Bush At War

by Bob Woodward

Bush glanced at Rice. "Or North Korea," he quickly added. "Let me talk about North Korea." But he seemed to mean Iraq also. Iraq, North Korea and Iran were the "axis of evil" he had identified in his State of the Union speech.

  The president sat forward in his chair. I thought he might jump up he became so emotional as he spoke about the North Korean leader.

  "I loathe Kim Jong II!" Bush shouted, waving his finger in the air. "I've got a visceral reaction to this guy, because he is starving his people. And I have seen intelligence of these prison camps - they're huge - that he uses to break up families, and to torture people. I am appalled at the ..."

  I asked if he had seen the overhead satellite photography of the prison camps provided by the U.S. intelligence agencies?

  "Yes, it appalls me." He wondered how the civilized world could stand by and coddle the North Korean president as he starves his people. "It is visceral. Maybe it's my religion, maybe it's my - but I feel passionate about this." He said he also realized that the North Koreans had massive military might poised to overrun the U.S. ally South Korea.

  "I'm not foolish," the president continued. "They tell me, we don't need to move too fast, because the financial burdens on people will be so immense if we try to - if this guy were to topple. Who would take care of - I just don't buy that. Either you believe in freedom, and want to - and worry about the human condition, or you don't."

  In case I didn't get the message, he added, "And I feel that way about the people of Iraq, by the way." He said that Saddam was starving his people in the outlying Shiite areas. "There is a human condition that we must worry about.

  "As we think through Iraq, we may or may not attack. I have no idea, yet. But it will be for the objective of making the world more peaceful."

  In Afghanistan, he said, "I wanted us to be viewed as the liberator."

  I asked him specifically about the time in late October 2001 when he had told his war cabinet that a coalition was held together not by consultations as much as by strong American leadership that would force the rest of the world to adjust.

  "Well," the president said, "you can't talk your way to a solution to a problem. And the United States is in a unique position right now. We are the leader. And a leader must combine the ability to listen to others, along with action.

  "I believe in results. If I said it once, I said, I know the world is watching carefully, would be impressed and will be impressed with results achieved. It's like earning capital in many ways. It is a way for us to earn capital in a coalition that can be fragile. And the reason it will be fragile is that there is resentment toward us.

  "I mean, you know, if you want to hear resentment, just listen to the word unilateralism. I mean, that's resentment. If somebody wants to try to say something ugly about us, 'Bush is a unilateralist, America is unilateral.' You know, which I find amusing. But I'm also - I've been to meetings where there's a kind of 'we must not act until we're all in agreement.' "

  Bush said he didn't think agreement was the issue, and I was surprised at the sweep of his next statement.

  "Well, we're never going to get people all in agreement about force and use of force," he declared, suggesting that an international coalition or the United Nations were probably not viable ways to deal with dangerous, rogue states. "But action - confident action that will yield positive results provides kind of a slipstream into which reluctant nations and leaders can get behind and show themselves that there has been - you know, something positive has happened toward peace."

  Bush said a president deals with lots of tactical, day-to-day battles on budgets and congressional resolutions, but he sees his job and responsibilities as much larger. His father had with some regularity derided the notion of a "vision" or "the vision thing" as unhelpful. So I was also surprised when the younger Bush said, "The job is - the vision thing matters. That's another lesson I learned."

  His vision clearly includes an ambitious reordering of the world through preemptive and, if necessary, unilateral action to reduce suffering and bring peace.

  During the interview, the president spoke a dozen times about his "instincts" or his "instinctive" reactions, including his statement, "I'm not a textbook player, I'm a gut player." It's pretty clear that Bush's role as politician, president and commander in chief is driven by a secular faith in his instincts - his natural and spontaneous conclusions and judgments. His instincts are almost his second religion.

