President George W. Bush liked to call himself “the decider.” He may have filled that role insofar as saying yes or no to various actions, but his ability to make real decisions and set policy was constrained by colleagues who severely limited his information and options and by a vice president who controlled his agenda and direction. From its earliest days, the Bush administration was a Cheney regency. As Barton Gellman of the Washington Post, Jane Mayer of the New Yorker, and others have documented, Cheney enforced conservative orthodoxy as well as controlled administration policy on Iraq, Iran, North Korea, the interrogation of prisoners, and the surveillance of Americans’ communications.
The bad consequences of this decision-making system, and of the Cheney regency, surfaced increasingly as the war in Iraq wore on. The Iraqi occupation, with its demands for continual pacification, absorbed American resources. A side result: the occupation pointed up the inadequacies of the neoconservative ideas that had pushed the United States into the preemptive war. As Iraq became a sinkhole, it consumed and eventually destroyed the legitimacy of the neoconservative program for America’s foreign policy.
IN THE SPRING of 2004, one year after the invasion of Iraq, the country’s occupation by more than 100,000 U.S. troops continued; though a provisional, nonelected government was in place, hundreds of Iraqi civilians and U.S. and coalition servicemen died each month primarily because of IEDs—“improvised explosive devices” placed by insurgents and al-Qaeda adherents. Al-Qaeda had used the Iraq War as a recruiting tool to lure young fighters into the country and into attempts to capsize the post-Saddam government. Suicide bombers regularly targeted police stations and Iraq army recruitment centers. Saboteurs routinely exploded Iraq’s oil pipelines. Insurgents made continual attacks on the electricity and telephone services and water-providing facilities.
The American people were growing restive about the conduct of the war, but polls suggested that most were willing to wait for the results promised by the administration.
Those positive expectations received a great shock from the exposure, in early 2004, of the torture, humiliation, and abusive treatment of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. guard troops at the Abu Ghraib prison twenty miles west of Baghdad—abuse that was captured in photos taken by the guards for their own amusement and quickly disseminated via the Internet around the world, and then on a 60 Minutes broadcast. To critics, Abu Ghraib became a symbol of American moral turpitude and decadent behavior. From what the public could discern, the excesses seemed to have been condoned if not explicitly permitted by higher officers; the torture and humiliation techniques and some of the instigators of the abuse were quickly traced back to the treatment of al-Qaeda prisoners at Guantánamo Bay.
War brings out the worst in human behavior: abusive treatment of prisoners occurs in all major conflicts, as does unnecessary killing of civilians by bands of soldiers bent on taking revenge for fallen comrades. But the Bush administration had claimed the high moral ground as reason for its aggressive terror-fighting tactics—and Abu Ghraib and stories of U.S. military units raping and executing Iraqi civilians demolished such claims. Voices around the world, including those of America’s allies, condemned the Abu Ghraib excesses, and those condemnations combined with anger at what news investigations were now exposing about the casus belli. These investigative reports showed that the alleged prewar presence of WMDs, Iraq’s nuclear program, and links between Saddam and al-Qaeda had been hyped at best and perhaps even deliberately falsified.
The excesses at Abu Ghraib, America’s invasion and continued occupation of Iraq, the administration’s refusal to deal diplomatically with Iran and North Korea, and its attempts to punish France and Germany for sitting out the war against Iraq dissipated virtually all the international goodwill and sympathy the United States had received after September 11, 2001. Nonetheless, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Bush continued to push the neocon agenda, the president asserting in early April 2004 that the big lesson of 9/11 was that the United States “must go on the offense and stay on the offense.”
In this atmosphere, Bob Woodward’s Plan of Attack, published in April, helped the administration’s public relations efforts. A second paean to Bush and the planners of the invasion of Iraq, it provided an antidote to the increasingly negative stories about the administration. The White House itself heavily promoted the book. By then the notion that Bush was not really in charge—that Cheney made all the significant decisions—was gathering force and specificity in reports in the Washington Post, the New York Times, and other leading venues. Woodward’s account attempted to correct this, reporting that Bush had overruled Cheney on such matters as first presenting the U.S. case to the UN before invading Iraq.
