“So,” I said aloud. “That’s the last mistake I’ll ever make.”
People who know me understand I can occasionally be forgetful of the necessities that crowd our lives: phones, keys, flash drives, items that slip my mind when my body and brain are not in the same place. This time, I was almost amused that my absentmindedness would be the end of me after all, as my wife had often predicted.
March 21, 2003, was the first day of the invasion of Iraq. I crossed from Kuwait into Iraq with a CBS News team including producers Bill Owens and Mark Hooper, cameraman Sean Keene, soundman Paul Hardy and satellite uplink engineer Perry Jones. We were working independently, outside the official military embed system. A short distance into Iraq we came across US marines fighting to hold Umm Qasr, Saddam’s only deep-water port on the Persian Gulf. Iraqi Republican Guard troops were sheltered behind a building about two-hundred yards outside the port perimeter. They were lobbing mortar shells onto the marines’ position. Fox Company seized a sandy embankment and opened a counterattack. When machine gun fire didn’t stop the mortars, the marines brought up shoulder-fired anti-tank missiles. Two Javelin missiles rocked the Iraqi redoubt, but the enemy kept shooting.
An incoming Iraqi shell, unlike the ones before, rose directly above the marines and exploded in midair. Fox Company instantly recognized this as a classic dispersion profile for a nerve gas weapon. “GAS! GAS! GAS!” the marines shouted. Each man reflexively pulled his gas mask over his face in one swift motion and resumed fire. I looked to see that Sean and Paul had their masks on. Then I discovered, in my hurry to get to Fox Company’s position, I’d left my mask in our SUV about one hundred yards away. Bill Owens, who had been my producer at the White House during the Clinton administration, was watching the battle and phoning in a report to CBS News radio. When I turned to measure the distance back to my mask I realized I was doomed. I braced myself. Then I noticed Owens running into the firefight. I thought, What are you doing? Get down! Owens had my mask in his fist. His legs were digging into the sand so hard he must have quickened the rotation of the Earth. With machine gun fire all around, shells rising and the belief that poison gas was descending, Bill shoved the mask into my hands. It was an act of extraordinary courage that can never be repaid, only admired.
We did not know the detonation over our heads was not poison gas. That first morning, we did not imagine that the sole justification for the war, like the shell, would go up in smoke. Saddam Hussein was a despot, a tyrant and a murderer, but he was not a liar when he denied concealing an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. Fox Company was firing the opening rounds in a war that would rage for more than fifteen years and kill well over 280,000 people.1 Included in this toll were 4,832 American and allied troops and 468 American and allied contractors.2 I covered our forces in Iraq for more than a decade. I watched them sacrifice, fight and die to salvage something useful from one of the great foreign policy blunders in American history. Iraq was another failure to heed Winston Churchill’s warning, “War now is nothing but toil, blood, death, squalor, and lying propaganda.”3
Six months before that gunfight, Bill Owens and I were in the Oval Office to ask President Bush whether he intended to commit the nation to another war—one year after the invasion of Afghanistan. In early September 2002, Washington was ninety degrees and muggy. Morning sun glazed the eleven-foot windows that frame the Rose Garden. A team of CBS News photographers, sound engineers, producers and associate producers was busy with final adjustments in the president’s 816-square-foot office. Nine television lights impaled on aluminum stands painted a circle around two upholstered, cane-back armchairs. The chairs were added by President Herbert Hoover during his restoration of the Oval after the West Wing was destroyed by fire in 1929.4 The chairs, facing each other, were leaving an impression near the middle of the oval rug that covered all but the edges of the polished floor fashioned from walnut and quarter sawn white oak.5 At the center of the rug, the Seal of the President was rendered in blue and gold which reflected the same seal, eighteen feet above, embossed in plaster on the ceiling. Franklin Roosevelt had another Seal of the President carved into a kneehole panel at the front of the president’s desk. On the seal, an eagle holds the national motto in its beak reading E Pluribus Unum, Latin for “Out of Many, One.” But when it comes to presidential seals in the Oval Office, you could flip that to read Unum de Multis. (Out of One, Many.)
Despite the heat oppressing the Rose Garden, Press Secretary Ari Fleischer came in with a revised forecast. “You’re going to feel the chill,” Fleischer warned me.
“Ari, I have to ask the president about Iraq, people need to know whether it’s next,” I protested.
“I’m just telling you, if you ask about Iraq, you’re going to feel the chill,” the press secretary insisted.
Our interview that morning was meant to be centered on the anniversary of 9/11, which was days away. Owens and I were finishing a documentary on how the president and the White House grappled with the day America was attacked. But “anonymous sources” and “senior officials” in the administration were leaking stories about an intolerable threat posed by Saddam Hussein. It looked to me like the beginning of an influence campaign to convince the public to support another war. Fleischer’s warning was matter-of-fact. The sense of it was: “You want to wreck your interview with the president? Be my guest.” Mr. Bush may not have wanted to hear questions about Iraq, but the American people wanted them asked. The earlier skepticism is brought to bear on issues of war, the more effective it can be in balancing the debate.
Mr. Bush walked into the Oval, a black mood in a blue suit. Someone had just told him something he didn’t want to hear. I don’t know what it was, but in this timeframe, the president was getting conflicting advice. Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld were arguing for war. They assured the commander in chief that Iraq would be quick and easy. Secretary of State Colin Powell—a retired army four-star general, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the only member of the war cabinet with combat experience—counseled patience. Powell warned that the president could end up owning Iraq and the demands of its twenty-five million people.6
Mr. Bush and I sat down in the pool of light. Privately, before the cameras rolled, I tried to impress him with the importance of being candid on Iraq. I reached back to our shared West Texas heritage. “Mr. President,” I said, leaning forward, my elbows pressing my knees. “We’re hearing a lot of talk about Iraq all of a sudden. You’re going to have to explain this to the folks at the feed store in Floydada, so they understand what their sons and daughters might be asked to do.” Fleischer’s forecast was off. It wasn’t a chill; it was a hard freeze. The president set his jaw, narrowed his eyes and said not a word. The cameras rolled. I got to the point.
“Are you committed to ending the rule of Saddam Hussein?”
“I’m committed to regime change,” the president said tersely. That was his full answer. “Don’t ask again” was written all over his face. I tried another angle. “There are those who have been vocal in their advice against war in Iraq, some of our allies in the [1991] Gulf War—Saudi Arabia, Turkey, for example. Even your father’s former national security advisor. What is it that they don’t understand about the Iraq question that you do?”
“The policy of the government is regime change, Scott. Hasn’t changed. I get all kinds of advice. I’m listening to the advice. I appreciate the consultations. And we’ll consult with a lot of people. But our policy hasn’t changed.”
Nor would it. At the time that Mr. Bush and I were knee to knee in the Oval, the president was already far down the road to war.
The early discussions of Iraq came even before 9/11. In June 2001, Douglas Feith, Mr. Bush’s nominee for undersecretary of defense, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the US “has a strong interest...in facilitating as best we can the liberation of Iraq.”7 Mr. Bush’s nominee for deputy secretary of defense, Paul Wolfowitz, told the committee, “We...are exploring whether more can be done to hasten the replacement of the present regime... Clearly our armed forces will have a prominent part to play in our national strategy toward Iraq.”8 Wolfowitz was among several of the president’s top advisors who had been with the elder Mr. Bush through the Gulf War in 1990/91.9 Back then, Vice President Cheney was George H. W. Bush’s secretary of defense. Others who served the father and joined the son’s administration included: Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby;10 National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice;11 her deputy, Stephen Hadley;12 and National Security Council staff member, Zalmay Khalilzad.13 In 1991, the president’s father liberated Kuwait. But, wary of a quagmire, he refused to march on Baghdad to overthrow Saddam. Instead, the elder Mr. Bush went on the radio to encourage the Iraqi people to rise against the dictator. Many did. But with no combat support from the United States, they were massacred. From that moment, Iraq was unfinished business for the president’s advisors. 9/11 presented a fresh chance to settle an old score.
