In retrospect, the speech is even more stunning than it appeared to be then, because it has become clear with the pa.s.sage of time that it constructed a case that was largely false. Containment may have worked in the Cold War, Cheney said, but is "not possible when dictators obtain weapons of ma.s.s destruction and are prepared to share them with terrorists who intend to inflict catastrophic casualties on the United States." It was time to be "candid," he said. "The Iraqi regime has in fact been very busy enhancing its capabilities in the field of chemical and biological agents, and they continue to pursue the nuclear program they began so many years ago____ Many of us are convinced that Saddam Hussein will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon." Nothing the U.S. government had tried in the previous decade had stopped Saddam, Cheney warned-not inspections, not the revelations of defectors, not Desert Fox. "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of ma.s.s destruction," he said, as flatly as possible. "There is no doubt that he is ama.s.sing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us."

Not only that, but the situation was getting worse. "Time is not on our side," Cheney added. "The risks of inaction are far greater than the risks of action."

Zinni goes into opposition Anthony Zinni, recently retired from the Marine Corps, sat behind Cheney on the stage that day as the speech was delivered. Zinni was there to receive the VFW"s Dwight D. Eisenhower Distinguished Service Award in recognition of his thirty-five years as a Marine. He had been a Bush-Cheney supporter in the 2000 campaign. But as he listened to the vice president in Nashville he nearly fell off his chair. "In my time at Centcom, I watched the intelligence and never-not once- did it say, "He has WMD."" Since retiring he had retained all his top-secret clearances, he was still consulting with the CIA on Iraq, he had reviewed all the current intelligence-and he had seen nothing to support Cheney"s cert.i.tude. "It was never there, never there," he said later. These guys are going to war without the evidence to back them up, he thought to himself that day. His second chilling thought, he recalled, was that they didn"t understand what they were getting into.

For his part, he couldn"t figure out the change in Cheney. In Zinni"s experience, the vice president was a realist, a hardheaded man who demanded the hard facts. From their encounters in Arab capitals in the 1990s, he had said, he had come to think of Cheney as very practical. But that wasn"t what he was seeing that August day in Nashville. "When he sort of got tied up and embraced all this, it seemed to be out of character, it really confused me." What he didn"t know then was that Cheney had changed-perhaps because he knew the Bush administration hadn"t performed well in heeding warnings before 9/11, or perhaps because of his heart ailments, which can alter a person"s personality.

Like many Marines, Zinni doesn"t shy away from a fight. He is an engaging conversationalist, even an intellectual at times. But he also steps easily into confrontation, verbal or physical. When two men tried once a few years ago to mug him at a rest stop on 1-95, he slugged one and, pretending he had a gun, chased the other away. And so he went into opposition. Zinni would feel at times that no one was really listening to him, but his principles made him persist. Just as Wolfowitz"s outlook was shaped to a surprising degree by the Holocaust, Zinni"s was formed on a cold day in November 1970, when he lay on a monsoon-soaked hillside west of Danang, his lifeblood seeping into the dirt from three North Vietnamese AK-47 rounds in his side and back. In subsequent operations, one third of his back muscle was removed. While recuperating, he vowed that if he ever had a chance to stop a situation like this from happening again to another young soldier, he would.

After watching Cheney in Nashville, Zinni stewed for some time. One day that fall, he went fishing with a close friend, retired Marine Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper.

"Rip, there are no weapons of ma.s.s destruction programs in Iraq," Zinni told Van Riper. "There may be some isolated weapons, though I doubt even that, but no programs as you and I would think of them."

In early October, Zinni went public with his doubts. "I"m not convinced we need to do this now," he told a meeting of the Middle East Inst.i.tute. Of Saddam, he said, "I believe he is... containable at this moment." There were other priorities in U.S. foreign policy. "My personal view is, I think this isn"t number one-it"s maybe sixth or seventh."

But Zinni"s cause was already lost. Inside the Bush administration, Cheney"s speech hit like a preemptive strike. Bush himself had been at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, when it was delivered. "My understanding was that the president himself was very surprised at that speech, because it was kind of constraining his options," said a former senior Bush administration official. "It had the effect of somewhat limiting the president"s options, in my view."

Cheney"s speech had a powerful effect elsewhere in the government. His hardline no debate stance was adopted by others in the administration. "We know they have weapons of ma.s.s destruction," Rumsfeld would a.s.sert a month later at a Pentagon briefing. "We know they have active programs. There isn"t any debate about it."

Cheney"s cert.i.tude also dampened skepticism in the intelligence community. "When the vice president stood up and said "We are sure"-well, who are we to argue?" said the senior military intelligence official. "With all the compartmental-ization, there"s a good chance that a guy that senior has seen stuff you haven"t." Some a.n.a.lysts figured Cheney must have been told about a piece of highly cla.s.sified "crown jewel" information to which lower ranking officials lacked access.

In fact, Cheney played that insider"s card himself, dismissively telling Tim Russert in an appearance on Meet the Press Meet the Press on September 8,2002, that those who doubted his a.s.sertions about the threat presented by Iraq haven"t "seen all the intelligence that we have seen." on September 8,2002, that those who doubted his a.s.sertions about the threat presented by Iraq haven"t "seen all the intelligence that we have seen."

Outside the government, Cheney"s certainty framed the debate in a way that powerfully helped the administration. He had put the opposition on the defensive, effectively saying, If you think I"m wrong, prove it. After this point the Bush administration"s statements about Iraq were not so much part of a debate about whether to go to war, they were part of a campaign to sell it-from Bush"s appearance at the United Nations to the congressional vote, and ultimately to Powell"s appearance at the UN six months later. Most important, the administration itself fell into line. In the following weeks, first Condoleezza Rice and then Bush himself would adopt the alarmist tone that Cheney had struck that day in Nashville.

A flawed NIE does the trick In September 2002 the U.S. intelligence community prepared a comprehensive summary, called a National Intelligence Estimate, or NIE, of what it knew about "Iraq"s Continuing Programs for Weapons of Ma.s.s Destruction"-the t.i.tle of the ninety-two-page cla.s.sified version of the report. It was prepared at the request of members of Congress who expected to vote on going to war with Iraq and wanted something on which to base their vote. Written by a group of senior intelligence officers and then approved by the leaders of the U.S. intelligence community, the estimate pulled together in one place the core data of the Bush administration"s argument for going to war. It reported that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons, was making advances in developing ways to weaponize and deliver biological weapons, and was "reconst.i.tuting its nuclear program." The report appeared more certain on all fronts than previous intelligence a.s.sessments, but the finding on the nuclear program was especially surprising, because it was a shift from a series of previous conclusions by the intelligence community. In fact, the estimate amounted to a serious misrepresentation of views in the intelligence community, maximizing alarming findings while minimizing internal doubts about them. It effectively presented opinion as fact.

