by Peter Baker
Cheney was aggravated that Powell was tossing out most of the terrorism case and pressed him, to no avail, to put some of it back in. Ever since the September 11 attacks, Cheney had been gripped by a report from the Czech intelligence agency that Mohamed Atta, believed to have been the lead hijacker, had been spotted in Prague meeting with an Iraqi intelligence officer on April 9, 2001. But American intelligence had disavowed the report, finding no evidence that Atta had been there other than the single source who told the Czechs, and plenty of evidence that he was not. Among other things, the FBI found indications that Atta was in Virginia Beach on April 4 and Coral Springs, Florida, on April 11, and that his cell phone was used in Florida on several days in between, including April 9. There was no evidence that Atta had left the United States or entered the Czech Republic.
Cheney remained fixed on the supposed Prague meeting long after intelligence analysts had discredited it. He first called it “pretty well confirmed” in a December 2001 interview, then, when more information came in, modified his language in subsequent appearances, saying it was “unconfirmed” but still holding out the possibility that it was true. Indeed, Cheney had been waging a quiet battle with the CIA for a year over suspected ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda. Scooter Libby, Douglas Feith, and others found indications of contacts over the years and argued that showed a relationship even if not an out-and-out alliance. The CIA prepared several reports, including a document on June 21, 2002, titled “Iraq & al-Qa’ida: Interpreting a Murky Relationship.” The most recent had been published on January 29, the day after Bush’s State of the Union address, but only after Jami Miscik, the deputy director for intelligence, stormed into Tenet’s office threatening to resign unless Libby stopped pushing for changes. The paper concluded there had been contacts over the years and moments when Iraq seemed to provide safe haven for terrorists. But it did not connect Iraq with Septem- ber 11 and found no evidence of “command linkages.” Libby and his allies countered that the Taliban did not “command” al-Qaeda either but supported it and that was enough under the Bush Doctrine. Cheney, Libby, Feith, and Paul Wolfowitz thought it was the CIA that was politicizing the intelligence by straining so hard to avoid seeing the ties.
With Powell heading to the United Nations, Rumsfeld revived a favorite idea, suggesting Bush reconsider an immediate strike against the suspected chemical weapons facility run by Ansar al-Islam and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi near Khurmal in northern Iraq. It was not the first time Cheney or Rumsfeld had brought the topic back up since the president rejected it the previous summer. But now Rumsfeld argued that Powell’s testimony would make clear the Americans knew about the camp and Zarqawi and his compatriots would evacuate before they could be taken out.
“We should hit Khurmal during the speech,” Rumsfeld said, “given that Colin will talk about it.”
“That would wipe out my briefing,” Powell protested. Besides, he added, “We’re going to get Khurmal in a few weeks anyway.”
All attention was on the diplomacy and the war plan. With Rumsfeld’s Parade of Horribles in mind, Tommy Franks briefed the White House repeatedly on the plans to penetrate a Fortress Baghdad—that is, the urban warfare many feared at the end of the invasion. But there was little focus on what would come next.
When Rice finally managed to arrange a briefing for Bush on “rear-area security,” as they called it, the president, knowingly or not, diminished its importance.
“This is something Condi has wanted to talk about,” he said, opening the meeting.
Rice immediately detected the generals losing interest, once they realized it was her issue, not the president’s.
“If he had done that to me, I would have resigned,” Hadley told her afterward.
“Yeah, I know,” she said. “But what is that going to solve?”
AFTER DAYS OF scrubbing, Powell flew to New York and took the chair in the Security Council chamber on February 5. He made sure George Tenet sat behind him to show the CIA had endorsed the evidence. Playing recordings of intercepted conversations and holding up a vial to show how little anthrax was needed to inflict mass casualties, Powell went through the case methodically. Bush watched on television in the dining room off the Oval Office, munching crackers and cheese and sipping Diet Coke. Rice joined him toward the end. They felt it went well. “He persuaded me,” wrote Mary McGrory, the legendary liberal Washington Post columnist, “and I was as tough as France to convince.”
Not quite, as it turned out. France remained unconvinced, as did Germany. Bush had been counting on his friend Vladimir Putin to support him, or at least not stand against him. But that reflected a profound misunderstanding of Putin and how Russia saw its place in the world. Putin wanted to be compensated for lost business with Iraq, a demand that went unmet. His shift to overt opposition came during a trip to Berlin and Paris, where he was treated like visiting royalty. Before leaving, Putin had said “we share the position of our American partners” in pushing Iraq to cooperate with inspectors and disarm. But then President Jacques Chirac met him at the Paris airport and escorted him down the Champs-Élysées lined with French and Russian flags for a ceremony at the Arc de Triomphe. On February 10, Putin stood by Chirac’s side and declared, “Russia is against the war.” The next day he suggested Russia would use its veto at the Security Council to stop “an unreasonable use of force.”
