500 Days

by Kurt Eichenwald

  So why go to war? Why would the Americans—or anyone, for that matter—consider a military action when the evidence of a threat was little more than wisps of rumors?

  “War is the worst solution,” Chirac said. “It will fuel Muslim hatred of the West. It will create terrorists. France is not ready to be drawn into such a war.”

  As the conversation wound down, the French president questioned whether Saddam understood the dangers he faced. “He is locked up in an intellectual bunker,” Chirac said. “None of the people around him dare tell him the truth. If there is war, he will be eliminated.”

  Saddam’s only choice, Chirac said, was to back down, to offer conciliatory and positive statements. Perhaps, though, the Iraqi dictator would prove incapable of acting in his own best interest.

  • • •

  Jim Haynes walked into his conference room for the weekly meeting with senior lawyers at the Pentagon, including the general counsels for each military branch and their aides. As usual, there was no written agenda, just an opportunity for the attorneys to update him on their projects and raise any concerns. Once those presentations were finished, Haynes made an announcement.

  “The secretary has ordered me to set up a working group for the different services to put together a study examining the issues associated with detainee interrogation,” he said. “He said that he wants this done very quickly, so we have very tight deadlines for this.”

  Mary Walker, the air-force general counsel, would be in charge, Haynes said, and would divide the responsibilities among her colleagues.

  Haynes glanced around the room. “Any questions?”

  None. “Okay, let’s get back to work,” he said.

  • • •

  The members of the working group probably weren’t up to the job on their own, Haynes mused. The legal quagmires they faced—interrogation techniques, constitutional law, antitorture statutes, international treaties, the rules of sovereignty—were far from their areas of proficiency. They would need outside expertise.

  He knew just the unit—and just the man—to handle the job: the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice, specifically John Yoo.

  Haynes phoned Yoo. “John, we’ve put together a working group that’s going to examine the interrogation issues top to bottom,” he said. “Our folks want to know what they can do, and we just haven’t provided enough guidance. Could you put together an analysis that defines the corners of the box of what’s legal?”

  Sure, Yoo replied. The two men discussed the points that needed to be addressed, then Yoo promised to get back quickly with a draft.

  Yoo hung up, questions racing through his mind. He had kept his cards hidden—neither Haynes nor anyone else at the Pentagon knew that the CIA had already been granted the authority to conduct extremely aggressive interrogations. Yoo had written a memo dated August 1, 2002, laying out the scope and limits of the law for agency interrogators. He wondered if he could simply give Haynes a copy of that, or at least call him back to tell him what his conclusions would be.

  Whatever decision he made, Yoo thought, a bigger issue was at play here. Granting the military the same interrogation authority enjoyed by the CIA was a mistake, one that could easily come back to bite the administration.

  • • •

  That afternoon, Yoo dropped onto the couch in the White House counsel’s office, where he had come seeking the advice of Gonzales and Addington on how to handle the request from the Pentagon.

  “Some of the legal issues are different, because the interrogations are on Guantanamo,” Yoo said. “But other than that, this is the same question we answered for the CIA.”

  If the White House gave the go-ahead, Yoo said, he could provide Haynes with the original CIA memo. But exposing the agency’s activities to a broader audience might be a problem.

  “My proposal is that we just write the opinion for Jim as if it were a fresh opinion and not tell him where it comes from,” Yoo said. “They’ll just think we did it for the first time with them.”

  Gonzales nodded. “I think that’s the best approach,” he said.

  “And that way,” Addington said, “Jim’s going to think you’re the fastest-working lawyer in the world.”

  They all laughed.

  “There is one thing we need to talk about,” Yoo said. “I don’t think it’s a good idea for DOD to be doing this. I wish we could just tell them not to.”

  The Department of Defense was not the Central Intelligence Agency, Yoo said. Inexperienced soldiers were much more likely to botch the job of conducting aggressive interrogations than trained CIA professionals.

