Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House

by Peter Baker

Behind the slogan was the idea of pursuing liberal goals through conservative means.

He rejected advice to demonize gays and lesbians. “I’m not going to kick gays, because I’m a sinner,” he told Doug Wead. “How can I differentiate sin?” He complained about the Christian

Stance on gays

Coalition’s divisive tactics. “This crowd uses gays as the enemy. It’s hard to distinguish between fear of the homosexual political agenda and fear of homosexuality.” He added, “I think it is bad for Republicans to be kicking gays.”

Looking back, Bush admitted that he did not react with the alarm he should have. He did not summon the directors of the FBI and the CIA. He did not order heightened alerts. Nor was any action requested of him in the memo. “I didn’t feel that sense of urgency,” Bush said. The thinness of the memo and his faith in the FBI lulled him into a false sense of security.

The agents, bristling with guns and urgency, had maneuvered Cheney into the tunnel beneath the White House by 9:37 a.m., just as the plane smashed into the Pentagon instead. Some concluded later that the hijackers tried to find the White House but from the air could not see it amid taller nearby buildings and struck at the military headquarters instead. If so, it saved Cheney’s life because the plane would have hit the White House before the agents got him into the tunnel.

Instinct kicked in. “I can hear you!” Bush responded. “The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.”

“I will not yield. I will not rest. I will not relent in waging this struggle for freedom and security for the American people.”

One morning shortly after the attacks, he read Proverbs 21:15: When justice is done, it brings joy to the righteous but terror to evildoers.

“States like these and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world,” he said. “By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States. In any of these cases, the price of indifference would be catastrophic.”

Bush unveiled this new strategy during a commencement address at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. “We cannot defend America and our friends by hoping for the best,” he told the first class to graduate since September 11. “We cannot put our faith in the word of tyrants, who solemnly sign non-proliferation treaties, and then systematically break them. If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long.” He added that “our security will require all Americans to be forward-looking and resolute, to be ready for preemptive action when necessary to defend our liberty and to defend our lives.”

The tension came to a head in late 2002 when Rumsfeld sent a testy memo telling Rice to “stop giving tasks and guidance to combatant commanders and the joint staff.” He wrote, “You and the NSC staff need to understand that you are not in the chain of command. Since you cannot seem to accept that fact, my only choices are to go to the President and ask him to tell you to stop or to tell anyone in DoD not to respond to you or the NSC staff. I have decided to take the latter course. It [sic] it fails, I’ll have to go to the President. One way or the other, it will stop, while I am Secretary of Defense.”

Indeed, he told Blair he had tentatively set the date: March 10.

Blair indicated that he was “solidly with the President and ready to do whatever it took to disarm Saddam.”

While the British still stood with Bush, his friend Tony Blair was under increasing pressure. The UN inspectors had not found illicit weapons and if Blair went to war without a second UN resolution, Jack Straw, his foreign secretary, warned him privately on March 5, “the only regime change that will be taking place is in this room.”

Bush waited until just a week before the war was to start to sit down with his team to talk about what would come after Hussein was ousted.

Satisfied that he had asked the question, Bush turned to Donald Rumsfeld. He had scripted out what he wanted to say, fully aware of the historic import of the moment. “Mr. Secretary,” he said, “for the peace of the world and the benefit and freedom of the Iraqi people, I hereby give the order to execute Operation Iraqi Freedom. May God bless the troops.”

Everyone sat quietly for a moment, and Colin Powell wordlessly reached out and touched Bush’s hand. The president then got up and left. As he strode out of the Situation Room, Eric Draper, the White House photographer standing outside the door, could see Bush’s eyes were red and tearing up. Even though he had known this was coming, emotion washed over the president in a way he had not expected. This was it; this was war. He marched upstairs and into the Oval Office without speaking to anyone, headed outside to the South Lawn to collect himself by taking his dog Spot for a walk. Aides could see his feelings were churning and did not follow. When he finally returned to the building, “you could see the weight on his face,” recalled Draper.