The 12 Year Itch

Cheney decided that America could not wait to be attacked. He found a powerful ally in the secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld. Cheney and his old friend "Rummy" had been comrades in arms in the White House of Gerald Ford during the mid-'70s; Cheney had succeeded Rumsfeld as Ford's chief of staff after Rumsfeld became secretary of Defense. (Rumsfeld holds the distinction of being the youngest--at 43--and oldest--at 70--Defense secretary in history.) Both Cheney and Rumsfeld lamented the weakening of American power and resolve in the years after Watergate and Vietnam. The threat to America posed by terrorism signaled to both men--now at the end of their careers, with nothing to lose--that this was the time to reassert American will in the world. According to aides to both men, Cheney and Rumsfeld talked often in the days and months after 9-11 about the need to be bold.

For Rumsfeld, the war on terror was an opportunity to reform the slow-moving, risk-averse Pentagon bureaucracy. A former fighter pilot and a restless, probing questioner, Rumsfeld had grown frustrated in his first few months in office trying to "transform" the military to fight the wars of the 21st century. But a real war gave him the urgency he needed to make the military "lean forward," in Rumsfeld's favorite phrase. Rumsfeld, a self-described realist, was leery of some of the grander dreams of his deputy Wolfowitz for a renewed and revitalized Middle East. But he was determined to create a renewed and revitalized American military machine that could and would win wars.

Rumsfeld strongly believed that the United States was seen around the world as a paper tiger, a weak giant that couldn't take a punch. He believed that the rapid withdrawal of U.S. troops from Somalia after the death of 18 servicemen in the battle of Mogadishu in 1993 had emboldened America's enemies. (Rumsfeld was not wrong about this; Al Qaeda had helped organize Somali resistance to the American GIs and exulted at the Clinton administration's hasty exit.)

In January 2001, just before Bush's Inauguration, the then Secretary of Defense-designate Rumsfeld told the president-elect that a crisis would surely come, somewhere in the world, and the world would be watching how the new president would respond. According to Rumsfeld, Bush responded that he was ready to lean forward, to erase any impression of American softness. It took almost no time after the planes plowed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon after 9-11. By nightfall, Bush had decided that he was going to strike back against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan--not with a few cruise missiles, like his predecessor Bill Clinton, but with the full force of the military.

Bush never wobbled. His resolve was strengthened every morning at 8, when the president received his daily intelligence briefing, usually with CIA Director George Tenet present. Bush read a "threat matrix" that showed all the raw intelligence about Al Qaeda's movements and actions around the world. On most days, it was a truly frightening document. Raw intelligence is not precise and is often wrong, but the cumulative effect on the president was to force him to look at a world seething with danger, every morning after breakfast. It did not matter if there was no hard evidence that Saddam was building a nuke or consorting with terrorists. There were plenty of signs from electronic intercepts and other intelligence that he might be. Bush, who by his faith and instincts prefers to see black and white, and not shades of gray, was not about to take the risk.

There was one voice for restraint. Colin Powell, a Vietnam veteran, had been a reluctant warrior as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, initially resistant to the invasion of Kuwait in 1991 and to any engagement by military forces in the Balkans. In his approach to diplomacy and foreign affairs, Powell had been tutored and to some degree shaped by the moderates who ran foreign policy in the first Bush administration, men like Scowcroft and Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger. Powell was in no hurry to go to war in Iraq, at least not without a strong coalition like the one forged for Operation Desert Storm.