by Peter Baker
Cheney pushed back. “We need to let the Israelis finish off Hezbollah,” he argued.
Rice, stunned, scribbled a note to Bush and passed it to him out of sight of the camera. Where has he been for the last two weeks? she wrote.
Bush did not say anything but let Cheney make his argument. Rice suspected the vice president had been talking with the Israelis on his own, bypassing her. She grew angrier.
Rice argued that a resolution at the United Nations was close and it was too late to turn back. They owed it to their friends in Lebanon who were trying to stabilize a country fraught with strife after decades of Syrian occupation.
Cheney pushed again to let Israel continue its operation.
Rice turned to the president. “Do that and you are dead in the Middle East,” she snapped in a voice loud enough to be picked up by the microphones.
Bush thanked everyone and ended the meeting.
Rice followed him out of the trailer. She was exasperated.
“I’ve been out there negotiating a resolution and now we don’t want one?” she asked.
Bush decided to take the night to think about it. The next morning, when Rice wandered over to the main house for breakfast, he handed her a short memo.
“Here’s a copy of something I want you to read,” Bush said. “I’ve already sent it to Dick.”
Rice was surprised. Bush had sat down and written out a strategy paper of his own, siding with Rice and agreeing to pursue a UN resolution calling for a cease-fire and sending in international peacekeepers. The paper outlined the reasons why, largely that Iraq was too important and if the Lebanon War continued, it would put that effort at risk, and that it would jeopardize what slim chances there were of getting a Palestinian state. Perhaps as important, he wrote, how could they stand for democracy in Iraq and allow a young democracy in Lebanon to be destroyed?
With Bush’s support over Cheney’s objections, the cease-fire in Lebanon went into effect August 14, ending the war after thirty-four days. The debate over video link that day in Crawford increasingly represented the pattern of national security meetings as Rice asserted herself more and Cheney found himself on defense. On issue after issue, they would preface their remarks with acknowledgments of their fundamental disconnect. Cheney would open by saying, “It won’t surprise you that I disagree with Condi on this one.” And Rice would say, “This is about diplomacy, so the vice president won’t want to do it.” They had become the two poles of the second-term foreign policy. “He is a natural debater and so am I,” Rice recalled. “So we would just go at it right there in front of the president. But it was not nasty or personal.” Her relationship with Bush gave her an advantage. “It made a difference when you have a secretary of state who’s at Camp David every single weekend,” noted Michael Gerson. Or, as in the case of the Lebanon War, at the ranch outside Crawford.
For Cheney, the question was less about his own diminishing influence than the gnawing sense that Bush was losing his will. Clearly some of the shift was due to Bush growing more comfortable in the job and more confident in his own judgments, no longer so reliant on the experience his vice president brought to the table. But Cheney thought Bush was letting outside criticism get to him and undermine his faith in the direction the two had taken together in the first term. Bush was listening to Rice, who had become a captive of the pin-striped foreign service set that had never subscribed to administration policies. “It wasn’t personal,” said Liz Cheney. “He was frustrated that the policy decisions were wrong.”
While the vice president maintained a deferential respect for Bush, the people around him engaged in long discussions about when exactly the president changed. Some thought it was as far back as 2003 when it became clear Iraq did not have banned weapons and Bush grew disenchanted with the path Cheney had led him down. Others pointed to the fight over reauthorizing the surveillance program when Bush felt blindsided, or the “last throes” comment when the vice president looked out of touch, or even the shooting accident. And then there were some close to the vice president who pointed to Lebanon, seeing it as a metaphor for Bush’s drift from his own record—the president who defied world opinion to take down the dictator of Baghdad was now more intent on currying favor with foreign leaders than doing what was right and standing by Israel against terrorists.
