by Peter Baker
“How’s your boy?” Bush asked when he found Webb.
“I’d like to get them out of Iraq, Mr. President,” Webb responded brusquely.
“That’s not what I asked you,” Bush responded. “How’s your boy?”
“That’s between me and my boy, Mr. President,” Webb replied coldly.
IN THE DAYS after the thumpin’, Karl Rove pored over the numbers like a forensic scientist, sifting them for evidence that the election was not a repudiation of the president, no matter what everyone else thought. Anyone who wandered into his windowless West Wing office with four Abraham Lincoln portraits would get the riff. “Get me the one-pager!” he would cry out to an aide.
The one-pager, a single sheet of paper filled with a stream of numbers, made the case that Bush was not at fault. Of the twenty-eight House seats Republicans lost, ten were due to individual scandals, Rove concluded. Another six were lost because incumbents did not recognize and react to the threat quickly enough. That left twelve other lost seats, fewer than the fifteen that Democrats needed to capture the House. So without corruption and complacency, Rove argued, Republicans could have kept control despite Bush’s troubles and the war. “The Republican philosophy is alive and well and likely to reemerge in the majority in 2008,” Rove declared.
Rove had a point. Anyone who thought 2006 represented a lasting shift in American political philosophy was overreading the results, and it was true that corruption scandals had taken a toll. Still, disenchantment with Bush and the war was hardly a minor issue. Exit polls found that 36 percent of those casting ballots said they were voting to oppose Bush, compared with just 22 percent who were voting to support him, a differential that clearly hurt Republican incumbents in close races. Overall, 57 percent of the voting public disapproved of Bush’s handling of his job. Those numbers were almost identical with those on Iraq, with 56 percent disapproving of the war and 55 percent favoring withdrawal of some or all troops.
One unlikely source of advice for Bush following the midterm debacle was his predecessor. In the weeks after the election, Bush found himself talking with Bill Clinton about the nature of partisanship in Washington and the opportunities of the presidency. An unlikely friendship was developing. “He would call every now and then,” Clinton said later. “We would talk. I just made it a project. I wanted to figure him out and get to know him.” In their talks after the midterm elections, Bush complained that no matter how much he wanted to work with the other party, the structural forces of Washington tore them apart—the cable shout-a-thons that encouraged conflict, the congressional leadership organizations that enforced party-line discipline, the rapid-response units that churned out acid e-mails long after campaign season. The mere discussion of bipartisan collaboration, Bush lamented, was seen as a betrayal of principle. Not that Bush was above partisanship. He had just come off a campaign where he had suggested the other party opposed going after terrorists. But now he faced a Congress of another party, much as Clinton had after the midterm elections of 1994.
Bush had no intention of compromising with Democrats on Iraq. With the election over, he ordered Hadley to merge the White House review with those at the Pentagon and State Department. Hadley put his deputy, J. D. Crouch, in charge. Crouch convened hours-long meetings in a conference room named for Cordell Hull in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the White House. The discussion focused at first not on troop levels but on the broader environment. They debated whether Americans were material or immaterial to the fighting going on; in other words, could they really influence the situation, and if so, how? Should they focus on protecting the civilian population, as Lieutenant General David Petraeus described in his new counterinsurgency manual, rather than just killing the enemy and retreating at night to large bases? Everyone agreed that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki needed to commit to going after Shia militias, not just Sunni insurgents.
A few days into the review, Hadley dropped by to make clear that whatever they produced, one option had to be a surge of additional troops. Everyone understood this to be where Bush was headed. But other options were debated as well. Zelikow and Satterfield had developed the “ring around the fire” approach that Rice had articulated—pull American troops out of Baghdad while Iraqi forces dealt with the sectarian violence and intervene only to stop mass slaughter. Cheney’s national security adviser, John Hannah, presented a paper suggesting the United States had been too eager to woo the disgruntled Sunni minority and perhaps it was better to invest in the Shia and Kurds, a scenario dubbed the “bet on Shiite” approach or the “80 percent solution” after their combined proportion of the population. Hannah had not shown the paper to Cheney but assumed he would agree.
