The Family (85 page)
“Today our nation saw evil,” he said, “the very worst of human nature . . . The search is under way for those who are behind these evil acts . . . We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.”
George W. Bush finally stepped into the shoes of a President three days later, September 14, 2001, when he visited Ground Zero. Climbing on top of a crushed fire truck, he draped his arm around the shoulder of the retired firefighter Bob Beckwith and started to speak.
“We can’t hear you,” someone yelled.
Bush picked up a bullhorn. “I can hear you,” he shouted. “The rest of the world hears you! And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!”
At last. The Andover cheerleader had found his voice. His exhortation of strength and resolve roused the bone-weary rescue workers from the white ashes of destruction. Raising hard hats in the air, they cheered their commander in chief. “Bush, Bush, Bush!” they chanted, pumping their fists. “USA. USA. USA.”
“It was a simple enough ad lib,” Jonathan Alter wrote in
Newsweek
, “but you could almost watch the molecules of presidential leadership being rearranged.”
The President told Lionel Chetwynd, a conservative filmmaker who wrote
DC 9/11: Time of Crisis
, that visiting Ground Zero had been visceral for him. “I was lifted up by a wave of vengeance and testosterone and anger. I could feel it.” Bush said he was approached by a rescue worker, whom he quoted as saying, “I’m digging for my brother here, and I didn’t vote for you, but you find the people who did this, and you take care of business, you hear me?”
The President spent that weekend at Camp David with his national security advisers. When he returned to the White House, he was focused. His mission had crystallized. “The Education President” was now “The War President.” George Walker Bush saw himself as the heat-seeking missile of righteousness against “the evil ones” and “the evil doers.”
His close friend Don Evans, Secretary of Commerce and a member of Bush’s White House Bible group, said that the President felt he had been “called” to lead the country to war.
“This is a crusade,” Bush told reporters when he returned from Camp David. The next day the White House apologized for his inept use of the word “crusade,” because it suggested the medieval slaughter of thousands of innocent Arabs and Jews. The President had no regrets, and the public responded positively to his zeal and passion. He declared bluntly, “We’re at war, there’s been a war declared and we will find those who did it. We’ll smoke them out of their holes, we’ll get them running and we’ll bring them to justice.” He also demanded the delivery of Osama bin Laden. “We’ll take him dead or alive,” Bush said. Fearful the remark made him sound hotheaded, his wife gently teased, “Bushie, you gonna git ’im?” The President remained grim. He was determined to launch himself and his country on a “wave of vengeance and testosterone and anger.”
Karl Rove, seizing the tragedy of 9/11 for political gain, was immediately set to catch the wave for reelection. “We can go to the country on this issue because they trust the Republican Party to do a better job of protecting and strengthening America’s military might and thereby protecting America,” he told the Republican National Committee. In what seemed at the time a shrewd move, he recommended the GOP hold its 2004 convention in New York City in September rather than August. The RNC began offering 9/11 commemorative photos of the President on Air Force One. The letter to potential contributors raised over $1.4 million: “Specially commissioned, individually numbered and matted, this limited edition series is yours free for serving as an honorary co-chairman of the 2002 President’s Dinner with your gift of $150 or more.”
When the President met with congressional leaders after 9/11, he took a direct slap at Clinton when he said, “When I take action, I’m not going to fire a $2 million missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt. It’s going to be decisive.”
Democrats and Republicans alike were impressed. “We all desperately want him to succeed,” said Richard Gephardt, the Democratic Minority Leader of the House of Representatives, “and there is nothing more valuable to a president than that emotion.”
Without a single dissenting vote, or even a debate, the Senate passed a resolution authorizing the President to use force. The House approved the resolution 420–1. The single holdout was Representative Barbara Lee, a Democrat from Oakland, California. She knew the resolution would pass with or without her vote, but she opposed as a matter of conscience. She quoted a clergy member who said, “As we act, let us not become the evil that we deplore.” Bush’s approval ratings soared to 90 percent, the highest ever recorded for a U.S. President since Gallup started polling in 1938, when Franklin D. Roosevelt was in the White House. Until George W. Bush set the record, his father, who hit 89 percent at the end of the first Gulf War, had held the previous high.
