Vice

by Lou Dubose

  The vice president might have been ready to take Saddam out. But polls indicated the public wasn't with him. Nor was Secretary of State Powell, who was trying to persuade Bush to work through the United Nations. In August, while Bush was on his ranch in Texas, riding his mountain bike, cutting brush, and preparing for a speech he was scheduled to deliver to the United Nations on September 12, The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed piece written by Brent Scowcroft. Under the headline "Don't Attack Saddam," the national security advisor from the George H. W. Bush administration made a convincing argument for diplomacy and challenged Cheney's justification for war: the unproven allegation that Saddam Hussein was connected to the al-Qaeda attacks on the United States on September 11. Scowcroft's argument seemed to carry the imprimatur of Bush Sr., and in fact gave voice to an argument many conservative Republicans, such as Senator Chuck Hagel, were making at the time.

  Beyond dismissing the Iraq-9/11 connection, Scowcroft presciently warned that invading Iraq "would not be a cakewalk. On the contrary, it would be very expensive—with serious consequences for the U.S. and the global economy—and could as well be bloody." Published on the American conservative movement's opinion page of record, Scowcroft's piece reinvigorated Powell's diplomacy-first position. It also angered Cheney and then national security advisor Condoleezza Rice.

  Powell's cautious approach to Iraq also seemed to carry the day at an August 16 National Security Council video conference with Bush at his Crawford ranch. Cheney's fast track to war was being undermined by diplomats in Foggy Bottom. But he had learned in the Ford administration that speeches shape the policy process. "In reality," Cheney said in 1977, "what happens is that oftentimes the speech process ends up driving the policy process."

  Cheney began to drive the policy process when he spoke to the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Nashville on August 26—more than two weeks in advance of the president's United Nations speech. Cheney informed Bush that he would be speaking to the VFW. He did not provide the president a copy of his text.

  "Don't get me into trouble," Bush told Cheney, according to Bob Woodward's Plan of Attack. Considering the speech Cheney delivered— and the disastrous war that followed—Bush's lighthearted admonishment seems laughable.

  Cheney's VFW speech stopped short of declaring that the United States would attack Iraq. But the speech was a syllogism leading to the conclusion that not going to war with Iraq put the United States at risk.

  We now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. . . . Many of us are convinced that Saddam will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon.

  Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us. . . .

  Yet if we did wait until that moment, Saddam would simply be emboldened, and it would become even harder for us to gather friends and allies to oppose him. As one of those who worked to assemble the Gulf War coalition, I can tell you that our job then would have been infinitely more difficult in the face of a nuclear-armed Saddam Hussein.

  And many of those who now argue that we should act only if he gets a nuclear weapon would then turn around and say that we cannot act because he has a nuclear weapon. At bottom, that argument counsels a course of inaction that itself could have devastating consequences for many countries, including our own. . . .

  Against that background, a person would be right to question any suggestion that we should just get inspectors back into Iraq, and then our worries will be over. Saddam has perfected the game of cheat and retreat, and is very skilled in the art of denial and deception. A return of inspectors would provide no assurance whatsoever of his compliance with U.N. resolutions. Many of us are convinced that Saddam will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon.

  How could Bush say "no" to war when Hussein was a nuclear threat? Cheney completely undermined the secretary of state's argument to work with the United Nations and to allow U.N. inspectors time to complete their work on the ground in Iraq.

  A week later, on NBC's Meet the Press, Cheney reiterated his claim that Hussein had reconstituted a nuclear weapons program. Then Cheney argued that there were connections between Hussein and al-Qaeda, repeating the false claim that Wolfowitz had made at the British embassy five months earlier.

  Well, I want to be very careful about how I say this. I'm not here today to make a specific allegation that Iraq was somehow responsible for 9/11. I can't say that. On the other hand, since we did that interview, new information has come to light. And we spent time looking at that relationship between Iraq, on the one hand, and the al-Qaeda organization on the other. And there has been reporting that suggests that there have been a number of contacts over the years. We've seen in connection with the hijackers, of course, Aohamed Atta, who was the lead hijacker, did apparently travel to Prague on a number of occasions. And on at least one occasion, we have reporting that places him in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence official a few months before the attack on the World Trade Center. The debates about, you know, was he there or wasn't he there, again, it's the intelligence business.

  Taken together, the vice president's warnings made a compelling case for war. They were, however, entirely untrue. Yet they refrained the terms of the Iraq debate, leading the public to the conclusion that the question should not be "if" but rather "when" the nation goes to war in Iraq.

  "The secretary was shocked," Wilkerson says of Powell's reaction to the VFW speech. "Here we were saying one thing out of one side of our mouth and here was the vice president speaking to what you might call a semi-official military audience and he was saying the exact opposite. Undercutting every bit of diplomacy before that diplomacy actually got off the ground. And I remember Powell coming back from a principals' meeting where he had made some remonstrance to the president about what's going on. And the president had said something which he was wont to say about most things like this. He said, 'Oh, that's just Dick.' "

  A month later, it was evident that Dick had prevailed when Bush interrupted Condi Rice's West Wing meeting with three senators to say "Fuck Saddam! We're taking him out!"

