The Assassins' Gate (60 page)

Perhaps it was a shrewd political read on Bush's part—a recognition that Americans, for all their passion after September 11, would inevitably slouch back to their sofas. It seemed fair to ask, though, how a body politic as out of shape as ours was likely to make it over the long, hard slog of wartime; how convincingly we could export democratic values when our own version showed so many signs of atrophy; how much solidarity we could expect to muster for Afghans and Iraqis when we were asked to feel so little for one another.

So the months after September 11 were a lost opportunity—to harness the surge of civic energy and to frame the new war against Islamist radicalism as a national struggle. It should have been the job not just of the experts in the intelligence agencies and Special Forces but also of ordinary American citizens to wage it. And it should have been waged on many fronts, with many tools—not just military, but also intellectual, diplomatic, economic, political, cultural. This had been the vision of the architects of the early Cold War, whom Chris Frosheiser read about in a college history course and whom he came to admire even more after September 11. But it wasn't the president's vision. Bush's rhetoric soared and inspired, but his actions showed that he had a narrow strategy for fighting the war, which amounted to finding and killing terrorists and their supporters. Other agendas, such as his tax cuts and energy policy and the bitter fights they stirred, disrupted the clarity and unity of September 11. Bush continued to govern from his ideological base. His message to the public was essentially, “Trust me,” and the public slipped into a fearful passivity.

Whatever national cohesion remained by mid-2002 came undone in the buildup to the invasion of Iraq. The White House forced a congressional vote on a war resolution one month before the 2002 midterm elections, in an atmosphere of partisan invective. While Republicans on the floor of the House and Senate were accusing their Democratic colleagues of Chamberlain-like appeasement of Saddam, others on the campaign trail were charging their opponents with dereliction of duty in defending the country because of Democratic objections to a provision in the Homeland Security Bill designed to weaken civil service unions. (The White House, having rejected the notion of a Homeland Security Department at the outset, later wrote language into the bill that forced Democrats to choose between their own idea and their labor base.) Joseph Biden, working with his colleague Richard Lugar, the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, drafted a war resolution that placed a few constraints on the administration's ability to act, making it slightly less likely that America would go to war without international participation, but that stood a better chance of gaining bipartisan support. The White House maneuvered to block the Biden-Lugar bill and got its own passed on a more partisan vote. The strategy of Bush's political adviser, Karl Rove, paid off in November, when the Republicans regained the Senate and added to their majority in the House. But the administration left behind an embittered Democratic minority and an increasingly divided electorate, just as it was preparing to take the country into a major land war.

The president was pursuing two courses at once: to reshape American foreign policy, and to consolidate his party's hold on power. Perhaps it was old-fashioned to point out that these courses might eventually collide, at some risk to national interests. It wasn't impossible yet, in the fall of 2002, to imagine a policy that harnessed both parties and America's democratic allies in defeating tyranny in Iraq. Such a policy would have required the administration to operate with more flexibility and openness than it wanted to. The evidence on unconventional weapons would have had to be laid out without exaggeration or deception. Once the UN inspectors were back in Iraq, they would have had to be allowed to carry out their work rather than be undermined by a campaign of vilification. Testimony to Congress would have had to be candid, not slippery. Administration officials who offered dissenting views or pessimistic forecasts would have had to be heard rather than silenced or fired. Experts in nation building would have had to be welcomed, not shut out, even if they had things to say that the White House didn't want to hear. American citizens would have had to be treated like grown-ups, and not, as Bush's chief of staff Andrew Card once suggested, ten-year-olds.

After the invasion, European allies would have had to be coaxed into joining an effort that desperately needed their help. French, German, and Canadian companies would have had to be invited to bid on contracts, not barred by an order signed by Paul Wolfowitz (who once wrote that American leadership required “demonstrating that your friends will be protected and taken care of, that your enemies will be punished and that those who refuse to support you will live to regret having done so”). American contractors close to the Pentagon would have had to be subjected to extraordinary scrutiny—not just to make sure that billions of dollars weren't wasted in Iraq, but to avoid even the appearance of corruption. Congress would have had to be kept steadily and candidly informed of the situation on the ground. Tony Blair would have had to be given something in exchange for his steadfast support, such as a serious effort at resolving the Israeli-Palestinian problem. The UN would have had to be brought into Iraq as an equal partner, not a tool of American convenience. The top American civilian in Iraq might even have had to be a Democrat, or a moderate Republican such as the retired general Anthony Zinni, whom an administration official privately described as the best-qualified person for the job held by Paul Bremer. (“You've got to rise above politics,” the official said. “You've got to pick the best team. You've got to be like Franklin Roosevelt.”) Political appointees would have had to be screened out of the occupation authority as much as possible in favor of competent, nonpartisan experts with experience overseas. The occupation authority would have had to focus on Iraqi society rather than serving as an arm of the White House. Its media office's public statements would have had to pass the laugh test every single day.

And when no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, the administration would have had to admit it to the world. President Bush would have had to give a nationally televised speech and, quoting his chief weapons inspector, David Kay, would have had to say, “We were almost all wrong.” The president would have had to scratch evasive formulations like “weapons of mass destruction–related program activities” from his State of the Union address. Officials and generals who were responsible for scandal and failure would have had to be given the sack, not a pat on the back or the Medal of Freedom. When reporters asked the president to name one mistake he had made in Iraq, he would have had to name five, while assuring the country that they were being corrected
because
he had been able to identify them. He would have had to summon all his rhetorical skill to explain to the country why, in spite of the failure to find weapons, ending tyranny in Iraq and helping it to become a democracy as the start of change in the Middle East was morally the right thing to do, important for American security, and worthy of a generational effort. In fact, he would have had to explain this
before
the war, when the inspectors were turning up no sign of weapons, thus allowing the country to have a real debate about the real reason for the war, so that when the war came, it would not come amid rampant suspicions and surprises, and America would not be alone in Iraq.