The effect of this NIE can"t be underestimated, said one general who talked frequently to Rumsfeld during this time. During the summer of 2002, he said, both Bush and Rumsfeld had been on the fence. "Cheney, Wolfowitz, and Armitage were the hawks," he remembered. Each argued that "we had to get rid of this guy, that time isn"t on our side, and that there will be no better time to get rid of him." On the other side of the argument were Colin Powell and some lesser figures in the administration. They "thought it was time to leverage the international community, especially since we"d scared the h.e.l.l out of everybody."

But then came the NIE, which had been pushed out unusually quickly, in just a few weeks. Bush"s view became that CIA director George Tenet says they have WMD, and Cheney says don"t get caught napping again like we did on 9/11, this general recalled. "The president became convinced" by that doc.u.ment and by Tenet"s interpretation of it, "that [going to war] was the right thing to do."

Over a year later, when the Senate Intelligence Committee reviewed the NIE in light of evidence that became available after the war, it came to the conclusion that the collective wisdom of the U.S. intelligence community, as represented in the estimate, had been stunningly wrong. "Most of the major key judgments [in the NIE] either overstated, or were not supported by, the underlying intelligence reporting," it would find. "A series of failures, particularly in a.n.a.lytic trade craft, led to the mischaracterization of the intelligence." Moreover, the errors and exaggerations weren"t random, but all pushed in the same direction, toward making the argument that Iraq presented a growing threat. As a political doc.u.ment that made the case for war the NIE of October 2002 succeeded brilliantly. As a professional intelligence product it was shameful. But it did its job, which wasn"t really to a.s.sess Iraqi weapons programs but to sell a war. There was only one way to disprove its a.s.sertions: invade Iraq, which is what the Bush administration wanted to do. Responsibility for this low point in the history of U.S. intelligence must rest on the shoulders of George Tenet.

Redefining the intelligence Richard Perle"s influence in the events leading up to war likely has been overstated. At the time the chairman of the Defense Policy Board, he also seems to have wielded some influence with the office of Vice President Cheney. Perle"s main role, at least in public, seems to have been the one willing to be quoted in the media, saying in public what his more discreet allies in the Bush administration, such as I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney"s chief of staff, would say to reporters only on background.

Perle resembles Wolfowitz in his approach-bright, incisive, and somewhat academic in tone, with an air of deliberation and precision. Yet while Wolfowitz seeks to persuade, Perle attacks, often seeming eager to pounce on his opponents" capabilities and to cast doubt on their integrity or intelligence. He also has a habit of making doubtful a.s.sertions as though they were generally accepted facts- such as his belief, now known to be wildly off base, that Saddam Hussein "was far stronger at the end of Clinton"s tenure than at the beginning."

Perle would later explain how, at the Pentagon, a.n.a.lysts working for Feith, his old subordinate who had become under secretary of defense for policy, produced their alarming interpretation of the murky intelligence about Saddam Hussein, WMD, and terrorism. "Within a very short period of time, they began to find links that n.o.body else had previously understood or recorded in a useful way," he said of those a.n.a.lysts. "They [noticed] things that n.o.body else had noticed. It was there all along, it simply hadn"t been noticed." This key information had been overlooked "because the CIA and DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency] were not looking."

The way he described it, all that was needed was the fresh, unbiased eye of competent a.n.a.lysts-which in his view was provided by Feith"s office at the Pentagon. "The whinging, the complaints from the intelligence establishment who had overlooked this material, [are] really quite pathetic." Perle"s argument, ultimately, was that he and his allies simply were better at parsing the data than were their opponents in the intelligence community: "Let me be blunt about this: The level of competence on past performance of the Central Intelligence Agency, in this area, is appalling."

It was at this point that the Bush administration"s views diverged from that of the intelligence community. "There wasn"t anyone in the intelligence community who was saying what" the Pentagon a.n.a.lysts around Feith were saying, a senior military intelligence official recalled. "There were a few stray a.n.a.lysts who connected some of those dots, but no one in the mainstream." The NIE, and especially its doubt-free summary version, offered only a dim and distorted reflection of their views.

This particular official is more sympathetic than most of his peers to the Bush administration, but still emphatically rejects the administration"s ex post facto defense that everybody got it wrong. The core conclusion of the best intelligence a.n.a.lysts was, he said, that "we were looking for evidence, but we weren"t finding it." But the failure to stop 9/11 had tarnished the credibility of the intelligence professionals, and lessened the deference that others might give them. On top of that, relative amateurs working for Feith and Cheney felt free to seize on existing bits of data and push them as hard as they could, this official added. "They would take individual factoids, build them into long lists, and then think because of the length of the list, it was credible." When the lists were rejected by intelligence professionals, they would be leaked to friendly journalists.

Yet even with that sort of pressure from Feith"s office, he concluded, "There was never a bow wave in the intelligence community for this case." That is, the appearance of consensus that the NIE gave was a false one, especially because it underplayed the lack of solid information about what had happened to Iraq"s weapons programs since Desert Fox. Also, there was a long-range worry. Intelligence a.n.a.lysts calculated that if current trends continued, sooner or later, Saddam Hussein definitely again would obtain those munitions of ma.s.s death. "In the back of our minds, at the fringes of the discussion, was: If we don"t do something now, then he would eventually dupe the UN, get the sanctions lifted, and we lose containment. Then he has money and new power, and he opens up his plants, and he is back in business."

Others lower in the intelligence hierarchy are less forgiving of themselves and of the Bush administration. Basically, said Greg Thielmann, the State Department proliferation expert, the administration was looking for evidence to support conclusions it already had reached. "They were convinced that Saddam was developing nuclear weapons, that he was reconst.i.tuting his program, and I"m afraid that"s where they started," he said. "They were cherry-picking the information that we provided to use whatever pieces of it that fit their overall interpretation. Worse than that, they were dropping qualifiers and distorting some of the information that we provided to make it seem even more alarmist and dangerous than the information that we were giving them." The impulse to push the conclusions was especially worrisome, he added, because the intelligence community, not wanting to be caught napping, already tends "to overwarn, rather than underwarn."

