by Peter Baker
The ninety-two-page NIE included dissents, but mostly in the back of the document. While 71 senators and 161 House members went to the White House for briefings by Bush, Cheney, and their aides, no more than 6 senators and a handful of House members actually went to the secure room on Capitol Hill to read the full NIE past the five pages of key judgments. Even Bush later acknowledged he never read the NIE, in his case figuring he had seen all this intelligence in his daily reports. And those daily reports, Tenet later concluded, were even “more assertive” than the NIE.
The importance of the issue could hardly be overestimated. The day after the NIE was released, Bush sealed a deal with Richard Gephardt, the House Democratic leader, on a resolution authorizing force, and the two appeared in the Rose Garden along with Republican leaders and Senator Joseph Lieberman, increasingly one of the leading hawks among the Democrats. Tom Daschle refused to go along. For Gephardt, the weapons were the issue. “Saddam Hussein is a bad guy, but I didn’t think we should go to war in Iraq just because he is a bad guy,” Gephardt remembered later. “If that is the test, then we have to go to war in fifty countries.” So he told Bush, “If I come to the conclusion that he does not have weapons, I am not going to vote for this.”
Largely unnoticed was an exchange during a closed-door meeting on the same day. Senator Carl Levin, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, asked John McLaughlin whether Hussein was likely to attack American interests with biological or chemical weapons. McLaughlin said the chances were low, but if the United States attacked Iraq, then the chances would be “pretty high.” In other words, Hussein was a direct threat only if Bush and Cheney acted first. The CIA agreed to declassify that exchange for the public, but it drew little attention. “I always wondered why they never used it more in their debate,” McLaughlin said later. “That tells you something about the atmosphere at the time.” Because the NIE was classified, the CIA released a white paper summarizing its conclusions for public consumption on October 4. The white paper was even more definitive, generally leaving out the dissents and caveats, such as the State Department doubts about a nuclear program and the air force assessment of the unmanned aerial vehicles.
Fanning the concern about weapons in Hussein’s hands was a smooth-talking Iraqi exile named Ahmad Chalabi. A jowly, charming banker with a doctorate from the University of Chicago, Chalabi headed the Iraqi National Congress, a group dedicated to toppling Hussein but deeply distrusted by American intelligence agents. After a CIA-backed coup failed in the 1990s, agency officials blamed Chalabi for exposing the plot and issued a “burn notice” against him, cutting him off from any support. But Chalabi had deftly worked the corridors of Washington, befriending neoconservative figures like Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and John Hannah in the years before they ascended to power with Bush and Cheney. They considered him a hero for his determined opposition to a dictator, an “enormously talented” figure, and a “huge asset for the United States,” as Perle put it. The CIA and the State Department, by contrast, considered him a huckster and his cheerleaders inside the administration “like schoolgirls with their first crush,” in George Tenet’s words. That did not stop information from Chalabi about purported weapons from circulating through government and even onto the front pages of newspapers like the New York Times.
All of this fed into what Scott McClellan, then Bush’s deputy spokesman and later White House press secretary, called “our campaign to sell the war.” After breaking with Bush, McClellan described “a carefully orchestrated campaign to shape and manipulate sources of public approval to our advantage.” He said, “We were more focused on creating a sense of gravity and urgency about the threat from Saddam Hussein than governing on the basis of the truth of the situation.”
Nor were they focused on what would come next. When a visiting lawmaker noted at a closed meeting on October 1 that the retired general Wesley Clark had predicted the United States would be stuck in Iraq for ten years, Bush brushed it off.
“I don’t know how he gets ten years,” he said.
WITH THE VOTES in Congress approaching, Bush decided to give a closing argument laying out the case. Advisers had long ago concluded the Oval Office even with its majesty did not suit Bush well as a venue. He needed an audience to play off; just staring into a camera made him look awkward and uncomfortable. So Bush agreed to deliver his prime-time address in front of an audience at a Cincinnati museum, picking a setting metaphorically in the middle of the country.