  “Putting aside the legality,” he said, “the military’s just so big, and they just use so much of a ‘one size fits all’ philosophy. I don’t think they’ll have the same level of quality control that the agency does.”

  “You’re right,” Addington said. “The military’s like that. They run by the blunt force of numbers and the CIA’s more surgical.”

  The meeting ended and Yoo stood. “I just wish we could tell Jim not to do it,” he said again.

  15

  Light from a chandelier of gilt bronze and crystal spilled across the hand-carved Louis XV desk where Jacques Chirac was working. His office, the Salon Doré, was an opulent holdover from nineteenth-century France, its golden walls adorned with Gobelin tapestries that surrounded the most valuable antiques in all of the Élysée Palace. But on this day, the familiar grandeur barely registered with the French president as he waited for yet another phone call from Bush: the topic, again, would be Iraq. Just weeks after the first U.N. resolution demanding that Saddam comply with his disarmament obligations, the Bush administration was pushing the Security Council to take the next step, authorizing a U.N.-backed invasion. Chirac remained unconvinced that military action was necessary: he still considered the evidence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction to be flimsy at best. Rushing into battle based on hunches and theories struck him as the height of folly.

  Bush had been particularly unpersuasive in making the case, Chirac thought. Months before, the American president had leaned on him to support an authorization for military action as part of the first U.N. resolution. Chirac refused, arguing that it was too soon to be discussing the use of force, since the weapons inspectors had yet to have begun their work. Even now, the U.N. team had barely been on the ground long enough to have located their hotel in Iraq, much less find hidden armaments. Yet here was Bush, tub-thumping about war again. Chirac would have none of it; authorizing an attack at this stage would make the original resolution seem like a cynical cover for a premeditated attack.

  The call came through and the two men traded diplomatic pleasantries.

  “Jacques,” Bush said, “Saddam is digging in. He is lying to the world and he is lying to Blix. We can’t let him think that the U.N. is a paper tiger that won’t enforce its own resolutions.”

  “I understand your concerns, George, but the inspectors need more time. War should be the last option, and it will be our admission of failure. I am not convinced that the situation is urgent, or even that the weapons are there. Before we take an irreversible step, we need to be certain of our beliefs.”

  Delay would serve only to embolden Saddam, Bush replied. “He has to hear a unified message from us, a declaration that the world is allied against him,” he said. “We know he will not comply unless he feels the pressure.”

  Bush wasn’t listening to him, Chirac thought. Instead, he was jumping all over the rhetorical map in search of the magic words that would win him over. Saddam was lying; the U.N. had to prove itself; the allies had to work together. Perhaps, but all beside the point if illegal armaments weren’t found. What if, in fact, Saddam was telling the truth? With the U.N. staring him down and inspectors roaming the country, Saddam couldn’t do anything with his arsenal, even if it existed. War would change that. If foreign forces cornered the Iraqi leader, and if he really did have such weapons at his disposal, t
hey wouldn’t remain hidden anymore. Instead, they would be trained on American soldiers and anyone allied with them.

  Before Chirac could elaborate on that point, Bush veered in another direction.

  “Jacques,” he said, “you and I share a common faith. You’re Roman Catholic, I’m Methodist, but we are both Christians committed to the teachings of the Bible. We share one common Lord.”

  Chirac said nothing. He didn’t know where Bush was going with this.

  “Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East,” Bush said. “Biblical prophecies are being fulfilled.”

  Gog and Magog? What was that?

  “This confrontation,” Bush said, “is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase His people’s enemies before a new age begins.”

  Chirac was bewildered. The American president, he thought, sounded dangerously fanatical.

  After the call ended, Chirac called together his senior staff members and relayed the conversation.

  “He said, ‘Gog and Magog.’ Do any of you know what he is talking about?”

  Blank faces and head shakes.

  “Find out,” Chirac said.