"What I saw was that a lot of a.n.a.lysts, of low-level people, had it about right," said a senior military intelligence official specializing in Middle Eastern affairs who is still involved in this area and so couldn"t speak on the record without endangering his security clearances. But as the intelligence moved up the chain of command rather than have its level of certainty diluted, as is generally the case when information is pa.s.sed upward, in this case it was treated as more definite. This was especially true in the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq. "By the time you get to the executive summary level, it didn"t look a lot like the a.n.a.lysts" views," he said. "And by the time you get to the uncla.s.sified public portion, all the mushiness and doubts were washed out."

Feith and his subordinates, especially Bill Luti, a former Navy officer who became a factotum for administration hawks, "were essentially an extra-governmental organization, because many of their sources of information and much of their work were in the shadows," said Gregory Newbold, the Marine general who was then the Joint Staff"s operations director. "It was also my sense that they cherry-picked obscure, unconfirmed information to reinforce their own philosophies and ideologies."

The Times Times goes nuclear goes nuclear Also fouling the intelligence process were certain breaking newspaper stories, especially Judith Miller"s in the New York Times. New York Times. In September she peeled off a string of articles based on the accounts of defectors. Most notable was one she coauth.o.r.ed with Michael Gordon, the In September she peeled off a string of articles based on the accounts of defectors. Most notable was one she coauth.o.r.ed with Michael Gordon, the Times"s Times"s respected senior military correspondent. respected senior military correspondent. u.s. says hussein intensifies quest for a-bomb parts u.s. says hussein intensifies quest for a-bomb parts, it reported on page one of the edition of Sunday, September 8. "The closer Saddam Hussein gets to a nuclear weapon, the harder he will be to deal with," it quoted a senior administration official as warning. It related that hardliners were saying that the first irrefutable evidence "may be a mushroom cloud."

Such stories had an insidious effect on intelligence estimates, said the senior military intelligence officer: "The media has far more effect on intelligence a.n.a.lysis than you probably realize." It would only emerge later-and long after the war began-that the Times Times story had been flat wrong. story had been flat wrong.

The combination of hyped newspaper stories and selective use of intelligence data had a powerful effect, said Rand Beers, who served on the staff of the National Security Council during the run-up to the war. "As they embellished what the intelligence community was prepared to say, and as the press reported that information, it began to acquire its own sense of truth and reality," he said.

Chalabi"s distorting effect Ahmed Chalabi, a clever, secular Shiite who spent the 1990s rallying support for a U.S. effort to depose Saddam Hussein, had two major means by which to influence the deliberations of the U.S. government. The first was indirect, through the media. Discussing his methods later, Chalabi told an interviewer from Frontline, Frontline, the PBS doc.u.mentary series, about how in 2001 his organization consciously took a source, Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, first to the the PBS doc.u.mentary series, about how in 2001 his organization consciously took a source, Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, first to the New York Times, New York Times, which published a story in December 2001, and then to the U.S. government. Most notably, al-Haideri told his questioners that three hundred secret weapons facilities had been reactivated since the withdrawal of UN inspectors. Chalabi"s organization later provided this information to the which published a story in December 2001, and then to the U.S. government. Most notably, al-Haideri told his questioners that three hundred secret weapons facilities had been reactivated since the withdrawal of UN inspectors. Chalabi"s organization later provided this information to the Washington Post, Washington Post, which carried an account in a July 2002 summary of what was thought to be known about Iraqi WMD programs. which carried an account in a July 2002 summary of what was thought to be known about Iraqi WMD programs.

"He told us, we told Judy Miller, she interviewed him, then we give him to the U.S. government," Chalabi said. "The thinking is that if we believed him to be credible, we wanted his story out, because we knew that if the U.S. took him, we would never see him again."

Chalabi also was able to introduce misinformation directly into the system. One senior military intelligence officer recalled being awed by Chalabi"s ability to inject himself into the internal deliberations of the U.S. government. "He always got access" during 2002 and 2003. "His views always got where he wanted them to go." At first, senior Defense Intelligence Agency officials working in Middle Eastern affairs tried to prevent that, but it became clear that Douglas Feith and other senior Pentagon officials disliked those efforts. So, this officer recalled, by the spring of 2003 "we stopped complaining about him."

A Defense Intelligence Agency official said Feith and Luti made it clear that "Chalabi was liked." They weren"t particularly interested in hearing arguments against him.

Chalabi had powerful allies. On March 17, 2002, Wolfowitz lunched with Christopher Meyer, the British amba.s.sador to the United States. "It was true that Chalabi was not the easiest person to work with," Wolfowitz told Meyer, according to a memorandum the envoy sent the next day to the office of British Prime Minister Tony Blair. "But he had a good record in bringing high-grade defectors out of Iraq."

"The arguments about Chalabi have been without substance," Richard Perle intoned in July 2003. "He is far and away the most effective individual that we could have hoped would emerge in Iraq.... In my view, the person most likely to give us reliable advice is Ahmed Chalabi."

The intelligence community, by contrast, had no agents sending reliable reports from inside Iraq. That left a vacuum-and gave Chalabi an opening that he exploited adeptly. He described his allies in the U.S. government as being from the office of "the vice president" and "the office of the secretary of defense," the latter a broad term covering not just Rumsfeld"s immediate aides but the offices of Wolfowitz and Feith and hundreds of people working for them.

Views of Chalabi tended to be shaped, pro or con, by where one stood in a divided administration. His reports became just one more issue in a running feud. "CIA and State were against Chalabi," said one intelligence veteran who during this period was working at the Pentagon. "So at DoD, any challenge to Chalabi was seen as just CIA or State attacks. And DoD"s att.i.tude was, Don"t you call my baby ugly."

Sometimes all these forces would converge, as in an October 2, 2002, article by Judith Miller that quoted Richard Perle criticizing the CIA for not heeding tips from Chalabi"s organization, the Iraqi National Congress. "The INC has been without question the single most important source of intelligence about Saddam Hussein," Perle a.s.serted. This was a sad moment in American journalism and governance. The U.S. government during this period was paying Chalabi"s organization substantial amounts, totaling more than $36 million from 2000 to 2003.

THE RUN-UP.

B.

y the time the public really focused on it, the decision to go to war had been made, though more through drift than through any one meeting. In September 2002 word began to circulate inside the military that an invasion of Iraq was inevitable, and the march to war began.