Most reviewers faulted Woodward’s narrative as lacking the balance it might have had if it covered the new information that was emerging about the questionable prewar claims of WMDs and al-Qaeda links. The existence of that contrary data underscored the appearance that Woodward was still, as in the past, a captive to his sources—a reporter too subject to what Joan Didion once identified as Woodward’s fatal flaw, his “disinclination…to exert cognitive energy on what he is told.” Woodward generally acted more as a stenographer than as a critical analyst of what his interviewees said, Didion charged. Roy McGovern, a CIA analyst for twenty-seven years before his retirement, predicted in a review that Plan of Attack “will provide useful yarn for White House spinners claiming the president was misled by faulty intelligence. And the slam-dunker [Tenet] can be left hanging on the rim of the basket…until he falls of his own weight.”
As McGovern’s review indicates, a blame game had begun. In reaction to the increasingly unsatisfying results in Iraq, the neocons and the administration pointed fingers at those who could be faulted for foiling the grandiose plans. In interviews, Richard Perle castigated the intelligence community and especially the CIA for giving the president bad information in the run-up to the war. Perle had recently been forced to resign as leader of the Defense Policy Board because of allegations of conflict of interest revealed in Seymour Hersh’s articles in the New Yorker, but he nonetheless remained on that unpaid board. The idea of “Darth Vader” Perle faulting “Slam-Dunk” Tenet—the story of the CIA director’s use of that phrase in Bush’s office was one of the highlights of Plan of Attack—drew some derisive comment, as both Perle and Tenet had been integral to the push for war in Iraq. The intelligence community (and Tenet) fought back, accusing Cheney and the neocons of cherry-picking intelligence to justify an ideological war.
The Republican-controlled Congress refused to investigate any possible misdeeds by the administration in the run-up to the war, in the subsequent conduct of the war, or in the occupation of Iraq. Underlying these three problem areas—the run-up to the war, the military operation, and the occupation—were, in addition to neocon hubris, some ideas drawn from traditional conservative theory, for instance, the preference for giving more tasks to private industry and fewer to the government. Rumsfeld’s decision to commit an inadequate number of troops to the fight led the government to hand off the reconstruction of Iraq to private contractors, such as Halliburton and Blackwater USA, who enjoyed the fruits of no-bid contracts. Massive fraud and waste were already being alleged in these programs, which had little U.S. government oversight. Critics charged that the contractors’ relatively free rein stemmed from their having friends in high places.
But the problems went beyond ideology to blatant attempts by the administration to avoid inquiries into their conduct. Critics accused Gonzales and Cheney’s office of blocking probes of wiretapping and other federal antiterror programs, which were coming under increasing fire for intruding into Americans’ lives while producing nothing of use in the war on terrorism. When the general in charge of the investigation into the abuses at Abu Ghraib testified to Congress that the abuses might well be traceable to Department of Defense officials, Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen Cambone insisted that only the military officers were to blame. The torture at Abu Ghraib was linked to techniques used in the treatment and interrogation of prisoners at Guantánamo. Accusations surfaced that Cheney and Addington had made the decision to interrogate some prisoners from the Afghanistan battlefields without affording them the protections of the Geneva Convention, which they contended did not apply to “unlawful combatants.” As the Washington Post’s Gellman later wrote:
The vice president’s office played a central role in shattering limits on coercion of prisoners in U.S. custody, commissioning and defending legal opinions…. Cheney and his allies, according to more than two dozen current and former officials, pioneered a novel distinction between forbidden “torture” and permitted use of “cruel, inhuman or degrading” methods of questioning.