Only seventy-six days after al-Qaida attacked America, a document stamped TOP SECRET CLOSE HOLD listed the issues to be discussed in preparation for war with Iraq. The talking points were prepared for a November 27, 2001, meeting between Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and General Tommy Franks, the commander of US Central Command. In this document, war was the goal—the justifications for war were listed as options. One of the memo’s bullet points is labeled “How start?” Below that heading the document reads:
Saddam moves against Kurds in the north?
US discovers Saddam connection to Sept. 11 attack or to anthrax attacks? [Anthrax had been mailed to the US Capitol after 9/11.]
Dispute over WMD inspections? Start thinking now about inspection demands.
In a news conference after their meeting, Rumsfeld was questioned about operations in Afghanistan which had started fifty-one days before. He told reporters that General Franks was “Doggedly fixed on the objective.”14 But the truth was, Rumsfeld had just ordered Franks to turn his attention to Iraq. The talking points were declassified in 2010 and released in a Freedom of Information Act request made by the National Security Archive, a nonprofit research organization. At the end of the notes, on the bottom of page three, someone has written in cursive, “Influence Campaign... When begin?”15
There were several reasons for the early interest in Iraq. During the Clinton administration, US warplanes enforced two no-fly zones to protect communities opposed to Saddam. Once in a while Saddam fired a missile at the American jets. Saddam also did all he could to obstruct the United Nations’ effort to ensure that Iraq’s chemical, biological and nuclear programs had been dismantled. Another possible reason was personal. After the 1990/91 Gulf War, an allied intelligence agency uncovered an Iraqi attempt to assassinate George H. W. Bush. The former president was on a victory tour of Kuwait with his wife, Barbara and son, Neil, among others. A bomb was concealed in a Toyota Land Cruiser that was to be parked on Mr. Bush’s route. A security source, intimately involved in the case, told me the explosives were so well hidden that the only thing out of place was an extra wire behind the lens of the glove compartment light. The plot was discovered before the Land Cruiser was in position. But I’ve often wondered whether Saddam’s attempt to kill his family played a role in George W. Bush’s decision to go to war.
Before beginning the campaign to influence the American people, the administration needed to select from among its three potential pretexts for war. For that, the administration turned to George Tenet, the longtime director of the CIA. Tenet had been appointed by President Clinton in 1997. In an unusual move, George W. Bush decided to keep him. One way to stay in an intelligence job is to stay out of the press. I once ran into Tenet at a Washington social event. I raised the possibility of going on 60 Minutes. He pulled his thumb and forefinger across a wry smile. “My lips are sealed,” he said.
It took a few years, but in 2007, shortly after his retirement, Tenet sat down with me for his first interview. Tenet never supported the second pretext for war listed in the Rumsfeld-Franks memo—“US discovers Saddam connection to Sept. 11 attack.” Instead, he told me he was mystified by the Bush administration’s post 9/11 haste to invade Iraq. Tenet described walking into the White House a day or so after 9/11 and running into Richard Perle, the chairman of the Defense Policy Board, a civilian advisory committee. Tenet remembered Perle saying, “Iraq has to pay a price for what happened yesterday, they bear responsibility.” Tenet told me he was incredulous. “It’s September the 12th. I’ve got the [airline] manifests with me that tell me al-Qaida did this. Nothing in my head says there is any Iraqi involvement in this in any way, shape, or form and I remember thinking to myself, as I’m about to go brief the president, ‘What the hell is he talking about?’” Tenet may have the day of the conversation wrong. He acknowledged later that it could have been a few days after 9/11, but he remains certain about Perle’s remark. I asked Tenet in 2007, “You said Iraq made no sense to you at that moment. Does it make any sense to you today?”
“In terms of complicity with 9/11? Absolutely none,” he told me. “It never made any sense. We could never verify that there was any Iraqi authority, direction and control, or complicity with al-Qaida for 9/11 or any operational act against America. Period.” This left weapons of mass destruction as the most appealing pretext for war remaining from the Rumsfeld-Franks talking points memo.
In our 2002 Oval Office interview, Mr. Bush was batting away my questions on Iraq because the White House had carefully timed its “influence campaign” to sell the American people. The plan called for months of leaks to the press before the president began his argument to close the deal. The administration, principally the office of Vice President Cheney, began passing unreliably sourced information about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction to the New York Times and others. One of the first leaks was timed three days before the anniversary of 9/11 when emotions would be running high. The Times front page announced, “U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts.” Two months later, the Times followed up with “Threats and Responses: Chemical Weapons; Iraq Said to Try to Buy Antidote to Nerve Gas.” The next month the paper announced, “CIA Hunts Iraq Tie to Soviet Small Pox.” Two months after that, another Times story ran under the headline “Defectors Bolster U.S. Case Against Iraq, Officials Say.” In March 2003, seven months after the propaganda campaign began, the Times headlined, “Iraq’s Weapons of Fear.”
The night of January 28, 2003, in his State of the Union address, the president made his case. There were fifty days left in the Pentagon’s secret countdown. One of the president’s key indictments centered on an alleged Iraqi nuclear program. Mr. Bush slowed his cadence and looked deeply into the House Chamber to underscore his point. “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”16 At the time that he said it, the president’s statement was known to the administration to be false. George Tenet’s CIA had found the documents that backed up the allegation were forgeries. Tenet asked that the claim be struck from an earlier October 7 speech Mr. Bush delivered in Cincinnati.17 Yet, it slipped back into the president’s most important, most widely viewed annual address. Tenet had been given a draft of the speech in advance for fact-checking. “I didn’t read the speech,” Tenet told me. “I was involved in a bunch of other things.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “The president’s State of the Union? You didn’t read that?”
“Right, I didn’t. I farmed it out. I got it at a principals meeting, brought it down the hall, handed it to my executive assistant. I said, ‘You guys go review this and come back to me if I need to do anything,’” Tenet recalled.
“Nobody came back to you?” I asked.
“And therein lies why I ultimately have to take my share of responsibility,” Tenet confessed.
The White House acknowledged the falsehood—four months after the invasion.18 I asked Tenet how other claims of the president and vice president squared with what he knew at the time. I began, “The president, in October 2002, said, quote, ‘We need to think about Saddam Hussein using al-Qaida to do his dirty work.’19 Is that what you’re telling the president?”
“Well, we didn’t believe al-Qaida was gonna do Saddam Hussein’s dirty work,” Tenet said.
I followed up. “January ’03, the president again, quote, ‘Imagine those nineteen hijackers this time armed by Saddam Hussein.’20 Is that what you’re telling the president?”
“No,” Tenet said.
Uranium ore cannot be concentrated to bomb-grade purity until it is spun in a centrifuge. Eleven days after the president’s false assertion, Secretary of State Colin Powell presented this missing piece to the U.N. Security Council. He told the council that aluminum tubes, intercepted on their way to Iraq, were centrifuge parts. Powell’s presentation on February 5, 2003, was the administration’s closing argument. The war would begin in forty-three days. The secretary of state played audio tapes of Iraqi communications that he said revealed a nerve gas arsenal. It seemed, not only was Saddam pursuing an illicit weapon, he was developing every kind of weapon of mass destruction, simultaneously, while under more than a decade of crippling U.N. economic sanctions. The propaganda campaign brimmed with confidence, untroubled by doubt.