At the heart of this part of the run-up to the war from the late summer of 2002 is the tale of how two contradictory delusions were pursued and sold by the Bush administration. To make the case for war, administration officials tended to look at the worst-case scenarios for weapons of ma.s.s destruction, dismissing contrary evidence, a.s.serting that Saddam Hussein possessed chemical and biological munitions and was on the road to getting nuclear weapons, and emphasizing the frightening possibility of his sharing them with terrorists to use against the United States. On September 7, Bush, speaking at Camp David with Prime Minister Tony Blair at his side, flatly a.s.serted that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of ma.s.s destruction. "The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons," Condoleezza Rice said on CNN on September 8, echoing that morning"s New York Times New York Times story. "But we don"t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." story. "But we don"t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

Yet at the same time, the administration"s consideration of postwar issues took a leap of faith in the opposite direction, emphasizing best-case scenarios that a.s.sumed that Iraqis generally would greet the U.S. presence warmly and that a successor Iraqi government could be established quickly, permitting the swift homeward movement of most U.S. troops. In order to make this case, more pessimistic views repeatedly had to be rejected and ignored, even if they came from area experts.

Both the pessimism of the threat a.s.sessment and the optimism of the postwar a.s.sessment helped pave the way to war. By overstating the threat of Iraq, the former made war seem more necessary. By understating the difficulty of remaking Iraq, the latter made it seem easier and less expensive than it would prove to be.

Bush beats the drums of war On the morning of September 4,2002, Rep. Ike Skelton and a group of seventeen other congressional leaders met with President Bush at the White House to discuss Iraq. At the meeting"s end, Skelton said later, he and Bush had a quick private exchange.

"What are you going to do once you get it?" Skelton asked the president."We"ve been giving some thought to it," Bush responded So had Skelton, who that afternoon wrote and sent to Bush a letter laying out his questions about the costs and duration of a U.S. occupation of Iraq. In typical Skeltonian fashion, he quoted the Prussian military theorist Karl von Clausewitz, to remind the White House of the requirement in war "not to take the first step without considering the last." He also invoked the other great philosopher of strategy, Sun Tzu, who had observed, "To win victory is easy; to preserve its fruits, difficult."

The official Bush administration line later would become that no one really foresaw the difficulties of postwar Iraq. But Skelton certainly was pointing out the direction, as were a host of experts on the Mideast and some strategic thinkers inside the Army "I have no doubt that our military would decisively defeat Iraq"s forces and remove Saddam," Skelton stated in his letter. "But like the proverbial dog chasing the car down the road, we must consider what we would do after we caught it." He was especially worried, he told Bush, about the "extreme difficulty of occupying Iraq with its history of autocratic rule, its balkanized ethnic tensions, and its isolated economic system." So he asked to see "detailed advanced occupation planning," and to know more about "the form of a replacement regime... and the possibility that this regime might be rejected by the Iraqi people, leading to civil unrest and even anarchy." Before invading Iraq, he concluded, the president should tell the American people what they were getting into. "The American people must be clear about the amount of money and the number of soldiers that will have to be devoted to this effort for many years to come." He added: "We need to ensure that in taking out Saddam, we don"t win the battle and lose the war."

There was no White House response. But in a meeting a White House congressional liaison official named Daniel Keniry told him, Skelton recalled, "Well, Congressman, we really don"t need your vote. We"ve got the votes." Nor was there much reaction from his congressional colleagues. One of the reasons for this is that Skelton is a bit of an outrider in his own party, well to the right of most of Democratic congressional representatives. But it also was because most of the senators who had led their party on defense issues during the Cold War had moved on and hadn"t been replaced, noted Kurt Campbell, a veteran of the Clinton Pentagon. Also, party politics had shifted away from supporting such figures. "The defense intellectuals tended to be centrists, and in the last decade, you"ve seen a hollowing out of the center," noted Campbell.

The drumbeat steadily intensified. On September 9, Franks briefed the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the state of the war plan. The military was beginning to move, laying the groundwork by expanding the ramp s.p.a.ce at airports in the Persian Gulf and upgrading key gear, such as Special Operations helicopters.

Two days later, on the first anniversary of 9/11, more than three dozen senators were invited to the Pentagon for a briefing by Rumsfeld on weapons of ma.s.s destruction. One of those attending, Sen. Max Cleland of Georgia, was surprised to find Vice President Cheney and CIA director Tenet also waiting there. "It was pretty clear that Rumsfeld and Cheney are ready to go to war," Cleland wrote later that day in a note to himself. "They have already made the decision to go to war and to them that is the only option." Cleland had lost three limbs as a 1st Cavalry Division soldier in Vietnam in 1968, and was worried about Iraq becoming a similar mess. His note concluded, "Our country is divided at this point and G.o.d knows what will happen."

The next day President Bush addressed the UN General a.s.sembly for twenty-six minutes, most of them devoted to a description of Iraq as "a grave and gathering danger." He explained his feeling of urgency: "With every step the Iraqi regime takes toward gaining and deploying the most terrible weapons, our own options to confront that regime will narrow." And if anyone didn"t get the point, the administration also issued a doc.u.ment t.i.tled "The National Security Strategy of the United States of America" that formalized the preemption doctrine outlined by the president at West Point in June. "We cannot let our enemies strike first," it stated. "The overlap between states that sponsor terror and those that pursue WMD compels us to action.... To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries, the United States will, if necessary act preemptively."

Culminating the campaign that had begun with Cheney"s VFW speech six weeks earlier, Bush traveled to Cincinnati in early October to make his case to the American people: The decades-old policy of containment of Iraq hadn"t worked, even when executed aggressively, Bush argued. "The end result is that Saddam Hussein still has chemical and biological weapons and is increasing his capabilities to make more," Bush stated, in the first of a series of a.s.sertions in the speech that were presented as fact and are now known to be incorrect. "And he is moving ever closer to developing a nuclear weapon."

Bush didn"t quite maintain that Iraq was an imminent threat to the United States, but he came close, saying, "The Iraqi dictator must not be permitted to threaten America and the world with horrible poisons and diseases and gases and atomic weapons." Nor could we afford to wait for more evidence, he warned. "America must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud."

Congress goes alongCongress wasn"t looking for a fight with the president.

The National Intelligence Estimate, in its full, ninety-two-page cla.s.sified form, contained a host of doubts, caveats, and disagreements with Bush"s a.s.sertions. Copies of that long form of the NIE were sent to Capitol Hill, where they sat in two vaults, under armed guard. Yet only a handful of members of Congress ever read more than its five-page executive summary. Delving into the dissent in the intelligence community would only have gotten a politician on the wrong side of the issue with the president. (Many months later, after the U.S. military invaded Iraq, White House officials would disclose that neither Bush nor Rice had read the entire NIE.) The congressional vote itself, authorizing President Bush to attack Iraq, was anticlimactic. When the House debate began there was just one reporter in the press gallery. At their most intense points, the debates in both the House and the Senate attracted fewer than 10 percent of each body"s members. "Usually, when there are few people around, it means that they don"t like what"s happening but don"t feel they can do anything about it," observed one Capitol Hill veteran.

