In My Time - Dick Cheney [210]
Bandar was convinced. He wanted to be able to tell the crown prince that he had heard this directly from the president, and so when he left my office, I conveyed his message to the president. He met with Bandar the following Monday.
TONY BLAIR RETURNED TO Washington at the end of January, arguing that we needed yet another UN resolution. Colin Powell, Condi Rice, Don Rumsfeld, and I were all in agreement that this was a mistake. We’d managed one resolution, no one believed we needed a second, and it would be very hard to get. French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin had already declared that “nothing today justifies envisaging military action” against Iraq. I was also concerned that going after a second resolution and failing to get it would give our critics a chance to say we were acting alone—though, in fact, we had assembled a coalition of several dozen countries. Many made small contributions, to be sure, but the historical significance was immense of having not only long-standing allies like the United Kingdom and Australia with us, but also countries such as the Czech Republic, from the former Soviet bloc. I also thought that going to the UN again would make us look hesitant and uncertain, but Blair saw a second resolution as a political necessity for him at home. Although he had a huge margin in Parliament, he couldn’t count on his fellow Labour Party members, and he foresaw the possibility of not only losing a vote on the war, but even bringing down his government. Britain was our major ally, and when the president decided to try for a second resolution, I understood his reasons. But our efforts to gather support for the resolution were unsuccessful, and on Monday, March 17, we pulled it down. That night the president addressed the nation and gave Saddam Hussein forty-eight hours to leave Iraq.
The next day, Tuesday, Blair won his vote in Parliament. A majority of Labour members supported him, and he got an even larger share of the Conservatives’ votes. At the request of the British, I had called a number of the Tories, including Iain Duncan Smith, the Conservative leader. He was, on this issue, a rock of support for Blair.
On Wednesday, as the military operation was ready to begin, I made calls to a series of world leaders, letting them know that diplomacy had run its course. My schedule shows that I talked to the leaders of Egypt, Israel, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, and South Korea. The Syrian president, Bashar Assad, was also on my call list, but when my office reached his, word came back that he was “unavailable.”
Somewhere during the series of phone calls, I was called down to the Oval Office. The president’s national security team was gathering to hear George Tenet, who had come to report that CIA sources inside Iraq believed they knew where Saddam Hussein would be that night. The agency had eyewitness accounts, George said, that Saddam and his two sons had been at a compound called Dora Farms and were likely to return. Amid a frenzy of activity, with new information coming in real time and staffers and principals hurrying in and out, Secretary Rumsfeld and Joint Chiefs Chairman Myers talked about our military options. If, in fact, Saddam was there, we had the possibility of striking a decapitation blow in the first moments of the war. But we had to act fast, and there were risks. We would need bunker-busting bombs on the target, and that meant planes flying close to Baghdad before its air defenses had been destroyed.
We thoroughly discussed the pros and cons, and eventually the president kicked everyone else out of the Oval Office, looked at me, and said, “Dick, what do you think we ought to do?” I told him I thought we should launch. If the intelligence was right, we had the chance to shorten the war significantly by killing Saddam up front. I thought that was worth the risk.