Producer Bill Owens and I had been looking for independent sources of information with inside knowledge of Saddam’s weapons programs. That was difficult. For the most part, they were either inside Iraq or dead. But in February 2003, shortly after Secretary Powell’s presentation, we aired an interview with General Nizar al-Khazraji, the former chief of staff of the Iraqi army. During Iraq’s war with Iran from 1980 through 1989, al-Khazraji was a hero credited with saving Iraq. But al-Khazraji told us he was fired after he warned Saddam that Iraq would lose the war for Kuwait. In 1996, al-Khazraji slipped out of Iraq to a small town outside of Copenhagen. He bore a resemblance to Saddam: late fifties, receding black hair and a trim mustache obscured by smoke rising from a permanent cigarette. He seemed weary, weary of all he’d seen in life and weary of waiting for a bullet. In the living room of his small cottage, I asked him about Saddam’s weapons program. Al-Khazraji offered this analysis: “If you mean the weapons of mass destruction, in my estimation Iraq does not have nuclear capabilities. And if we come to chemical weapons, I also believe that no chemical weapons currently exist. If they do exist, he has no means to use them. There remains the matter of biological weapons. It is probable that Saddam has biological weapons and it is probable that he will use them.” Here was a man who had every reason to encourage an American invasion. He was exiled, waiting for Saddam’s assassin. An Iraq without Saddam would welcome al-Khazraji as a national hero. Yet, he knocked out two pillars of the Bush administration’s argument. No nuclear. No chemical. This also had to be assessed with skepticism, but I find when people speak against their self-interest, that’s a strong indication they’re telling the truth. General al-Khazraji’s truth was nothing like what America was hearing from President Bush.
Journalism students sometimes ask me to name my biggest mistake. This is it. On 60 Minutes II, we reported what General al-Khazraji told us. But in retrospect, I failed to grasp the importance of the interview. After al-Khazraji, I should have heard an internal alarm and aggressively investigated whether it was possible the administration was blundering into war. A reporter’s most important tool is skepticism, what Ernest Hemingway called a “built-in, shock-proof, shit-detector.”21 There was some good reporting questioning the rationale for war but I believe our profession, writ large, let the nation down. What skeptical reporting there was, was shouted down by selective leaks and bellicose speeches. This is a cautionary lesson every generation must learn. It is precisely when the nation’s temper turns to war that journalism must pursue the countervailing questions. Those stories and their authors will be excoriated as unpatriotic. But the reverse is true. Providing reporting that might keep America out of a misguided war is the zenith of patriotism. War, above all things, is not an administration’s business—it is the people’s business. When journalism fails to question an administration, the administration fails to question itself.
In the summer of 1971, the Supreme Court of the United States decided New York Times Co. v. United States. The Nixon administration sued to stop the Times and the Washington Post from publishing the Pentagon Papers that revealed how administrations, both Democratic and Republican, cooked the books on Vietnam to deceive the American people. The court found for the newspapers, which is to say, it sided with all citizens who have the right and obligation to inspect their government. Justice Hugo Black, a former US senator from Alabama, wrote a concurrence to the majority opinion which read in part:
In the First Amendment, the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The government’s power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people.
Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell.
In my view, far from deserving condemnation for their courageous reporting, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other newspapers should be commended for serving the purpose that the Founding Fathers saw so clearly. In revealing the workings of government that led to the Vietnam War, the newspapers nobly did precisely that which the Founders hoped and trusted they would do.22
In 2003, the hidden “workings of government” provoked fear of Iraq in the public, while attempting to lower anxiety in Congress. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld decided in advance that the war would be quick and Iraq would be handed back to Iraqis in short order. Rumsfeld was contemptuous of the Gulf War in 1990/91. The force of about five hundred thousand US and allied troops was far too large in Rumsfeld’s view. Rumsfeld was fond of noting that 80 percent of the ammunition sent to the Gulf War was returned.23 Following his instincts, Rumsfeld cut the Pentagon’s troop estimate by two-thirds. There was arrogance on the civilian side of the planning, a sense that the uniformed Pentagon just didn’t understand the administration’s concept of short, lightning-strike wars. One day in the Oval Office, I was surprised when President Bush confided to me before the invasion, “Yeah, we have a lot of nervous Nellies over at the Pentagon.”
The president might have been referring to his army chief of staff, General Eric Shinseki. Shinseki didn’t seem nervous, but after a lifetime in the army, he had a clear-eyed view of what the occupation of Iraq would look like. Twenty days after Powell’s presentation to the Security Council, Shinseki was asked by the Senate Armed Services Committee how many troops would be required. He replied, “Something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers is probably a figure that would be required. We’re talking about post-hostilities control over a piece of geography that’s fairly significant with the kinds of ethnic tensions that could lead to other problems.”24 Shinseki’s prescient, honest appraisal blindsided the White House. Two days later, Rumsfeld’s deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, was dispatched to the House Budget Committee with this rebuttal: “Some of the higher-end predictions that we have been hearing recently, such as the notion that it will take several hundred thousand US troops to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq, are wildly off the mark.”25 His appearance before the committee came twenty days before the invasion. Wolfowitz calculated the total cost of the war at $10 billion with a worst case of $100 billion. The actual cost was more than $1 billion a month. By 2017 Congress had appropriated $807 billion. However, a study by the Cost of War Project at Brown University estimates the total is well over $2 trillion after you add costs including projected veterans’ medical and disability benefits.26 Wolfowitz’s cost estimate was wildly off the mark because he naively ignored the fatal fault line in Iraqi society—the schism between the two main branches of Islam—the Sunnis and the Shiites. Wolfowitz testified that American troops would be “greeted as liberators.” He assured the committee that post conflict peacekeeping demands would be low because there was no “record in Iraq of ethnic militias fighting one another.” In truth, the record of ethnic militias fighting one another was nearly 1,400 years long.
The split in Islam began with the death of the prophet Muhammad in 632 AD. The divide is more about politics than theology. Shiites believe Muhammad appointed his son-in-law, Ali, as his successor. Shiites hold that only blood relatives of Muhammad can lead the faith. Sunnis, on the other hand, believe Muhammad died without appointing a successor so any learned and righteous member can be appointed leader. A decisive battle was fought in 680 AD near the town of Karbala in present-day Iraq. The Shiite forces were massacred and the Shiite leader was killed.27 Despite their defeat, today in Iraq, about 65 percent of Muslims are Shiites, only 30 percent belong to the victorious Sunni sect.28 And therein lies the animosity. From the creation of modern-day Iraq, the minority Sunnis have held power. A rough analogy is South African apartheid—a minority using brutality to repress the majority. It doesn’t take a great deal of imagination to predict a Shiite lust for revenge if Saddam was suddenly removed. The Shiites stood to take power for the first time in the democratic system the US intended to impose.29 30 General Shinseki foresaw civil war when he warned Congress about “ethnic tensions that could lead to other problems.” There was a weapon of mass destruction in Iraq. But it was President Bush, not Saddam, who was about to set it off.
Certain of swift, low-cost victory, the civilian leadership of the Pentagon organized an elaborate embed system that assigned journalists to dozens of military units. For the American people, it was an enormous improvement over the censorship and obstruction imposed in the 1990/91 Gulf War. In 2003, as excellent as the embed system was for the public, I felt there should be a role for independent reporting. Bill Owens and I prepared to cover the invasion on our own, unattached to any unit. The risk was high but the principle was vital. The public had a right to independent reporting unaffiliated with the self-interested Pentagon, as Justice Black wrote in his Pentagon Papers opinion, “just as the Founders hoped and trusted we would do.”
Our jumping off point was a farmhouse that we rented in the demilitarized zone on Kuwait’s border with Iraq. We chose the house because a gap, thirty yards wide, had been bulldozed through the eight-foot-high sand bastion the Kuwaitis erected after their 1990 experience with Iraq. We didn’t have to be von Clausewitz to figure out the freshly dug breach was a likely invasion route. But we did not know when the war would begin. We assembled a satellite uplink in the bed of a pickup truck and provisioned the house for a long stay. Our first night was March 20, 2003. Producer Mark Hooper and I were on the flat roof of the house where a camera was tethered to the satellite dish. Winds were light and cool—fifty-nine degrees. In the darkened distance, we heard rumbling. “Sounds like helicopters,” Hooper said. “No,” I replied. “That’s the sound of tank treads on blacktop.” We stretched our ears toward the approaching clatter.
