500 Days (83 page)

The president furrowed his brow. Launching an air war now would be a drastic departure from the carefully choreographed invasion plan; there were supposed to be two days of covert operations before bombing began. Plus, he couldn’t underestimate Saddam’s ruthlessness, he thought. Launching this strike could annihilate the Iraqi dictator and his lieutenants, or it could kill innocents put in danger by that sociopath. Bush wanted more information before making a decision.

Either way, General Tommy Franks, head of U.S. Central Command, had to be briefed on the situation. General Dick Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, walked out of the room to call him.

•  •  •  

At that moment, just west of Doha, Qatar, Tommy Franks was asleep in his bedroom at the Al Udeid Air Base, the forward headquarters of CENTCOM. As he dozed, a movie—a 1949 John Wayne western called
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
—was playing, unwatched and unheard, on his television.

By his bed, the secure phone rang. It was Myers.

“Tom,” the general said, “I’m in the White House with the president, Secretary Rumsfeld, and George Tenet. Are you aware of the emerging target at Dora Farms?”

Franks knew about it. He had heard from the CIA the previous day of the intelligence suggesting Saddam and some of his senior lieutenants might be planning to hide out on March 19 at the compound. He told Myers that his group had been laying the groundwork for an aerial attack on the grounds.

“Can you strike it tonight?” Myers asked.

Franks pulled on his boots. This would be a last-minute change in the
strategy. There would be none of the long-planned “shock and awe” from the initial moments of attack, more like puzzlement and laughter. Still, Franks understood that there was a chance to end this war by taking out Saddam in one shot. The American military would have pulled off a feat to astonish the world.

•  •  •  

Timing was tight.

The intelligence indicated that there was an underground concrete shelter at Dora. The only aircraft in the area that could carry a bunker-busting bomb, hit a precise target in the middle of a populated area, and, with luck, return safely was an F-117 Stealth Fighter. Sending a bomber now, without having first crippled Baghdad’s air defenses, would never be authorized in normal circumstances. F-117s could barely be detected by radar, and at night, they were almost impossible to observe from the ground. But in daylight, they could be seen and shot down. For this mission, the Stealths would have to drop the bombs, then flee the Baghdad skies before the first glow of dawn. To pull that off, Bush had give the go-ahead for the attack by no later than 7:15
P.M.
Washington time, just three hours away—and forty-five minutes before the deadline Bush had given Saddam for leaving Iraq.

•  •  •  

Tenet had more news. Saddam had been spotted arriving at Dora in a taxi.

Bush paused as he considered the new development. It was 7:11, four minutes before the deadline Franks had set for a decision. The president looked around the room at his advisors.

“Do you favor a strike?” he asked. Each of them—Myers, Rumsfeld, Tenet, Cheney, Rice, and Powell—said yes.

“Let’s go,” Bush said.

7:12
P.M.
The moment that Bush issued his last major policy decision in the terror wars, launched on a clear day in Washington some eighteen months before.

•  •  •  

Three minutes later, Tony Blair was in his private residence on the third floor of Number 10 Downing Street, watching soccer highlights on the ITV television network. He was disheartened to see that his favorite team, Newcastle United, had been knocked out of the Champions League tournament with a 0–2 loss to Barcelona.

The telephone rang. David Manning, the special advisor on foreign affairs,
was on the line. “I just received a call from the White House,” he said. “The president has just authorized a decapitation strike against Saddam and the Iraqi high command.”

A last-minute change. The war wasn’t supposed to start this way. Blair mentioned that he wanted to speak to Bush, to hear more about what was happening.

There wasn’t much else to learn, Manning said. “And the president’s gone off for dinner.”

Blair thanked Manning and hung up.

•  •  •  

George and Laura Bush were sitting in the living room of the White House residence when a call came through from Andy Card, the chief of staff. It was 8:05
P.M.
The deadline Bush had issued two days before had passed.