  When I specifically asked about Powell's contributions, the president offered a tepid response. "Powell is a diplomat," Bush responded. "And you've got to have a diplomat. I kind of picture myself as a pretty good diplomat, but nobody else does. You know, particularly, I wouldn't call me a diplomat. But, nevertheless, he is a diplomatic person who has got war experience."

  Did Powell want private meetings? I asked.

  "He doesn't pick up the phone and say, I need to come and see you," Bush said. He confirmed that he did have private meetings with Powell which Rice also attended. "Let me think about Powell. I got one. He was very good with Musharraf. He single-handedly got Musharraf on board. He was very good about that. He saw the notion of the need to put a coalition together."

  "I'LL GIVE YOU a tour," the president proposed after two hours and 25 minutes. We walked outside, and he climbed behind the wheel of his pickup truck and motioned me toward the passenger side. Rice and a female Secret Service agent squeezed into the cramped passenger back seat. Barney, his Scottie dog, parked himself between us in the front and was soon in his master's lap.

  We wound slightly down from the flatlands into a small valley, where surprising rock formations probably 60 to 100 feet high could be seen in the distance. The president took each turn in the gravel road slowly, savoring the expanse. He provided a commentary on the trees and land, the deep forest areas and open plains. He noted downed trees that would need to be chopped up or patches of forest that seemed thriving, or where he himself had cleared cedars, a nonnative tree that takes precious water and light from nearby oaks and other hardwoods.

  He seemed to have a particular destination in mind as he tucked the truck into a hidden corner of trees and stopped. We got out, having come perhaps two miles across his property. Rice said she was not going to get out because she did not have the right shoes. The Secret Service agent did not follow, so the president and I walked alone toward a wooden bridge about 20 yards away.

  As we crossed it, a giant limestone rock formation maybe 40 yards across loomed above us, nearly white in color, shaped like a half-moon, with a steep overhang. It looked as if a mammoth seashell had grown out of the Texas canyon. A tiny natural waterfall tumbled from the center of the overhang. The rock looked ancient, as old as the Roman catacombs. The air had a sweet, pungent smell that I could not identify. Bush started tossing rocks at the overhang, and I briefly joined in.

  As we walked back, Bush again brought up Iraq. His blueprint or model for decision making in any war against Iraq, he told me, could be found in the story I was attempting to tell - the first months of the war in Afghanistan and the largely invisible CIA covert war against terrorism worldwide.

  "You have the story," he said. Look hard at what you've got, he seemed to be saying. It was all there if it was pieced together - what he had learned, how he had settled into the presidency, his focus on large goals, how he made decisions, why he provoked his war cabinet and pressured people for action.

  I was straining to understand the meaning of this. At first, this remark and what he had said before seemed to suggest he was leaning toward an attack on Iraq. Earlier in the interview, however, he had said, "I'm the kind of person that wants to make sure that all risk is assessed. But a president is constantly analyzing, making decisions based upon risk, particularly in war - risk taken relative to what can be achieved." What he wanted to achieve seemed clear: He wanted Saddam out.

  Before he got back in his truck, Bush added another piece to the Iraq puzzle. He had not yet seen a successful plan for Iraq, he said. He had to be
careful and patient.

  "A president," he added, "likes to have a military plan that will be successful."

  "CHENEY SAYS PERIL of a Nuclear Iraq Justifies Attack," Powell read in The New York Times from his vacation the morning of August 27. It was the lead story. The vice president had given a hard-line speech the day before, declaring that weapons inspections were basically futile. "A return of inspectors would provide no assurance whatsoever of his compliance with U.N. resolutions," Cheney had said. "On the contrary, there is a great danger that it would provide false comfort that Saddam was somehow 'back in his box.' " He gave voice to his deep concerns about weapons of mass destruction that the war cabinet had heard many times. In the hands of a "murderous dictator" these weapons are "as grave a threat as can be imagined. The risks of inaction are far greater than the risk of action." Cheney's speech was widely interpreted as administration policy. The tone was harsh and unforgiving. It mentioned consultations with allies but did not invite other countries to join a coalition.