OUTSIDE THE WHITE House, Bush found himself targeted not only by liberals but even by fellow conservatives disenchanted with Iraq and nervous about upcoming midterm elections. On the morning of August 15, Joe Scarborough, a former Republican congressman now hosting a talk show on MSNBC, grilled guests about whether “George Bush’s mental weakness is damaging America’s credibility at home and abroad,” while the bottom of the screen flashed the caption “IS BUSH AN ‘IDIOT’?” Other pundits normally sympathetic to the president were jumping ship. Rich Lowry, editor of National Review, wrote that “success in Iraq seems more out of reach than it has at any time since the initial invasion,” blaming “the administration’s on-again-off-again approach.” Quin Hillyer, executive editor of the American Spectator, added that “we seem not to be winning” and that the administration could not “credibly claim that victory in Iraq is achievable” until it took on militia leaders like Moqtada al-Sadr. George Will, the syndicated columnist, mocked neoconservative aspirations to transform the Middle East.
The White House responded to Will by e-mailing supporters a 2,432-word rebuttal by Peter Wehner—three times as long as the original column—arguing that Will’s version of stability meant not confronting oppression and radicalism and “would eventually lead to death and destruction on a scale that is almost unimaginable.” But behind the scenes, Wehner was among those in the White House most vocal about the mistakes in Iraq, taking it so personally that he was physically sick and having trouble sleeping at night. To colleagues who blamed media negativity, Wehner argued that “Iraq was not a communications problem, it was a facts-on-the-ground problem.” Finally, that August, he took it upon himself to send a memo to Joshua Bolten arguing that Bush should get rid of Rumsfeld. Bolten invited him for a forty-five-minute conversation about the war. Even if the strategy was changed, Wehner told him, no one would perceive it as change as long as Rumsfeld was there. He suggested someone like James Baker, Joseph Lieberman, or Fred Thompson.
Bush returned from Texas more skeptical of his defense chief as well. For inspiration, he had been reading Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power, by Richard Carwardine, one of fourteen Lincoln biographies he would read during his presidency. Like Bush, Lincoln had issues with generals and struggled to find the right balance between empowering them and imposing his judgment when he thought they were wrong. Under Bush’s hands-off approach, Rumsfeld had gotten himself caught in a similarly vicious circle. He had so emphasized the need to transform the military to a lighter, more agile force that when he asked commanders if they needed more troops in Iraq—and he had asked on numerous occasions—the answer came back no, perhaps because the generals had come to internalize his transformation goals or because they assumed they knew the answer he wanted. George Casey said he later found out that junior officers held back making requests. “They weren’t pushing things up because they didn’t think they’d get approved,” he said.
If the generals were not asking for troops, Rumsfeld was not about to overrule them. For all the complaints about his overbearing leadership, on this question he had become all too willing to accept “no, sir.” One close aide to the secretary thought that after five years of being called a bully, Rumsfeld had grown gun-shy about pushing too hard in questioning the military’s conclusions lest he fuel the still-simmering generals’ revolt. Another aide, though, thought the eagerness to transition and withdraw reflected Rumsfeld’s own ambivalence. “I’m not sure Rumsfeld believed in the Iraq War,” the aide said later. “You can tell by his body language.”
The responsibility lay not just with Rumsfeld. Casey and John Abizaid genuinely believed the occupation itself was a spark for the in
surgency and so the more the Americans could pull back and put an Iraqi face on the security force, the sooner violence would ebb. For more than two years, Bush had accepted that. But no longer. The president gathered with his national security team on August 17, meeting in the Roosevelt Room because the Situation Room was under renovation. Casey, who, like Abizaid and Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, was participating from Iraq via secure video, reported on Operation Together Forward II, the latest effort to secure Baghdad, and said he hoped to turn over security in the capital to the Iraqis by the end of the year.
Bush and Cheney both seemed unconvinced. Over a video link from Wyoming, the vice president asked what could be done to reduce the number of attacks and suggested American forces take on a bigger role, not scale back.
