by Peter Baker
That night, he had dinner in the residence again with Laura and Pamela Nelson. His mind was focused thousands of miles away. Before the food arrived, Bush began talking about the stories of atrocities he had heard about Hussein’s Iraq, about the tortures, the rapes, the tongues cut out of mouths. “It was pretty graphic,” Nelson recalled later. As they dined, Laura read aloud from the letter Bush’s father had sent.
AMERICAN AND BRITISH forces stormed into southern Iraq and pushed quickly toward Baghdad. Many of the worst-case scenarios on Donald Rumsfeld’s Parade of Horribles list had not occurred; there was no use of chemical or biological weapons, no massive refugee crisis, no significant attacks bringing Israel into the war, no widespread destruction of the oil fields.
But the troops were meeting resistance. A supply convoy of clerks and cooks was ambushed, leaving several dead and others captured. Irregular Iraqi fighters known as the Fedayeen Saddam played havoc with the Americans in Nasiriyah and elsewhere, disguising themselves as civilians, using children as shields, and pretending to surrender before opening fire. A sandstorm and unanticipated resistance by irregular fighters slowed the advance briefly, and in Washington some of the same concerns about a quagmire that perturbed Bush in the early days of the Afghan war began emerging again.
On the first weekend of the Iraq invasion, Bush headed to Camp David with advisers and friends, hoping to show that he was not obsessing over every incremental development on the battlefield. But in between workouts and walks along the trails, he was glued to television reports from Iraq and talked about little else. “He is just totally immersed,” reported Roland Betts, an old college friend who joined him that weekend.
As the invasion accelerated, the military returned to a long-identified target, the Ansar al-Islam camp in Khurmal in northern Iraq, which was bombarded on March 21, the second day of the war, by sixty-four Tomahawk cruise missiles. A week later, on March 28, Special Forces, accompanying Kurdish Peshmerga fighters, arrived at the scene and took on the remaining extremists in a four-day pitched battle. Reports to Bush and Cheney indicated evidence of a chemical weapons facility. Tests detected traces of cyanide salts, ricin, and potassium chloride, and soldiers found chemical hazard suits and Arabic manuals on chemical munitions. But there was no evidence the group was tied to Hussein’s regime. Worse, the strike did not succeed in taking out Zarqawi.
On March 27, Bush hosted Tony Blair at Camp David, where the two discussed the war. Bush was looking ahead, hoping the invasion would send a signal to other international outliers. Already there were positive signs. Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, the son of Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi, the longtime dictator of Libya, had just approached the United States through British contacts to open a dialogue about his country’s own weapons of mass destruction. The younger Qaddafi indicated that Libya was contemplating a radical rapprochement with the West and that “everything would be on the table,” including renunciation of its weapons program. Bush and Blair debated Qaddafi’s motivations. Was it a ruse or was he serious?
Libya had been moving to settle accounts for some time, including a settlement admitting culpability in the 1988 terrorist bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. It was certainly possible that Qaddafi was watching what was happening in Iraq and determined to avoid Hussein’s fate. “When Bush has finished with Iraq, we’ll quickly have a clear idea of where he’s going,” Qaddafi had said in a typically fiery interview with the French newspaper Le Figaro in which he compared Bush to Adolf Hitler about a week before the invasion. “It won’t take long to find out if Iran, Saudi Arabia, or Libya will be targets as well.”
Bush and Blair agreed to pursue the outreach to see where it would lead, but keep the discussions secret even from many inside their own governments. Only Bush, Cheney, Rice, Tenet, Stephen Hadley, and a couple of others would know. Powell and Rumsfeld would be told only in very general terms that something was going on, and Bush would leave it to the CIA and his own staff to explore the opportunity. “We had a real concern that if we told the Defense Department, it would leak in ten seconds. If we told the State Department, it would leak in five seconds,” Robert Joseph, a National Security Council official tasked with working the issue, said later. “So the goal was to keep it very tightly held.”
