Vice (25 page)

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 conflict, 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."

The vice president might have been ready to take Saddam out. But polls indicated the public wasn't with him. Nor w
as 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
debate
s 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.