In the United States, the bitterness against the French was growing. A Florida bar owner dumped his entire stock of French wines into the street in protest. A North Carolina restaurateur renamed French fries on the menu “freedom fries.” Congressional Republicans went one step further, relabeling not only fries at the U.S. Capitol cafeteria but also French toast, which became “freedom toast.” More seriously, administration officials proposed blocking France and other countries that opposed them from obtaining postwar oil and reconstruction contracts. “France is clearly trying to destroy NATO in favor of the EU,” Rumsfeld told Bush in a memo on February 18, discounting the European view that there were better ways of confronting Hussein than war. “France is trying to define its role in the world by its opposition to almost everything the US proposes.” He went on to say that he, Rice, and Powell agreed they should move more NATO decision making away from the North Atlantic Council to the alliance’s Defense Policy Committee, an arm that did not include the French. The feelings of animosity were mutual. “We need a lot of Powell and not much of Rumsfeld,” Prime Minister José María Aznar of Spain told Bush during a visit to Crawford a few days later.
The diplomatic maneuvering was testing Cheney’s patience. He summoned the French ambassador to his residence.
“Is France an ally or a foe?” Cheney asked pointedly.
An ally, the surprised ambassador answered.
“We have many reasons to conclude that you are not really a friend or an ally,” Cheney said.
As far as Cheney was concerned, the UN track was a waste of time. Every passing day just increased the threat and gave Hussein more time to prepare. Finally, at one of his weekly lunches with the president in the dining room off the Oval Office, he snapped.
“Are you going to take care of this guy or not?” Cheney demanded impatiently.
It was a particularly impertinent question to ask the president, and Bush was so surprised that it would stick in his mind years later.
He told Cheney that he was not ready to move yet.
“Okay, Mr. President, it’s your call,” Cheney said. “That’s why they pay you the big bucks.”
He tempered the sharpness with a smile, but the point was made. Cheney was afraid Bush was going wobbly.
THE STRAIN WAS getting to Bush’s father, watching on the sidelines from Texas. When the elder Bush noticed a column supporting his son by the writer Walt Harrington, he picked up a pen and wrote to him: “Walt, he does not want war. He does want Iraq to do what it has pledged to do. Have you ever seen a president face so many tough problems all at once? I haven’t.”
A few weeks af
ter Bush and Cheney met with the commanders, the quiet tension between Rumsfeld and the uniformed military broke into the open as Eric Shinseki, the army chief of staff, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee on February 25.
“General Shinseki,” asked Senator Carl Levin, the Democratic chairman, “could you give us some idea as to the magnitude of the Army’s force requirement for an occupation of Iraq following a successful completion of the war?”
Shinseki ducked. “In specific numbers, I would have to rely on combatant commanders’ exact requirements,” he said.
Levin pressed. “How about a range?” he asked.
Then Shinseki offered a thought that had been swimming around his head for a while, although he had not offered it during his meeting with the president. “Something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers are probably, you know, a figure that would be required,” he said.
With that, the soft-spoken general stuck a dagger into the heart of the Bush-Cheney team. Whether he meant it or not, his comment became fodder for an enduring indictment of the administration for failing to devote enough resources to the post-Hussein operation. Rumsfeld’s vision of a fast-moving, light-footprint military did not include hundreds of thousands of troops hanging around Baghdad and Basra for years. The idea was to get in and get out, turning the country over to a new generation of Iraqis as quickly as possible.
Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, bristled at Shinseki’s comment. In testimony before the House Budget Committee two days later, on February 27, Wolfowitz raised the issue without waiting to be asked. “Some of the higher-end predictions that we have been hearing recently, such as the notion that it will take several hundred thousand U.S. troops to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq, are wildly off the mark,” Wolfowitz said. “It’s hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and to secure the surrender of Saddam’s security forces and his army.” The next day, Rumsfeld was asked at a briefing about Shinseki’s estimate. “My personal view is that it will prove to be high,” he said.
Critics of the administration eventually made Shinseki into something he was not, a martyr who stood up to the president and tried to stop the war train. Despite his off-the-cuff guesstimate, Shinseki never made a proposal for a post-Hussein force of hundreds of thousands of troops. Indeed, in a memo to Rumsfeld upon his retirement in June 2003, Shinseki said his statement had “been misinterpreted” and that he did not “believe there was a ‘right’ answer on the number of forces” needed to secure Iraq. “I gave an open-ended answer suggesting a non-specific larger, rather than smaller, number to permit you and General Franks maximum flexibility in arriving at a final number.”
Rumsfeld glossed over the depth of the tension with Shinseki, dismissing it as a media myth without acknowledging a significant disconnect with his army chief. Neither Rumsfeld nor Wolfowitz ever asked Shinseki about his public estimate and what he meant by it, so it was reasonable for the general to assume his views were not welcomed. Rumsfeld had made his own thoughts so well-known that anyone who dared contradict them risked being marginalized.