The exchanges on the Senate floor offered little of the memorable commentary seen in the two other most recent congressional debates on whether to go to war, in 1991 and in 1964, regarding the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. "The outcome-lopsided support for Bush"s resolution-was preordained," wrote the Washington Post"s Washington Post"s Dana Milbank. Republicans were going to support the president and their party, and Democrats wanted to move on to other issues that would help them more in the midterm elections that at that point were just three weeks away. Dana Milbank. Republicans were going to support the president and their party, and Democrats wanted to move on to other issues that would help them more in the midterm elections that at that point were just three weeks away.

"With Democrats, the longest shadow was cast not by Karl Rove but by Sam Nunn," said Kurt Campbell, now head of the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. A decade earlier, nearly three quarters of the congressional Democrats had balked at attacking Saddam Hussein"s troops in Kuwait, led in this opposition by Sen. Sam Nunn, the Georgia Democrat they trusted to protect their flank on military affairs. Nunn, in turn, appeared to have been persuaded to go slow by Colin Powell and other generals with whom he had had private conversations. But Democrats felt abused by that outcome, because after that war was concluded, their party looked less capable of handling national security issues. For the next three presidential election cycles, no Democrat who had been in his party"s majority opposing the 1991 war was able to make headway in presidential politics. Those who appeared on the next three Democratic tickets-Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Joseph Lieberman-had all been Gulf War hawks, in their party"s minority.

The Democrats weren"t going to make that mistake again. This time they were going to stay well out of the way of President Bush. In fact, said Sen. Robert Byrd, a West Virginia Democrat, the Democratic caucus decided on September 19 to get the vote out of the way as soon as possible, so they didn"t have it hanging over them on election day. "Members were intimidated," Byrd said later.

Like an old-time Southern mossback obstructionist confronting the New Deal, Byrd stood astride the train tracks of history, knowing he wasn"t going to change the course of events but protesting nonetheless. "The Senate is rushing to vote on whether to declare war on Iraq without pausing to ask why," he said in a Senate speech at the time. "Why is war being dealt with not as a last resort but as a first resort?" But he was seen by many in Congress as a blowhard, given to long-winded talks bristling with allusions to the Bible, ancient history, and the Const.i.tution. He would remind his fellow senators of Croesus"s comment to Cyrus the Great, and quote to them from the Roman orator Cicero and from the Roman historian Livy, whom he correctly but pedantically referred to as t.i.tus Livius. At a time when many senators, elected through carefully ma.s.saged television commercials, arrive in Washington seemingly unable to speak well spontaneously, the white-maned Byrd was capable of churning out eloquence at great and sometimes numbing length. He had little influence even in his own party, and was mocked by some Republicans, who were fond of remembering that as a young man Byrd had belonged to the Ku Klux Klan, and in fact had been the exalted cyclops of his local chapter in West Virginia.

Ultimately, 77 of 100 senators and 296 of 435 House members voted to authorize the president to "use the armed forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in order to defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq." The majority of House Democrats voted against the war, but in the Senate, 29 Democrats backed the Bush administration"s stance while 21 voted against it.

One of those voting for it was a successor to Sam Nunn as a Georgia Democrat: Max Cleland, who was in a tight campaign for reelection in which his challenger, Saxby Chambliss, was running commercials that showed images of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein and implied that Cleland wasn"t standing up to them. Despite his misgivings, Cleland felt under intense political pressure to go with the administration. "It was obvious that if I voted against the resolution that I would be dead meat in the race, just handing them a victory," he said in 2005. Even so, he now considers his prowar choice "the worst vote I cast."

Waiting to vote, Cleland looked over and saw Byrd, who had been in the Senate for forty-four years. "I knew he had been through the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. I knew he wanted me to show some political courage."

Cleland"s name was called. "Aye," he said. He glanced again at Byrd, who, he recalled, "got up and walked away."

Despite his vote for war, the next month Cleland lost his Senate race by a margin of 53 percent to 46 percent, in part because of a statewide controversy over the Confederate battle flag that helped get out the rural white vote. He said he took it harder than being blown up by a hand grenade in Vietnam. "I went down-physically, mentally, emotionally-down into the deepest, darkest hole of my life," he recalled. "I had several moments when I just didn"t want to live."

He began attending group therapy sessions every Tuesday afternoon at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in northwest Washington, D.C., where he had been medically retired from the military on Christmas Eve 1968. "I wound up back at Walter Reed! I look down the hall, and it"s like Salvador Dali is painting my life. Thirty-seven years later, and I have another president creating a Vietnam. Kids are dying, getting blown up-that"s me." Sitting in his office overlooking Farragut Square in downtown Washington long after the start of the war, he propped himself sideways in his armchair, pushing the stump of his right arm into the side of the chair. "I see these young Iraq veterans, missing legs and arms and eyes. They are so brave. They have no idea what is down the road for them."

