by Lou Dubose
TEN
Dick Cheney's War
I think he saw those towers come down, saw what terrorists were capable of, and at that moment he became a strategic hysteric," says a defense policy analyst who learned the trade while working for Georgia senator Sam Nunn.
It's an interesting theory:
A man known for almost unnerving calm and the ability to set aside emotion and make rational decisions even when dealing with angina so intense he is gasping for breath sees what al-Qaeda visited on two U.S. cities on a clear September morning and becomes Dr. Strangelove.
It's more convincing after discussing the September 11 attacks with Pentagon staffers who were caught in the inferno. Or with women who were told to remove their high heels and run—from the Pentagon, the Capitol, or the White House. Or with a seasoned military officer who ran head-on into Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld desperately searching for members of his staff in a smoke-filled corridor in the E Ring of the Pentagon.
Living that moment as Dick Cheney did, knowing that the one passenger jetliner unaccounted for was "ten minutes out" from Washington, must have had enormous transformational power.
There's another theory:
The al-Qaeda attack on September 11, 2001, was Dick Cheney's rendezvous with destiny. The moment he had been waiting for since he watched the nation's last imperial presidency collapse under the burden Richard Nixon imposed on it, then threw himself into Gerald Ford's effort to put the pieces of the shattered institution back together again. This is not to suggest that Dick Cheney wanted a violent, transformative event; but rather, that he was searching for the unifying principle that would define the U.S. role in the world in the absence of the threat of nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union.
Cheney's groping for that central purpose is evident in the digressive answer he gave Nicholas Lemann when interviewed for a May 2001 New Yorker article. Lemann wanted to know if there was an organizing principle that could be compared to the Cold War. In the interview, which was probably recorded six months before the 9/11 attack, Cheney responded:
Well that's—I think it's much more difficult to say. Back at the time when I was at the Pentagon, ten years ago, the world had been arranged in a certain way throughout the postwar period, into the eighties. And because the Soviets represented a strategic threat to the United States—they could potentially threaten our very existence—we were organized from a military standpoint, and to some extent from an economic standpoint, to deal with that. When the Soviet threat went away, it was clearly a world-shaking event. The reunification of Europe, the end of the Cold War—it was fairly easily identified.
It's much more difficult now. Whatever the arrangement is going to be in the twenty-first century is most assuredly being shaped right now.
Lemann asked if it still made sense to talk about "the threat," as we used to during the Cold War. Cheney said the threat is much different today:
There are still regions of the world that are strategically vital to the U.S. . . . And anything that would threaten their independence or their relationships with the United States would be a threat to us. Also, you've still got to worry a bit about North Korea. You've got to worry about the Iraqis, what ultimately develops in Iran. . . . I think we have to be more concerned than we ever have about so-called homeland defense, the vulnerability of our system to different kinds of attacks. Some of it homegrown, like Oklahoma City. Some inspired by terrorists external to the United States. . . . The threat of terrorist attack against the U.S., eventually, potentially, with weapons of mass destruction—bugs or gas, biological, or chemical agents, potentially even, someday, nuclear weapons. . . .
Cheney was holding his cards close to his vest. At the time, he was already involved in discussions about regime change in Iraq. And if he wasn't being evasive, he was way off the mark ("got to worry a bit") on North Korea.
Asked the question six months later, he would have answered with greater clarity. But like the American defense policy principles he struggled to describe at that moment, the Bush-Cheney administration lacked focus. In fact, it appeared that the team whose focus, discipline, and sense of purpose had carried it from the Florida recount to the White House was coming apart in those initial months in power.
Shortly before the September 11 attack, word from the Pentagon and Congress was that Cheney's confidant, colleague, and friend Don Rumsfeld was finished at Defense. While most agreed that Rummy had the right program for reform of the military, according to one retired general, Rumsfeld—"SecDef " for the second time in twenty-six years—was so arrogant and abusive that he alienated everyone he would need to make his reform agenda happen. Another source who served on a House committee at the time says Sean O'Keefe's name was floated as Rummy's replacement. O'Keefe had been comptroller at the Defense Department and secretary of the Navy during the first Bush Administration.