  Cheney was engaged in a tactical rather than a strategic repositioning—a change of mind but not of heart. He'd already become a true believer in the scheme laid out by Wolfowitz, Khalilzad, and Libby—the master plan that envisioned a hegemonic United States making the Middle East safe for democracy and oil and gas production. It had first surfaced in the "Limited Contingency Study" Wolfowitz had handed to Jimmy Carter's secretary of defense, Harold Brown. In the plan's second iteration, Secretary of Defense Cheney embraced it when no one else in the George H. W. Bush administration would. The final version of the plan was informed by the thinking that Cheney and Wolfowitz had developed at the Saturday morning meetings Cheney hosted at the Pentagon when he was defense secretary. With Afghanistan a smashing success, it was time to turn Wolfowitz's bold thinking into a militarized foreign policy. In Iraq, American forces, the vice president predicted, would be "greeted as liberators."

  And Bush bought it.

  Much has been written about the terrifically smart Cheney easily overwhelming small-bore material like George W. Bush. And while the man-to-man might have brought Bush around on the Iraq War, there's a larger picture. Bush, Rove, Karen Hughes, and Joe Allbaugh did brilliant work in the 2000 campaign—even if Cheney and Bush family consigliere James Baker III had to manage the postelection fight through the Supreme Court. Yet when it was time to govern, Bush and his "Iron Triangle" were out of their league. In Washington, they were indeed the "Mayberry Machiavellians" described by Bush's first faith-based initiatives director, John Dilulio. The president's staff was no match for the disciplined operation Dick Cheney deployed to take care of business and to bureaucratically emasculate George W. Bush.

  The public got a rare glimpse of the power and insularity of Cheney and his staff when the vice president shot Austin lawyer Harry
Whittington on a South Texas bird hunt in February 2006. Before speaking to Bush about the shooting, Cheney consulted his family, Addington, and his former media aide, Mary Matalin. For the twenty-four hours that lapsed before the ranch owner reported the shooting to a small local news outlet, the president's staff was besieged by reporters demanding an explanation, but Cheney kept quiet. On Tuesday, after Cheney had said nothing publicly about the Saturday hunting accident, Bush's beleaguered press flack tried levity to diffuse the issue. At a press conference, Scott McClellan joked about his orange tie and Cheney's hasty trigger finger, unaware that the vice president's staff had been informed earlier that morning that Whittington had suffered a heart attack as a result of the shooting. It was only after a personal appeal from Karl Rove that Cheney made a public statement, in an interview with Fox News anchor Brit Hume five days after the shooting.

  Lawrence Wilkerson was Colin Powell's assistant for the four years Powell served as secretary of state. In the Army and at State, Colonel Wilkerson has paid careful attention to bureaucratic structure and power. Watching the White House from the perspective of the State Department, and trying to cover his boss's back, Wilkerson figured out who was in charge.

  It wasn't George Bush.

  Within the largest vice presidential staff in the history of the office, Dick Cheney set up his own shadow National Security Council staff— something no vice president had ever done before. In this unprecedented arrangement was another glaring peculiarity. The vice president's national security staffers read all the e-mail traffic "in, out, and between" the president's NSC staffers, Wilkerson says. Yet the president's staff isn't allowed to read the communication of Cheney's staffers.

  "Members of the president's staff sometimes walk from office to office to avoid Cheney's people monitoring their discussions," says Wilkerson. "Or they use the phone." The arrangement provides a clear demonstration of who is running foreign policy.

  During the administration of George H. W. Bush, when Secretary of Defense Cheney reached the end of his tether, he would hear from the president, or the president's secretary of state and friend James Baker. An angry Baker called National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft on one occasion in 1989 to complain about Cheney's open criticism of Mikhail Gorbachev.

  "Dump on Dick with all possible alacrity," Baker demanded.

  No one in the current White House is willing to play that role. If someone did, Cheney's staff would devour that person. "Bush's staff is terrified of Cheney's people," says a former White House staffer. To maintain tight control of the national security portfolio, Cheney brought in his loyalists to fill positions on his staff—and on the president's staff. It was a gathering of intellectual and ideological firepower the Texans could never equal. Stephen Hadley became the White House's deputy national security advisor, after working for years with Wolfowitz. Zal Khalilzad was the National Security Council's Middle East agent, until he was shipped to Baghdad to try to salvage the disaster in Iraq. Both foreign policy experts had a long history with Cheney, going back as far as Bush I. Libby, who had been Wolfowitz's deputy, became Cheney's chief of staff. Cheney saw to it that Libby was also special assistant to the president, thus insinuating his chief of staff into the White House staff. Aides from Cheney's NSC staff sat in with White House staff on all major foreign policy deliberations. Cheney had George Bush surrounded. Not only was the president outsmarted by the man he calls "Vice"—he was outstaffed.