Lingering doubts In October, the Atlantic Monthly, Atlantic Monthly, which would do an exemplary job in posing the right questions about Iraq both before and after the invasion, carried a clarion call by James Fallows t.i.tled "The Fifty-first State?" Fallows began by explicitly rejecting the a.n.a.logy to the 1930s on which Wolfowitz so relied. "n.a.z.i and Holocaust a.n.a.logies have a trumping power in many arguments, and their effect in Washington was to make doubters seem weak-Neville Chamberlains, versus the Winston Churchills who were ready to face the truth," he wrote. But "I ended up thinking that the n.a.z.i a.n.a.logy paralyzes the debate about Iraq rather than clarifying it." Yes, Saddam was brutal. But Iraq was hardly a great power. It had few allies, no industrial base, and was split internally by religious and ethnic differences. Also, the U.S. military had been confronting it and containing it successfully for over a decade. So, Fallows said, a more apt parallel was an earlier war. "If we had to choose a single a.n.a.logy to govern our thinking about Iraq, my candidate would be World War I." This wasn"t just because Iraq was created by that conflict, but also because that war is "relevant as a powerful example of the limits of human imagination," especially about the long-term consequences of an action. He then proceeded to a.n.a.lyze the likely problems a U.S. occupation would encounter, from manning an occupation force to standing up an Iraqi government to keeping Iraq in one piece. It was a powerful call to debate, a reminder of the urgent necessity of parsing the issues. What exactly was the job the United States was taking on? How long would it last? What were the chances of success? And what were the likely costs? which would do an exemplary job in posing the right questions about Iraq both before and after the invasion, carried a clarion call by James Fallows t.i.tled "The Fifty-first State?" Fallows began by explicitly rejecting the a.n.a.logy to the 1930s on which Wolfowitz so relied. "n.a.z.i and Holocaust a.n.a.logies have a trumping power in many arguments, and their effect in Washington was to make doubters seem weak-Neville Chamberlains, versus the Winston Churchills who were ready to face the truth," he wrote. But "I ended up thinking that the n.a.z.i a.n.a.logy paralyzes the debate about Iraq rather than clarifying it." Yes, Saddam was brutal. But Iraq was hardly a great power. It had few allies, no industrial base, and was split internally by religious and ethnic differences. Also, the U.S. military had been confronting it and containing it successfully for over a decade. So, Fallows said, a more apt parallel was an earlier war. "If we had to choose a single a.n.a.logy to govern our thinking about Iraq, my candidate would be World War I." This wasn"t just because Iraq was created by that conflict, but also because that war is "relevant as a powerful example of the limits of human imagination," especially about the long-term consequences of an action. He then proceeded to a.n.a.lyze the likely problems a U.S. occupation would encounter, from manning an occupation force to standing up an Iraqi government to keeping Iraq in one piece. It was a powerful call to debate, a reminder of the urgent necessity of parsing the issues. What exactly was the job the United States was taking on? How long would it last? What were the chances of success? And what were the likely costs?

Similar questions were being raised in some meetings in Washington. In one particularly revealing exchange at a meeting at the American Enterprise Inst.i.tute, Michael O"Hanlon, a defense a.n.a.lyst at the Brookings Inst.i.tution, predicted the course of the American occupation of Iraq. "We have got to go in and win this war quickly, and then be prepared to help stabilize Iraq over an indefinite period, five to ten years, at a minimum, I believe, using a large fraction of American forces. This is a major undertaking," he said, that likely would require a total of 150,000 troops and "could stay above 100,000 for several years, based on the precedents and models that I"ve seen."

That prediction, which time has proven impressively accurate, was promptly slapped down by Richard Perle. "I don"t believe that anything like a long-term commitment of 150,000 Americans would be necessary." There would be no one fighting for Saddam Hussein once he was gone, Perle said, so "it seems to me ironic that Michael envisions 150,000 Americans to police a post-Saddam Iraq."

Two days later, the Washington Inst.i.tute for Near East Policy held a three-day seminar at a plush conference center in Leesburg, Virginia, on the western edge of the Washington suburbs. Attendees, including officials from the Pentagon policy office, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the staff of the National Security Council, were told by a panel of experts that there was a gaping discrepancy between the Bush administration"s ambitious rhetoric and its limited commitment: Either it should plan to be in Iraq for years, the speakers warned, or it should scale back its goal of transforming Iraq and the Middle East. "It is overly optimistic to think that we can take a country that has emerged from under a totalitarian regime with its inst.i.tutions of civil society and create a beacon of democracy within five years," cautioned Patrick Clawson, the Washington Inst.i.tute"s deputy director. "We could run into serious trouble if we operate under that notion." He advised against the United States overstaying its welcome: Get in, get out, and don"t try to plant a new type of politics. "If we try to transform Iraq into a democracy, we will need more and more troops over time because we will have to quell nationalistic revolts."

"I am not clear that we have a clear idea of where we want to be the morning after an invasion," said Alina Romanowski, a former Pentagon official who at the time of the conference was on the staff of the National Defense University. "The U.S. military will be stepping into a mora.s.s. Iraq presents as unpromising a breeding ground for democracy as any in the world. It has never really known democracy or even legitimate, centralized rule for any great duration." Given the ethnic divisions and the "brutally violent" politics of the country, she said, it should be considered that a "small U.S. force sufficient to bring about Saddam"s demise might not be sufficient to stop the subsequent bloodletting."

Amatzia Baram, a University of Haifa expert on Iraq and Middle Eastern history, added that he was "a little more pessimistic" than his fellow panelists. A U.S. occupation would need to show that it could improve conditions in Iraq rapidly, or risk alienating the Iraqi population. "You will need to win Baghdadis quickly." Someone should tell the president, he said, that U.S. forces would need to be in Iraq for two to five years, "and they will not have an easy time there."

The meeting amounted to an anti-Wolfowitz gala, a broadside at all the optimistic a.s.sumptions that the deputy defense secretary was offering to persuade a doubtful military and a wary Congress. But administration insiders were dismissive, seeing these conferences and reports not as genuine criticisms but more as underhanded ways of opposing the invasion.

A message from the foint Staff Rather than refute the skeptics, the Pentagon"s leaders followed Cheney"s example and simply decided that the time for debate was past. Such an a.s.sertion might not affect civilians outside the government, but inside the military establishment it could be issued with the force of an order. The Joint Staff effectively stated that view in the form of a Strategic Guidance for Combatant Commanders. In mid-October a draft of this guidance was sent out to planning officers on the staffs of the senior U.S. military commanders around the world, often called the CinCs. The message was simple: We are preparing to order that a war with Iraq be considered part of the war on terror.

That was an unusual order, and smacked of a politicized military leadership. It provoked a series of swift responses, some of them quite blunt. "How the h.e.l.l did a war on Iraq become part of the war on terrorism?" was how one officer on the Joint Staff summarized the reaction of four of those commanders" staffers. The draft didn"t seem consistent with a Pentagon directive exactly a year earlier that had laid out five clear lines of attack in a global counteroffensive against terrorism, all focused on hitting terrorist groups with global reach, and their state sponsors. "There is no link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11," one of the responses argued. "Don"t mix the two. This is going to work h.e.l.l with the allies. What is going on?"