"Within six months Rumsfeld wrecked the DOD," says the general. "He refused to talk to the military. The opposite of what Cheney had done. He was worse than Les Aspin. He asked for a $37 billion appropriations increase. But he was out of sync with his own administration. All they were talking about over there was tax cuts. Nobody on the Hill took him seriously. No one in the Pentagon took him seriously.
"By September 8, they were talking about his replacement. [Senator Richard] Lugar, I would guess. O'Keefe would have been his deputy, not secretary. On September 7 there was a function at Walter Reed. [Senator Daniel] Inouye was there, [Senator led] Stevens, [Congressman Jack] Murtha. The talk then was that it was over for Rumsfeld."
The problems extended beyond the Pentagon. Six months into their first term, Bush and Cheney were adrift. Dick Cheney and Karl Rove treated Senator Jim Jeffords so shabbily that he left the Republican Party, returning Democrats to the majority. Secretary of State Colin Powell had to clean up after George Bush and negotiate a public apology when the president's hostile comments inflamed a crisis that began with an American EP-3 spy plane colliding with a Chinese fighter jet. The budget surplus was disappearing. The president was incapable of making a decision on stem cell research. And the vice president was back in the coronary unit at George Washington University Hospital, his third trip since the election. This visit required implanting a pacemaker/defibrillator in Cheney's chest, reviving late-night talk show jokes about George W. Bush being a "heartbeat away from the presidency."
The man who was a heartbeat away from the presidency was reading to second-graders in the Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Elorida, when two passenger planes struck the World Trade Center towers on September 11. Dick Cheney was in his White House office with then national security advisor Condi Rice. As eight Secret Service agents escorted Cheney to the PEOC (the Presidential Emergency Operations Center bunker) in the East Wing, White House antiterrorism director Richard Clarke thought he saw "a reflection of horror" on Cheney's face. Among the others in the bunker were Lynne Cheney, political operative Mary Matalin, Cheney's chief of staff, Scooter Libby, deputy White House chief of staff Josh Bolten, and Bush's communications director, Karen Hughes. From the emergency command center in the bunker, Cheney directed Air Force One and the president to a secure site at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska—the vice president calling the shots from Washington while a seemingly confused president flew from Florida to Louisiana to Nebraska.
Looking back on that morning in the White House bunker, Clarke writes that he knew that the vice president had been one of the "five most radical conservatives in the Congress," whose views would seem "out of place if aired more broadly." But in his book Against All Enemies, Clarke also seemed to find Cheney's presence in the PEOC bunker reassuring. While he had no sense of the president, he knew Dick Cheney. At the time, Bush hadn't been briefed on terrorism threats, although Clarke had briefed Cheney, Rice, and Secretary of State Colin Powell. And while Cheney, Rice, and Powell had been briefed on Clinton's National Security Presidential Directive to "eliminate al-Qaeda" by arming the Northern Alliance and push
ing the CIA to use lethal force, Bush was unaware of that plan as well. Eight months into his presidency, the president was the only principal out of the loop on his predecessor's plan for dealing with al-Qaeda.
Despite the contrasting images—the president and First Lady in a room full of schoolchildren, the vice president and his wife in the communications bunker at the White House—the right guy, Dick Cheney, was in Washington and in charge. It's unlikely that what Cheney experienced that day rendered him in any way incapable of making policy decisions. For the vice president, September 11, 2001, was the day when all the variables in the national security/presidential power equations fell into place. The country's need for a strong leader who could make snap decisions unencumbered by the deliberative inefficiency of a Congress' provided an opportunity to restore an imperial presidency undone by Watergate. Constitutional impediments to intelligence gathering and arrest, detention, and prosecution of individuals who threatened "homeland security" could henceforth be selectively observed.
And the terrorist attacks of 9/11 could be used to move the country beyond the "Vietnam syndrome." From the White House, Cheney had watched an earlier moment of national humiliation on April 29, 1975, when the fall of Saigon became America's first military defeat broadcast on the evening news. The night the president ordered the evacuation of the U.S. embassy in Saigon, Cheney had stood silently in a West Wing corridor, with a dejected Ford and Rumsfeld, each man alone in his thoughts. Cheney would later say the war was lost because "America didn't do enough." Use of force in the Middle East would serve to end the executive's reluctance to use force that followed defeat in Vietnam.
