Condi: The Condoleezza Rice Story (30 page)

In addition, Scowcroft predicted dire consequences in the region if the United States struck Iraq. The Middle East, which considers the Israeli-Palestinian conflict the most crucial issue, would interpret such an attack as a turning away from that conflict. This would ignite, according to Scowcroft, “an explosion of outrage against us.” Rather than contributing to solutions in that decades-long struggle, “we would be seen as ignoring a key interest of the Muslim world in order to satisfy what is seen to be a narrow American interest,” he said.

Unlike Scowcroft, Condi’s statements echoed the administration’s more hawkish policy toward war and its willingness to go it alone. When France, Germany, and Russia announced that they would not join the coalition in the spring of 2003, her reaction was sharp and strident. She referred to their policy as “non-nein-nyet,” and stated that the U.S. strategy should be to “punish France, ignore Germany, and forgive Russia.” This hard-line position contrasted with the more moderate, Scowcroft-like foreign policy perspective Condi had spelled out in her
Foreign Affairs
article in January 2000. According to her close associates, the 9/11 attacks transformed her world view and set her upon a more conservative path. After the attacks, her foreign policy perspective more closely reflected that of the president and neoconservative members of his administration. “They believe that September 11 was a wake-up call,” said Condi’s friend Coit Blacker, “and that certain things had to be done— painful, violent, but they had to be done—and let the chips fall where they may. They’ve shaken up the chessboard, and now no one doubts the ability of the United States to run risks that were unimaginable before September 11.”

Condi admitted that her more conservative foreign policy views were not “the orientation out of which I came,” but evolved out of the president’s focus on universal values and freedom. “This president has a very strong anchor and compass about the direction of foreign policy, about not just what’s right and what’s wrong, but what might work and what might not work,” she said. “I found myself seeing the value of that.”

One strong characteristic of Condi and George W. Bush’s connection to each other is their deep religious faith, and the values that Bush expressed in speeches during the first anniversary of the terrorist attacks revealed the religious undertones of his foreign policy. The moral compass that Condi noted was clear in Bush’s comments about America’s duty to spread its ideals throughout the world. On September 11, 2002, he stated that the “attack on our nation was also an attack on the ideals that make us a nation. . . . Our deepest national conviction is that every life is precious because every life is the gift of a Creator who intended us to live in liberty and equality. More than anything else this separates us from the enemy we fight.” The enemy, he added, is “any terrorist or tyrant [who means] to threaten civilization with weapons of mass murder.”

Continuing his description of the nation’s “sacred promise,” Bush stated that “our cause is even larger than our country. Ours is the cause of human dignity, freedom guided by conscience and guarded by peace. This ideal of America is the hope of all mankind. . . . That hope still lights our way, and the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness will not overcome it.”

In a radio address a few days later, the president reiterated his argument that Hussein posed a threat to the world that must be addressed by U.S. and global intervention:

Congress must make it unmistakably clear, when it comes to confronting the growing danger posed by Iraq’s efforts to develop or acquire weapons of mass destruction, that the status quo is totally unacceptable. The issue is straightforward—we must choose between a world of fear or a world of progress. We must stand up for our security and for the demands of human dignity. By heritage and choice the United States will make that stand. The world community must do so as well.

A few weeks after the president made these remarks, Condi presented a speech at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York that outlined Bush’s national security strategy. While she had acknowledged the role of values in making foreign policy decisions in her 2000
Foreign Affairs
article, here she emphasized the need to integrate idealistic concerns with issues of power. “In real life, power and values are married completely,” she said. “Great powers matter a great deal—they have the ability to influence the lives of millions and change history. . . . And the values of great powers matter as well.” Like the president, Condi now focused on a more idealistic view of foreign policy as an instrument of defining the nation’s values: “Foreign policy is ultimately about security—about defending our people, our society, and our values, such as freedom, tolerance, openness, and diversity.” And also like the president, she described foreign policy in terms of a new, grandiose struggle that divided the world: “Since September 11th all the world’s great powers see themselves as falling on the same side of a profound divide between the forces of chaos and order.”

The U.S. House and Senate passed a measure that allowed the president to use military force against Iraq in October 2002, and the next month the United Nations Security Council passed resolution 1441 that called for new weapons inspections in Iraq. In January 2003, Condi published an editorial in
The New York Times
entitled “Why We Know Iraq Is Lying,” in which she summarized Hussein’s non-compliance with the new inspections. Inspectors had not been given the full access demanded by Resolution 1441, she stated, and Iraq’s “recent promises to do better can only be seen as an attempt to stall for time.” She concluded that Iraq treated the inspections as a game, and warned that the country “should know that time is running out.”