“Helicopters,” Hooper repeated.
“Tanks,” I insisted.
The next moment, two US Marine Corps AH-1 Super Cobra helicopters skimmed the roof of our house. They bolted over the border into Iraq and launched Hellfire missiles into a communications station. Whoop, Boom! Whoop, Boom! An image of the desert froze in the flash of each exploding missile. Hooper didn’t take time to say “I told you so.” He called up the camera crew, Sean Keene and Paul Hardy, and asked our engineer, Perry Jones, to fire up the uplink to bounce our pictures off a satellite twenty-five thousand miles above us. I grabbed a microphone and spoke to the CBS News control room in New York. “The war has started, put us on the air!” I said to the senior producer in charge of our prime-time coverage. Another sortie of attack helicopters thundered over our heads and into Iraq. Whoop! Boom! “Stand by,” the control room producer said. There was a long, unexplained wait as another nest of Super Cobras released its burden of missiles. “Scott,” the New York producer said into my earpiece, “we’ve checked with our Pentagon correspondent. He cannot confirm that the war has started.” One had to admire the usual CBS News caution, but seriously? I asked Sean to turn the camera 180 degrees, away from me and onto the explosions illuminating the landscape. Whoop, Boom! Whoop, Boom! Whoop, Boom!
“Jeez!” the control room producer yelled. “We’re coming to you now!” That is how America first learned the war was on. Not from the Pentagon, but from independent reporting. There was no danger of giving away any secrets. I took care not to report exactly where I was along the border, and the Iraqis, by this point, were well aware they were under attack. We broke the story from our outpost and remained on the air continually until the sun was up in the DMZ. Our coverage was notable for another reason. Because we were on a farm, there was a chicken coop next to the house. With every explosion, the roosters sounded off. Boom! Cock-a-doodle-doo! Whump! Cock-a-doodle-doo! Bang! Cock-a-doodle-doo! They had a lot to crow about, but it was a ridiculous soundtrack. It crossed my mind that I could wring the necks of the roosters. I didn’t. We had to live with our comical rendition of “Ol’ McDonald had a war.”
Shortly after daylight, with the combed cacophony full-throated, a curious US Marine Corps Super Cobra helicopter dropped toward our rooftop and stopped to maul the air forty feet or so above us. The glass Cyclops eyes of Hellfire missiles stared blankly from the hard points on the gunship’s stubby “wings.” A 20mm Gatling gun was pointing at me, mounted just below the masked pilot in the front seat. I hoped he was a devoted viewer of CBS News and might recognize me, but instead, he seemed to be trying to figure out what we were doing there with something large on a tripod, overlooking a chokepoint for the invasion force. He’s either going to shoot us, or he’s not, I said to myself. Then, I remembered a cloth I had in the front left pocket of my pants. It was a cheap facsimile of the original, made in China. With the Super Cobra coiled and motionless in front of me, I pulled out the cloth and unfurled thirteen stripes and fifty stars. Without acknowledgment, the great machine tilted left and peeled away.
American and British armor were flowing through the gap like a torrent through a breach in a levee. They spread across the alluvial plain onto what was, very likely, humanity’s first battlefield. Mesopotamia—Greek for, “The land between two rivers”—was the birthplace of civilization. Before recorded time, floods on the Euphrates and the especially unruly Tigris laid layer upon layer of rich, dark earth. Everything that was touched by water sprang aggressively to life. About 10,000 BC, Neolithic nomads, in what is now Iraq, invented agriculture and cattle breeding.31 With mere survival checked off its “to do” list, humanity had a moment to think. Mesopotamia gave us the wheel and the first written accounts of astronomy, mathematics, law, politics, organized religion and organized murder.32 History’s first record of war was immortalized in about 2700 BC on the Sumerian King List, a four-sided clay column, eight inches tall. The column is in a museum at the University of Oxford.33 The clay testifies that the Sumerian king, Enmebaragesi, defeated the city-state of Elam.34 The cuneiform symbols note that the king “carried away as spoil, the weapons of the land of Elam.”35 Forty-seven centuries later, the rationale for this war in Mesopotamia was precisely the same—to carry away the weapons of mass destruction of the land of Saddam.
At the farmhouse, we had two SUVs and a Chevy pickup with our nine-foot-wide satellite dish resting in the bed. Bill and I got the team together and asked who wanted to join the invasion. Each man raised his hand. We compressed more food, water and jerry cans of gasoline into the vehicles than their springs should shoulder. Water and gas could be lethal limitations. We’d have to beg and borrow more of both or our coverage would be limited to three days or so. We twisted ourselves into body armor, slid into the heavy, complaining vehicles and lumbered through the severed embankment, joining the invasion flood. We planned to navigate the open desert to intersect Iraqi Freeway 1, which linked the Persian Gulf port of Umm Qasr to the city of Basra, an ancient inland port from which the mythical Sinbad sailed. Within half an hour we ran across another team of reporters with the same idea. We stopped for a familiar face peering through the other windshield. Fifty-year-old Terry Lloyd was a longtime foreign correspondent for the British television network ITN. Lloyd had reported from the Middle East for more than two decades. It was Lloyd, in 1988, who revealed to the world that Saddam Hussein had massacred five thousand Iraqi Kurdish civilians with nerve gas. Anytime I covered a story in the region it seemed Terry Lloyd was several steps ahead of me. I was an admirer and a fan. We spoke to Lloyd through the open driver’s side windows for a few minutes, comparing notes. My team drove on to Umm Qasr. Lloyd and his team headed in the opposite direction to Basra. About an hour later, Lloyd’s SUV ran across an Iraqi army unit. His truck turned around and headed toward a platoon of US marines. Inside Lloyd’s vehicle, that must have seemed prudent. But, from the marines’ point of view, Lloyd’s SUV was coming at them from the Iraqi line. The marines opened fire. The Iraqis responded. Lloyd, his cameraman, Fred Nérac, and a Lebanese interpreter, Hussein Osman, were killed. Cameraman Daniel Demoustier, the lone survivor, was wounded. Later, a British government inquest would judge the deaths “unlawful.”36 I agree that more care should have been taken before opening fire on a civilian SUV, but I can also see how the situation must have looked from the marines’ perspective.
The few teams of reporters that were independent of the military embed system assumed all responsibility for the risk. We stood to be killed by either side. Mistaken identity was a danger we could mitigate only with four long strips of duct tape on the hood and doors of our vehicles that intersected in the lines “TV.” Many days into our journey, the Pentagon called CBS News headquarters to insist that my team be ordered off the battlefield because the military said it “couldn’t guarantee our safety.” Our New York headquarters dutifully and clearly passed on the message by satellite phone but we all agreed the order was “garbled” and impossible to understand. In a second attempt, an army public affairs major back in Kuwait warned us by satellite phone that “no unilateral reporters would be allowed north of Tallil,” a large Iraqi air base. I had to explain to the major, in all honesty, we were already one hundred miles north of Tallil and headed to Baghdad. No one was asking the Pentagon to guarantee our safety. Most every day, someone at CBS News risks his or her life to provide the American people with independent reporting from the most dangerous points on Earth. There are many professions in which dedicated people put their lives on the line to serve the public: police officers, firefighters, the military—and journalism is another. Since 1948, seventeen CBS News journalists have given their lives in the line of duty. Many more have been wounded or endured captivity. ITN’s Terry Lloyd was likely the first casualty among reporters in the Iraq war, but over the decade to follow, there would be many more. Some of them dear friends.
My team rolled into Umm Qasr. The heavy steel gates that barred the road to the port were mangled. A US Marine Corps tank had defeated the padlock and everything it was attached to. Umm Qasr connected to the Persian Gulf via the man-made Khawr az-Zubayr Waterway canal. If allied reinforcements or humanitarian aid were to be delivered en masse they would have to come by sea. Umm Qasr was the only way.