Much debate went into crafting the speech, both in substance and in style. Adam Levine, a press aide, recognized that it would be delivered almost exactly on the fortieth anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis and suggested harking back to the line John F. Kennedy drew against the threats of his era.
One of the speechwriters protested that Kennedy was a Democrat.
“Yeah, that’s right,” agreed Karl Rove. “What about that?”
“Yeah,” Levine shot back, “the worst you are going to get is Ted Sorensen will write a New York Times op-ed that says exactly why everything you have said President Kennedy would have disagreed with.”
But if so, Levine went on, it will mean they had struck a chord. Invoking Kennedy would take some of the partisan sheen off the case and summon a memory associated with strength.
A more serious quarrel broke out over the evidence to put in the speech. The drafts written by Michael Gerson and the other speechwriters accused Hussein of building a “massive stockpile” of anthrax and producing “thousands of tons” of mustard gas, sarin nerve gas, and VX nerve gas. It expressed concern that Iraq could use unmanned aerial vehicles to strike the United States. It echoed Cheney’s speech from the summer asserting that Hussein was reconstituting his nuclear program, citing the disputed aluminum tubes. The sixth draft of the speech also asserted that Iraq had “been caught attempting to purchase up to 500 metric tons of uranium oxide from sources in Africa—an essential ingredient in the enrichment process.” When the text was sent to the CIA for review, analysts objected to the uranium assertion and rushed to see George Tenet on October 5.
Tenet called Stephen Hadley. “Steve, take it out,” he said, arguing that Bush should not be a “fact witness” on a disputed issue. Tenet’s executive assistant followed up with a memo to Hadley and Gerson, noting that the CIA had already disagreed with the British on the matter. “We told Congress that the Brits have exaggerated this issue,” the memo said. The next day, another CIA analyst followed up with a second memo reinforcing the point, noting that “the evidence is weak” and that Iraq would not need the supply since it already had a large stock of uranium oxide. Moreover, the agency had told Congress “that the Africa story is overblown.”
The White House complied and deleted the line. Even without it, Bush’s speech was plenty provocative. At 8:00 p.m. on October 7, Bush addressed the nation with a compendium of frightening warnings. If Iraq developed nuclear weapons, it would “be in position to dominate the Middle East,” “threaten America,” and “pass nuclear technology to terrorists.” As Levine suggested, he quoted Kennedy declaring that the world could not “tolerate deliberate deception and offensive threat” by any nation or wait until “the actual firing of weapons” to respond to danger. He all but declared war. “Saddam Hussein must disarm himself,” he said, “or for the sake of peace, we will lead a coalition to disarm him.”
Three days later, on October 10, at 3:05 p.m., the House of Representatives voted 296 to 133 to authorize force in Iraq. With Richard Gephardt’s help and Dick Armey’s acquiescence, 81 Democrats joined a near-unanimous Republican caucus. Less than ten hours later, voting just past midnight, the Senate followed suit, 77 to 23. Twenty-nine Democrats backed Bush, including Tom Daschle, Joseph Biden, John Kerry, and Hillary Clinton; only one Republican, Lincoln Chafee, balked. After the sun came up, aides sent Bush a memo telling him that he had won bigger majorities than his father had twelve years earlier.
But with lawmakers persuaded
about what would go wrong if America did not attack Iraq, Bush and Cheney were confronted with a roster of what could go wrong if it did. Rumsfeld had scrawled out by hand a list of all the possible setbacks, then returned to his office to commit them to a memo. Marked “SECRET” and dated October 15, the three-page document became known as the “Parade of Horribles” and cited twenty-nine possible bad outcomes. Number one was that Bush would fail to win UN approval, meaning that “potential coalition partners may be unwilling to participate.” Others included the entry of Israel into the war, a Turkish incursion into Kurdistan, eruption of the Arab street, disruption of oil markets, higher than expected collateral damage, and Iraqi use of weapons of mass destruction against American forces. Number thirteen was “US could fail to find WMD on the ground in Iraq and be unpersuasive to the world.” Number nineteen was “Rather than having the post-Saddam effort require 2 to 4 years, it could take 8 to 10 years, thereby absorbing US leadership, military and financial resources.” And number twenty-seven was “Iraq could experience ethnic strife among Sunni, Shia and Kurds.”
