The War Within (58 page)

"That's unacceptable!" Bush said again. "Why is that?"

Rice explained that the U.S. military didn't have bases close to Afghanistan. The intelligence was weak. Targets were scarce. And the weather was deteriorating.

"I'm ready to go," he later told me. "Sometimes that's the way I amófieryÖ. I can be an impatient person." On the eve of that first war, he was riddled with impatience.

In another instance, on October 25, 2001, after the bombing in Afghanistan had begun, Rice went to see the president. She reported that several members of his war cabinet were worried that the progress in the initial weeks was too slow. She suggested that he solicit their views at the NSC meeting the next morning. "I'll take care of it," he told her.

At the next day's meeting, Bush said, "I just want to make sure that all of us did agree on this plan, right?" He went around the table asking everyone to affirm allegiance to the plan. He asked if anyone had any ideas, but as I later wrote after interviewing everyone who had been in the room, "In fact the president had not really opened the door a crack for anyone to raise concerns or deal with any second thoughts. He was not really listening."

* * *

I first interviewed President Bush in the Oval Office on December 20, 2001, three months after the terrorist attacks.

The war in Afghanistan appeared to be going well, with the overthrow of the Taliban regime and promising efforts to deny sanctuary to al Qaeda. Bush was jaunty and full of self-confidence. At 55, he was a young president, filled with certainty. He directed an aide to his desk to pull out three sheets with short biographies of al Qaeda leaders, each with a color photo. He showed how he had crossed through the pictures with a large "X" as each suspected terrorist leader was killed or captured.

"One time early on, I said, 'I'm a baseball fan. I want a scorecard.'" He was going to have a body count.

And he had major goals. "We're going to root out terror wherever it may exist," he said. He talked of achieving

"world peace," and of creating unity at home. "The job of the president," he said, "is to unite the nation."

* * *

President Bush once said to me of the path he'd chosen, "I know it is hard for you to believe, but I have not doubted what we're doing. I have not doubtedÖThere is no doubt in my mind we're doing the right thing. Not one doubt."

It wasn't so hard to believe. He repeatedly told me that his certainty was an asset. "A president has got to be the calcium in the backbone," he said. "If I weaken, the whole team weakens. If I'm doubtful, I can assure you there will be a lot of doubt. If my confidence level in our ability declines, it will send ripples throughout the whole organization. I mean, it's essential that we be confident and determined and united.

"I don't need people around me who are not steadyÖAnd if there's kind of a hand-wringing going on when times are tough, I don't like it."

He spoke a dozen times about his "instincts" or his "instinctive reactions," summarizing once, "I'm not a textbook player, I'm a gut player."

After I recounted these details in
Bush at War
many readers and a number of reviewers and columnists thought I had portrayed Bush as a strong, inspirational leader. But my account also showed that he didn't want an open, full debate that aired possible concerns and considered alternatives. He was the "gut player," the "calcium-in-the-backbone"

leader who operated on the principle of "no doubt."

"His instincts are almost his second religion," I wrote. In the Afghanistan War, he had laid down the marker that his convictions would trump nearly everything and everyone else.

During an interview at his Crawford ranch on August 20, 2002, he had laid out his thinking about an Iraq war, which was still seven months away.

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

"I will seize the opportunity to achieve big goals," he said, and on his own he brought up North Korea. He had identified it along with Iraq and Iran as an "axis of evil" in his State of the Union address earlier that year. He made it clear that Iraq and North Korea were linked in his mind. Bush leaned forward in his chair and spoke about his gut reaction to the North Korean leader.

"I loathe Kim Jong Il!" the president bellowed, waving his finger. "I've got a visceral reaction to this guy, because he is starving his people. And I have seen intelligence of these prison campsóthey're hugeóthat he uses to break up families, and to torture people. I am appalledÖIt is visceral. Maybe it's my religion, maybe it's myóbut I feel passionate about this." He said he'd been advised not to move too fast on North Korea, but he added, "Either you believe in freedom andÖworry about the human condition or you don't.

"And I feel that way about the people of Iraq, by the way," he said, adding that Saddam Hussein was starving the Shia in outlying areas of Iraq. "There is a human condition that we must worry about."

But the president made it clear that he didn't think much of diplomacy. "You can't talk your way to a solution to a problem," he said, and the United States had the responsibility to lead. That triggered "resentment toward us," and caused people to say, "Bush is a unilateralist; America is unilateral." He added, "I've been to meetings where there's a kind of 'We must not act until we're all in agreement.' Well, we're never going to get people all in agreement about force and use of force." International coalitions or the United Nations were probably not viable ways to deal with dangerous rogue states, he said. "Confident action that will yield positive results provides kind of a slipstream into which reluctant nations and leaders can get behind."

Again, his blind faith in his instincts meant more than the concerns of his war cabinet and the international community.

My second book on Bush,
Plan of Attack,
recounted the president's decision making during the 16 months from November 2001 to the invasion in March 2003. During this period, Rumsfeld and the Central Command commander at the time, General Tommy Franks, gave the president a dozen detailed briefings on the invasion plan. Every meeting was about
how
to go to war. There was no meeting to discuss
whether
to go to war. The president had never questioned its rightness, and its rightness made it the only course.

Bush later acknowledged in interviews with me that he did not seek recommendations from four key people: his father, former President George H.W. Bush, who had overseen the first Gulf War in 1991; Secretary of State Colin Powell; Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld; and CIA Director George Tenet.

When I pressed him a dozen times on what his father's advice on invading Iraq might have been, Bush dodged the questions and told me he couldn't recall. Finally, he said, "He is the wrong father to appeal to in terms of strength.

There is a higher Father."