Yet as deliberations regarding a response to the 9/11 attacks got under way, the vice president was cautious to an extent that recalled reporters' comments about adult supervision when Bush announced that Dick Cheney would be his running mate. Cheney and Powell had scripted and executed the near-perfect Gulf War ten years earlier. This time around, if Cheney wasn't as cautious and thoughtful as Powell regarding invading Afghanistan, he was close. He seemed determined to remind Bush of the unintended consequences of any decision he might make regarding war.
Cheney warned about the collapse of Pakistan. He was concerned about the rugged terrain of a country that had swallowed up the British Army when it was a colonial power. He asked whether Pakistan's decision to support the United States would galvanize enough Islamist radicals to overthrow Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf. When Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, at an August 4, 2001, meeting documented in Bob Woodward's Bush at War, advanced the preposterous argument that there was a 10 to 50 percent chance that Saddam Hussein had been involved in the 9/11 attacks, Cheney refused to take the bait.
Cheney maintained that the overarching goal of any campaign must be to ensure the "homeland" was never again attacked. If the best route to achieve that was through Kabul, he was willing to go there. He also refused to support Rumsfeld's argument, early in the deliberations that followed September 11, that Iraq was the country to attack because there were "not enough good targets" in Afghanistan. And after American pilots encountered no defenses of any consequence while bombing Afghanistan, Cheney also rejected Rumsfeld's proposal to take the war to other countries where there were large numbers of Islamic terrorist organizations. The focus of the military campaign should remain the capture or killing of Osama bin Laden.
Yet as the Afghan War wound down, concluding with the failure to capture Osama bin Laden, Cheney became the administration's leading proponent of war in Iraq. Cheney bears his share of responsibility for bin Laden's escape from the cave complex at Tora Bora. In December 2001, when CIA operatives were perched in the remote mountains of Afghanistan monitoring bin Laden's shortwave radio and pleading for American special forces to encircle the area, Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld decided to honor an agreement with Pakistani president Musharraf to let the Pakistani Army close off its side of the border and grab bin Laden if he tried to escape into Pakistan's tribal lands.
Perhaps Cheney had already shifted his focus to Iraq.
Six years into the Bush administration, it seems clear that when historians look at its legacy, that legacy will be Iraq—which more and more appears to be a colossal foreign policy blunder. And while the buck might stop on George Bush's desk, Dick Cheney was the man who made the war happen.
Cheney wasn't always obsessed with overthrowing Saddam Hussein. His belief that the United States had achieved its objectives in the first Gulf War is evident in his response to a question following a speech he made at the Discovery Institute in Seattle after the Gulf War ended:
Well, the question often comes up about Saddam.
My own personal view continues to be one that he is not likely to survive as the leader of Iraq. I emphasize that's a personal view. You can get all kinds of opinions. That's based on the fact that he's got a shrinking political base inside Iraq. He doesn't control the northern part of his country. He doesn't control the southern part of his country. His economy is a shambles. The U.N. sanctions continue to place great pressure on him. We've had these reports of an attempted coup at the end of June, early July, against him. I think he—I think his days are numbered. . . .
The question that is usually asked is why didn't we go on to Baghdad and get rid of him? And let me take just a moment and address that if I can, because it is an important issue. Now, as you think about watching him operate over there every day, it's tempting to think it would be nice if he weren't there, and clearly we'd prefer to have somebody else in power in Baghdad. But we made the decision not to go on to Baghdad because that was never part of our objective. It wasn't what the country signed up for, it wasn't what the Congress signed up for, it wasn't what the coalition was put together to do. We stopped our military operations when we'd achieved our objective— when we'd liberated Kuwait and we'd destroyed most of his offensive capability—his capacity to threaten his neighbors. And no matter what he may say today, he knows full well that he lost two-thirds of his army, about half of his air force, most of his weapons of mass destruction, a lot of his productive capability. His military forces were decimated, and while he can try to regroup and reorganize now, he does not at present constitute a threat to his neighbors.