As more information surfaced about the intelligence problems in the run-up to the Iraq War, the clamor for a culprit rose, and George Tenet resigned as director of the CIA. Though his agency had raised alarms about al-Qaeda before September 11, and had tried to give proper warning of the absence of WMDs in Iraq, he had eventually caved in to pressure and delivered the “slam-dunk” message that helped to green-light the invasion of Iraq. Bush replaced him with Porter Goss, an undistinguished conservative politician whose major qualification was his previous service on the House’s CIA oversight panel. At the direction of the White House, Goss quickly fired more than a dozen seasoned analysts, chief among them those who had leaked to the press about the CIA’s prewar assessments about Iraq’s WMDs.
BY JULY, WITH the 2004 election season well under way, President Bush had no real challengers for the Republican nomination, and Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts had won enough primary votes to become the Democratic nominee. A Vietnam veteran who had commanded riverine “swift boats” in the war and claimed responsibility for the innovative and aggressive tactic of turning the boats toward attackers on the shore when the boats were fired upon, Kerry had become famously antiwar after returning home, testifying to Congress as a leader of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War before becoming a public prosecutor and then a long-serving senator. When Kerry trumpeted the contrast between his military service in the Vietnam era and Bush’s, he was countered by a group calling itself the “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth,” which ran a series of misleading ads maligning Kerry as a liar and a traitor. But Iraq gave Kerry as much trouble as Vietnam: Having voted for the war authorization and for subsequent military appropriations bills, it was difficult for him to tap into Democratic anger over the war.
Ultimately, though, the election turned on a domestic issue: Eleven states had measures on the ballot that would mandate a ban on “gay marriage,” a practice approved in some states—including Kerry’s home state of Massachusetts—but which Christian conservatives deemed an abomination. The Christian right had helped propel Bush into office in 2000—some conservatives felt America’s foreign policy needed to protect Israel so that biblical prophecies about the end-times could come to pass—and in 2004 that alliance was galvanized by the gay-marriage issue. In some states where a gay-marriage ban was on the ballot, such as Ohio, Christian voters provided the margin of victory for Bush. After the results came in, however, Bush hailed his victory as a validation of his foreign policy and of the neocon agenda.
SEVERAL BUSH ADVISERS who had independent stature left the administration at the outset of his second term, replaced by people who owed their high positions to their loyalty to Bush. Condoleezza Rice succeeded Colin Powell as secretary of state, and Albert Gonzales replaced Ashcroft as attorney general. The relative weakness of the new secretaries, coupled with other, similar personnel changes, left Vice President Cheney and his allies—Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Libby, Feith, Addington—even more in control. In the second term, the vice president assumed more day-to-day control over the management of the government and the administration’s legislative agenda. This triggered attempts to pursue more neocon ideas, such as the spreading of democracy as a way to create allies for the United States.
“The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands,” Bush said in his second inaugural. “The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.” The task of the United States, Bush said, was therefore to instill democracy in places where it had not yet taken root. The first example was the “purple fingers” election in Iraq at the end of January 2005, during which citizens who voted had their fingers inked to ensure proper counting. Newsweek cited genuine exhilaration over this step toward democracy and similar pushes elsewhere in the Gulf region—in a story headlined “Where Bush Was Right.”
This was the high point for the neocon agenda. From then on it would slide further and further into the abyss of Iraq.
Iraq’s newly elected parliament, ostensibly democratic, was sharply divided along ethnic and religious lines and had very little real control over the country’s destiny; power remained in the hands of the American and coalition forces. After the Iraq election, however, member nations of the “coalition of the willing” bowed to pressures at home and began withdrawing their small contingents from Iraq.
American troops, in contrast, were unable to go home except on a rotation schedule; the unstable country still needed policing. The administration made a series of predictions about the coming end of this phase of American involvement in Iraq: It would come in the fall of 2005, at the end of 2005, by the time of the 2006 U.S. midterm elections. The White House stopped talking about the idea that Iraq’s oil would pay for the war, as it had done before the invasion, because insurgent attacks on the pipeline continued to seriously curtail oil production; the U.S. military had to import gas and oil to run its vehicles, at a high cost per gallon. The overall monetary cost of the war to the American taxpayer soared, while Iraqi citizens paid primarily in blood, with thousands of Iraqis dying each month in sectarian and al-Qaeda violence.
