George W. Bush: The American Presidents Series: The 43rd President, 2001-2009 Read online

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  In Iraq, the violence not only continued through 2006 but took on an entirely new dimension. In February, the Golden Mosque in Samarra, a holy site for Shia Islam, was destroyed by two large bombs. Within months, sectarian fighting erupted between Shiites and Sunnis, while the attacks on American troops continued. The death figures told the story. American fatalities in 2006 were roughly the same as in the previous year, but the deaths of Iraqi civilians shot upward: in a single month, September 2006, more than three thousand Iraqi civilians were killed. After a visit to Iraq that fall, Rice told Bush directly: “Mr. President, what we are doing is not working—really not working. It’s failing.”

  Inside Washington, the Iraq War was now reaching the point of crisis as the domestic opposition grew ever more intense. In the spring of 2006, a number of retired generals publicly called for the ouster of Rumsfeld, arguing that he was mismanaging the war effort and that he often rejected the advice of his military commanders. Bush once again said he would keep Rumsfeld on the job. It was in this context that he offered his long-remembered quote: “I’m the decider. And I decide what is best,” he said. “And what’s best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain as the secretary of defense.”

  In September, Mitch McConnell, the second-ranking Republican in the Senate, asked to speak with the president in private. Inside the Oval Office, he told Bush that because of his growing unpopularity the Republicans were going to lose control of the House and the Senate in the November elections. He pleaded with Bush to start withdrawing some American troops from Iraq. Bush responded that he was not going to let his policy in Iraq be determined by the polls.

  McConnell’s prediction proved accurate. When the results of the midterm elections came in, Bush and the Republicans suffered a resounding defeat. The Democrats took back the House of Representatives for the first time since the Gingrich revolution of 1994. Instead of dealing with dependably loyal Speaker Dennis Hastert, Bush would be obliged during his final two years in office to do business with Nancy Pelosi, a combative and tenacious liberal Democrat. The Senate changed hands, too, as the Democrats picked up six seats. The Democrats won a majority of the nation’s governorships and picked up hundreds of seats in state legislatures.

  Karl Rove, who had guided the Republican strategy for the 2006 campaign, later tried to blame the defeat mostly on a series of scandals involving individual Republicans in Congress rather than on Bush’s policies. The election had little to do with Iraq or with Bush’s handling of Katrina and Social Security, he insisted defensively.

  But Bush had no illusions about what had transpired. At a news conference the day after the election, he put it succinctly: “It was a thumping.”

  7

  Second-Term Changes

  Immediately following the 2006 congressional elections, George W. Bush took the momentous step he had been considering for several years. He announced that Donald Rumsfeld would step down as defense secretary. As his replacement, Bush selected Robert Gates, the veteran intelligence official who had served in the George H. W. Bush administration as deputy national security adviser and as director of central intelligence.

  This was not merely a personnel change at the Pentagon but a shift in the center of gravity and worldview of Bush’s foreign-policy team. Gates was closely allied with the realists in George H. W. Bush’s administration who had favored a balance-of-power approach over idealism and preferred cautious multilateral diplomacy to unilateralism. Over the years, he had learned the ways of national security in Washington from two former bosses, Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski, who by 2006 had become the two most prominent critics within the foreign-policy community of George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq.

  The ouster of Rumsfeld was a significant blow to the power and influence of Vice President Cheney. Rumsfeld had been Cheney’s close friend for decades and his steadfast ally on policy questions. Twice in the previous two years, Cheney had persuaded Bush not to let Rumsfeld go. A few days before the 2006 elections, however, Bush called the vice president aside and informed him that after Election Day he was making the change Cheney had long opposed. It was an icy meeting. “This time the president didn’t wait around after he told me he had made up his mind,” Cheney wrote later. “He turned and was out the door fast.”

  Bush fully understood the implications for his vice president. At the end of an interview with Gates for the Pentagon job, he had asked if Gates had any further questions. Then, smiling, Bush prompted, “Cheney?,” raising on his own the sensitive question of Cheney’s role in the administration that Gates hadn’t asked. “He is a voice, an important voice, but only one voice,” the president said.

  Cheney’s position had already been weakened by the indictment in late 2005 of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, his chief of staff. With Rumsfeld’s departure, the vice president became increasingly a minority voice within the administration; his hawkish views on foreign policy no longer dominated. During the final two years of his presidency, Bush would make a series of decisions, particularly on foreign policy, over Cheney’s opposition.

  The replacement of Rumsfeld was not so much the catalyst for a change of direction for Bush as it was the crowning moment for a change that was already under way. From the first days of Bush’s second term, his administration had increasingly taken on a different tone and emphasis as the president sought to counteract the negative impact of his invasion of Iraq. He by then had strong reasons of self-interest to pursue the multilateral approaches he had forsaken earlier; in Iraq, for example, he was now eager for European aid and personnel to alleviate the chaos that had erupted after the American invasion.