Both father and son started wars in the Persian Gulf, and both staked their reelections on the outcome. As Bush 43 prepared to attack Afghanistan, he heeded the advice of Bush 41 to build an international coalition. He began a series of seventy face-to-face meetings with foreign leaders to secure troop commitments from Britain, Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Australia, Canada, the Czech Republic, New Zealand, Japan, Pakistan, and Turkey. After Afghanistan, he fully intended to attack Iraq, determined to change the balance of power in the Middle East once and for all. On September 17, 2001, W. signed a two-and-a-half-page document marked “TOP SECRET” that outlined the plan for war in Afghanistan and also directed the Pentagon to begin planning military options for an invasion of Iraq. Three days later, during a private dinner with Britain’s Prime Minister, the President asked Tony Blair to support the removal of Saddam Hussein from power. Blair, according to Sir Christopher Meyer, the former British Ambassador to Washington who also attended the dinner, told Bush he should not get distracted from the initial goal of dealing with the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.
“I agree with you, Tony,” said the President. “We must deal with this first. But when we have dealt with Afghanistan, we must come back to Iraq.”
The air strikes against Afghanistan began on October 7, 2001. The original goal, stated clearly and definitively by the President, was to capture Osama bin Laden and destroy his terrorist network. This was a war of revenge. But the goal soon had to be redefined to include replacing the Taliban government that had allowed Al Qaeda to flourish. As bin Laden continued to elude capture, Bush again reconfigured his ultimate goal to justify the tens of billions of dollars spent and the deaths of American service men and women. Then the purpose of the war became rebuilding Afghanistan so the people of that country could enjoy stability and freedom.
To that end, an Afghan coalition government was formed in December 2001, headed by Hamid Karzai, a tribal aristocrat and former Deputy Foreign Minister who had spent the Taliban years in exile in Pakistan. Three years after Karzai became head of state, a large part of Afghanistan still remained under the control of warlords and their private militias—and bin Laden had still not been captured. Farmers had started growing opium again; the practice had been banned under the Taliban, but the United States looked the other way as Afghanistan became a force in the international drug trade.
In April 2003, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld announced that he was going to meet with Karzai to discuss a date for U.S. withdrawal. In the middle of 2004, there were still twenty thousand U.S. troops in Afghanistan, up from eleven thousand the previous year. The President was not content with one ongoing war; he was obsessed with another one—bloodier and far more costly.
By the end of 2002, it was clear that the President was hell-bent on taking the country to war in Iraq. Yet he responded angrily when pressed on the subject. Speaking to reporters at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, he snapped at one who voiced the assumption.
“You said we’re headed to war in Iraq. I don’t know why you say that,” Bush said. “I’m the person who gets to decide, not you.”
Ten weeks later, on March 19, 2003, Bush announced the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Some saw it as his filial trump card: a son going off on his own to surpass his father by finishing off the elder Bush’s unfinished business. By now the son had become openly critical of his father’s Gulf War. As Bush 43 told Bill Sammon of
The Washington Times
about Bush 41: “Freedom will prevail so long as the United States and allies don’t give the people of Iraq mixed signals . . . and that is cut and run early, like what happened in ’91.”
Others saw the son as the Bush family’s spear-carrier, seeking revenge against a despised dictator. “After all,” W. told Houston Republicans on September 26, 2003, “this is a guy that tried to kill my dad at one time.”
Armchair psychiatrists called the Iraqi war “Oedipus Wrecks.”
The President denied any personal animus in his drive to depose Saddam. “The fact that he tried to kill my father and my wife [Laura Bush had accompanied her father-in-law to Kuwait in 1993, when the assassination attempt was aborted] shows the nature of the man,” Bush said. “He’s cold-blooded. He’s a dictator and he’s a tyrant. The decision I’m making and have made to disarm Saddam Hussein is based on the security of the American people.”