If we'd gone on to Baghdad, we would have wanted to send a lot of force. One of the lessons we learned was don't do anything in a halfhearted fashion. When we committed the forces to Kuwait, we sent a lot of forces to make certain they could do the job. We would have moved from fighting in a desert environment, where you had clear areas where we knew who the enemy was. Everybody there was, in fact, an adversary—military, and there was no intermingling of any significant civilian population. If you go into the streets of Baghdad, that changes dramatically. All of a sudden you've got a battle you're fighting in a major built-up city, a lot of civilians are around, significant limitations on our ability to use our most effective technologies and techniques. You probably would have had to run him to ground; I don't think he would have surrendered and gone quietly to the slammer. Once we had rounded him up and gotten rid of his government, then the question is what do you put in its place? You know, you then have accepted the responsibility for governing Iraq.
Now what kind of government are you going to establish? Is it going to be a Kurdish government, or a Shia government, or a Sunni government, or maybe a government based on the old Baathist Party, or some mixture thereof? You will have, I think by that time, lost the support of the Arab coalition that was so crucial to our operations over there because none of them signed on for the United States to go occupy Iraq. I would guess if we had gone in there, I would still have forces in Baghdad today, we'd be running the country. We would not have been able to get everybody out and bring everybody home.
And the final point that I think needs to be made is this question of casualties. I don't think you could have done all of that without significant additional U.S. casualties. And while everybody was tremendously impressed with the low cost of the c
onflict, for the 146 Americans who were killed in action and for their families, it wasn't a cheap war. And the question in my mind is how many additional American casualties is Saddam worth? And the answer is not very damned many. So I think we got it right, both when we decided to expel him from Kuwait, but also when the president made the decision that we'd achieved our objectives and we were not going to go get bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq.
There, in Dick Cheney's reasoned and measured monotone, is the logical argument against a war that has overextended and undermined the most powerful military machine ever created—to a point that general officers now hold press conferences as they retire from the Army, denouncing U.S. military policy in Iraq.
Yet it was Dick Cheney who pushed a hesitant George W. Bush into that war. Early in 2002, as the war in Afghanistan looked like a success with a relatively low loss of American life, the vice president sat down for a serious talk with his boss.
Cheney's persistent defense of the senior Bush's decision to end the Gulf War without overthrowing Saddam Hussein served to strengthen Cheney's hand as he changed his position and made the case for war. In The New Republic, Franklin Foer and Spencer Ackerman capture the moment early in 2002: Cheney's heart-to-heart with Bush, in which the vice president explained that he had been part of a team that planned and executed what he had come to realize was a flawed war policy. Leaving Saddam Hussein in power had been a mistake, Afghanistan an unqualified success that silenced Bush's critics, and conditions were right to go into Iraq. "The reason Cheney was able to sell Bush the policy is that he was able to say 'I've changed,' " a former member of the Bush-Cheney administration told The New Republic. " 'I used to have the same positions as [James] Baker, [Brent] Scowcroft, and your father. And here's why it's wrong.' "
Wolfowitz immediately went to work as Cheney's drummer. On March 17, 2002, Wolfowitz was at the British embassy in Washington for Sunday lunch. According to one of the "Downing Street Memos" obtained by reporter Mike Smith of the London Sunday Times, Wolfowitz wasn't focused on the weapons of mass destruction Bush and Cheney would use to justify attacking Iraq. "Wolfowitz thought it was indispensable to spell out in detail Saddam's barbarism," reads the March 18 memo to Tony Blair's political adviser. There was a second justification. "Wolfowitz said that it was absurd to deny the link between terrorism and Saddam." There might be doubt about the alleged meeting in Prague between Mohammed Atta, the lead hijacker on 9/11, and Iraqi intelligence (the same meeting Cheney would later use to justify the war, which, in fact, never occurred). But there were other substantial cases of Saddam giving comfort to terrorists. This was a full year before the start of hostilities in Iraq. Yet shortly after Cheney sold Bush on Iraq, Wolfowitz was out working the Brits—prior to a trip that Prime Minister Tony Blair would make to Bush's Texas ranch to discuss Iraq. "There's no way he would have done that without the approval of Rumsfeld," says a State Department source who was disturbed to see the DOD doing diplomacy. "And Rumsfeld would never have approved it without Cheney's okay."