Either way, the military hierarchy, influenced by John Abizaid and George Casey, strongly resisted more troops, viewing it as just worsening the problem. Lieutenant General Douglas Lute, representing the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Crouch’s meetings, presented a memo arguing for an accelerated transition and withdrawal, essentially doubling down on the current approach. Crouch, remembering the William Luti study, asked Lute if the military could hypothetically add five brigades. Lute argued no.
During a break, Brett McGurk asked Lute if it was truly impossible.
“You could do it,” he replied. “You just won’t have an American army left. So you know, it’s kind of up to you.”
BUSH GATHERED HIS national security team at 5:00 p.m. on November 26, the Sunday after Thanksgiving. He picked the Solarium, a hideaway on the third floor of the White House residence with windows on three sides, olive walls, a magnificent view of the Washington Monument, and a cozier feeling than many rooms in the aging mansion. It had seen its share of history, most famously Dwight Eisenhower’s sessions rethinking the Cold War. John F. Kennedy used it as a schoolroom for his daughter, Caroline. Richard Nixon told his family in that room that he would resign the presidency. Ronald Reagan recuperated from his attempted assassination there. Bill Clinton used it to prepare for grand jury testimony in the Monica Lewinsky case. Bush, on the other hand, had rarely used it. Rice, who spent more time in the residence than probably any other adviser, had never seen it before. But Bush hoped to shake things up.
The meeting opened with a briefing by Crouch, who presented a dozen or so slides outlining his team’s assessment of where things stood in Iraq. Perhaps the most important was “Key Assumptions,” summarizing how the staff had revisited its previous theories to discover that they were no longer true, and some maybe never had been. In the past, the chart read, the White House believed that “political progress will help defuse the insurgency.” Now it concluded that “political and economic progress are unlikely absent a basic level of security.” In the past, the White House assumed the “majority of Iraqis will support the Coalition and Iraqi efforts to build a democratic state.” Now, it read, Iraqis were “increasingly disillusioned with Coalition efforts.” The chart indicated the White House wrongly assumed that dialogue with insurgent groups would reduce violence, that other countries in the region had a strategic interest in a stable Iraq, and that Iraqi security forces were gaining strength. Instead, dialogue had not worked, Arab states had not fully supported the Iraqi government, and many Iraqi forces were “not yet ready to handle” the security threat. There on a single page was a revolution in thinking by the Bush team and a remarkable turnaround for a president loath to admit mistakes. Now the question was what to do with the new assumptions.
O’Sullivan had been assigned to prepare the part of the briefing titled “Emerging Consensus” and thought it was “the hardest and worst memo I ever wrote” because, as she told Hadley, “there is no emerging consensus.” In the Solarium that evening, Crouch took what she had prepared and said that changing the dynamics on the ground in Iraq “may take additional forces.” But the lack of consensus quickly became apparent. After all of their clashes over the years, Rice and Donald Rumsfeld, who was a lame duck pending Robert Gates’s confirmation hearings, found thems
elves on the same side opposing a surge, although they advocated different alternatives.
As he had all along, Rumsfeld maintained it would be up to the Iraqis to solve the problem. “The Iraqis need to pull up their socks,” he said, a phrase he repeated at least three times by another participant’s count. Hedging his bets, Rumsfeld allowed that if more forces were needed temporarily, then the president should do that. But he argued that more forces by themselves were not going to help unless they were doing something concrete. Otherwise, he said, “you are just sending more targets over there.”
For her part, Rice again advanced the pullback strategy developed by Zelikow and Satterfield and challenged the notion of American forces providing population security. “So are we now responsible for the security of the Iraqi population or is that the job of their government?” she asked.