Bush felt fortified in his resolve when he stopped by Rice’s office one day that week while she was meeting with Elie Wiesel, the famed Holocaust survivor. Bush had just read Michael Beschloss’s book The Conquerors, about how Franklin Roosevelt and other leaders failed to act to stop the Holocaust. “I’m against silence,” Wiesel told him. “I’m against neutrality because it doesn’t ever help the victim. It helps the aggressor.”
“YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND how big this is.”
Bush was excited. On March 1, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the September 11 attacks and the killer of Daniel Pearl, a Jewish reporter for the Wall Street Journal slain in Pakistan, was captured in Rawalpindi, the military garrison city near the capital of Islamabad. Bush was asleep at Camp David when Rice was notified. She decided not to wake him. But the capture was the biggest since the war on terror began, and by morning Bush was sharing his enthusiasm with Dan Bartlett.
On the same day, though, Bush got bad news from overseas when the Turkish parliament formally rejected an American request to send forces through its territory into Iraq. Cheney and Rumsfeld blamed Powell for not doing more, while he blamed them for making diplomacy impossible. Regardless, without a northern front, the invasion would have to come entirely from Kuwait in the south, leaving Iraqi forces plenty of room to retreat and regroup.
While the British still stood with Bush, his friend Tony Blair was under increasing pressure. The UN inspectors had not found illicit weapons and if Blair went to war without a second UN resolution, Jack Straw, his foreign secretary, warned him privately on March 5, “the only regime change that will be taking place is in this room.” It did not help that the case against Saddam Hussein took a hit two days later when the International Atomic Energy Agency concluded the documents reporting the supposed Iraq-Niger uranium deal were forgeries. The basis for the president’s claim in the State of the Union had been demolished. The speechwriters had hedged by attributing it to the British, who claimed to have other sources and refused to back off, but it looked dubious.
If the regime was changed in Iraq, the central question was, what would come next? For months, Cheney’s allies had been promoting the idea of a new government headed by Ahmad Chalabi, the exile who had been lobbying Washington for years to get rid of Saddam Hussein. But Bush was uncomfortable with that idea, suspicious of the charismatic opposition leader, and wary of looking as if America were simply installing its own favorites.
Bush waited until just a week before the war was to start to sit down with his team to talk about what would come after Hussein was ousted. Leading the briefing on March 10 was Lieutenant General Jay Garner, a retired officer who had managed relief efforts in northern Iraq after the Gulf War and had been tapped to lead the post-Hussein effort. Garner emphasized the importance of paying Iraq’s soldiers, police officers, and government workers and using the Iraqi military for reconstruction while bringing in international forces to stabilize the country. A plan presented by Garner envisioned demobilizing soldiers and putting them immediately to work in construction brigades. Bush approved.
In a separate presentation the same day, Frank Miller of the NSC staff briefed the president on Iraq’s ruling Baath Party. Miller noted there were 1.5 million official members of the party, but many were simply teachers and public servants who had to join to get jobs. Miller recommended removing between 1 percent and 2 percent of them from their posts, or roughly 25,000 people, the genuine party elite who were part of Hussein’s apparatus of fear. Again, Bush approved, though he expressed concern. “It’s hard to imagine punishing 25,000 people,” he said.
Two days later, on March 12, Bush and Cheney met again with the team to discuss the future of the Iraqi army. At Donald Rumsfeld’s request, Douglas Feith presented Garner’s plan to disband Hussein’s paramilitary forces and Iraq’s premier security units like the Republican Guard and the Special Republican Guard but retain and reconstitute the main army. Three to five divisions would form the nucleus of a new Iraqi army. Feith described the arguments for and against keeping the bulk of the army intact—the utility of having a force to do reconstruction and avoid putting large numbers of armed men out of work versus eliminating a corrupt, abusive, and dysfunctional organization in favor of a completely rebuilt military. No one at the meeting spoke against Garner’s recommendation to keep the army, and Bush approved it.
Feith also presented a plan to form a temporary government called the Iraqi Interim Authority. Because of Bush’s opposition to simply installing Chalabi, the newly envisioned authority running Iraq would include a mix of “externals” and “internals.” The authority would operate under the auspices of the American-led coalition, but at least it would put an Iraqi face on the emerging order and provide a foundation for a future government. Bush agreed to this too.
Bush was still refereeing between Cheney and other members of his team on other fronts. On March 14, Tenet came to him just before the morning intelligence briefing to complain that Cheney was planning to give a speech describing Hussein’s ties to terrorism—essentially the material Colin Powell had thrown out of his UN presentation.
“Mr. President, the vice president wants to make a speech about Iraq and al-Qaeda that goes way beyond what the intelligence shows. We cannot support the speech and it should not be given.”
Whether Bush intervened, Tenet never learned. But Cheney did not give the speech.
WITH THE SECURITY Council vote approaching, Bush was growing frustrated that even friends like Mexico and Chile were planning to abstain or vote no. His frustration was clear all the way down in Texas, when Karen Hughes called to check in to see if he needed help.
“Would you like me to come up there?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Let’s take a vote.”
Rice and Laura Bush were with him, among others.
“What’s the vote?” Hughes asked.