The tension between State and Defense escalated as the invasion progressed. On March 31, Rumsfeld confronted Powell, accusing his deputy, Richard Armitage, of “badmouthing the Pentagon all over town.” Powell countered that Rumsfeld’s deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, had clearly been leaking against State, which Rumsfeld denied. The defense secretary was frustrated by the national security team’s fractiousness and thought it was moving too slowly in coming up with a replacement for the day Hussein fell. The next day, April 1, he sent a memo to Bush, Cheney, and the rest of the National Security Council urging them to let him set up an interim government. “We have got to get moving on this,” he wrote. “We can’t afford to have a protracted interagency debate. This is now a matter of operational importance—it is not too much to say that time can cost lives.” A new government would convince many Iraqis that the Americans would not stop until Hussein was truly gone, giving them the courage to side with the invaders. Even though Bush had already ruled out a government made up of exiles like Ahmad Chalabi, the fight was not over.
AS AMERICAN FORCES drove toward Baghdad, Bush and his wife boarded Air Force One on April 3 to fly to Camp Lejeune in North Carolina to visit marines. With reports of renewed momentum in the field, Bush was in an upbeat mood as he climbed a makeshift stage set up on a field ringed by tanks and packed with enthusiastic young men and women in uniform. Camp Lejeune had sent 17,500 marines and sailors to Iraq, with more soon to go.
“There’s no finer sight, no finer sight, than to see 12,000 United States Marines and corpsmen—unless you happen to be a member of the Iraqi Republican Guard,” Bush said to raucous applause. “A vise is closing,” he declared, “and the days of a brutal regime are coming to an end.”
After ribs and macaroni and cheese with troops in the mess hall, the president and first lady went to a chapel annex to meet families of five marines killed in Iraq, his first such session since the invasion began. So far, thirteen troops from Lejeune had been killed, more than any other military installation, and another six were missing. Each family was seated separately, some wearing pictures of their lost relative on their lapels, and the Bushes offered each words of comfort. “He’s in heaven,” the president told the relatives of one slain marine. Two of the marines had left behind children they had never met, babies born after their deployment.
Bush met twin six-week-old girls whose father had been lost. How could he not think about his own twin girls, and all they had meant to him, and how these two babies, these two girls who could be so much like Jenna and Barbara, would never know their father? Bush was teary-eyed by the time he left the chapel and boarded Marine One. Usually after such moments, he would bounce back and regain his upbeat demeanor, but not this day. He sat during the twenty-minute helicopter ride in utter silence, staring out the window the whole time. Ari Fleischer had never seen him quite like that, clearly bothered by “that wrenching realization of a family torn apart, broken up, so similar to his.”
Aides worried about how Bush was holding up. Stephen Hadley had a moment alone with him after a meeting and asked how he was doing.
“I made the decision,” Bush said. “I sleep well at night.”
Despite Bush’s decision not to install a government of exiles, Ahmad Chalabi’s patrons in the Pentagon managed to slip him into Iraq. On the morning of April 5, Powell and Tenet woke to learn that Chalabi and a force of his Free Iraqi Forces had been airlifted to Nasiriyah. Rumsfeld thought the insertion of the Iraqi exiles would be “a useful corrective to the perception that the United States was invading Iraq to occupy the country rather than liberate it.” Powell and Tenet thought it was crazy and undercut the argument that America favored Iraqis choosing their own leaders.
“They’re hooking it up and they’ve got the crane out there,” one of the assistants called to Bush, who had retreated back into the Oval Office.
“Well, let me know,” he said.
“Well, it’s about to come down,” the assistant replied.
So he hustled back out to watch the fateful fall. Looking back on that moment years later, he described himself feeling “overwhelmed with relief and pride.” But others remembered him being more restrained. Eric Draper, his photographer, recalled Bush pausing just for moments to watch the scene. “A second and a half later, he headed back to the Oval,” Draper said. “He really wasn’t interested. He was so focused on certain things, and what may be dramatic to you and I may not be dramatic to him because he was already past it. He’s already thinking ahead.”