“The situation seems to be deteriorating,” Bush said. “I want to be able to say that I have a plan to punch back. Can America succeed? If so, how? How do our commanders answer that?”
Casey maintained that transferring responsibility to the Iraqis faster was key.
Rumsfeld agreed, saying America must “help them help themselves.”
Bush found that unsatisfactory. “We must succeed,” he said. “If they can’t do it, we will. If the bicycle teeters, we’re going to put the hand back on. We have to make damn sure we do not fail.”
The bicycle analogy was a direct shot at Rumsfeld, who for years had said the United States needed to take its hand off the bicycle seat so the Iraqis could learn to ride on their own. Just like that, Bush made eminently clear that he no longer bought the Rumsfeld-Abizaid-Casey approach. He was so pointed during the conversation that Cheney from Wyoming felt the need to offer praise for Casey and Khalilzad so it would not be taken personally. Bush agreed, saying he supported them “100 percent,” but stressed the need to challenge their thinking. “These are difficult times,” he said. “We need to ask some difficult questions.”
After the meeting, Bush authorized Stephen Hadley to formalize the strategy review already coming together. And if the strategy was to be changed, it followed that there should be changes at the top. It was a telling sign of Bush’s anxiety over Iraq that he was finally ready to replace Rumsfeld after years of resisting the advice of even his closest advisers. He respected Rumsfeld and hated tossing overboard a loyal member of his team, particularly one whose ouster would be taken as an acknowledgment of how far off course his presidency had drifted. He hated the satisfaction it would give his critics. But so much was at stake there was little choice.
One solace through much of this period had been the economy. While Bush got little credit for it because of Iraq, 2006 had seen strong growth and falling unemployment and inflation despite fears of recession. But growth was slowing, down from a robust 5.6 percent in the first quarter to half that in the second, and the housing boom that had fueled the economy now appeared at risk. The day after pushing back on Iraq, Bush gathered advisers at Camp David for a long discussion of the economy, led by the newly sworn-in Treasury secretary, Henry Paulson.
Paulson, in his debut, noted economic history and warned that a disruption was due. “We can’t predict when the next crisis will come,” he told Bush. “But we need to be prepared.” As he would later note with chagrin, he correctly foresaw a crisis but not the cause; his presentation made little mention of problems in the overheating housing market.
THE PRESIDENT AND the widow sat on two frayed chairs in a teachers’ lounge, just the two of them, so close their knees were almost touching. Bush listened in pain as she held him responsible for her husband’s death and begged him to bring home the troops.
“It’s time to put our pride behind us and stop the bleeding,” she told Bush.
He demurred, unwilling to debate a mourning widow. “We see things differently,” he said simply.
As she mentioned two children left fatherless and tears rolled down her face, his eyes welled up too. He hugged her, held her face, kissed her cheek. “I am so sorry for your loss,” he kept repeating.
It was August 24. Bush had flown to Kennebunkport, but before heading off for some fishing with his father, he met with relatives of slain soldiers in a local elementary school. One was Hildi Halley, whose husband had died in Afghanistan.
While the public saw Bush’s swagger, his private meetings with families that had lost sons and daughters and husbands and wives revealed a different side, one kept out of the media. Typically in such encounters, Bush sat down with each family separately, joined only by a single aide, usually his deputy chief of staff, Joe Hagin. He offered commemorative coins, posed for photographs, or signed autographs, depending on what they wanted. “I do the best I can to cry with them or, you know, laugh with them if they wanna laugh, and hug them,” he said. It took a toll. After such meetings, he was drained.
By this point, Bush had served as a wartime president longer than any occupant of the White House since Lyndon Johnson and had presided over more American military casualties than any since Richard Nixon. He avoided military funerals and eschewed public displays that might be seen as weak or doubtful, even when he felt weak and doubtful. Yet he was conscious not to appear indifferent either, giving up golf, except for chipping in the privacy of Camp David, as long as young men and women were dying on his orders. To many of the military relatives who met with him, the private Bush came across as personally tormented by their grief. Laura Bush always knew when her husband had visited the wounded or relatives of the slain because he was uncharacteristically silent, what she called “a deafening kind of quiet.” One look at his face told the story. “The grief shone in his eyes,” she said.