  • • •

  Near Lake Geneva in Switzerland, Thomas Römer, a theology professor at the University of Lausanne, was in his office when the phone rang. On the line was the head of the Biblical Service at the Protestant Federation of France with an odd request: Jacques Chirac wanted to know the meaning of “Gog and Magog.”

  “He recently spoke with the president of the United States, and he brought up Gog and Magog in relation to the recent events in the Middle East,” she said. “Could you write a page about it, explaining the meaning?”

  The original appeal for help had come from Chirac’s aides at the Élysée Palace, she said. They had first sought out the Protestants for an answer, since Bush belonged to the evangelical Christian movement. But the question was beyond the federation’s expertise—its scholars focused on the New Testament, while the concept of Gog and Magog had its origins in the Old Testament. So they turned to Römer, a world-renowned expert on the Hebrew scriptures.

  “I’d be happy to help,” Römer said. He understood Bush’s reference; it would be easy to put into plain words for Chirac.

  At his computer, Römer typed the explanation. The phrase Gog and Magog shows up in two books of the Old Testament, Genesis and Ezekiel. The available translations of the text were quite cryptic and theologians had long debated their meaning. In Genesis, they appear to refer to two creatures, but Ezekiel used them in the description of a future war. Groups such as the evangelicals seized on the passages as a prophecy of an apocalyptic conflict between good and evil in the time of the Messiah.

  That interpretation was reinforced by the use of the term in the New Testament’s Book of Revelation. Although that mention of Gog and Magog does not refer to the same people or events, it does pertain to a war fought at the end of the millennium, with Satan attempting to deceive the nations of the world and engage in a battle against Christ and His saints. According to that rendition, the righteous would emerge victorious, and Satan would be flung into a lake of fire.

  That Bush was invoking this biblical concept as a justification for his foreign policy didn’t surprise Römer—for some reason, American presidents seemed to have a weakness for Gog and Magog. Ronald Reagan, for example, had proclaimed this biblical confrontation between good and evil would pit the United States against the Soviet Union, which had abandoned God at the time of the Russian Revolution.

  Now, with America’s old enemy defunct, Bush had apparently decided that Moscow had nothing to do with the battle of Gog and Magog. Instead, the forces of evil had emerged in Baghdad.

  • • •

  The response from Römer confirmed the worst of Chirac’s fears—biblical writings were influencing Bush’s decisions about war in the Middle East. A certainty of God’s will would surely blind any political leader to the evidence of man—weapons inspections would never persuade the administration if Bush believed a clash with Iraq was being guided by God. And that sealed it—Chirac would oppose all military action. France was not going to fight a war based on an American president’s interpretation of the Bible.

  • • •

  At the Versailles Palace on January 22, the white wine was a German Riesling; the red, a French Bordeaux—carefully chosen symbols for an extraordinary party. It was the fortieth anniversary of the friendship treaty between the two countries, and both governments—including all 603 members of the German parliament and their 577 French counterparts—had gathered at the magnificent château of French kings for the unprecedented celebration.

  Chirac and German chancellor Gerhard Schröder arrived together through the Marengo Room, hung with canvases that portrayed the victories of Napoléon. To a drumroll, they entered the assembly hall, an extravagant auditorium decked out in red velvet and gold leaf.

  Chirac spoke first, calling for the two countries to deepen their ties at every level, from government cooperation to cultural exchanges. Then he raised the issue of Iraq.

  “War is not inevitable,” he said as the assembled delegates burst into vigorous applause. “For us, war is always the proof of failure and the worst of solutions, so everything must be done to avoid it.”

  There was only one framework for a legitimate solution to the challenge of Iraq, he said, and that was the United Nations. Germany and France, Chirac added, were joining together in favor of a peaceful solution. Any attempt by the United States to secure a resolution in support of an invasion, he hinted, would be vetoed by both nations.

  In his comments, Schröder skipped the hints. “Don’t expect Germany to approve a resolution legitimizing war,” he said. “Don’t expect it.”