Meanwhile, in Washington, under Cheney’s impetus the administration continued to aggrandize the powers of the presidency at the expense of the legislative and judicial branches. When Democrats accused the administration of hiding the influence of energy industry lobbyists on recent energy bills, Cheney refused to turn over to Congress any of his visitor records that might document such meetings with energy industry people. When a court challenge to such tactics resulted in a ruling the Cheney office did not like, contrary rulings were sought in more friendly courts. “We’re one bomb away from getting rid of that obnoxious [FISA] court,” Addington told Jack Goldsmith, and at Addington’s lead the administration refused to use the FISA courts that were specifically empowered to review wiretap applications in secret, because it feared a negative ruling. Goldsmith added that Cheney, Addington, “and other top officials in the administration dealt with FISA the way they dealt with other laws they didn’t like: They blew through them in secret based on flimsy legal opinions that they guarded closely so no one could question the legal basis for the operations.”
As Goldsmith suggests, that widespread pattern ran through almost every arena of the government. When experts on the federal payroll generated scientific reports that were at odds with administration positions, in agencies ranging from the National Institutes of Health to the Environmental Protection Agency to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, political appointees in those agencies frequently bowdlerized the reports to eliminate negative findings and comments before publication, and levied penalties against government employees who endorsed the critical findings. At the request of the White House, the Justice Department forced out eight competent U.S. Attorneys and installed more politically accommodating replacements. Political appointees gave Republican campaign briefings on the premises of at least fifteen federal agencies, violating statutes forbidding partisan political activity on government grounds. The sum of these actions was governance by an elite that seemed to consider itself above most laws and believed it owed little to the public and nothing at all to congressional or judicial oversight.
A few reporters saw to it that some of these matters reached the public consciousness, but many ongoing problems did not. The administration’s use of “signing statements,” a by-product of Cheney’s “unitary executive” principles, went largely unnoticed by the public; the Bush administration would eventually issue eleven hundred of them. As the war in Iraq dragged on, and legislators grew less inclined to yield to the administration’s wishes, the number of signing statements increased. Not until 2006, when Boston Globe reporter Charlie Savage’s articles about the statements won international attention (and eventually a Pulitzer Prize), did the administration cut back on issuing such statements.
THE ADMINISTRATION’S MAJOR claim about the war on terror and its extension in Iraq was that it had prevented further al-Qaeda attacks on American soil. But it was not able to prevent al-Qaeda-inspired and-modeled attacks in Spain in 2004, which killed hundreds and toppled a government that had joined the U.S.-led coalition that invaded Iraq. Nor could it prevent the July 7, 2005, suicide bomber attacks on the London underground, which produced dozens of casualties and chaos in the heart of America’s most important ally. Two weeks after that, on July 21, terrorists made another attempt to explode four bombs in Great Britain, but the detonators were faulty and little damage was done. The bombings, traced to a bomb factory in Leeds, bore many of the characteristics of al-Qaeda suicide attacks; the dead bombers were either Muslims from Pakistan or had spent time in Pakistan in al-Qaeda circles, and organizations with ties to bin Laden claimed credit for the British bombings. Experts suggested that while bin Laden had been weakened, al-Qaeda had become like a Hydra; the destruction of one head or faction would not prevent others from pursuing the group’s anti-American, anti-Western agenda.
Americans were sobered by these attacks in Spain and Great Britain, but by mid-2005, U.S. media attention was increasingly interested in how the United States had gotten into the Iraq War. Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation into the Valerie Plame–Joe Wilson matter took center stage, with its focus on the falsification of the run-up to war and the punishing of Ambassador Wilson by the publicizing of his wife’s name and CIA affiliation. The two men suspected of leaking Plame’s name and identity were White House political director Karl Rove and Cheney’s chief of staff, Scooter Libby. The judge sent Judith Miller, the New York Times reporter, to jail for refusing to reveal her source. Matt Cooper of Time narrowly escaped jail when, under pressure, he testified that Rove had given him the information.
