In My Time - Dick Cheney [202]
I was interested in finding a way to pull Hu aside so that the two of us could have a private conversation. He had been rigidly scripted in every one of his meetings with U.S. officials, never deviating from his talking points. I thought that if the two of us could talk alone, he might loosen up and we could have a real exchange. My plan was to take him into the library on the first floor of my residence after lunch.
The Chinese delegation wasn’t on board with our plan. Moments after Hu and I had seated ourselves in the library, the doors flew open and Li Zhaoxing, a senior Communist Party member close to Hu’s boss, President Jiang Zemin, burst in. He had blown past my staff as they tried to explain politely that this was a one-on-one meeting, and now he seated himself between Hu and me. It was clear this was the minder reporting back to Beijing. Hu didn’t skip a beat and continued to deliver the scripted answers he’d been giving in other meetings.
My relations with Hu were capped off by the visit I had with him two years later when I was in China in early 2004. By that time Hu had ascended to the presidency, and I had a sensitive message President Bush had asked me to convey in a one-on-one session. We agreed that a small meeting would occur after our larger session. The meeting went fine, I thought, and I had conveyed the message without any minder pushing his way in.
As I left the meeting room I was surprised to learn from my staff that the conversation I thought had been private had actually been broadcast into an adjacent room, where Hu’s staff gathered around a speaker to listen. The Chinese, apparently, aren’t fans of one-on-one meetings.
DON RUMSFELD AND Tommy Franks came to the White House on May 10, 2002, with a status report on the military planning process. Part of the discussion focused on timing. The logistics of any major military operation are exceedingly complex, and though we were still hopeful that war would not be necessary, we worried that Saddam might launch an attack on us or our allies before we had sufficient forces in place. No one wanted us to be embroiled in a conflict at a time of Saddam’s choosing rather than ours.
I was concerned about a number of contingencies. How did our war plan deal with weapons of mass destruction? How did we intend to discourage Saddam from using these weapons, and what preparations were we making to protect our troops if he did? If we were successful at getting the inspectors back into Iraq, how effective did we believe they could be? Could we insist on placing U.S. inspectors on the teams? How could we deny Iraq the ability to launch Scud missiles at Israel, as Saddam had done during the first Gulf War? How was Saddam likely to respond to our actions? What would it take for us effectively to defend the Kurds against the Iraqi forces massed in the north?
Throughout the process Congress would be very important, and I wanted to know if we had a strategy to ensure that key members were briefed on how we would conduct the war if it came. We also needed to ensure that Congress and the American public understood the consequences of an unconstrained Saddam. With his tremendous oil resources and the fraying sanctions, failure to bring him under control or act against him would simply give him time to advance his WMD programs and perhaps develop a nuclear weapon.
THROUGHOUT MAY AND MUCH of June, we debated our policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. In meetings of the Principals Committee and the National Security Council, I urged that we move beyond Yasser Arafat. The record was clear, in my view, that he could not be part of trying to establish peace.
Our policy debates culminated in the president’s Rose Garden speech on June 24, 2002, in which