Inside The Mind Of George W. Bush

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Many Democrats who supported the war now say if they had known the true state of Saddam's arsenal, they would not have gone along. But Bush treats such doubts as a failure of will. "I've seen no second thoughts by him at all," Democratic Senator John Breaux says of Bush. Even though many congressional Republicans believe privately that the chances are no better than fifty-fifty that the U.S. will be successful in Iraq, Bush's friends say the President gives no hint in private conversations that he is discouraged. If he did waver, there would be political hell to pay. "We're getting close to having a thousand soldiers dead in Iraq," says a Republican Senator. "A lot of people are upset, and the polls have changed. So if the President in any way opens that door a little bit and says, 'Maybe we didn't think this thing through well enough,' that could be disastrous politically."

WHAT DID HE LEARN FROM IRAQ?

Most of Iraq was not actually in flames in April, but it looked that way on TV, and Bush had to perform the cleansing ritual he likes least: a prime-time press conference, in the East Room. Asked by a TIME correspondent what he considered his biggest mistake and what he had learned from it, the President chased the wet bar of soap around the tub for a while and then conceded he had no answer. At a time when only 48% of Americans support his handling of the war, he has a fine line to walk: to make his case that he was right while showing he has learned from what went wrong.

Bush constantly cites the example of postwar Germany and Japan to argue that it is far too soon to call Iraq a failure. In turn he sounds like Truman, Johnson and Reagan when he says war and its aftermath are always hard and messy, that a failed state would be a disaster causing dominoes to fall, that a free Iraq would be a beacon to the world. Asked again last week what his greatest mistake was, he is ready with an answer. "Had we had to do it over again," he says, "we would look at the consequences of catastrophic success, being so successful so fast that an enemy that should have surrendered or been done in escaped and lived to fight another day." If he learned in Texas that even failure can yield benefits, he learned in Iraq that even success comes at a cost.

The war has become a case study in weighing the value of a show of strength, and Fallujah is the fulcrum. The city exploded in March, when a mob killed four U.S. private security contractors and played with their charred bodies like beach balls. The President reacted as expected. This would not be his Somalia. On the night of the killings, at 6:15, General John Abizaid, head of U.S. Central Command, called the White House residence to give word that within 72 hours there would be a "specific and overwhelming attack to restore justice," as a senior Administration official put it.