In reality, it was a small moment in Baghdad involving only a few hundred people. But the symbolic parallels to such iconic scenes as the liberation of Paris and the fall of the Berlin Wall dominated the media. CNN replayed the toppling of the statue that day on average every 7.5 minutes and Fox News every 4.4 minutes. Bush’s father sent him an e-mail praising his “conviction and determination.” It would be hard for a president not to feel a sense of satisfaction.
Cheney watched in a hotel room in New Orleans, where he had flown to give a speech. By evening, he had returned to Washington and had an unanticipated visit at the White House from Kanan Makiya, the Iraqi exile author who had told him and Bush that Americans would be greeted with “sweets and flowers.”
“Thank you for our liberation,” Makiya said.
Cheney took Makiya down the hall to the Oval Office so he could thank Bush.
Rice arrived in the Oval Office right around then. “You did this,” she congratulated Bush. He did not respond. “He was very much inside his own thoughts,” she noticed.
Liberation, however, proved to be messier than anyone had hoped. Cheney and Makiya were right when they said that Americans would be welcomed as liberators by Iraqis. They were, at first. Long-suffering Iraqis were jubilant at Hussein’s fall. The stories of torture that spilled out in those days after the statue fell made up a Stalinesque tapestry of cruelty. Where Cheney and Makiya got it wrong was presuming the welcome would last or that the joy over Hussein’s overthrow necessarily translated into enduring amity for the overthrowers.
Iraqis had endured a dozen years of international sanctions that Hussein had blamed for widespread malnutrition, disease, and every economic malady. They had been told that a rash of cancers was the result of depleted uranium in American bombs left over from the Gulf War or used to enforce the no-fly zone. Shiites and Kurds were still resentful that after freeing Kuwait, the Americans did nothing to help as Hussein brutally crushed their uprising in 1991. And there was deep-seated suspicion that the Americans had come back not to help them but to take their oil. It did not help that American troops sat by and did little to keep order amid the chaotic scenes following the collapse of the Hussein regime as looters ransacked government buildings. “Stuff happens,” Rumsfeld glibly said. But forces were being set loose that would take years to control.
For the moment, that was lost on the White House team. On April 13, Cheney hosted a small dinner to celebrate the fall of Hussein. The few invited included Scooter Libby, Paul Wolfowitz, and Kenneth Adelman, a longtime friend and aide to Cheney and Rumsfeld who had written in the Washington Post that the invasion of Iraq would be “a cakewalk.” As the vice president welcomed the guests, Adelman surprised him by hugging him, something that generally made Cheney uncomfortable. But emotions were soaring. “We were euphoric,” Adelman recalled. “The mood and feeling were just wonderful. I just thought it was a magical moment.”
Over dinner, the group toasted Bush and victory in Iraq. Cheney was high on his partner. “It is amazing his courage,” the vice president told his guests.
“When do you think this all started?” Adelman asked.
“I am pretty sure it was decided right after 9/11 to go in,” Cheney said, “but it took us all too long if you ask me.”
The group agreed they had rid America of a terrible enemy, demonstrated the capacity of the U.S. military, and created hope of a genuine ally in the heart of the Middle East. Cheney was not as interested in the democracy experiment that absorbed Bush; he was more focused on American security.
As the evening wound up, Adelman interjected the only sour note. “I wonder why we haven’t found WMDs yet,” he ventured.
Libby jumped on him. “Oh, we are going to find them,” he said. “Don’t worry about that.”
“They haven’t found them, because they have been looking for other stuff,” Cheney added.
“Well, if they don’t find them pretty soon,” Adelman said, “people are going to be pretty pissed off.”