There was a momentum toward war and a lack of caution that the president embraced. His convictions were driving the march to war like a locomotive gaining steam.

In a December 2003 interview, nine months after the Iraq invasion, Bush told me, "I believe we have a duty to free people." He wanted to liberate the Iraqis from oppression and said he had a "zeal" to do so. In May 2008, I asked if he still believed that.

"I do," he said. "It's very important, though, for you to understand that I have a set of beliefs that are inviolate: faith in the transformative power of freedom and the belief that people, if just given a chance, will choose free societies."

I have never doubted the sincerity of the president's convictions. But convictions alone are not enough. The decision to go to war is momentous. The decision to launch a preemptive war is doubly so and carries with it a great weight of responsibility.

In my 1991 book,
The Commanders,
on the invasion of Panama and the first Gulf War to oust Saddam from Kuwait, I wrote, "The decision to go to war is one that defines a nation, both to the world and, perhaps more importantly, to itself. There is no more serious business for a national government, no more accurate measure of national leadership."

A president must be able to get a clear-eyed, unbiased assessment of the war. The president must lead. For years, time and again, President Bush has displayed impatience, bravado and unsettling personal certainty about his decisions. The result has too often been impulsiveness and carelessness and, perhaps most troubling, a delayed reaction to realities and advice that run counter to his gut.

This was most evident in the three years after the invasion, the period covered in my third Bush book,
State of
Denial,
published in September 2006. Bush and his administration had not openly acknowledged the severity of escalating violence and deterioration in Iraq. "With all Bush's upbeat talk and optimism," I wrote in the book's last line, "he had not told the American public the truth about what Iraq had become."

My reporting for this book showed that to be even more the case than I could have imagined.

* * *

In some ways, President Bush has changed very little since my first interview with him on December 20, 2001. He remains a man of few doubts, still following his gut, convinced that the path he has chosen is right. But in other ways, the 61-year-old president I encountered in May 2008 was a different man entirely. It wasn't just the inevitable aging. The presidency, not surprisingly, has worn on him. Seven years of war have taken a visible toll. His hair is much grayer, and the lines in his face deeper and more pronounced. Still fit for his age, he has a noticeable paunch and sometimes slouches in his chair.

During the first years of the Iraq War, the president always spoke about "winning" or "victory." By 2008, he seemed to have tempered his expectations. Twice in the interview when he mentioned "win," he immediately corrected himself and said "succeed," a subtle but definite scaling back of his once fiery rhetoric.

Since March 2003, when President Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq, about half a million men and women of the U.S. military have served there. More than 4,100 have died and another 30,000 have been seriously wounded. Tens of thousands of Iraqis have been killed. As I write this in the early summer of 2008, about 140,000 U.S. troops remain there.

In our final interview, the president talked irritably of how he believed there was an "elite" class in America that thought he could do nothing right. He was more guarded than ever, often answering that he could not remember details and emphasizing many times how much he had turned over to Steve Hadley. There was an air of resignation about him, as if he realized how little he could change in the eight months he had left as president.

He alternately insisted that he was "consumed" by the war, "reviewing every day," before adding, "But make sure you know, it's not as though I'm sitting behind the desk and totally overwhelmed by Iraq, because the president's got to do a lot of other things."

By his own ambitious goals of 2001, Bush had fallen short. He had not united the country but had added to its divisions, and he himself had become the nation's most divisive figure. Even the president acknowledged that he had failed "to change the tone in Washington." He had not rooted out terror wherever it existed. He had not achieved world peace. He had not attained victory in his two wars.

* * *

On August 7, 2007, my assistant Brady Dennis and I went to see former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, one of the architects of the Vietnam War. In his 1995 book,
In Retrospect,
McNamara had owned up to his mistakes and concluded that the United States could have withdrawn from Vietnam much earlier without serious consequence to national security.

We sat with McNamara in the white-carpeted living room of his Watergate apartment. At 91, his mind was still lively, and his blue eyes still flickered with enthusiasm. Throughout the three-hour interview, he kept returning to one theme: The major disagreements about the Vietnam War too often had not been put on the table before President Johnson, especially with all his key advisers present. Too few people had expressed their reservations, and the president hadn't exactly sought them out.

"I am absolutely positive that most leaders wish to avoid confrontation among their senior people, particularly in front of them," McNamara said. "And that's a serious weakness. I think every leader should force his senior people to confront major issues in front of him." Presidents want to maintain harmony. "They steer away from conflict."

McNamara believed that was a great disservice.

McNamara said he thought he was being loyal to Lyndon Johnson at the time by going along with the president's policy on the war. "As I look back on it," he said, "I should have been more forceful in forcing Johnson to address these issues." When he announced his resignation in 1967, he said, "I felt at the end very reluctant to expose the differences that existed. I was worried they might get out. And I was worried that they would make the job of the president more difficult, because [internal memos] basically said we're losing."

* * *

One final question: Who pays the price of war? I don't mean the billions of dollars spent each year on it. I mean the human cost. That falls to the 140,000 service members and to their loved ones. They are the ones losing limbs, losing lives, and losing years to deployments halfway around the world. A friend of mine labeled this the "ripple of human misery" that disperses slowly, quietly throughout every corner of the country, often unnoticed by the majority of Americans.

Those who serve and their families are the surrogates of all Americans. They bear the risk and the strain of a year or more in a violent foreign land. So many have spent their youth and spilled their blood in a fight far from home. What do we owe them? Everything. And what have we given them? Much less than they deserve.

President Bush has rarely leveled with the public to explain what he was doing and what should be expected. He did not seek sacrifice from most of the country when he had the chance. He did not even mobilize his own party.