First Stop, Iraq

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Then, in November 2001, as alliance soldiers combed through al-Qaeda safe houses in Afghanistan, documents and computer records revealed that Osama bin Laden's network had been trying to acquire WMDs. Administration officials didn't have to work hard to identify a possible supplier. "Iraq," says a White House official, "was the easiest place they could get them from." Says a former senior Administration official: "The eureka moment was that realization by the President that were a WMD to fall into [terrorists'] hands, their willingness to use it would be unquestioned. So we must act pre-emptively to ensure that those who have that capability aren't allowed to proliferate it." Those seeking to convince Bush that Saddam should be a target now had important allies. Throughout the 1990s, the uniformed military had been unenthusiastic about intervention in Iraq. After Sept. 11, that changed. "It became clear that these terrorists would kill as many Americans as they could," says an Army general. "If they could get their hands on chemical, biological or nuclear weapons--from Saddam or from someone else--they would use them against us."

There was more. By 2002, say advisers to the President, Bush had become increasingly horrified by stories of Saddam's brutal regime--by the ways in which Iraq's security services raped and tortured his opponents, gassed Kurds rebelling against rule from Baghdad in 1988 and summarily executed those Saddam mistrusted. This fascination with Saddam's cruelty, says a source close to the White House, was neither ghoulish nor an expression of Bush's propensity to identify evil in the world. The point, says this adviser, is that Bush thinks Saddam is insane. "If there is one thing standing between those who want WMDs and those who have them," says this source, "it is this madman. Depending on the sanity of Saddam is not an option."

By this point, Bush was on board for action against Iraq. But in what form? It was easy to say Iraq should be disarmed and Saddam unseated from power if he would not abandon his WMDs. But by the spring of 2002, the Administration had no idea how to achieve such a goal. Would the U.S. do it alone? What would Washington tell its allies in the Middle East and Europe? In March, as he did 12 years earlier, Cheney set out on a trip to the Middle East to rally support for an aggressive American policy against Iraq. The trip didn't go well. Cheney's hosts wanted to talk about the rising tide of violence in Israel and the occupied territories, not about Iraq. If there was going to be an international effort to disarm Saddam or remove him from power, it would have to be led by the man who, up to now, had steadfastly resisted the neoconservative case--Colin Powell.

NO LONGER A DOVE