The 12 Year Itch

The neocons had the ear of Vice President Cheney, but the veep was not, at the outset, one of them. Cheney has long been regarded a cautious and skeptical man. As Defense secretary during Operation Desert Storm in 1991, he did not press to march to Baghdad. He seemed comfortable with the moderates in charge, men like Secretary of State James Baker and national-security adviser Brent Scowcroft. Even in George W. Bush's White House, at least initially, Cheney was not pushing for the overthrow of Saddam. Although he respected Wolfowitz and his own chief of staff, Scooter Libby, both ardent neocons, he was not optimistic that the Middle East could be transformed, and he was in no rush to mount an invasion or order up risky covert operations.

Nor, for that matter, was president Bush. In his first few months in office, Bush was much more worried about the coming threat from China than he was about Iraq. He had no desire to be an interventionist president, to play GloboCop. His foreign-policy pronouncements during the 2000 campaign had stressed the need for humility by the world's only superpower.

Then came 9-11. Almost instantly, everything changed. Bush seemed staggered, but only for a moment. By the time he climbed onto the rubble at the World Trade Center on the afternoon of Sept. 14 to vow revenge, he had dedicated his presidency--and apparently his whole being--to making sure such an attack never happened again. Without much consultation or debate, Bush formulated his own "doctrine," holding that the United States would go after not only terrorists but countries that harbored them as well. At the first meetings to plan the war on terror, held at the president's retreat at Camp David on the weekend after 9-11, Wolfowitz saw his chance. He argued that the United States should remove Saddam as the greatest threat to supply terrorists with WMD.

Wolfowitz was a step ahead of the pack. The decision was made to first drive the Taliban, hosts to Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, from Afghanistan. But the idea of taking on Saddam had merely been postponed, not rejected.

Later, when Bush administration officials interviewed by NEWSWEEK tried to recall how and when the president decided to invade Iraq, they had a hard time picking out one turning point. "We never had a decisive moment. It was like water dripping," said one senior State Department official. The public outline can be fairly clearly discerned by Bush's speeches, first his State of the Union when he identified the Axis of Evil to include Iraq, Iran and North Korea--rogue regimes with WMD--then at West Point in May, when he announced that the United States would pre-empt threats from such regimes. But more revealing are the underlying attitudes of Bush and his top advisers--and how those attitudes evolved and changed.

Vice President Cheney was never very fond of the ceremonial aspects of his job, the "traveling to funerals" that the elder George Bush joked about during his time as Ronald Reagan's veep. After 9-11, for security reasons, Cheney was free to vanish to an "undisclosed location." The vice president was busy educating himself. He brought in scholars like Victor Hanson, who taught him about the gloomy burden of the ancient Greeks, and Princeton professor Bernard Lewis, the author of "What Went Wrong?" his best seller describing why the Islamic nations failed to keep up with the West. The Arabs have never been very receptive to Western idealism, Cheney was told. But they fear and respect force. Cheney also dipped deeply into the technical and medical literature on bio-chemical weapons. He read about the ravages of smallpox and anthrax and plague.