  Powell was astonished. It seemed like a preemptive attack on what he thought had been agreed to 10 days earlier - to give the U.N. a chance. In addition, the swipe at weapons inspections was contrary to Bush's year-long assertions that the next step should be to let the weapons inspectors back into Iraq. That was what everyone - the U.N. and the United States - had been fighting with Saddam about since 1998 when he had kicked the inspectors out.

  The day after Cheney's speech, Rumsfeld met with 3,000 Marines at Camp Pendleton in California. "I don't know how many countries will participate in the event the president does decide that the risks of not acting are greater than the risks of acting,"

  Rumsfeld said. Powell could decode this: Cheney had asserted that the risks were in not acting, and Rumsfeld had said he didn't know how many countries would join if the president agreed with Cheney. Rumsfeld also said that doing the right thing "at the onset may seem lonesome" - a new term for acting alone, in other words unilateralism.

  To make matters worse the BBC began releasing excerpts of an earlier interview that Powell had done in which he had said it would be "useful" to restart the weapons inspections. "The president has been clear that he believes weapons inspectors should return," Powell had said. "Iraq has been in violation of many U.N. resolutions for most of the last 11 or so years. And so, as a first step, let's see what the inspectors find. Send them back in."

  News stories appeared saying that Powell contradicted Cheney, or appeared to do so. Suddenly, Powell realized that the public impression of the administration's policy toward inspectors in Iraq was the opposite of what he knew it to be. Some editorial writers accused Powell of being disloyal. He counted seven editorials calling for his resignation or implying he should quit. From his perspective all hell was breaking loose. How could I be disloyal, he wondered, when I'm giving the president's stated position?

  When Powell returned from his vacation, he asked for another private meeting with the president. Rice joined them over lunch on September 2, Labor Day, as Powell reviewed the confusion of August. Was it not the president's position that the weapons inspectors should go back into Iraq?

  Bush said it was, though he was skeptical that it would work. He reaffirmed that he was committed to going to the U.N. to ask for support on Iraq. In a practical sense that meant asking for a new resolution. Powell was satisfied as he left for South Africa to attend a conference.

  On Friday evening, September 6, Powell was back and joined the principals at Camp David without the president.

  Cheney argued that to ask for a new resolution would put them back in the soup of the United Nations process - hopeless, endless and irresolute. All the president should say is that Saddam is bad, has willfully violated, ignored and stomped on the U.N. resolutions of the past, and the United States reserves its right to act unilaterally.

  But that isn't asking for U.N. support, Powell replied. The U.N. would not just roll over, declare Saddam evil and authorize the U.S. to strike militarily. The U.N. would not buy that. The idea was not saleable, Powell said. The president had already decided to give the U.N. a chance and the only way to do that was to ask for a resolution.

  Cheney was beyond hell-bent for action against Saddam. It was as if nothing else existed.

  Powell attempted to summarize the consequences of unilateral action. He would have to close American embassies around the world if they went alone.

  That was not the issue, Cheney said. Saddam and the blatant threat was the issue.

  Maybe it would not turn out as the vice president thought, Powell said. War could trigger all kinds of unanticipated and unintended consequences.

  Not the issue, Cheney said.

  The conversation exploded into a tough debate, dancing on the edge of civility but not departing from the formal propriety that Cheney and Powell generally showed each other.

  The next morning the principals had an NSC meeting with the president. They did a rerun of the arguments and Bush seemed comfortable asking the U.N. for a resolution.

  During the speech-drafting process, Cheney and Rumsfeld continued to press. Asking for a new resolution would snag them in a morass of U.N. debate and hesitation, opening the door for Saddam to negotiate with the U.N. He would say the words of offering to comply but then, as always, stiff everyone.