The conversation lasted roughly two hours—more informal yet more intense than a Situation Room meeting. Hadley argued something had to be done to stop the violence, while General Peter Pace, the Joint Chiefs chairman, expressed skepticism that the military could pull off what was being asked. Bush let the debate play out, interjecting questions but not tipping his hand. “That meeting is where the elephants finally threw up on the table,” Crouch said later. “In other words, they finally expressed their views in front of the president. Everybody knew this was the moment—speak now or forever hold your peace.”
Bush made no decision, and Crouch and O’Sullivan left deeply discouraged. “I sort of walked out of that meeting a little bit with my tail between my legs, because it seemed like a morass of contrary views,” Crouch said. O’Sullivan thought the meeting “went horrendously” and worried no real change would result. Playing it over in her mind, she decided to stop at a grocery store on the way home. When she made it into the parking lot, her phone rang. It was Dan Bartlett, who wanted to take her temperature.
“How do you think the meeting went?” he asked.
“It is an impending disaster,” she said. “Things are being seriously misrepresented to the president.”
The two talked for forty-five minutes while the heater in her car ran. She explained they had analyzed a surge and believed it could work. All the alternatives, she said, were much worse, and their current path was catastrophic. When they finally hung up, O’Sullivan discovered her car battery had died.
BUSH KNEW no new strategy would work unless the Iraqis stepped up, and he flew to Amman, Jordan, to meet with Nouri al-Maliki. The meeting was already awkward because Hadley’s memo disparaging Maliki had shown up in the New York Times, in what many in the White House assumed was a Pentagon leak designed to deflect blame for the deteriorating situation.
Maliki surprised Bush with his own plan for salvaging the war, handing him a PowerPoint document with the seal of the Iraqi government on the cover. Maliki proposed adding four more Iraqi brigades to Baghdad while American troops moved out of the city. He would take charge of reimposing security on the capital. Bush instantly deemed the idea impractical because Iraqi security forces were not up to the task, but he was impressed by the desire to lead.
Bush asked to see Maliki alone, and the two slipped away with their translators.
“The political pressure to abandon Iraq is enormous,” Bush told him. “But I am willing to resist that pressure if you are willing to make the hard choices.”
For the first time, Bush embraced a surge. “I’m willing to commit tens of thousands of additional American troops to help you retake Baghdad. But you need to give me certain assurances.”
Maliki had to promise that Iraqi forces would be evenhanded, challenging Shia as well as Sunni militants, including the powerful Moqtada al-Sadr. Maliki also had to stop interfering with American military operations. Maliki agreed. It was a major turning point. As Bush boarded Air Force One for the flight home, he had all but decided that he would send more troops. Now he had to figure out how to bring along the rest of his government.
On December 6, Bush and Cheney hosted the Iraq Study Group, a bipartisan collection of elder statesmen assigned by Congress to recommend a way forward in the war. It was headed by James Baker, one of the prime architects of the first Bush presidency and the operative who helped ensure the ascension of the second, and Lee Hamilton, the former Democratic congressman and 9/11 commission vice chairman. “The situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating,” read the first line of the group’s report. The report outlined a path to what Hamilton would later call “a responsible exit.” It recommended opening a new dialogue with Iran and Syria, intensifying Middle East peace efforts, and, most critically, withdrawing all combat forces from Iraq by the first quarter of 2008. In essence, the study group had picked up the Rumsfeld-Abizaid-Casey plan for transferring responsibility to the Iraqis.
“We’re not giving you this report to vex you or embarrass you,” the former senator Alan Simpson, Cheney’s close friend who served on the panel, told the president. These were serious recommendations, and Simpson said he hoped Bush would look at them.
“Oh, I will,” Bush said.
Simpson turned to Cheney. “Now you read this, Richard Bruce,” Simpson said.
“I will,” Cheney said.