“Mr. President,” Card said, “our intelligence officials say they have no information that Saddam has left Iraq.”

Now there was no longer any reason for Bush to call off the F-117s that were hurtling toward Baghdad. They would reach their target, he knew, in just over an hour and a half.

•  •  •  

At 5:34 Baghdad time, the Stealth bombers dropped laser-guided GBU-28 bunker busters on Dora Farms. Explosions thundered over the sleeping city. Apparently, the Iraqi military had not been expecting a morning attack; a full minute passed until air-raid sirens sounded, followed by another lengthy delay before antiaircraft fire began.

•  •  •  

A crowd of senior administration officials dashed into and out of the Oval Office dining room, making calls in search of news from Baghdad. Bush came down from the residence and joined his advisors just after ten o’clock. Steve Hadley, the deputy national security advisor, approached him.

“Mr. President,” he said. “It appears that the bombing mission went according to plan. The planes are still in stealth mode and are heading back to base.”

Bush nodded. “Let’s pray for the pilots,” he said.

Everyone in the room bowed their heads in silence. When the moment passed, Bush walked into the Oval Office and sat at his desk, the same one used twelve years before by his father, President George H. W. Bush, when he announced the commencement of bombing against Iraq in the opening salvo of the Persian Gulf War.

Now, once again, a camera and sound equipment rested on wooden planks that had been laid across the floor. A member of the television crew approached Bush, brushed his hair, applied some makeup, and straightened his lapel. When she finished, the president glanced at an aide and pumped his fist.

“Feel good,” he said.

Seconds before 10:15, the countdown began. His image appeared on televisions worldwide.

“My fellow citizens,” he began. “At this hour American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger.”

He spoke for four minutes, then sat completely still with his eyes focused on the camera.

“And, we’re out,” the director said. “Thank you, Mr. President.”

Bush stood and approached the men and women who had helped guide him through the tumultuous months since 9/11, shaking their hands and accepting their congratulations. Then he strolled away, leaving his aides behind as he headed upstairs for bed.

Beneath a flawless late-summer sky, two bagpipers and a drummer played “Amazing Grace” in the concrete canyon where the World Trade Center once stood. Alongside them, police officers and firefighters unfurled the tattered American flag that had previously fluttered over the rubble of the towers, as a tribute to the terrorists’ victims and a display of the nation’s resolve.

The crowds that gathered for the second anniversary memorial service were smaller than the previous year, and fewer official ceremonies were taking place around the country. Still, thousands had come to Ground Zero this day, wearing ribbons of remembrance and holding photographs aloft of loved ones who had perished on 9/11. At 8:46, exactly two years after American Airlines flight 77 smashed into the North Tower, a single bell chimed and the crowd went silent.

A boy named Peter Negron, dressed in a dark suit that hung loosely over his thin frame, stepped up to a wooden podium near the flag. He was no longer the eleven-year-old mischief maker he had been on the day his father was murdered. He was a teenager with an ache that wouldn’t go away and eyes that wept whenever he recalled his father’s last words to him: “I love you, champ.”

Peter leaned in to the microphone. “I wanted to read you this poem,” he said, “because it says what I am feeling.”

In a reedy, tremulous voice, Peter recited an elegy called “Stars,” describing his affection for the lights in the sky because they never told him to cheer up or asked him the reasons for his sadness, yet somehow calmed him in their silent vigil.

He reached the final lines. “I felt them watching over me, each one—and let me cry and cry till I was done.”

Peter was followed by two hundred other children who had lost loved ones in the attack and who now stood, two at a time, to speak the names of the dead. It was a poignant and potent scene. These were the youngest victims, the sons, daughters, nieces, nephews, and grandchildren of the three thousand who lost their lives that day.

