In My Time - Dick Cheney [237]
The next morning we had our Oval Office intelligence brief earlier than normal because the president and Prime Minister Tony Blair were having breakfast at 8:00 a.m., followed by a joint press conference. As the intelligence briefing wrapped up, a staffer came in with a copy of the president’s opening remarks for the press conference. I didn’t usually get involved with drafts of presidential speeches, but a quick glance at this one sent up a red flag. I’d seen an earlier version and it had the word victory in it. Someone had taken it out of the remarks.
For some time, Dan Bartlett, the director of communications, and Josh Bolten, the chief of staff, had been arguing that the president shouldn’t say “victory.” They viewed that as the equivalent of arguing to stay the course. They were concerned the press would hear it and write that the president hadn’t understood the message of the midterms we’d just lost. They worried it would lead to stories that the president was “stubborn” and “wasn’t listening.” They urged repeatedly that for optics’ sake, we make clear we had a changed strategy—and that meant deleting references to “victory.”
I disagreed. Our national security depended on victory in Iraq. That was simply the truth, and the president should be clear about it. I also thought about our soldiers and their families and what they would think when they heard the president’s remarks. The commander in chief could not be sending men and women into harm’s way if we weren’t fighting to win.
“Mr. President,” I said, holding up the proposed remarks, “you can’t refuse to talk about winning. That will be a huge signal that you no longer believe in victory.” The president understood immediately, and a few hours later when he appeared with Prime Minister Blair, he said, “We agree that victory in Iraq is important; it’s important for the Iraqi people, it’s important for the security of the United States and Great Britain, and it’s important for the civilized world.” It could not have been any clearer.
At four that afternoon the president’s principal national security advisors met in the secure conference room in the Old Executive Office Building, across West Executive Avenue from the White House, to discuss Iraq. Secretary Rice and I had a vigorous debate. She argued that Iraq was experiencing the kind of sectarian violence that American forces should not be in the middle of. Our troops should stand back, she said, and engage only if they think they are witnessing a massacre, the kind of violence that had happened in 1995 when Serbian forces had slaughtered thousands of Bosnians in Srebrenica. I did not think this was realistic. My view was that we had to stay actively and aggressively engaged in the fight, that the outcome mattered too much for us to simply pull back and watch the Iraqis battle it out.
By the next morning, when we gathered in the Roosevelt Room for a meeting on this topic with the president, much of the distinction between Secretary Rice’s view and mine had been airbrushed away. Instead of two crisply drawn options for the president, the NSC staff presented what they described as “an emerging consensus.” They were following a practice for managing conflicting views that Rice had started when she was national security advisor. I’d never been a fan of it, but I was particularly concerned that in the case of Iraq the president should be presented with clear choices, not halfway measures, not policy recommendations that split the difference.
I spoke up. “These aren’t the options we discussed last night. The distinction has been blurred here.” There was a big difference between letting the Iraqis fight it out and staying engaged to defeat the enemy, and I observed that attempting to find some sort of compromise position, some view that made everyone happy around the table, might in fact produce policy that was incomprehensible and impossible to implement as a military strategy.
The chairman