Cheney, typically, held his own counsel, although no one in the room thought he agreed with the report. Bush, on the other hand, asked questions and seemed to listen. “While I knew he was not entirely sympathetic with some of the things we were saying,” recalled Leon Panetta, a Democratic member who would go on to serve as CIA director and defense secretary after Bush left office, “I felt in the least, especially considering where the war was at that point, that he would think pretty seriously about what we had to say.”
For all his politeness, though, Bush had already moved well beyond what the study group was recommending, and Cheney dismissed the report, saying it “was not a strategy for winning the war.” Baker tried to help, privately urging Bush aides to read this page of the report, where the panel said in passing that it could “support a short-term redeployment or surge of American combat forces to stabilize Baghdad” on the way to the early 2008 withdrawal.
The next morning, December 7, Bush was to see Tony Blair and then jointly address reporters. But when Cheney saw the text of the president’s opening remarks, he noticed the word “victory” had been taken out of an earlier draft.
“Mr. President, you can’t refuse to talk about winning,” he said. “That will be a huge signal that you no longer believe in victory.”
Bush agreed and used the word “victory” at the news conference. He tried to finesse the Iraq Study Group report, calling it “worthy of serious study” and insisting he too wanted troops to come home even if he did not accept the study group’s timetable. “I’ve always said we’d like our troops out as fast as possible,” he said.
But he bristled when a reporter asked if he was “still in denial about how bad things are in Iraq.”
He glared at the reporter. “It’s bad in Iraq,” he said sharply. “Does that help?”
At 4:00 that afternoon, Cheney and Rice debated Iraq strategy at a national security meeting without Bush. Cheney argued that the outcome mattered too much to simply withdraw and let Iraqis fight among themselves. But Rice remained opposed to a troop buildup. “I was really skeptical of whether a surge was really going to work,” she explained later. “If we were going to use the same old strategies, we were just going to get more people killed.”
The depth of Bush’s political problems became clearer that evening as a Republican senator rose on the floor without warning to deliver an anguished speech breaking with the White House over the war. Senator Gordon Smith of Oregon, a quiet, self-effacing moderate who had “tried to be a good soldier,” had grown disaffected. He had read John Keegan’s history of World War I and was haunted by its lessons. Next he read Fiasco, the history of the first years of the Iraq War by Thomas E. Ricks. That winter morning, he woke up, turned on the news, and saw reports of more American soldiers killed in Iraq.
“I for one am at the end of my rope when it comes to supporting a policy that has our soldiers patrolling the same streets in the same way and being blown up by the same bombs day after day,” Smith said on the floor. “That is absurd. It may even be criminal. I cannot support that anymore.” A fellow Republican senator called it “a tipping point”—exactly what Bush feared. Republican support for Bush and the war was fraying.
WHEN CHENEY SHOWED UP for an Iraq meeting the next day, December 8, he was disturbed to see that instead of presenting Bush with a crisp choice, the formal agenda papered over the differences he had with Rice. But the real tension during that meeting came between Bush and the woman who was supplanting Cheney as his most influential adviser. Rice made the case that any additional commitment by the United States might be pointless unless Iraqi leaders stepped up.
If they did not want to secure their own population, she argued, why should the United States?
Bush grew testy. “So what’s your plan, Condi?” he snapped. “We’ll just let them kill each other, and we’ll stand by and try to pick up the pieces?”
Rice was offended at the suggestion she was less committed to winning. “No, Mr. President,” she shot back. “We just can’t win by putting our forces in the middle of their blood feud. If they want to have a civil war we’re going to have to let them.”
Others in the room were stunned at the confrontation. In Bush’s nearly six years in office, they had never seen Bush and Rice bark at each other. The heated exchange revealed just how deeply the war had scarred all of them. Bush seemed desperate for a Hail Mary pass to salvage a deteriorating situation, while Rice seemed to despair that it was too late.
Still angry, Rice followed Bush back to the Oval Office afterward.
“You know that’s not what I mean,” she told him. “No one has been more committed to winning in Iraq than I have.”
Bush had cooled down. “I know, I know,” he said softly.