  At the top of Cheney's staff hierarchy sat the vice president's legal counsel, David Addington, a tall, paunchy workaholic with a gray beard and thatch of gray hair. He would replace Scooter Libby as chief of staff after Libby was indicted in the outing of CIA officer Valerie Plame. Addington, who had been with Cheney since their days together on the House Intelligence Committee, was always the power center in Cheney's office. "Addington would have been [Cheney's] chief of staff from the beginning," says a military officer who worked with both men. "But he didn't want to be tied down. [Addington] is always involved in the issues. But he's always in the background. They are too smart, too powerful for Bush and his team. There's nothing new in this town. There are a lot of smart people who know how to run things. But none of them I've ever seen compare to Addington. Al Gonzales is not going to stand up to him."

  Indeed, the attorney general, who followed Bush from Texas, has nowhere near the experience, or, it appears, the intellectual capacity, of David Addington. Gonzales was a Hispanic tabula rasa working in the property rights division of Vinson & Elkins, a Houston-based law firm, when Karl Rove made him Bush's general counsel, then Texas secretary of state in 1997. At that moment, Addington was on his sole brief hiatus from government service, after having worked at the CIA, the House Intelligence Committee, the Iran-Contra Joint Committee, and the Department of Defense. Addington and the team he and Libby directed, the general said, were eating the Bush people alive.

  While Cheney was pushing Bush toward war with Iraq, Cheney's cabal in the Office of the Vice President and at the Pentagon were laying the groundwork for that war. They were the nation's best and brightest right-wing policy intellectuals while Bill Clinton was president. Many of them had attended the Saturday policy salon Wolfowitz and Cheney held at the Pentagon, then moved on to the American Enterprise Institute, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and the Hudson Institute. Cheney himself spent some time at AEI after he left the administration of Bush père. Lynne Cheney also found a home there, and stayed. The collection of think tanks served as a shadow administration, filled with policy wonks waiting for their return to power.

  The think tanks also served as a nexus for Cheney's policy cabal to cultivate their relationship with Iraqi expatriate Ahmed Chalabi and others from the exiled Iraqi National Congress. Those relationships proved to be useful when the administration began preparing for war. Wolfowitz and Libby were often the INC's principal protagonists inside the White House. Wolfowitz was hostile to the CIA because, among other reasons, they did not trust Chalabi, a reservation that seemed reasonable when Chalabi's promises on Iraq didn't materialize. An INC source who worked with Chalabi while he was trying to sell regime change explained the heart-and-head dichotomy that members of his organization came to understand existed in the Bush-Cheney White House.

  "Bush believed the democracy part," the INC official said. "That's where his head was. For Cheney, it was the threat—we cannot live with the threat. Democracy was an afterthought.

  "The issue was to take Saddam out. There was a debt to us by the U.S. The spring '91 uprising, chemical weapons sold in the eighties, sanctions that were really hurting the Iraqi people but not Saddam." It was a legitimate and uniquely Iraqi perspective. Americans had sold Hussein feed stock to make chemical weapons during Iran's war with Iraq and failed to live up to promises made after the Gulf War.

  "My interest," he said, "was Iraq, not America."

  The INC's access to the Office of the Vice President was facilitated by Cheney's NSC director, John Hannah. The argument INC leader Ahmed Chalabi would lay out was appealing and useful for Cheney and his cabal of neocons, who now were convinced that U.S. forces had to go back into Iraq and finish what was left undone by the administration of Bush père ten years earlier. Support for Hussein in Iraq would evaporate after a U.S. invasion. Iraqi exiles returning to govern would be embraced as they began building a democratic system. It provided a large part of the justification for going back into Iraq and getting it right.

  George Bush's war was being planned by Dick Cheney's staff and loyalists.

  It was predictable that Bush would be displaced by Cheney, who at thirty-four was known to Gerald Ford's security detail as "Backseat"—the chief of staff sitting behind the president and leaning into the deal. Twenty-five years later, "Backseat" would become the vice president whom White House staffers humorously call "Edgar"—a reference to Edgar Bergen, the vaudeville comic who did the talking (and thinking) for the celebrated ventriloquist dummy Charlie McCarthy.

  A y
ear before the September 11 attacks, Bush had been engaged in statehouse policy fights over property tax reduction bills and mandatory testing in public schools in Texas. In Washington he found himself confronting what six years as governor of Texas had least prepared him for: a room full of intelligent advisers steeped in the political culture of Washington pressing him for a decision on war.

  As formidable as Bush's "Iron Triangle" might have appeared, the war was not so much the work of the Bush White House, but rather what Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson refers to as "the cabal" running American foreign policy out of the vice president's office and the DOD: men who had been working together, in and out of government, for almost thirty years. Cheney, Addington, and Libby, working with Wolfowitz in the Pentagon and several moles in the State Department, drove Iraq War policy.