Our three-vehicle convoy entered a vast expanse of concrete, warehouses and railcars on the shore of the steel gray Gulf. The new owners, as of that morning, were the marines of Fox Company, part of the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit out of Camp Pendleton, California. It was with Fox Company that I had forgotten my gas mask during the ensuing firefight. For Fox, seizing the port had been tougher than expected. Iraqi forces were dug in, armed with anti-tank rockets and mortars. The marines won the battle without casualties. But the enemy declined the defeat. They weren’t playing by the rules. “I certainly thought the laws of war would be understood,” Fox Company’s commanding officer, Captain Rick Crevier told me. “I didn’t think that we were going to be encountering enemy carrying white flags and dressed in civilian gear. We’ve learned they don’t respect the white flags. We’ve learned that they wave white flags at us and go on back to their defensive positions, so it requires us to have our head on a swivel.”
“Puts you in a hell of a spot,” I said.
“You’re right. It has put us in an awful spot.”
Corporal Mike Breslin from Maryland told me, “The Iraqi infantry is just too cowardly to wear their uniforms and stand up and fight us. They’re just using, basically, terrorist techniques to inflict ‘onesies’ and ‘twosies’ of casualties instead of fighting us like men.” Breslin didn’t know it, but he had just described the next fifteen years of the American experience in Iraq.
Along Highway 1, a few miles from the port, was the village of Safwan. There, I caught an early sign that even civilians who benefitted from the end of Saddam were furious with America. A long line of people carrying buckets cued up behind a tanker truck filled with fresh water. A tall, older gentleman walked straight up to me. “Where have you been!” he demanded in an angry voice just below a shout. “Where have you been?” The man’s English was perfect. His suit was dirty and wrinkled but was of a cut that suggested better times. “Our families have been hanging from lampposts for twelve years!” he shouted at me. “Where have you been?” His gray hair and beard gave him the bearing of a college professor. It turned out he was an English instructor, although unemployed. He was bitter—the kind of bitterness that is wrung from a broken heart. “You asked us to rise up! You encouraged us. Why did you forsake us?” he howled. He was referring to George H. W. Bush’s call to the Iraqi people in 1991 to overthrow their despot. The downtrodden Shiites rose up and were massacred by Saddam’s Sunni minority dictatorship. The idea that American troops would be “greeted as liberators” betrayed the ignorance of the war advocates in the Bush administration. Iraqis I spoke to did not believe the US invaded to seize weapons of mass destruction. The only rationale that made sense to them was that an ally of Israel invaded to seize Iraqi oil. I heard that from Safwan to Baghdad to Mosul and beyond. It occurred to me that people always come up with a nickname for foreign troops. I asked one Iraqi if they had a nickname for us. “Yes,” he said without hesitation. “We call you, ‘the Jews.’”
This was the first morning of America’s first decade in the occupation of Iraq. The marines on the firing line did not yet know loss, nor anger, nor revenge. All of that would come. America’s head would be continually “on a swivel” as the “nervous Nellies” at the Pentagon were proven prescient and the Bush administration’s hubris was fed, page by page, into shredders.
After two weeks sending stories to 60 Minutes II, we received terrible news by satellite phone. Bill Owens’s mother, who had been ill, was in the last days of her life. We drove through the battlefield back to Kuwait. Bill made it to her bedside in New York in time. I picked up a fresh crew including producer Shawn Efran, who would become a distinguished combat journalist and gifted filmmaker; cameraman David Gladstone; and soundman Matt McGratten. This time, the toughest part of the journey was getting back into Iraq. An iron curtain had descended on the border. The military ordered it sealed. I was desperate to get to Basra where the British were planning an assault to take the city. I stopped by the Pentagon public affairs operation to see if I could find a way in. Public affairs was based in Kuwait City at a luxurious seaside Hilton Hotel with a Starbucks attached. These troops in the rear were dining on an endless buffet of seafood and lamb courtesy of the emir of Kuwait. The soldiers and marines I had just left in the field were searching through dusty cardboard boxes in hope of their preferred MRE (Meals Ready to Eat) menu. Cajun Chicken, in a brown plastic pouch, heated on a Humvee engine block was a favorite. The real pros memorized which MRE menus contained M&M candies.
While stuck in Kuwait, I checked with one well-fed public affairs major about getting a lift to Basra. He had an idea. The major had boxes filled with thousands of four-inch American flags on little black sticks. He hoped to organize a helicopter to get the flags into the hands of the grateful people of Basra as the city fell to allied forces. Imagining the blizzard of red, white and blue, he told me, “It’ll be awesome on TV.” He said he would try to find me a seat on the helicopter. The major was in a hurry. He worried the flags wouldn’t reach Basra before the cameras. The “Hilton heroes” were dining on the same rich optimism that fattened the imagination of Washington. As it happened, the major needn’t rush. It would be weeks before Basra fell, after some of the hardest fighting in the invasion.
As I searched for the breakthrough that would get my team across the border, I wondered why we had not heard anything about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. More than two weeks had gone by. I knew the Pentagon sent teams of scientists and engineers directly to the dictator’s suspected arsenals. The 75th Exploitation Task Force (XTF) included the Chemical Biological Intelligence Support Team—twenty-one specialists, towing trailers packed with sophisticated laboratories. One trailer manned by the army’s Edgewood Chemical Biological Center was engineered to handle nerve gas and blister agents. Another, operated by the Naval Medical Research Center, was equipped to classify virulent germs down to their unique genetic codes. The team was supported by the 75th Field Artillery Brigade from Fort Sill, Oklahoma. One reporter was embedded with the 75th XTF—it was the New York Times correspondent to whom the vice president’s office had fed its misleading, menacing tales in the months before the war. She had been rewarded with the coveted, exclusive embed. The army expected such momentous results from the 75th XTF that it attached an official military historian to the team to chronicle its achievements.37 About three weeks into the war, I happened to run into the 75th XTF. We were both checking out the discovery of a warehouse full of bodies. The army took me to the warehouse because they suspected the two hundred or so corpses were evidence of a Saddam war crime. I asked one of the chemical biological unit’s senior officers whether his commander would talk to me. “No way!” the officer said, nearly laughing at the thought.
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because we’re not finding anything!” He italicized his last word with frustration, dismay and a hint of panic. He continued, “We kind of thought we’d have [Iraqi] generals saying, ‘Here it is,’ but, no. We haven’t found a thing.” Every report of a chemical or biological weapon was a goose chase. Even the warehouse of the dead was a dead end. The bodies were those of Iraqi soldiers stored for identification and return to their families.
In the days after my brush with the XTF, I took my team to a US base on the border. It was an act of desperation. I had no plan. But being closer to Iraq had to be better. Producer Shawn Efran and I spent a day at the front gate with our thumbs up as military vehicles rolled north. Once in a while, curiosity would get the best of a driver who would stop at our sand-covered figures. When he found out what we wanted he’d leave us in another layer of dust. At the base, we were sleeping in our vehicles. But eventually we were taken in by an army reserve unit which had a little space in its barracks. Each day, the reservists watched Shawn and me come back to their plywood sleeping quarters with faces of dejection from rejection. One evening, one of the unit’s sergeants stood up, walked to a blackboard and began an impromptu briefing. “Men, this is a Black Op,” the sergeant announced. “I’ll be taking only volunteers. We’re going to get the CBS News crew to Basra.” I could not believe what I was hearing. I was pretty sure we were serving as the butt of a joke. But the sergeant explained the route and the number of Humvees he would need, which was three. Just then, the lieutenant colonel in command of the unit walked in unexpectedly. My heart sank. He hesitated suspiciously in the doorway.
“Sergeant!” he demanded. “Is this something I should know about?”
“No, sir! It is not!” the sergeant replied.