Meeting with the wounded and the relatives of the dead might have eroded another leader’s commitment and convinced him to reverse course. But Bush took the opposite message—in large part because Hildi Halley was the exception. “The number of people that would really say we have to get out, it was a very, very, very small number of people,” said Hagin. “By far and away, the most prominent emotion was, they would sort of set their jaw and say, ‘Don’t let my son have died in vain.’ ” One mother of a slain soldier told Bush, “He did his job. Now you do yours.”
For Bush, withdrawing troops before Iraq was secure would mean admitting their sons and daughters had indeed died in vain, and that was something he just could not let happen.
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“Don’t let this be your legacy”
President Bush was unwilling to give ground on Iraq, but he was more open to strategic retreats elsewhere, much to Vice President Cheney’s consternation. One of the most heated debates of the second term took place one August day as the president and the vice president finally confronted the issue of what to do about the secret prisons holding terror suspects overseas. “We had just a huge blood-on-the-floor fight,” one official recalled.
The meeting in the Roosevelt Room came almost a year after the Washington Post wrote about the so-called black-site prisons and two months after the Supreme Court ruled that the Geneva Conventions applied to al-Qaeda prisoners. It was a time of flux for the interrogation and detention program cobbled together so hastily in the days after the planes hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Bush was faced with taking what was effectively a stopgap system and making it acceptable to courts and Congress.
Michael Hayden, who as NSA director had already pushed the boundaries of counterterrorism with the controversial surveillance program, had spent much of the summer as CIA director getting up to speed on the agency’s handling of prisoners and decided he wanted to preserve at least part of the interrogation program that many called torture. “I want to keep some of it even if it is just the ambiguity, you know, that they don’t know,” he told Stephen Hadley that August. Of thirteen harsh interrogation techniques in the original program, he asked to keep seven. Ultimately, he was allowed to keep six. But he believed it was time to empty the overseas CIA prisons and bring the detainees to Guantánamo, where they would have the same rights as other captives.
Condole
ezza Rice also favored closing the secret prisons. They were never as extensive as some thought: fewer than a hundred detainees had been kept in them at various points over the years, fewer than a third of those had been subjected to the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques, and just three had been waterboarded, none since March 2003. But she thought they had taken a disproportionate toll on the nation’s image. Everywhere she traveled, she saw an image of America reflected back that was dark and sinister, a place that sounded more like those she had studied years earlier as a Soviet scholar. She did not want to repudiate the decisions made in the early days of the war on terror, when circumstances warranted tough actions. But this was nearly five years later, and like her effort to promote more diplomacy following the Iraq invasion, she felt it was time to recalibrate.
Hadley agreed. The legal, ethical, and security landscapes had changed since the original interrogation and detention policies were put in place. What might have been acceptable at a moment of maximum danger no longer seemed necessary, especially since American intelligence agencies had learned so much more about al-Qaeda by this point and were better positioned to fight the war. Moreover, both Congress and the Supreme Court had weighed in, shifting the ground underneath them. As the president and his team took their seats in the Roosevelt Room that day, Hadley orchestrated the meeting “just like a conductor with a baton,” as one person in the room recalled.
Rice gave an impassioned speech. The attacks had happened on our watch, she said, so the perpetrators should be tried on our watch. “Democracies don’t disappear people,” she said.
Hayden, beaming into the meeting from a secure video connection in Key West, where he was on a brief break, backed Rice. “Mr. President, I think we have to empty the sites,” he said. “We are not the nation’s jailers.”
Cheney strongly disagreed. For some in the room, it was the first time they had ever heard him speak directly on an issue.