Throughout 2002, Bush built his case against Saddam to Congress and the American people, although much of it later proved to be based on lies, exaggerated intelligence, forged documents, and an insistence that the things George W. wanted to be true must be true. The President had not learned that respecting the truth distinguishes a great statesman from a mere politician. As Winston Churchill said, “Wrongs will be forgiven, sufferings and losses will be forgiven or forgotten . . . but anything like a trick will always rankle.”
The President claimed unequivocally that the Iraqi regime possessed weapons of mass destruction, including a possible nuclear capability. He insisted that Saddam had the capacity to develop anthrax and nerve gas. Without proof of any kind—in fact, with proof that just the opposite was true—he linked the 9/11 attacks to Iraq. He declared Saddam a threat to international security, although Saddam had instigated no attacks outside his own borders in a decade. He asserted the U.S. right to act unilaterally and preemptively against any and all terrorist threats. He taunted the UN, saying Saddam had defied all its resolutions for ten years. He demanded total disarmament. He affirmed that a free Iraq would bring democracy to the Middle East, and he promised the Iraqis a new country of prosperity and freedom. “No more poison factories, no more executions of dissidents, no more torture chambers and rape rooms.”
The President was obsessed with getting rid of Saddam and determined to make it his country’s top priority. In January 2003, he told Senator Peter Fitzgerald of Illinois that if he knew where the dictator was, he would order his assassination. When their conversation became public, the White House hastily affirmed that the executive order forbidding the assassination of foreign leaders was still in place. The President did not retract his words.
By this time, he had come to see himself in the glorious mode of Winston Churchill, who had defied Hitler during World War II. Bush had asked the British embassy in Washington for a bronze bust of the wartime Prime Minister, whose soaring rhetoric had, in the words of John F. Kennedy, “mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.” George W. Bush, who mangled the English language, saw Churchill as a kindred spirit. “He really kind of went after it in a way that seemed like a Texan to me,” Bush said of Churchill. “He wasn’t afraid of public-opinion polls. He charged ahead, and the world is better for it.”
White House speechwriters stretched for Churchillian prose when the President announced the beginning of the Iraqi invasion. “We will not waver; we will not tire; we will not falter; and we will not fail,” Bush said, borrowing effectively from a famous Churchill speech. The President soon felt the scourge of public opinion as antiwar demonstrations were staged around the world. Several million people took to the streets of Europe on February 15, 2003, in a vast wave of protest against the prospect of a U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. More than 750,000 filled London’s Hyde Park for the largest political demonstration in British history. Nearly 1 million people turned out in Rome, and 500,000 demonstrated in Berlin at the biggest rally since the fall of the Wall. The breadth of the global opposition was staggering. From Canberra to Oslo and Cape Town to Damascus, protesters jammed their cities, waving placards that read: “Drop Bush, Not Bombs,” “No Blood for Oil,” “An Eye for an Eye and the Whole World Goes Blind,” “Drunk Frat Boy Drives Country into Ditch.”
The former President could not stand any criticism of his son. Three months after W. was sworn into office, George H.W. Bush returned to New Haven for Yale’s tercentenary celebration. At the end of his remarks, he begged his audience to give the new President a chance. “He’s only been in office 100 days,” said the doting father. Speaking in Boston two days after the 9/11 attacks, he said he resented criticism of his son for not returning to Washington sooner. Later, as his son careened away from coalition building to waging his own war, his father again defended him. He told Paula Zahn on CNN, “I hate Saddam Hussein.” The elder Bush panned those who did not support his son’s war against the dictator. “I read stuff that really burns me up,” he said.
The former President smarted each time he heard his son called a warmonger, and he responded as if each rebuke were personal. “They’ve hurt this loving, proud father very much,” he told an audience in Stamford, Connecticut. He protested when the Most Reverend Frank Griswold, presiding Bishop of the U.S. Episcopal Church, said, “I’d like to be able to go somewhere and not have to apologize for being from the United States . . . I am not surprised that we are hated and loathed . . . for indifference to human suffering.”