In the midst of all this, Bob Woodward created an odd spectacle when he offered on television to serve part of Miller’s sentence, expressing solidarity with her for protecting her sources—while not revealing to his editors or to the public that he too had been told by administration sources of Plame’s identity. After Miller emerged from jail, Woodward was finally forced to testify, and only then did he reveal that for two years he had concealed his knowledge about Plame’s identity. He apologized to the Post management; they were forgiving, but he took intense criticism from other reporters and media analysts for withholding important information in a federal investigation. The incident only underscored Woodward’s latter-day reputation as a mouthpiece for his sources in the administration rather than an unbiased reporter.
The White House continued to stymie the Fitzgerald investigation into the Plame leak and threw up similar obstacles in other arenas. It blocked the Senate testimony of retired senior military officers who wanted to call attention to the poor planning for the war in Iraq and the U.S. military’s inability to pacify that country. It blocked an internal Department of Justice inquiry into whether Gonzales had acted improperly in overseeing the domestic surveillance program. It blocked internal attempts by Defense, State, and Justice to close Guantánamo and repatriate prisoners the government did not intend to try in court. When the Supreme Court forbade the administration from setting up military tribunals and rejected its interpretation of the Geneva Convention concerning abusive interrogations, Bush vowed to push Congress to grant him those powers explicitly. In 2006 they did just that, passing a bill severely limiting the right of defendants in military courts to the protection of habeas corpus that many scholars considered unconstitutional. As part of a defense appropriations bill, the administration also introduced amendments allowing the president to take control of any state’s guard units without the consent of the governor, and to suspend the Posse Comitatus Act, a prohibition against the use of U.S. military forces within the United States. Few people paid attention, and the bill was passed.
The continuing occupation of Iraq swallowed ever-greater segments of the American treasury and consumed the administration’s plans. “Commanders in the field had their discretionary financing for things like rebuilding hospitals and providing police uniforms randomly cut; money to pay Iraqi construction firms to build barracks was withheld; contracts we made for purchasing military equipment for the new Iraqi Army were rewritten back in Washington,” according to the testimony of a recently retired general who had been in charge of training Iraqi troops. Groups of retired military officers agitated publicly for Rumsfeld to be replaced, calling him not just overbearing and dictatorial but incompetent. Senior active-duty military officials privately expressed their frustration that Rumsfeld had not provided enough troops to do the job in Iraq, or enough armor and armored vehicles to protect the troops from IEDs. Faced with such revolt, Bush convinced an ailing Gerald Ford to give Rumsfeld an endorsement that kept him at the Pentagon until the 2006 midterm election.
For the military officials, however, the problem went beyond Rumsfeld to the fundamental rationale for the war. In their view, the administration had not properly—professionally—taken into account the war’s likely consequences (as Fritz Kraemer had demanded of Rumsfeld in their final meeting). Retired lieutenant general William Odom, a fellow of the right-leaning Hudson Institute as well as a professor at Yale, put the argument well in a widely reprinted article:
First, invading Iraq was not in the interests of the U.S. It was in the interests of Iran and Al Qaeda. For Iran, it avenged a grudge against Hussein for his invasion of the country in 1980. For Al Qaeda, it made it easier to kill Americans. Second, the war has paralyzed the U.S. in the world…. Only with a rapid withdrawal from Iraq will Washington regain diplomatic and military mobility. Tied down like Gulliver in the sands of Mesopotamia, we simply cannot attract the diplomatic and military cooperation necessary to win the real battle against terror.