  So the request for a resolution came out of the speech. Meetings on the drafting continued for days. The speech assailed the U.N. for not enforcing the weapons inspections in Iraq, specifically for the four years since Saddam had kicked them out.

  "You can't say all of this," Powell argued, "without asking them to do something. There's no action in this speech.

  "It says, here's what he's done wrong, here's what he has to do to fix himself, and then it stops?" Powell asked in some wonderment. "You've got to ask for something."

  So the principals then had a fight about what to ask for. What should the "ask" look like?

  They finally agreed that Bush should ask the U.N. to act.

  Powell accepted that, since the only way the U.N. really acted was through resolutions. So that was the implied action. Calling for a new resolution would have really nailed it, but the call to "act" was sufficient for Powell.

  Tony Blair told Bush privately that he had to go the U.N. resolution route. David Manning, the British national security adviser, told Rice the same.

  TWO DAYS BEFORE the president was to go to the U.N., Powell reviewed Draft #21 of the speech text the White House had sent him with EYES ONLY and URGENT stamped all over it. On page eight, Bush promised to work with the U.N. "to meet our common challenge." There was no call for the U.N. to act.

  At a principals' committee meeting without the president just before Bush left for New York City, Cheney voiced his opposition to having the president ask specifically for new resolutions. It was a matter of tactics and of presidential credibility, the vice president argued. Suppose the president asked and the Security Council refused? Saddam was a master bluffer. He'd cheat and retreat, find a way to delay what was required. What was necessary was getting Saddam out of power. If he attacked the United States or anyone with the weapons of mass destruction available to him – especially on a large scale - the world would never forgive them for inaction and giving in to the impulse to engage in semantic debates in U.N. resolutions.

  Rumsfeld said they needed to stand on principle, but he then posed a series of rhetorical questions, and did not come down hard about the language.

  Cheney and Powell went at each other in a blistering argument. It was Powell's internationalism versus Cheney's unilateralism.

  "I don't know if we got it or not," Powell told Armitage later.

  The night before the speech, Bush spoke with Powell and Rice. He had decided he was going to ask for new resolutions. At first he thought he would authorize Powell and Rice to say after his speech that the United States would work with the U.N. on them. But he had concluded he might as well say it himself in the speech. He liked the policy h
eadline to come directly from him. He ordered that a sentence be inserted near the top of page eight, saying he would work with the U.N. Security Council for the necessary "resolutions." It was added to the next and final draft, #24.

  "He's going to have it in there," Powell reported to Armitage.

  At the podium in the famous General Assembly hall, Bush reached the portion of the speech where he was to say he would seek resolutions. But the change hadn't made it into the copy that was put into the TelePrompTer. So Bush read the old line, "My nation will work with the U.N. Security Council to meet our common challenge."

  Powell was reading along with Draft #24, penciling in any ad-libs that the president made. His heart almost stopped. The sentence about resolutions was gone! He hadn't said it! It was the punch line!

  But as Bush read the old sentence, he realized that the part about resolutions was missing. With only mild awkwardness he ad-libbed it, adding two sentences later, "We will work with the U.N. Security Council for the necessary resolutions."

  Powell breathed again.

  The president's speech was generally a big hit. It was widely praised for its toughness, its willingness to seek international support for his Iraq policy, and its effective challenge to the U.N. to enforce its own resolutions. It was a big boost for Powell who stayed behind in New York to rally support for the policy, especially from Russia and France, who as permanent members of the Security Council could veto any resolution.

  The next day Iraq announced that it would admit new weapons inspectors. Few believed it was sincere. See, the vice president argued, the U.S. and the U.N. were being toyed with, played for fools.

  BUSH BELIEVED A preemption strategy might be the only alternative if he were serious about not waiting for events. The realities at the beginning of the 21st century were two: the possibility of another massive, surprise terrorist attack similar to September 11, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction - biological, chemical or nuclear. Should the two converge in the hands of terrorists or a rogue state, the United States could be attacked and tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of people could be killed.