WITH HUSSEIN DRIVEN from power and the military engaged in what seemed like mop-up operations, Bush and his team thought the war was all but over. Stephen Hadley even called Richard Armitage to ask how victory parades were organized after the Gulf War.
Tommy Franks was eager for some sort of presidential speech to recognize what his troops had achieved in just a matter of weeks, and Bush wanted to accommodate him.
Joe Hagin came to Bush and told him that the USS Abraham Lincoln was returning to port in San Diego after being deployed longer than any vessel since Vietnam; it seemed like the picture-perfect venue. Bush would fly out to the carrier as it approached the coast and deliver a nationally televised speech from the deck. The idea appealed both to the former Air National Guard pilot in Bush and to his inner political showman.
The setting chosen, the question became what to say. When Michael Gerson wrote a lofty speech inspired by Douglas MacArthur’s remarks on the deck of the USS Missouri ending World War II, it drew plenty of skeptical responses, not least from Rumsfeld. Reading it during his first post-invasion trip to Baghdad, the defense secretary thought the speech “seemed too optimistic” and told the White House to “tone down any triumphalist rhetoric.” Rumsfeld wondered where the talk of democracy came from. “Bringing democracy to Iraq had not been among the primary rationales” of the war, he knew. The only one who talked like that in their numerous Situation Room meetings was Rice, “but it was not clear to me whether she was encouraging the president to use rhetoric about democracy or whether it was originating with the president.” Rumsfeld was not the only one with concerns; Colin Powell and Karen Hughes weighed in too. But for all the attention to the wording of the speech, what the political advisers did not consider deeply enough was the wording of a banner that the White House had printed up at the request of a proud Lincoln crew.
While the White House initially explained that Bush would fly to meet the carrier because it was still too far offshore for a helicopter trip, in fact it had arrived close enough to the West Coast that it had to be repositioned to exclude land from the camera shot. The truth was Bush simply wanted to fly onto the carrier the way a combat pilot did, and his advisers understood the power of the image. To fly to the carrier in an S-3B Viking, Bush and Andy Card had to undergo water-survival training. The president donned an aviator’s flight suit and harness and practiced jumping into the White House swimming pool and removing the gear before touching bottom.
On May 1, Bush flew aboard Air Force One to Naval Air Station North Island in San Diego Bay, where he m
et his pilot. Commander John “Skip” Lussier warned Bush of the inherent dangers of flying a jet onto the deck of a moving ship.
“Ninety-nine point nine percent of the time, everything goes really smoothly,” Lussier told him. “But there’s always that .1 percent chance that something could happen.”
“Luce, you don’t need to worry about that,” Bush said. “We’ve got a great vice president.”
Bush and Lussier soared into the sky aboard the Viking out toward the Pacific. “Mr. President,” Lussier said after a few minutes. “You want the jet?”
Of course he did, excited as a kid to be flying again at four hundred miles per hour, much to the obvious discomfort of the Secret Service agents in the back.
Lussier took the controls back when it came time to land on the Lincoln, hitting the deck at 150 miles per hour and catching the fourth and final cable that brought it to an abrupt halt. Bush emerged in his flight suit looking like an older Tom Cruise from Top Gun. Any political strategist would have killed for the picture of the manly commander in chief. Except that after he changed back into a suit to give his speech, he now shared the picture with the banner requested by the crew: “Mission Accomplished.”
The speech itself was more modulated, after the rewrites Rumsfeld and others insisted on. “My fellow Americans,” Bush said, “major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.” The sailors and airmen applauded. “And now our coalition is engaged in securing and reconstructing that country.” Bush declared that “we’ve removed an ally of al-Qaeda,” once again advancing a claim that overstated the intelligence. But he made sure to add the important caveat that the fighting was not over. “We have difficult work to do in Iraq. We’re bringing order to parts of that country that remain dangerous. We’re pursuing and finding leaders of the old regime, who will be held to account for their crimes.”