Still, Rumsfeld was not opposing war. He concluded his list by noting that “it is possible of course to prepare a similar illustrative list of all the potential problems that need to be considered if there is no regime change in Iraq.”
THROUGH ALL OF this, a separate crisis was brewing with another member of the axis of evil. American intelligence agencies had uncovered evidence that North Korea had a secret uranium enrichment program in addition to the plutonium program it had suspended as part of the Agreed Framework negotiated with Bill Clinton. James Kelly, an assistant secretary of state, was instructed to confront the North Koreans during a trip to Pyongyang. When he did, the North Koreans responded in a way that Kelly took as confirmation.
Suddenly Bush and Cheney had another rogue state developing nuclear weapons. Bush in particular had developed an intense personal animus toward Kim Jong Il, the North Korean dictator. “I loathe Kim Jong Il,” he told the journalist Bob Woodward. To Republican senators, Bush had called Kim a “pygmy” and “a spoiled child at a dinner table” who was “starving his own people” and running “a Gulag the size of Houston.” But it was not in Bush and Cheney’s interest to overemphasize North Korea at the moment, and the announcement on October 16 was largely overlooked amid the public debate on Iraq. “We decided to park this problem in the six-party talks until we dealt with Iraq,” Cheney said at one point in the Oval Office.
The skepticism Bush encountered at home was mirrored in the chambers of the Security Council. If they had to seek another resolution, then Cheney wanted it to have teeth and insisted on a draft threatening to use “all necessary means” if Hussein was found in violation. Powell knew that was a nonstarter but sent it up just to make the point; sure enough, every other member of the Security Council, including the British, rejected such explicit language. Powell and the British instead convinced the French to go along with threatening “serious consequences” without explaining what that meant, leaving enough ambiguity for Washington to define it as it chose.
Moreover, Powell set the resolution’s terms such that Iraq was almost certain to violate them. “We built a lot of ambushes or traps into 1441 for Saddam Hussein,” he said afterward. “The big one was the initial one, where we said, you’re in material breach now.” Rather than let Iraq off the hook for the past twelve years, the Security Council would start from the premise that it was still in violation of its obligations, putting the burden on Baghdad to establish otherwise. The other “ambush” that Powell helped insert was a requirement that Hussein file a full declaration disclosing all banned weapons programs. Either he would deny having weapons, which would be widely considered a lie, or he would admit having the weapons, which would confirm that he had been lying for years. Then the United States could move straight to “serious consequences.”
The drive to war paid off in the midterm elections. As Karl Rove had urged, Bush and Cheney had taken their leadership of the war on terror to the voters. Rove’s “72-Hour Project” drove up turnout in the final days of the campaign. On November 5, Bush invited Bill Frist, Dennis Hastert, and other congressional leaders to dinner in the Family Dining Room and then to watch returns. Cheney was not among the guests. Bush was fired up. Republicans defeated Max Cleland and picked up two extra seats in the Senate for a total of fifty-one, recapturing the upper chamber lost when James Jeffords left the party. In the House, Republicans gained eight seats, padding their majority. Bush grabbed Ken Mehlman’s cell phone to call winners like Bob Ehrlich, who was elected governor of Maryland. “You won!” Bush exulted.
It was the first time since 1934 that an incumbent president’s party picked up seats in both houses in a midterm election. Bush had raised more than $200 million, traveled to forty states, and lent an approval rating that, while down from its post–September 11 high, remained in the mid-sixties. Cheney too dedicated enormous time to the project, making roughly thirty trips in the last couple of months of the campaign and raising more than $40 million. For Bush, it seemed to some advisers that this finally provided him a measure of validation, even legitimacy, after the much-disputed outcome in 2000. If Bush did not win a mandate then, he had won one by proxy in 2002.