  At the same time, Bush was increasingly inclined to rely on his own judgments rather than those of his advisers. This shift was difficult for the public to detect, because the Iraq War was still ongoing and had greater long-term significance for the United States than any of the actions Bush took to repair the damage. Nevertheless, the initiatives Bush took in foreign policy during his second term were of considerable significance and were later praised by the Obama administration.

  Beyond Bush himself, the principal agent for these changes was Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who on a personal level was much closer to Bush than any other member of the foreign-policy team and thus was able to win Bush’s support for diplomacy where in many cases Powell was not. Their close bond also meant that Bush could use Rice as his instrument for altering the course of foreign policy that had been set under the strong influence of Cheney and Rumsfeld during the first term. Modest and deferential in the early years of the administration, Rice transformed herself into a skilled operator in the internal bureaucratic combat that was a hallmark of the Bush foreign-policy team. When Bush had first asked her to become secretary of state, she told him she wanted to run foreign policy without Rumsfeld’s input. Two years later, when Bush told her he was about to replace Rumsfeld, she recorded her reaction as follows: “I could barely contain my joy.” She had worked closely with Gates on Soviet policy in George H. W. Bush’s White House, and the two quickly renewed their smooth relationship. Gates would later write that on virtually every foreign-policy issue, “she and I were pretty much on the same page.” It was quite a contrast to the frosty relationship between Rice and Rumsfeld.

  In some instances, the new Bush-Rice dominance over foreign policy resulted simply in inaction: Cheney would recommend hawkish measures that Bush decided not to pursue. In the spring of 2007, Israeli officials brought the Bush administration intelligence showing that, with help from North Korea, Syria was secretly building a nuclear reactor. U.S. intelligence agencies subsequently confirmed the report. Israel wanted the United States to bomb the reactor. Cheney argued repeatedly that the United States should take military action to destroy the facility. Rice and Gates both strenuously registered their opposition. They were concerned that any American bombing could spark a wider regional war and perhaps lead to Syrian retaliation against American troops in Iraq. Bush
agreed with these arguments, adding that he also did not like the implications of a surprise attack (which, referring to Pearl Harbor, Bush called the “Tojo option”). He rejected Israel’s request for an American strike. Instead, on September 6, 2007, Israel bombed the facility on its own and succeeded in destroying it without a Syrian response. Bush later acknowledged he was not unhappy with the result.

  The Middle East was the subject of several other internal disputes between Cheney and Rice, with Bush ultimately taking Rice’s position. When Hezbollah carried out raids across Israel’s border in the summer of 2006 and Israel retaliated by launching a war into Lebanon against Hezbollah, Bush (and other Western leaders) at first supported Israel’s action as a legitimate response. After a week, other governments began to call for a cease-fire, but Bush refused to join, seeking to give Israel more time to weaken Hezbollah. Finally, in the third week, after Israeli bombers hit an apartment complex and killed twenty-eight civilians, Bush called in his advisers to talk about a cease-fire resolution. Cheney argued against it. “We need to let the Israelis finish off Hezbollah,” he told Bush. “If you do that, America will be dead in the Middle East,” Rice retorted. Bush came down on Rice’s side and pushed successfully for a cease-fire.

  In early 2007 Rice announced that the Bush administration would be willing to talk with the governments of Syria and Iran concerning the future of Iraq. Little came of this initiative, but the very willingness to launch the diplomacy underscored how Bush’s foreign policy had changed; earlier, the administration’s policy had been to isolate these two regimes.

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  The bitterest and most protracted of all the foreign-policy battles in Bush’s second term involved North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. North Korea was a particularly awkward subject for Bush. He had dispatched American troops into Iraq for the stated purpose of preventing it from developing nuclear weapons. North Korea’s nuclear program was far more advanced than Iraq’s—it had already produced enough material to make a bomb and was continuing to expand the program—yet the United States was raising few alarms and was doing little substantively to reverse the situation. Any American military action could have provoked North Korea to retaliate with an artillery attack that could have devastated the vibrant South Korean capital of Seoul.

  Bush had originally hoped that North Korea might follow the example of Libya. In 2003, after the invasion of Iraq, Libyan dictator Muammar Gadhafi, perhaps shaken by the American show of force, agreed to give up his nuclear weapons program in exchange for an end to the Western policy of isolating his regime. Bush sought to persuade North Korea and Iran to relinquish their nuclear programs as Libya had, in exchange for a new relationship with the United States. It turned out that neither government was willing to do so.

  The situation reached a crisis in October 2006, when North Korea conducted its first nuclear test, thus becoming the world’s ninth nuclear-weapons state. In response, Rice, with Bush’s support, launched a series of diplomatic initiatives aimed at persuading North Korean leader Kim Jong Il to freeze and abandon his nuclear program. Over the following two years, Rice and her lead negotiator, Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill, offered North Korea a series of incentives to disarm, including oil supplies and removal from the State Department’s terrorist list as well as the prospect of a nonadversarial relationship with the United States. North Korea proved willing to enter into an agreement that seemed to be the first step toward giving up its nuclear program but then repeatedly backtracked, sometimes after already accepting some of the benefits (such as the oil) that it had been offered.