In the
Times
editorial, Condi also discussed an issue that would become a hot-button crisis in the administration. Writing about the 12,200-page declaration that Iraq had submitted to the United Nations about its weapons program, Condi stated that the document “fails to account for or explain Iraq’s efforts to get uranium from abroad.” The question of Iraq’s purchase of uranium from Niger had been investigated by the CIA and the State Department, both of which concluded that the attempts to buy this material could not be confirmed. The evidence was so scant that the CIA urged Great Britain to drop references to this alleged event in a dossier it published in the fall of 2002. In spite of the CIA and State Department’s reports, President Bush announced in his January 2003 State of the Union address that “the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld repeated the statement at a press briefing at the Pentagon the following day. Secretary of State Colin Powell, however, omitted the uranium story from his presentation to the United Nations in February 2003, explaining later that he did not think the evidence was substantial enough to announce. When the British report was found to be a forgery, Condi was forced to admit on
ABC News This Week
on June 8, 2003, that “clearly, that particular report, we learned subsequently, subsequently, was not credible.”

On February 24, the Bush administration and two allies, Great Britain and Spain, attempted to make this urgency official by proposing a U.N. resolution that stated that “Iraq has failed to take the final opportunity afforded to it in resolution 1441.” In response, France, Germany, and Russia drafted their own resolution calling for more inspection time. “The military option should only be a last resort,” stated the draft, which argued that the conditions for using force against Iraq “are not fulfilled.”

The day that both of these draft resolutions were submitted, Condi reiterated the president’s call for swift action in dealing with Hussein. In a news conference at the White House, she outlined the Iraqi threat and reminded the press corps of the president’s timetable. “We all continue to live under the threat of continued programs of weapons of mass destruction linked to someone who’s got links to terrorism,” she said. “It’s time to deal with this problem. And so it should be very clear by now that when the President said, weeks, not months, he really did mean, weeks, not months.” Condi also reminded the press that the president was willing to act alone: “The President has made very clear that the Security Council needs to act and that, if the Security Council is unable to act, then we will have to act with a coalition of the willing.”

The proposed U.N. resolution from the United States, Great Britain, and Spain found only one supporter at the Security Council, Bulgaria, and the sponsors did not call for a vote. On March 20, 2003, the administration followed through on its plan to act alone and launched its attack on Iraq with Operation Iraqi Freedom. On April 9, U.S. forces took control of Baghdad, and millions of television viewers watched the symbolic toppling of a statue of Saddam Hussein.

The following month, President Bush announced from the aircraft carrier
Abraham Lincoln
off the coast of San Diego, California, that major combat operations in Iraq were over, and that the U.S. and its allies had prevailed. Awaiting the president’s S-3 Viking jet on deck were Condi, Chief of Staff Andy Card, and White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, all of whom had flown in earlier on a less glamorous C-2 Greyhound delivery plane. Passengers on the Greyhound are seated backward in a dark interior, and jolted unexpectedly by air currents and during landing. Condi, sporting goggles and ear protectors, looked unfazed when she stepped out of the plane. She explained that it was her second trip in a Greyhound and that “the weather was better this time.” The image of the president on the deck of the carrier, with a “Mission Accomplished” sign in the background, became fodder for Bush’s critics in coming weeks and months as the war in Iraq continued to escalate.

Another carefully orchestrated presidential appearance in 2003 reestablished the fact that Condi is the president’s closest advisor and confidante. When President Bush began planning his top-secret, morale-boosting Thanksgiving trip to Baghdad in October, Condi was one of only a handful of staff who knew about the plan, and the only staffer selected to join him. Secrecy, the number-one priority among the many challenges of safely flying the president into a war zone, went into every detail of the plan. First Lady Laura Bush was aware that the trip was a possibility, but was not told it would actually happen until a few hours before Air Force One flew. Bush’s daughters learned about the trip that day, too, but Bush’s parents were not informed until the president landed in Baghdad. The word from the White House was that the Bush family would spend Thanksgiving at the ranch in Crawford.

At about 8 P.M. Wednesday night, November 26, the president and Condi slipped away from the Crawford ranch in an unmarked car, both dressed casually with baseball caps pulled over their eyes. “We looked like a normal couple,” Bush told reporters later. The trip on Air Force One was unusually quiet, as they were accompanied by only a small press pool and the usual security. The plane flew in radio silence with its call sign disguised from all air-traffic controllers, and all cell phones and other electronic devices were packed away in manila envelopes during the flight. Baghdad International Airport, which had been the site of a missile attack on a cargo jet just five days earlier, was blacked out when the plane approached, and Air Force One, also totally dark, was virtually invisible upon landing.

The president stunned the six hundred troops who were having Thanksgiving dinner in the mess tent at the airport, and was met with “Hoo-ah” shouts and wild, stamping applause. After a two-and-a-half-hour visit, the president, Condi, and their small pool of journalists boarded Air Force One for the flight home.

When critics charged that Bush made the dangerous trip for political gain, Condi defended the president’s motivations. “Let the chips fall where they may,” she said. “But for the American people, I don’t care what your party, they know that the president of the United States, as commander in chief, going to see these troops is an important step.”

Bush’s decision to bring Condi along on this dangerous, top-secret trip revealed the enormously close working relationship they share. Bush’s father developed a deep admiration for and trust in his national security advisor, Brent Scowcroft, but George W. appears to put even more confidence in his NSA. Spending so much time with the president in the White House, at Camp David and at the Crawford ranch, Condi was prompted to make a slip during a dinner party in the spring of 2004. At one point she said, “As I was telling my husb—As I was telling President Bush . . .”