And gradually, with the passage of time, they were being forgotten by an emotionally exhausted nation. Patriotic fervor was giving way to doubt. Sorrow had been subsumed by anger and protests—about Iraq, Guantanamo, detainee treatment, military commissions. Soon, the domestic political conflict would spread to other controversies, with the disclosures of the NSA’s new powers to monitor electronic communication, the CIA’s secret prisons, and the legal analyses proclaiming the president’s almost unfettered powers at a time of war. The revelations spilled out, one after another, ripping the national fabric as nothing had done since Vietnam.

Bush was already losing credibility. The invasion of Iraq was emerging as a strategic debacle—there were no weapons of mass destruction, no connections to 9/11, no adequate preparations for the aftermath of victory. Looting, blackouts, and mayhem were turning the Iraqi people against the United States. Bush and some of the strongest advocates for the war revised the rationale, nudging aside the claims about nuclear and biochemical arsenals and about Saddam’s connivance with al-Qaeda, proclaiming instead that the mission was largely to free Iraqis from the rule of a tyrant. But a growing number of Americans were unconvinced—that same day, even as crowds were softly weeping at Ground Zero, a new Gallup poll was released showing that Bush’s approval among Americans had tumbled to its lowest level since the 9/11 attacks. By the time Bush left office, he was the most unpopular departing president in history, with Gallup showing a final approval rating of 22 percent.

In Britain, as the casualties mounted in Iraq, Tony Blair faced a similar collapse in support. Widespread public anger at the prime minister intensified on the 9/11 second anniversary, when a just-issued parliamentary report revealed that British intelligence had warned him military action against Iraq would
increase
the risk of terrorists’ obtaining weapons of mass destruction.

By 2005, Blair had become a drag on his Labour Party, which lost almost one hundred seats in Parliament. Pressure mounted within the party for him to resign, and in 2007, he stepped down as prime minister. But that didn’t end the Iraq controversy for Blair—in 2009, Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced the formation of an independent committee to investigate decisions
and intelligence that led Britain to join the invasion. Blair was summoned to testify multiple times.

The abruptness of the American public’s pivot away from wrath at al-Qaeda to preoccupation with Iraq was breathtaking, and was reflected in Bush’s own statements. In the last half of 2003, he mentioned Osama bin Laden only three times—in each instance, in response to questions at a press conference specifically about the terrorist leader. He uttered Saddam Hussein’s name in almost 150 instances in the same period. The words
al-Qaeda
passed his lips nine times, once to state that Saddam Hussein had been tied to the terrorist group. He talked about Afghanistan nineteen times; Iraq, ninety-six.

Disputes about the reliability of the information used to justify the invasion of Iraq continue to this day. George Tenet publicly accused Dick Cheney and other hawks in the administration of pushing the country into war without ever seriously evaluating whether Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat to the United States. Tenet resigned from the CIA in 2004 and is now a managing director with the financial firm Allen & Company.

Cheney became a lightning rod for public criticism; by the time he left office, Gallup reported that 59 percent of Americans disapproved of his performance as vice president. According to associates, when he first returned to private life, Cheney was angry with Bush for rejecting much of his advice in the second term. However, the two men have since put their differences aside.

Colin Powell, who stepped down as secretary of state in 2005, felt betrayed and abused by how
the Bush administration had used him in the buildup to the Iraq war. During the attempt to secure a U.N. resolution authorizing military action, Powell had delivered a detailed presentation to other member nations about the intelligence that proved Iraq’s misdeeds. The speech was, Powell later said, the lowest point in his career, because so much of the information he had been provided by members of the administration proved to be false. One of the primary sources of information in the speech—Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, or “Curveball,” as his U.S. and German handlers called him—admitted in 2011 that he had fabricated evidence of Iraq’s supposed biological weapons program. In February of that year, Powell called on the CIA and the Pentagon to explain why they had failed to alert him to Curveball’s unreliability before his address at the U.N. Beyond that dispute, Powell has maintained a low profile since his resignation and is now an honorary board member of Wings of Hope, a charitable group that combats poverty.