“Thank you, sergeant!” the lieutenant colonel barked. He wheeled on his heel and walked out. It was like a scene from M*A*S*H. The Black Op briefing continued.
Before dawn, the reservists led my vehicles over the border and twenty-eight miles to Basra. They needed to hurry back before they were missed, so they left us with 3 Commando Brigade of the British Royal Marines. I would like to take this moment to name these soldiers who understood the vital role of journalists in war, but I won’t. Some of them might still be serving in the military. I fear they’d be reprimanded even after all these years. You know who you are. And I am deeply grateful.
In Basra, the British had taken ownership of Saddam’s palace the day before. Saddam had confiscated waterfront real estate for his sprawling complex on the wide Shatt al-Arab waterway, which drains the Tigris and Euphrates into the Gulf. There were acres of palms shading a dozen buildings wrought in marble and mosaics. We rolled over bridges spanning man-made canals that flowed into pools. Nothing was more precious than water. The brimming palace grounds were meant to project careless excess. I ventured outside the gates where the liberated people of Basra gathered in numbers the American major of public affairs had imagined. But if his flags had arrived, I didn’t see them. Nor were the people of Basra particularly enthusiastic about liberation. A man with contorted countenance thrust his face into mine and screamed in fractured English, “You tell Bush, Water! Water! Water! You tell Bush, Water! Water! Water! You tell Bush, Water! Water! Water!” Rather than liberators, we were greeted as plumbers late for an appointment. After thirteen years of United Nations economic sanctions, liberation was far down the list of Iraqi expectations, somewhere below water, sanitation, electricity, schools and health care. The crowd fired salvos of grievances at the only American in range. My translator, who was listening to the mob in Arabic, said, “We have to get out of here.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll just get a couple more interviews.”
“No!” he yelled. “We have to leave now!”
We dove into our cars and headed back to the protection of the British at the palace. My translator explained that he had overheard a man tell someone in the crowd he would be right back, he was going home to get his gun. Nothing in the early weeks of the war filled me with dread like the Basra mob. Iraqis expected the United States to rebuild their country and fast. They think they’re the fifty-first state, I said to myself. That night, in our small CBS encampment inside the palace grounds, I switched on my shortwave radio. Voice of America bounced off the ionosphere and ricocheted the voice of President Bush reading his Saturday radio address from the White House. The president said, in part, “As people throughout Iraq celebrate the arrival of freedom, America celebrates with them. We know that freedom is a gift from God to all mankind and we rejoice when others can share it.”38 “Whooo-boy,” I whispered to myself. “I wish the president could see this—there’s not a whole lot of celebratin’ goin’ on.” Presidents, I thought, should be required to tour their battlefields. The Bush administration imagined a fully functioning modern society waving flags in gratitude and saying, “Thanks, we’ll take it from here.” In truth, Iraq was a failed nation inhabited by a destitute, bitterly divided society. Without the crushing gravity of a police state, freedom was a centrifugal force pulling Iraqis apart along the seam of Islam’s great divide. By the time I entered Baghdad on April 9, the specter of civil war was spreading like a shadow. I ran into Peter Bluff, the legendary CBS News producer. Peter had spent a lifetime covering the region. His first words to me after, “Hellooooo, dear boy,” were these: “The Shiites have taken over the hospital.” I understood. Nothing more needed to be said. The Shiites, the majority oppressed for generations, were rising.
I watched Baghdad tip into chaos. Looting, arson and old scores settled with a bullet went unchecked by an American force much too small to impose its will on the city of seven million. US reinforcements had been on their way as part of the original invasion plan, but they were turned around en route and sent home by the oblivious civilian leadership at the Pentagon.39 Given the mayhem, most citizens were not infused with confidence in America. “If this is the best you can do, then go out!” one man shouted at me. Many Iraqis refused to talk to me at all. They believed Saddam might return.
Over the next weeks, the 75th XTF pulled its trailers to more than six hundred suspected sites of weapons of mass destruction. They found nothing.40 In my interview with former CIA director George Tenet, I read aloud the first key judgment his agency wrote in its prewar National Intelligence Estimate, “Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons.”
“Period,” I added.
“High confidence judgment,” Tenet confirmed.
“How could you make such a bold statement?”
“We believed he had chemical and biological weapons.”
“But there was no hard evidence,” I said.
“No, no. There was lots of data,” Tenet countered. “There’s lots of technical data. So, you put all of this together. It’s not evidence in the court of law. Remember, when you write an estimate, when you estimate, you’re writing what you don’t know. You might win a civil case. You’re not gonna win a criminal case, in terms of evidence.”
“We are going to war,” I said. “Tens of thousands of people are going to be killed. And you’re telling me you had evidence to prove a civil case, not a criminal case?”
“Well, as you know, hindsight is perfect. For professionals who pride themselves on being right, this is a very painful experience for us.”
Tenet’s National Intelligence Estimate also claimed that Saddam possessed, conservatively, between one hundred and five hundred tons of chemical weapons.
“Where did these numbers come from?” I asked.
“From our National Intelligence Estimate. You don’t make this kind of stuff up,” Tenet said.
“Wait a minute!” I said incredulously. “You did make this stuff up.”
“Scott, you’re doing it again. You’re impugning the integrity of people who make analytical judgments and make their best judgments about what they believe the Iraqis possessed. Intelligence, you know, my business, is not always about the truth. It’s about people’s best judgments about what the truth may be. We believed it. We wrote it.”
None of the equivocation so abundant in our interview had been revealed to the American public before the war. I wondered whether any senior officials had tapped the brakes on the road to Iraq. I asked Tenet, “Did anyone at the White House, did anyone in the defense department, ever ask you whether we should go to war in Iraq?”
Tenet confessed, “The discussions that are ongoing in 2002 in the spring and summer of 2002 are how you might do this. Not whether you should do this.”
“Nobody asks?” I said.
“Well, I don’t remember sitting down in a principals committee meeting and everybody saying, ‘Okay, there’s a deep concern about Iraq. Is this the right thing to do? What are the implications?’ I don’t ever remember that galvanizing moment when people sit around and honestly say, ‘Is this the right thing to do?’”
Having chosen war, it suited the Bush administration to promote vague conspiracy theories that suggested a link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11. That was item number two under the heading “How Start?” in the talking points drafted for the meeting between Secretary Rumsfeld and General Franks. There was no evidence for that either, but it worked—too well. On a former Iraqi air base, in the shadow of an ancient step pyramid, a US Army sergeant told me, “They [Iraqis] want to stop us from going to Disney World!” I scanned his face for satire. It wasn’t there. “Those bastards come over here [on 9/11] and impose their way of life on us? There’s gotta be more to life than banging your head on the ground five times a day!” he said, referring to Islamic prayer. He continued, “We have to defend our right to listen to rap. We have to defend guys going to Disney World on their once-every-five-years trip. You have the right to enjoy seeing your children have a good time!” His rant misunderstood most everything about 9/11, Iraq and Islam. His take was extreme, but some variation of the theme was not uncommon among our troops. Years later, I was standing in the kitchen of an Iowa National Guardsman who was leaving for his first tour in Iraq. His son was also going as part of the same unit. I asked the guardsman why he felt it was important for him and his son to fight. “Well,” he said. “They attacked us, so we have to go over there and set things right.” I didn’t argue. If that was what he believed, or needed to believe about Iraq, it wasn’t for me to raise doubts on the eve of his deployment.
By January 2007, American troops were being cut down in the crossfire of an Iraqi civil war. President Bush decided to double down and commit about thirty thousand reinforcements in what was called “the surge.” It was a turning point and the president wanted to explain it on 60 Minutes. Mr. Bush announced the surge in an address from the Oval Office. The next day I was escorted across the South Lawn to Marine One. Mr. Bush had invited me on a trip to Georgia.
“Scott, how ya’ doin’?” Mr. Bush said, standing up from his seat in the helicopter and extending his hand.
