First Stop, Iraq

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By the fall of 2000, however, Cheney was back in it--big time. As the vice-presidential running mate of the son of his old boss, he was beginning to focus on problems the Clinton Administration had been unable to solve. High among them was Iraq's continued defiance of U.N. resolutions requiring it to disarm. And when he broached the topic on the campaign trail, Cheney sounded ever more hawkish. He had been outraged by Saddam's attempt in 1993 to assassinate former President Bush in Kuwait, and he thought the short bombing campaign after Iraq kicked out the U.N. inspectors in 1998 was a joke. "We have swept that problem under the rug for too long," he told a campaign aide in 2000, speaking of Iraq. "We have a festering problem there."

When Cheney was tapped to create the second Bush Administration, he seeded it with men who had once worked for him. Wolfowitz became Deputy Secretary of Defense under Cheney's old friend and mentor Donald Rumsfeld (another signatory of the 1998 letter). But as is often the case, the new responsibilities of office meant that officials had to postpone trying to implement their most cherished to-do list. In the State Department, Powell was working on a plan for "smart sanctions" on Iraq--tightening the porous U.N. embargo while allowing more humanitarian support for innocent Iraqis. The neoconservatives weren't impressed, but in those initial months they were able to do little to develop their own strategies for ousting Saddam.