One of the officers who was caught in the middle of this went to Army Lt. Gen. George Casey, then the J-5-the chief of strategic plans and policy on the staff of the Joint Chiefs-and reported these puzzled, angry comments from the field. Casey, who in 2004 was to become the top U.S. officer in Iraq, laid down the law. The discussion was over. "Look, this is part of the war on terror," this officer remembered Casey instructing him. "Iraq is one of those state supporters, and it is a state that has used weapons of ma.s.s destruction." That was the message that went back out to the CinC"s staffs near the end of 2002, in the form of a highly cla.s.sified five-paragraph order. In a bureaucratic maneuver, in order to keep Feith from trying to edit it word by word and comma by comma-an excruciating process that the Joint Staff had come to dread-it was sent out as a change to an existing strategic guidance rather than as a new statement. Its third paragraph said that should it become necessary to conduct combat operations against Iraq, this activity was to be thought of as part of the wider war against terrorism. (Casey said through a spokesman that he didn"t remember the conversation or the wording of the strategic guidance, but added, "I did and do believe that operations against Iraq, designated by our government as a state sponsor of terror, were and are part of the war on terror.") As that message was being finalized, Lt. Gen. Newbold quietly retired from his job on the Joint Staff and left the military. It had been common knowledge on the staff that he opposed the invasion of Iraq, but he managed to keep that from leaking out. His is the only known departure from the senior ranks of the military over the looming Iraq war. Publicly, Newbold was discreet, saying he was leaving because he felt he owed it to his family and to younger officers, so they could move up. At any rate, he said, the job of operations director "is a square hole, and I am a round peg."

In the intelligence community, a.n.a.lysts and their bosses began to shut up in the fall of 2002. No one had to tell them to do so. "The feeling was, our job is to do what we"re told, and this thing is going to happen," said the senior military intelligence official. "The feeling was, it wasn"t our place to raise a ruckus."

Indeed, by this point the war already was beginning in quiet ways. Officers in the Gulf were told to be ready for war in spring. Army Lt. Gen. David McKiernan, the commander of the ground invasion force, said in an official Army debriefing interview in the summer of 2003 that "I think from last fall we knew it was a question of just when, not if."

Likewise, in September, a senior U.S. intelligence official in Bahrain told colleagues, "You"ll see all this diplomatic stuff, but it"s clear we"re going to war."

Wars don"t always commence with a bang. In the Gulf, the information campaign began with the sound of paper rustling, as millions of leaflets were dropped on Iraqi troops. "In September we really began to ratchet that up, because we had more a.s.sets to drop leaflets and transmit radio messages," recalled Maj. Gen. Renuart, the operations chief at Central Command, referring to specialized aircraft that were being moved into the Gulf region. Among these were EC-130 Commando Solo planes that could transmit television and radio broadcasts, and EC-130H Compa.s.s Call planes that could jam enemy communications. This was, in some ways, a quiet beginning of the war. "The fuse was long and slow burning, and we could cut it off at any point," Renuart said. "The design was to explore if you could topple the regime without having to take action. Maybe as the pressure stepped up, as the UN took action, maybe somebody in Iraq would move against Saddam."

An unhappy Army plans for war Running through planning of the war was unresolved friction between Rumsfeld and the Army, whose relationship had begun badly and deteriorated further with time. In hindsight, many Army officers would remember the situation simply as being that Gen. Eric Shinseki, the chief of staff of the Army, was right, and OSD-the civilian leadership of the military-as being wrong. But it is a more complex story than that.

The Army that went into Iraq wasn"t a happy inst.i.tution at its top levels. Of all the services, it was the one most at odds with Rumsfeld and other senior Pentagon civilians, distrusting their views, and believing they were interfering on matters in which they were professionally uninformed. The Army also would be the service shouldering most of the burden in Iraq. People around Rumsfeld, in turn, saw the Army as unresponsive, unimaginative, and risk averse. "The secretary is asking the Army to do things it is unable to do-like think innovatively," cracked one of Rumsfeld"s aides.

"Rumsfeld doesn"t hate the Army," said another civilian Pentagon official, who attended meetings with the secretary about the service. "He is frustrated with tendencies he sees in the Army to be impervious to change."

Tension between senior civilians and Army generals unresponsive to their concerns had been escalating for some time, and predated Rumsfeld"s arrival. In June 1999, Deputy Defense Secretary John Hamre, a low-key, soft-spoken sort, had fired a shot across the service"s bow. "If the Army only holds onto nostalgic versions of its grand past, it is going to atrophy and die," he had warned in a public speech.

The Army wasn"t inclined to spend too much time worrying about such warnings from civilians. On the battlefield it considered itself the best in the world. At home it had intimidated the Clinton administration. Army Lt. Gen. Joseph Kellogg, Jr., recalled advising Shinseki during the 2000 campaign to take seriously the Republican presidential candidate"s speech promising to cancel the Army"s new mobile artillery system, called the Crusader. "Shinseki said, "Not gonna happen,"" Kellogg recalled. "There was a kind of arrogance there, like these guys are just temporary help."

Kellogg also remembered running into a three-star Army general after church one Sunday and commiserating about some of Rumsfeld"s moves. "Oh, we"ll wait these guys out, we always do," this general told him. The military is very good at "slow rolling" initiatives from its civilian overseers. The top bra.s.s won"t directly disobey an order, but they can be ingenious at finding ways to vitiate and delay implementing it. After all, the military rationale goes, in a few years the civilians will all be gone from this Pentagon-but those in uniform will still be in those uniforms, and perhaps burdened by the poor decisions of long-gone former bosses.

But the new crowd wielded sharper elbows than the Army had experienced since d.i.c.k Cheney had stepped down as defense secretary eight years earlier. In August 2001, when the administration had been in office just a few months, Rumsfeld"s subordinates were hinting to the Army that it might need to be cut from ten active-duty divisions to eight, recalled retired Lt. Gen. Johnny Riggs. Shinseki came in from summer leave to argue against the move, which was put on hold. Interestingly, Wolfowitz sided with the Army and against Rumsfeld on the issue of cutting the service. The impa.s.se continued until the September 11 attacks, which would result in a flood of funding for all the services. Wolfowitz recalled that after those attacks, he said to Rumsfeld, "Aren"t you glad now that we didn"t cut Army force structure?"

The Afghanistan campaign that followed those attacks produced additional bad blood, with profound unhappiness in the Army with both Rumsfeld and Franks over the handling of the war there, with some officers reporting that Franks didn"t address key strategic questions and instead meddled in tactical issues, where he often disregarded the views of subordinates. Then, in April 2002, Rumsfeld"s aides let it be known that he had decided to name Gen. Jack Keane, the Army"s vice chief of staff, as its next chief. This was some fifteen months before Shinseki was scheduled to retire. The leak made Shinseki a lame duck and undercut his ambitious transformation agenda to make the Army more agile and deployable, a plan he had set forth in 1999, well before Rumsfeld was defense secretary.

Next, Rumsfeld killed the Army"s Crusader artillery program because he saw it as too heavy to deploy to distant battlefields and not "transformational" enough to be relevant in future wars. Army leaders had coveted the Crusader for years as a weapon that would finally make the Army second to none in artillery firepower. They were particularly steamed at how Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz killed the system, keeping the Army in the dark about what was happening until Congress was ready to vote on the fiscal 2003 budget. Wolfowitz, for his part, felt that the Army had been untruthful in producing information about the system.