Staunch civilian conservatives now also publicly questioned the war in Iraq. Bill Buckley said in 2004 that if he had known in 2003 “that Saddam Hussein was not the kind of extra-territorial menace that was assumed by the Administration,” and that the United States would become bogged down in Iraq, “I would have opposed the war.” Rod Dreher, a former National Review editor who had initially supported the war and had dismissed pre-invasion critics as “unpatriotic,” soon told a radio audience:
In Iraq, this Republican President for whom I voted twice has shamed our country with weakness and incompetence, and the consequences of his failure will be far, far worse than anything Jimmy Carter did. The fraud, the mendacity, the utter haplessness of our government’s conduct of the Iraq war have been shattering to me. It wasn’t supposed to turn out like this.
WRESTING THE NATION’S attention from Iraq, Hurricane Katrina struck the American Gulf Coast with tremendous force at the end of August 2005, devastating New Orleans and wreaking havoc in smaller communities from Texas to Florida. Despite the widespread and debilitating destruction, the Bush administration’s response to the disaster was slow, ineffectual, and shallow, partly because important resources, such as those of the Army Corps of Engineers and the National Guard, had been diverted to Iraq.
Katrina was a seminal event in modern U.S. history. Bush’s apparent lack of distress over the disaster, and his administration’s lackadaisical and inept response to it, seemed to validate the charges of incompetence, arrogance, and untruthfulness leveled against the administration over Iraq. After Katrina, Bush’s poll ratings began a steady decline. Richard Viguerie, the conservative fund-raiser for Goldwater and Reagan, tied dismay about Iraq to the Katrina response and other administration failures:
For all of conservatives’ patience, we’ve been rewarded with the botched Hurricane Katrina response…. We’ve been rewarded with an amnesty plan for illegal immigrants. We’ve been rewarded with a war in Iraq that drags on because of the failure to provide adequate resources at the beginning, and with exactly the sort of “nation-building” that Candidate Bush said he opposed.
Theorist Francis Fukuyama, who had once hailed America’s triumph over Marxism as “the end of history,” now turned his thoughts to the relationship between the neoconservatism he had helped define and the reality its agenda had confronted in Iraq. “The problem with the neoconservative agenda lies not in its ends, which are as American as apple pie,” Fukuyama wrote, “but rather in the overmilitarized means by which it has sought to accomplish them…. What is needed now are…new ideas that retain the neoconservative belief in the universality of human rights, but without its illusions about the efficacy of American power and hegemony.”
Support for Fukuyama’s charge about overmilitarization came in July 2006, when a war broke out in Lebanon between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah. Shiite militias fired rockets into Israeli territory, and Israel, backed by the Bush administration, retaliated and invaded the southern part of Lebanon. Soon Israel’s military was bogged down and Israel was subjected to international denunciations and internal dissent as seldom before in its history. Whatever hope there had been that democracy would overcome the influence of Syria and Muslim extremists in Lebanon vanished in the war. A bad blow for Israel, it was also a setback for neocon backing of military aggression. As some critics noted, in both the Lebanon conflict and the U.S. war in Iraq the real beneficiary was Iran.
As the midterm congressional elections approached, and Bush’s popularity sank to levels not seen since Nixon was enmeshed in Watergate, Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld, and other leaders began to sound a drumbeat about the threat to civilization posed by Iran’s nuclear program. Richard Perle even accused Bush of making an “ignominious retreat” on Iran by not answering the Iranian premier’s boasts about nuclear development with firm military action.
Once again the CIA, as it had early in the run-up to the Iraq War, tried to douse the flames. It contended in secret reports that evidence from overheard telephone conversations between Iran’s military commanders, among other things, convinced the intelligence community that Iran’s nuclear program had been shut down, possibly in response to the invasion of Iraq, and had not been revived. In an August 2006 report, a congressional committee headed by an administration loyalist complained that the intelligence agencies were not sounding warnings about Iran loudly enough. The New York Times suggested that the report reflected “the views of some officials inside the White House and the Pentagon who advocated going to war with Iraq and now are pressing for confronting Iran directly over its nuclear program and ties to terrorism.”
As the 2006 election approached, the neocons were joined by the Republican-controlled Congress in spoiling for war against Iran. It remained to be seen whether the results of that election, which were expected to challenge Republican control, would deter a second preemptive war.