Two days after the election, on November 7, Bush was in an expansive mood at a news conference celebrating the victories. He called for a return to the bipartisan spirit that had reigned ever so briefly after September 11.
But with the 2002 election over, the reporters were already turning to 2004. Bill Sammon of the Washington Times asked if he would keep Cheney on the ticket.
“Should I decide to run,” Bush said flatly, “Vice President Cheney will be my running mate. He’s done an excellent job. I appreciate his advice. I appreciate his counsel. I appreciate his friendship. He is a superb vice president, and there’s no reason for me to change.”
For Cheney, the president’s comments were obviously satisfying. But they were not necessarily the final answer.
13
“You could hear the hinge of history turn”
In the fall of 2002, Vice President Cheney allowed himself to muse aloud about the differences between the current White House and previous ones where he had served. “In this White House,” he said, “there aren’t Cheney people versus Bush people. We’re all Bush people.” He was talking about the fact that he had no aspirations to run when President Bush was done, a virtually unheard-of situation in modern American politics that meant there was no subtle competition between president and vice president that drove their teams apart, as had happened so often in the past.
Bush thought much the same—at first. He valued Cheney’s counsel, and one of the attractions of picking him was that “he didn’t want it.” While the vice president intimidated others with his quiet, powerful certitude, Cheney was careful to defer to Bush, almost never disagreeing with him in front of others and keeping a low profile to avoid upstaging the president. While outsiders imagined Cheney dominating meetings, in fact Cheney largely kept silent until the president asked for his opinion. When he did talk, he tended to ask questions rather than state his views explicitly, although it was not always hard to tell from his questions which direction he was leaning.
By the time the midterms had passed, though, there were in fact Bush people and Cheney people. In both the national security and the economic teams, fissures had opened that reflected profound differences in policy and personality. Bush and Cheney themselves remained close, and the president still relied heavily on his number two. But the president allowed a fractious struggle to play out beneath him without resolving it firmly one way or the other. Most significantly, Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were increasingly fighting with Colin Powell, sometimes joined by Condoleezza Rice. At times, Bush grew frustrated enough to demand better behavior, only to retreat when nothing really changed. As the confrontation with Iraq accelerated, there were moments when Cheney worried Bush would not prove decisive enough and those when Bus
h resented Cheney pushing him.
For all of his Texas swagger, Bush hated conflict within his team and was still a relatively new president with limited experience. He had surrounded himself with some of the nation’s most seasoned hands, which at first was reassuring. But friends said it later became something of a straitjacket. “After 9/11, it was, my God, nobody could be luckier having these people there, and he was very fortunate to have them,” said Jim Langdon, Bush’s longtime friend from Texas. “And with that kind of experience sitting around the table, maybe it did not leave a lot of room for his own judgment in these matters. His team has been there, done it, seen it all, had the context while Bush was governor of Texas.”
Bush was often seen as acceding to Cheney’s judgment. Yet it was more complicated than that. Even in this period, when Bush and Cheney were closest, the president rejected his advice at key moments. He gave his Middle East speech, he refused to bomb the Khurmal terrorist camp in northern Iraq, and he decided to go to the United Nations, all at odds with Che- ney’s recommendations. “One of the things people fail to recognize about George W. Bush—he would almost always agree with Cheney and Rumsfeld about what the objectives should be, which was a hawk, but what people miss is that he would agree with Condi Rice and Colin Powell about how to achieve it,” reflected Ari Fleischer.
The growing schism between Cheney and Powell was profound and damaging. The two Gulf War partners who rose to prominence side by side in the first Bush administration had become fierce adversaries in the second. Powell had long understood that Cheney was more conservative than he was—a “right-wing nut,” as he had once called him semi-jokingly to his face—but now he saw what he considered a fever in Cheney when it came to Iraq and terrorism. The vice president, for his part, increasingly viewed Powell, in the words of his aide Neil Patel, as a “pain in the ass,” basically a freelancer more interested in his own press clippings and personal stature than in following orders.