  • • •

  The slap from Europe infuriated Bush. So he slapped right back.

  “Surely our friends have learned lessons from the past,” he told a group of reporters gathered in the Roosevelt Room at the White House. “Surely we have learned how this man deceives and delays. He’s giving people the runaround.”

  Regardless of whether the French and Germans blocked a second U.N. resolution, Bush suggested, America and its supporters would act. “Time is running out,” he said. “I believe in the name of peace, he must disarm. And we will lead a coalition of willing nations to disarm him. Make no mistake about that. He will be disarmed.”

  • • •

  During an afternoon press briefing at the Pentagon, Rumsfeld decided to follow his boss’s lead in taking a poke at the French and Germans—but this time, with a much sharper stick.

  It came in response to a query posed by Charles Groenhuijsen, a journalist with Dutch public television. “Sir, a question about the mood among European allies,” Groenhuijsen began. “It seems that a lot of Europeans rather give the benefit of the doubt to Saddam Hussein than President George Bush. These are U.S. allies. What do you make of that?”

  Rumsfeld engaged in some lighthearted banter with Groenhuijsen before answering.

  “What do I think about it?” he said. “Well, there isn’t anyone alive who wouldn’t prefer unanimity. I mean, you just always would like everyone to stand up and say, ‘Way to go! That’s the right thing to do, United States.’ ”

  But rarely did all countries reach common accord on anything, he said. On the other hand, the transatlantic partnership had been different. Almost always, Europe joined hands with America if the facts justified taking action.

  “Now, you’re thinking of Europe as Germany and France,” he continued. “I don’t. I think that’s old Europe. If you look at the entire NATO Europe today, the center of gravity is shifting to the east.”

  There were plenty of new countries that had been invited to join NATO, he said. But still, he acknowledged, Groenhuijsen was right.

  “Germany has been a problem, and France has been a problem,” he said. “But you look at vast numbers of other countries in Europe, they’re not with France and Germany on this
, they’re with the United States.”

  • • •

  Rumsfeld’s broadside was greeted in France and Germany with a mixture of bemusement and irritation. Inept diplomacy aside, Washington appeared to be signaling that any ally—no matter how strong its historical friendship with the United States—could be elbowed aside if it disagreed with the administration’s policy. It was childish, as if the White House believed its “with us or against us” mind-set forbade any country from reaching an independent conclusion about Iraq.

  Still, some politicians relished being cast as the elder statesmen lecturing their impetuous cousin in the New World. “When one is an old continent, a continent with an old historic, cultural, and economic tradition, one can sometimes inherit a certain wisdom, and wisdom can be a good advisor,” said Jean-François Copé, the French government’s official spokesman.

  The German foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, was delicate in his response. “We should try to treat each other sensibly,” he said. “Our position is not a problem, it is a constructive contribution.”

  Others showed less restraint. Asked by a reporter for her view, Roselyne Bachelot, the French environment minister, responded, “If you knew what I felt like telling Mr. Rumsfeld . . .”

  She stopped herself, saying that the word she had in mind was too offensive.

  • • •

  Yoo’s draft memo for the Pentagon on interrogations was delivered that same week to Mary Walker, the air-force general counsel. As head of the working group reviewing interrogation policy for Guantanamo, Walker declared that she alone would be allowed to keep a copy of the legal analysis. To ensure the highest level of security, she said, her counterparts at the other military branches would be allowed only to read the document in her office.

  Her fellow lawyers grumbled among themselves about her pronouncement. They were supposed to be working together to form policy. The Yoo opinion—and who was this guy John Yoo, anyway?—was going to be the template for everything they did. Forcing them to rely on notes scribbled during a reading session in Walker’s office would crimp their ability to do their job. And the lawyers couldn’t help but wonder—since Jim Haynes had appointed Walker, did that mean he didn’t trust the rest of them either?