, embarrassing analysts who could not keep up with questions. The visits would become hotly disputed, a sign to many that Cheney pressured the CIA, although subsequent investigations found no evidence that anyone changed an assessment of Iraq’s weapons program because of pressure from the vice president.
“There is this mythology that he would come out to the agency frequently for briefings and try to muscle us into stuff,” John McLaughlin, the deputy CIA director who sat in on most of the meetings, said later. “We never viewed it that way.” Cheney, he said, “wasn’t passive at all, but he was not bullying in any sense. He was always very respectful and engaging, and you just have disagreements.” Still, less senior analysts might not have seen it so benignly. “They might have had a different feeling than I did,” McLaughlin said. “That is always something you have to be on guard for.”
Others said that while there was no obvious pressure, at some point analysts knew what the vice president was looking for and were “overly eager to please,” as Michael Sulick, then the CIA’s associate deputy director of operations, put it. “Analysts feel more politicized and more pushed than many of them can ever remember,” an intelligence official told a reporter at the time. Some in the agency even nicknamed the vice president Edgar, as in Bergen, the famous ventriloquist who made his dummy talk. A Cheney aide concluded later that even if the vice president did not intend to influence anyone, “he’s a pretty intimidating guy, and he was even more intimidating during that time because people didn’t see much of him.” Richard Kerr, a former deputy CIA director who led an independent review, concluded the steady requests from the White House created “significant pressure on the Intelligence Community to find evidence that supported a connection” between Iraq and al-Qaeda.
To the extent there was pressure, in McLaughlin’s mind it came from a desire to be more definitive in conclusions rather than sticking to typical on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand hedging. “In the history of writing National Intelligence Estimates, the pendulum had sort of swung over to the view that in your key judgments, basically you just say what you think,” he said. “What do you really think? I don’t need t
he two-armed economists; just tell me what do you think?” That stemmed in part from experience with a 1990s commission on ballistic missile threats headed by Donald Rumsfeld. “They felt our work had been too bound to evidence and there had been too little willingness to go beyond the evidence, to speculate, to infer, to come to the logical conclusion based on what you are seeing or not seeing here,” McLaughlin said. And after not connecting the dots prior to September 11, analysts erred on the side of being more aggressive.
So the National Intelligence Estimate, or NIE, sent to Congress on October 1 offered strongly worded key judgments that minimized doubts and dissents. “The nuance was lost,” Tenet later admitted. The estimate declared flatly that “Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons,” was “reconstituting its nuclear weapons program,” and, if it acquired fissile material from abroad, “could make a nuclear weapon within several months to a year.” The conclusions were based on poor tradecraft, mistaken assumptions, and overinterpretation. The main evidence of Hussein’s attempt to rebuild a nuclear program was the purchase of the aluminum tubes that Cheney had highlighted on television. But the Energy Department believed those tubes were not suited for enriching uranium and instead were for conventional rocket launchers, a conclusion shared by the State Department intelligence unit. Conclusions about biological weapons were based on tenuous sourcing, particularly an Iraqi defector code-named Curveball, who was being held by the German intelligence agency, which had not let the CIA interrogate him. Unmanned aerial vehicles being built, supposedly to deliver biological or chemical weapons, were actually not suited to the task, according to the air force. For what it was worth, the NIE’s key judgments did not include the reported uranium deal with Niger that had attracted Cheney’s interest, itself based on forged documents provided to the Italian intelligence agency that did not pass basic scrutiny for names, dates, and titles. It was, however, mentioned in the body of the report.