“Good morning, Mr. President. Thanks for the lift. How are you?”
“Doin’ fine, welcome.”
We settled, face-to-face, into cream-colored leather seats. His was the only one onboard embroidered with the Seal of the President. Two marine pilots would speed us the ten minutes to Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland. We would travel the rest of the distance to Georgia on Air Force One. “This [the surge] was a hard decision,” the president told me. Raising his voice above the chop of the Sikorsky’s rotor blades, he said: “But once I make up my mind, I know it’s important for me to explain it as clearly as I can. And I’m going to go down to Fort Benning today to continue explaining the decision I made to men and women who wear the uniform. I owe it to the troops to explain my decision and to thank them and to thank their families. It’s an extraordinary country to have men and women volunteer in the face of danger.” The overnight polling showed his Oval Office address had not convinced many Americans of the wisdom of the surge. A CBS News/New York Times poll showed 61 percent of Americans said the US should have stayed out of Iraq and 63 percent disapproved of the job Mr. Bush was doing.41
On Air Force One, Mr. Bush and I settled on a couch that ran parallel along the windows on the left side. The president complained that the new Iraqi government was a large part of his problem. He leaned forward and began poking me in the chest when talking about Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. “Scott, that Maliki is a son of a bitch! But I have to deal with him.” Each word landed on the point of a presidential index finger.
The war that was expected to be so quick that reinforcements were turned around, was now demanding that individual troops make two, three, four, five even six deployments. The all-volunteer military was too small for a prolonged occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq which former army chief of staff General Eric Shinseki had understated as “a piece of geography that is fairly significant.”
“When is enough, enough for these families?” I asked the president.
“You know, Scott, we’re fortunate that people are willing to continue to serve. I’ve talked to some wives, and their husband’s been over there for their second time. I said, ‘How you doing?’ They said, ‘Doing fine. My husband understands what we’re doing.’ The military is motivated.”
I followed up, “In Vietnam, you served 365 [days] and you were done.”
“This is a different situation,” the president said. “This is a volunteer army. In Vietnam, it was, ‘We’re going to draft you and you go for a year.’ This is a military where people understand there may be additional deployments.”
At Fort Benning, Mr. Bush spoke to several hundred soldiers in an aircraft hangar. After his speech, he slipped through a nondescript door for a meeting. Few people were aware that he had done this often, always out of sight. The room was filled with families who had lost sons and daughters on his orders. You could not accuse the man of dodging the heartbreaking reality of his decisions. Most often, the families were respectful and appreciative. Sometimes he was excoriated by a tearful parent. Mr. Bush understood what the American people wanted to see in a wartime president: confidence held high with self-deprecating, relaxed authority. But after the family meeting, I found him careworn—just on this side of tears. “It’s, you know, it’s hard for the family members to recount or relive their love in front of the president,” he told me. I was struck by his use of the word “love” rather than “son” or “daughter.” Mr. Bush continued, “And yet, you know, once we get beyond the initial, kind of, meeting, it’s amazing how strong these folks are. And they want to let me know a lot of things. They want to let me know what their son or husband was like.”
“What are the stories you heard today?” I asked.
“Oh, you know, one mom said, ‘My son was six foot five, good-looking guy.’ She showed me the picture. He was in a Humvee. IED hit. He was so big that his body shielded four other troops from death. I asked her, ‘Well, did you get to meet the other four?’ And she said, ‘They’re like my family now.’ You know, a lot of them say, ‘Mr. President, don’t let my son die in vain.’”
In moments of personal pain, I noticed Mr. Bush had a way of ending a conversation with a click of his tongue. I’d seen it before, through tears, when he was telling me about meeting the young son of an FDNY firefighter who was missing at Ground Zero. Mr. Bush had told the boy he was sure his daddy would be fine, when, of course, the president knew the man certainly must have been killed. He hated everything about that moment: the death of the firefighter, the sadness of the boy, the comforting falsehood that a president must tell a child. Click, he signaled with his tongue to end my questioning. It meant, ‘That’s it, I can’t say any more.’ With that same palatal click at Fort Benning, Mr. Bush ambled back to Air Force One.
The next day, I met the president at Camp David, Maryland, for our main interview. I was surprised that Mr. Bush wanted to do an interview at Camp David. He considered the cabins folded into the Catoctin Mountains a sanctuary from all he did not like about Washington. After six years in office, he had spent 365 days at Camp David—precisely one year. Winter had stripped the dense woods. It was fifteen degrees the night before. But by the time the president and I were walking along a narrow, winding road, it was fifty degrees and breezy. He dressed for the location with Topsider shoes, a blue, open-collar, pinpoint Oxford shirt and a fleece-lined bomber jacket in green, with the Seal of the President stitched in yellow on his right breast. “President Bush” was threaded underneath the seal. In the shade of an immense spruce, I gave the president a pre-interview pep talk. “The folks at home need to understand why sending more troops is a good idea in your view. You need to be as forthcoming as you can,” I said. In my effort to persuade, I found myself tapping the president on the chest with my fist, much as he had with me on Air Force One. It didn’t seem inappropriate. Over the years I had found Mr. Bush was physically casual. Once, after an interview on Air Force One, Mr. Bush walked to his stateroom to change clothes. Apparently, he forgot to tell me something. He walked back into his office, stripped of his dress shirt. It never occurred to him that a partially clad president of the United States would be remarkable to my crew and me.
Now, with the surge, the commander in chief was gambling that he could make a success of Iraq in his last two years. Republicans had been badly beaten two months earlier in the 2006 midterm elections. “A thumpin’,” he called it. As a concession to defeat, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld resigned immediately. In our walk at Camp David, I leveled with the president from the start.
“You’re not very popular in the country right now, to be frank,” I said.
“I’m afraid you’re right,” the president acknowledged, half chuckling.
“Does that get to you?” I asked.
“Not really.” Mr. Bush shrugged.
“You know that there’s a perception in some quarters of the country that you’re stubborn. What do you think?”
“I think I’m a flexible, open-minded person. I really do. Take this policy. I spent a lot of time listening to a lot of people because, Scott, I fully understand the decisions I make could affect the life of some kid who wears the uniform or could affect the life of some child growing up in America twenty years from now.”
As we walked in the woods, the extraordinary 60 Minutes producer Harry Radliffe II and our camera crews were setting up Laurel Lodge for the “sit down” interview. Laurel is Camp David’s mess hall and meeting space serving a dozen or so guest cabins. In my experience, President Bush didn’t like interviews. He seemed to consider them a necessary chore. He once said to me, “You just want to get me ‘on the couch,’” as though I was a psychiatrist pulling his inner thoughts by their roots. Mr. Bush left me to change clothes and then returned to Laurel Lodge in a motorcade of golf carts. We settled into a pair of chairs with Radliffe and his team seated at a long table of monitors nearby.
Before we began, the former owner of the Texas Rangers Baseball Club threw a brushback pitch. “Those your questions?” Mr. Bush asked, glancing at the notes on my lap.
“Yes, sir, Mr. President,” I replied.
“Well, you’d better start cuttin’ them back.”
Harry Radliffe and I had started the night before with a list of about sixty questions which we culled down to a dozen. That may not seem like many, but I always make room for follow-up questions that spring to mind during the interview. Those “unscripted” moments usually provide the unexpected insight that illuminates the issues better than anything I write beforehand.
It had been in Laurel Lodge that President Bush made the decision to go to war in Afghanistan. The fall of the Taliban and the scattering of al-Qaida were, he judged, among his greatest achievements. I said to the president, “Back then, the whole country was with you. Now you seem to have lost them.” Mr. Bush reflected, “The Iraq war hasn’t gone as well as I had hoped at this point in time. And people are discouraged. They don’t appreciate, they don’t approve of where we are. And so, I think that’s where the country is.”