  These overtures were carried out over the bitter opposition of Cheney and other hawks in the administration. “Hill and Rice made concession after concession to the North Koreans,” Cheney later wrote. “I concluded that our diplomats had become so seized with cutting a deal, any deal, with the North Koreans that they had lost sight of the real objective, which was forcing the North to give up its weapons.”

  Bush allowed Rice to proceed with her North Korean diplomacy until the last weeks of his administration, when the negotiations collapsed. After the United States removed Pyongyang from the State Department list of state sponsors of terror, North Korean officials refused to provide verification, such as soil and air samples, to prove it had halted its nuclear program. In 2009, after North Korea conducted another nuclear test, the Obama administration soon came to essentially the same conclusion Cheney had reached earlier: that North Korea’s leaders did not view its nuclear program as a bargaining chip. They would not give up their nuclear weapons in exchange for other benefits, because they viewed nuclear weapons as essential to the survival of the regime.

  With Iran, Bush went through a comparable evolution. After seeking throughout most of his presidency to isolate Iran, he sought negotiations to test whether Iran would abandon its nuclear program. Once again, Rice took the leading role. In 2007, she took part in a conference with an Iranian official but did not actually meet with him. The administration continued to hold to the long-standing U.S. government position that it would not talk directly with Iran until it complied with United Nations resolutions calling on it to stop enriching uranium. In the summer of 2008, Bush eased the policy, and Rice dispatched Undersecretary of State William Burns to meet with Iranian officials in Geneva. Conservatives were outraged. “Just when the administration has no more U-turns to pull, it does another,” asserted John Bolton, Bush’s former ambassador to the United Nations. Once again, as with North Korea, the talks produced no significant results, but they demonstrated how much Bush’s foreign policy shifted in his later years in the White House.

  Bush’s efforts to stop the North Korean and Iranian nuclear programs were unsuccessful, but they did leave one important legacy: a new, increasingly powerful set of financial sanctions. In 2004, Bush approved a reorganization in which the Treasury Department was given full status in the intelligence community, with full access to all available information about money flows throughout the world. The Treasury Department established a new unit, the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, which soon focused its attention on North Korea. Treasury officials traveled widely in Europe and Asia to show international banks how they were unwittingly being used to facilitate illegal activity, such as counterfeiting, terrorism, or weapons programs. International banks were warned that if they continued to do business with one North Korean bank in Macao, they could be barred from doing business in the United States.

  This approach proved surprisingly effective in freezing North Korea’s ability to conduct international financial transactions, and before long U.S. officials began to impose financial sanctions on Iran in the same way, again with greater and greater success. After Bush left office, the Obama administration persuaded the Treasury Department official who had devised the new sanctions, a conservative Republican named Stuart Levey, to stay on the job. Over the following years, Obama came to rely on these international financial sanctions as his principal tool to push Iran into negotiations over giving up its program to enrich uranium. Although Cheney had proposed military action to stop Iran’s nuclear program, Bush, with the support of Rice and Gates, chose diplomacy and financial sanctions instead.

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  The changes in the second term also included a new, intermittent emphasis on promoting democracy overseas. This policy focus came directly from Bush. The invasion of Iraq had failed to find evidence of a nuclear program, and by the beginning of his second term, as the war simmered on, Bush had elevated democracy into the principal rationale not just for the war itself but for his overall foreign policy. The prominent cold war historian John Lewis Gaddis had suggested that Bush include a line in his second inaugural address dedicating U.S. foreign policy to the goal of “ending tyranny in our world.” Bush liked the idea, and he and his advisers began to speak in broad terms about the administration’s “freedom agenda.”

  For a time, during the first eighteen months of the second term, it see
med as though Bush would be willing to press the cause of democracy in the Middle East, where the United States had long supported authoritarian regimes. He and his administration drew encouragement from a series of events in early 2005. In Iraq, citizens turned out to vote in large numbers, defying intimidation and proudly displaying the purple thumbs that showed they had cast their ballots. In Lebanon’s Cedar Revolution, large-scale demonstrations had forced Syria to withdraw the troops that had been occupying the country. Optimists talked buoyantly of the “Arab spring” of 2005, a phrase that would soon be forgotten and then revived six years later.

  That summer, Bush and Rice advocated for democracy with a dictator with whom the United States had deep and long-standing ties: Hosni Mubarak of Egypt. “A democratic Egypt would change the region like nothing else,” Rice believed. In a one-on-one session with the Egyptian leader, she pleaded with him to give way for gradual democratic change. Mubarak told her that Egyptians do not like to be told what to do.

  Undaunted, Rice gave a speech at the American University in Cairo, declaring that the United States was changing course in the Middle East and was “supporting the democratic aspirations of all people.” The speech attracted considerable attention, and for a few months it seemed as though Mubarak was open to some limited political liberalization. These hopes were soon dashed. In parliamentary elections later that year, there were accusations that Egyptian security forces had sent out thugs to intimidate voters, and in 2006 Mubarak announced that he would keep in place the decades-old “emergency law” limiting free speech and assembly. Years later, Rice admitted to wondering whether her speech had “promised more rapid change than anyone could deliver, most especially the United States.”