After this, Shinseki became almost sullen in his dealings with Rumsfeld. "There was a meeting at Fort McNair on transformation," said one general. "The CinCs were there. All the service chiefs were there-but one. Shinseki didn"t go. And a wall built up between the Army and OSD." Likewise, when an advisory panel told Rumsfeld that the Army needed to think more about peacekeeping and other postwar stabilization missions, Shinseki strongly objected, recalled a retired four-star general. This was a tragic situation for generals such as Shinseki, who had begun their careers as the lieutenants of the Vietnam era and spent much of their careers rebuilding the Army. Now, at the culmination of decades of service, Shinseki and his peers were facing a quagmirish scenario of the very sort they had vowed for decades to avoid.

In the summer and fall of 2002, a series of warnings were issued inside the military establishment about the right and wrong ways to approach Iraq. Most of these appear to have been ignored, mainly because the Bush administration tended not to listen to people outside a small circle of insiders. On August 26-the same day that Cheney effectively launched the march to war with his "no doubts" speech to the VFW-a group of Army commanders and other top service officials met at the Army War College"s bucolic campus on the outskirts of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, to review, among other things, the Central Command"s middling performance in the Afghan campaign. The meeting concluded that major errors had been committed in the conduct of that offensive, especially in the handling of the larger, strategic issues. This conclusion was meant to be descriptive of what had happened in the previous year, but it would also prove accurate in predicting what would go wrong in the handling of the Iraq war.

The first major criticism on which the partic.i.p.ants agreed was that the Afghan situation had been marred by the excessively short-term approach of top defense leaders. This problem of a "tactical focus that ignores long-term objectives" was especially notable at Central Command, said an internal Army memo that summarized the meeting"s conclusions and that has never been released. As Sean Naylor of the Army Times Army Times later pointed out, Franks failed to grasp in waging the Afghan war that taking the enemy"s capital wasn"t the same as winning the war, a conceptual error he would repeat in Iraq. But the problem extended beyond that-and thus those meeting at the Army War College laid it at the feet of Rumsfeld and the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, who took over just before the Afghan war began. "All partic.i.p.ants at the conference from all commands complained about the problems caused by a lack of clear higher direction," the summary emphasized. later pointed out, Franks failed to grasp in waging the Afghan war that taking the enemy"s capital wasn"t the same as winning the war, a conceptual error he would repeat in Iraq. But the problem extended beyond that-and thus those meeting at the Army War College laid it at the feet of Rumsfeld and the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, who took over just before the Afghan war began. "All partic.i.p.ants at the conference from all commands complained about the problems caused by a lack of clear higher direction," the summary emphasized.

A more specific grievance was the insistence of the Pentagon on not using established deployment plans for units, and instead sending them out piecemeal.

"Headquarters have had to utilize scores of individual Requests For Forces (RFF) to build organization in key theaters instead of formal TPFDL," another Army report on the meeting stated. Back then this complaint about messing with the painstakingly developed TPFDL-an awkward acronym that military types p.r.o.nounce "tip-fiddle" and which stands for Time-Phased Force Deployment List- seemed minor, even obscure, but it would grow into an angry chorus in the Army during the invasion and occupation of Iraq, as it caused endless turmoil and confusion. "The pernicious effect of these grab-bag augmentations is to create headquarters staffs with little experience or cohesion," this second report stated. "One conference partic.i.p.ant described the situation as "playing the Super Bowl with a pick-up team."" Most ominously, the report warned that by overburdening under-trained staffs, the resulting turmoil especially undercut the military"s ability to develop effective long-range plans.

In November, Maj. Gen. James Mattis, the commander of the 1st Marine Division, which would spend much of the next two years in Iraq, invited Gen. Zinni to be the speaker at the division"s Marine Corps birthday dinner, the most important day of the year for the Corps. On the afternoon before the dinner, Mattis had Zinni speak to all his senior commanders. "If you guys don"t go through the enemy in six weeks, we"ll disown you," Zinni said, according to Mattis. "But then the hard work begins.... We have lit a fuse, and we don"t know what"s at the other end- a nuke, a hand grenade, or a dud?"

Zinni"s message to the a.s.sembled Marine commanders that afternoon was: You are about to get into something that is going to be tougher and more chaotic than you might think. "I was worried that we didn"t understand the importance of maintaining order, that we had to come in with sufficient forces to freeze the situation, to understand that when we"re ripping the guts out of an authoritarian regime, you"ve got responsibility for security, services, everything else. You have to be prepared to handle all that."

He also warned the Marines that in such situations the U.S. government tends to look to the military for solutions. "The other caution I gave them was don"t count on it when somebody tells you "Well, the State Department"s got that," or "OSD"s planning for that." Don"t believe them. You"re going to get stuck with it. So, have a plan. This is the Desert Crossing philosophy: You"re going to end up being the "stuckee" on this."

A week later seventy national security experts and Mideast scholars met for two days at the National Defense University, one of the military"s premier educational inst.i.tutions, located in Washington, to discuss "Iraq: Looking Beyond Saddam"s Role." They concluded that occupying Iraq "will be the most daunting and complex task the U.S. and the international community will have undertaken since the end of World War II"-a sweeping statement that placed a war with Iraq in the cla.s.s of the Vietnam War and the containment of the Soviet Union. The group"s first finding, both underlined and italicized in its report, was that the primary postinvasion task of the U.S. military "must be on establishing and maintaining a secure environment." It also strongly recommended against a swift, uncoordinated dissolution of the Iraqi military. "There should be a phased downsizing to avoid dumping 1.4 million men into a shattered economy."

Col. Paul Hughes sent a copy of the conference report to Douglas Feith"s office in the Pentagon, but "never heard back from him or anyone else" over there, he recalled. "I cannot tell you if it had any impact at all." Both its recommendations quoted here would be effectively ignored in the following months by military planners and by the civilian occupation authority.

On December 10 and 11, the Army staff at the Pentagon convened about two dozen military experts, Middle East area specialists, diplomats, and intelligence officials, at the Army War College to look at the missions that the service likely would face in postwar Iraq. On the morning of the second day of meetings, remembered Conrad Crane, the Army historian running the study, "We were struck by a ma.s.sive ice storm" that forced the cancellation of many commercial pa.s.senger flights in the mid-Atlantic region. It was an unexpected boon in that it delayed some planned departures and permitted the group to dig a bit deeper than expected.