The White House communications office knew this was going to be a tough interview. They couldn’t tell me what to ask, of course, but they did control how much time I had. The interview was scheduled for twenty minutes and they came up with a new tactic apparently designed to get inside my head. A White House staffer, in my line of sight, but off camera, held up time cues behind the president’s head. On white cards, in black marker, I was reminded of the countdown, “Ten minutes...five minutes...two minutes.” I’ve never seen that in a presidential interview before or since.
I moved to the heart of what disturbed many Americans about the war.
“Sir, you know better than I do that many Americans feel that your administration has not been straight with the country, has not been honest. To those people, you say what?”
“On what issue?” he asked.
“No weapons of mass destruction. No credible connection between 9/11 and Iraq. The Office of Management and Budget said this war would cost somewhere between $50 and $60 billion and now we’re over $400 billion...”
Mr. Bush jumped in to stop my litany. “I got you. I got you. I got you,” he said.
“The perception, sir, more than any one of those points, is the administration has not been straight with us.”
“Well, I strongly disagree with that. I strongly reject that this administration hasn’t been straight with the American people. The minute we found out they didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, I was the first to say so.”
“You may have been wrong, but you weren’t dishonest?”
“Oh, absolutely. Everybody was wrong on weapons of mass destruction and there was an intelligence failure which we’re trying to address. But I was as surprised as anybody he didn’t have them.”
I reminded the president of the polls. “Most Americans don’t believe in this war in Iraq,” I said. “They want you to get us out of there.”
“I would hope they’d want us to succeed before we get out of there. That’s the decision I had to make. Scott, I thought a lot about different options. One was doing nothing, just kind of the status quo. And I didn’t think that was acceptable and I think most Americans don’t think it’s acceptable. Secondly, was get out.”
“You thought about that?” I asked.
“Of course I have. I think about it a lot, about different options, and my attitude is if we were to start withdrawing now, we’d have a crisis on our hands in Iraq. And not only in Iraq, but failure in Iraq will embolden the enemy. And the enemy is al-Qaida and extremists. Failure in Iraq would empower Iran, which poses a significant threat to world peace. So, then I began to think, ‘Well if failure’s not an option and we’ve got to succeed, how best to do so?’ And that’s why I came up with the plan I did.”
In his address to the nation that week, Mr. Bush acknowledged “mistakes,” but hadn’t mentioned what any of them might have been. My job was to get specifics.
“What mistakes are you talking about?”
“Abu Ghraib was a mistake,” the president said, referring to the depraved abuse of Iraqi prisoners by US Army jailers in the Abu Ghraib prison. Mr. Bush continued, “Using bad language, like, you know, ‘Bring them on’ was a mistake.” Mr. Bush was recalling his public taunting of the enemy. “I think history is going to look back and see a lot of ways we could have done things better. No question about it.”
“The [low] troop levels, sir?”
“Could have been a mistake,” he conceded. “And the reason I brought up the mistakes, I don’t want people blaming our military. We got a bunch of good military people out there doing what we’ve asked them to do. The temptation is going to be to find scapegoats. Well, if the people want a scapegoat, they got one right here in me because it’s my decisions.”
“Mr. President, do you think you owe the Iraqi people an apology for not doing a better job?” Mr. Bush wasn’t sure he heard me right. He asked, “That we didn’t do a better job or they didn’t do a better job?”
“That the United States did not do a better job providing security after the invasion.”
“Not at all. I am proud of the efforts we did. We liberated that country from a tyrant. I think the Iraqi people owe the American people a huge debt of gratitude. That’s the problem. Here in America [Americans] wonder whether there is a gratitude level that’s significant enough in Iraq.”
After the fall of Saddam, Iraq split three ways with Kurds fighting for independence in the north, the Shiites fighting to take over from the south and the minority Sunnis fighting to carve out the center. Mr. Bush told me, “Some of my buddies in Texas say, you know, ‘Let them fight it out. What business is it of ours? You got rid of Saddam. Just let them slug it out.’ And that’s a temptation that I know a lot of people feel. But if we do not succeed in Iraq, we will leave behind a Middle East which will endanger America in the future.”
“But wasn’t it your administration that created the instability in Iraq?”
“Well, our administration took care of a source of instability in Iraq. Envision a world in which Saddam Hussein was rushing for a nuclear weapon to compete against Iran.”
There it was again. I was surprised to see the president reach back, reflexively, for his discredited prewar talking points.
“My decision to remove Saddam Hussein was the correct decision in my judgment. He was a significant source of instability.”
“It’s much more unstable now, Mr. President,” I said.
“Well, no question, decisions have made things unstable. But the question is can we succeed? And I believe we can. I, listen, I’d like to see stability and a unified Iraq. A young democracy will provide the stability we look for.”
The surge resulted in the bloodiest single year for the US military in Iraq with 904 Americans killed. But in the short run, it worked. Casualties plummeted afterward. And, in a masterstroke of counterinsurgency, American troops convinced alienated Sunni communities to join the fight against extremists. The progress, however, was doomed by an unstable government in Baghdad. In 2014, the Sunni fanatics of Islamic State or ISIS defeated the American trained and equipped Iraqi Army and seized one-third of Iraq.
Mr. Bush’s warning in our interview that “if we do not succeed in Iraq, we will leave behind a Middle East which will endanger America in the future” was prescient. The US did not succeed and Islamic State inspired mass murder in San Bernardino, California; Orlando, Florida; plus, Paris, London, Manchester, Brussels and Istanbul. By 2018, Islamic State had lost its stronghold in Mosul and was withering under the counterattack of the Iraqi army backed by about five thousand US troops. Americans continued to fight and die in Iraq, but after fifteen years of war, the American public largely lost track of our troops and their mission. In 2019, the government in Baghdad remained at war with itself. And Iran, not the United States, became the greatest influence on Iraqi policy.
In the last two years of his presidency, Mr. Bush continued to read casualty reports every morning and put his preferred black Sharpie to every condolence letter—about 4,222 letters by the time he handed the unhappy duty to Barack Obama who, in turn, handed an unstable Iraq to Donald Trump. Estimates of Iraqi dead exceed 288,000.42 In one of the most insightful studies of the war, Richard D. Hooker Jr. and Joseph J. Collins, editors of National Defense University’s 2015 Lessons Encountered, wrote:
Neither national-level figures nor Field Commanders fully understood the operational environment, including the human aspects of military operations. To fight, in Rupert Smith’s term, ‘war among the people,’ one must first understand them. We were not intellectually prepared for the unique aspects of war in Iraq and Afghanistan. In both conflicts, ethnic, religious, and cultural differences drove much of the fighting. Efforts to solve this problem...came too little and too late.
Our lack of understanding of the wars seriously retarded our efforts to fight them and to deal with our indigenous allies, who were often more interested in score-settling or political risk aversion than they were in winning the war.43
The best-trained, most professional military force in the world cannot make a success of bad policy though, my God, how they tried. I returned to Iraq twenty-three times over the next ten years. For the most part, I witnessed Americans fighting with distinction, winning every battle, upholding our ideals. They were professionals who did, honorably, what they were ordered to do. Reasonable people will disagree, but in my view, the failure in Iraq lies with uninformed civilian leadership that created an existential threat where none existed. The administration accepted only evidence that supported its plans. Then, rejecting expert military advice, it stubbornly stuck to an implausible ending—a quick, easy war celebrated by cheering faces behind a blur of tiny American flags, a war that would be “awesome on TV.”
Nearly five thousand years after mankind’s first recorded war in Mesopotamia, it turned out there were no “weapons of Elam” to carry away.44 But the descendants of Sumer did possess one weapon of mass destruction never imagined by the White House nor alleged by George Tenet. The weapon was patience. Iraq claimed as many Americans as possible, not in a battle, but in a decade. Thirty-two years after the Pentagon Papers, the American people and most reporters were persuaded by the false “influence campaign” of an administration bent on war. There will be another time.
Skepticism is patriotism.