Character is fate. What prevented any of this from happening was, above all, the character of the president. Bush's war, like his administration, like his political campaigns, was run with his own absence of curiosity and self-criticism, his projection of absolute confidence, the fierce loyalty he bestowed and demanded. He always conveyed the impression that Iraq and the war on terror were personal tests. Every time a suicide bomber detonated himself, he was trying to shake George W. Bush's will. If Bush remained steadfast, how could America fail? He liked to call himself a wartime president, and he kept a bust of his hero Winston Churchill in the Oval Office. But Churchill led a government of national unity and offered his countrymen nothing but blood, toil, tears, and sweat. Bush relentlessly pursued the partisan Republican agenda while fighting the war, and what he offered was optimistic forecasts, permanent tax cuts, and his own stirring resolve.

One of Bush's advisers once explained to the journalist Ron Suskind the worldview of the White House. Whereas the nation-building experts and the war critics and Ron Suskind lived “in what we call the reality-based community” where people “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality,” unfortunately “that's not the way the world really works anymore.” The way the world now works amounted to a repudiation of reason, skeptical intelligence, the whole slate of liberal Enlightenment values. “We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors,” the aide concluded, “and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

This was the Bush presidency without the inspirational rhetoric, more Leninist than Christian in tone, determined not just to remake the world after its own unexplained will but to sweep away all opponents in the process. Philosophically as well as practically, there was a serious flaw in the project of such an administration becoming the bearer of democratic values to the world. Democracy was inherently self-critical. But because the president always prayed to be “as good a messenger of His will as possible,” his Iraq policy would ultimately succeed. By believing so, by appearing to believe so, by forcing such discipline on his administration that no appearance to the contrary ever escaped the seal, he would create the reality that would follow. Faith, hubris, or both, it was a strategy for victory.

I asked Richard Perle whether the top Bush officials ever suffered doubts about Iraq. “We all have doubts all the time,” Perle said. “We don't express them, certainly not in a public debate. That would be fatal.” Expressing doubts in public would give opponents exactly what they were waiting for. In public, Perle himself essentially said, “I told you so.” To a French documentary filmmaker he said, “Most people thought there would be tens of thousands of people killed, and it would be a long and very bloody war. I thought it would be over in three weeks, with very few people killed. Now, who was right?” That was early on. As the war became longer and bloodier, Perle was still right, but in a different way: If only five thousand INC members had gone in with the Americans as he had wanted, if only Ahmad Chalabi had been installed at the head of an interim government at the start, all these problems could have been avoided. Michael Rubin, one of Perle's young protégés, left the Office of Special Plans and then the CPA to start a second career as a writer, and his single subject was the stupidity of officials in the White House, the State Department, and the CIA in botching postwar Iraq by not listening to Michael Rubin and his neoconservative allies in the Pentagon—the agency that ran the occupation. Every key postwar decision was made by Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, or Rumsfeld's appointee Bremer. None of them publicly uttered a single doubt, a syllable of self-scrutiny.

Leslie Gelb worked in the Pentagon during the last months of the Johnson presidency, and he directed the writing of the Pentagon Papers, the secret history of the Vietnam War that had been commissioned by Robert McNamara before leaving office. I expressed skepticism to Gelb that Donald Rumsfeld had commissioned anyone at the Pentagon to write a secret history of the Iraq War. “You can bet your bippy,” Gelb said with a laugh. “Only liberals look back and say they were wrong.” Neoconservatives, by contrast, “say they were stabbed in the back. It's not accidental that President Bush during the campaign couldn't answer the question whether he ever made a mistake. I've never seen those folks say they were wrong. Vietnam was a liberals' war. This is not. They're not dumb—they're very smart. And they're reckless.” Comparing Bush to his own boss, Gelb went on, “Johnson was a tragic figure. He was driven by the imperative not to lose the war. He knew he couldn't win. Bush is Johnson squared, because he thinks he can win. Bush is the one true believer. We're talking about a guy essentially cut off from all information except the official line.”

The theology of confidence served the president well in domestic politics. Steadfastness in wartime is an essential quality, and after the 2004 election no one could reasonably doubt his ability as a politician. For him, the result validated everything he had done and proved all his critics wrong. “We had an accountability moment,” the president said, “and that's called the 2004 election.” But in Iraq, which had a reality of its own, the approach didn't work as well.

When Bush spoke, as he did in his acceptance speech at the Republican Convention in September 2004 and again in his inaugural address in January 2005, about the power of freedom to change the world, he was sounding deep notes in the American psyche. His Democratic opponent came nowhere close to making such music. But when Iraq looked nothing like the president's soaring vision—when Iraq was visibly deteriorating, and no one in authority would admit it—the speeches produced either illusion or cynicism in the public. What would determine success or failure in the war was what happened in Iraq and how Iraqis perceived it. The president's relentless assertion that the war was succeeding forced the entire government to fall in line or risk the White House's wrath. So agencies sometimes issued reconstruction reports that prettified the truth, and officials here breathed easier for a while; but the total megawattage in Iraq hadn't changed. Covering up failures only widened the gap in perception between Washington and Baghdad—which, in turn, made Washington less capable of grasping and responding to Iraqi reality. Deception turned into self-deception, until it was hard to know where one ended and the other began. Eventually, the failures announced themselves anyway—in a series of suicide bombings, a slow attrition of Iraqi confidence, a sudden insurrection. War, unlike budget forecasts and presidential campaigns, is merciless with untruth. In refusing to look honestly at Iraq, Bush made defeat there more likely.