I Cogitate

First Stop, Iraq
Michael Elliott and James Carney
March 24, 2003

How did the U.S. end up taking on Saddam? The inside story of how Iraq jumped to the top of Bush's agenda -- and why the outcome there may foreshadow a different world order

"F___ Saddam. we're taking him out." Those were the words of President George W. Bush, who had poked his head into the office of National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.

It was March 2002, and Rice was meeting with three U.S. Senators, discussing how to deal with Iraq through the United Nations, or perhaps in a coalition with America's Middle East allies. Bush wasn't interested. He waved his hand dismissively, recalls a participant, and neatly summed up his Iraq policy in that short phrase.

The Senators laughed uncomfortably; Rice flashed a knowing smile. The President left the room. A year later, Bush's outburst has been translated into action, as cruise missiles and smart bombs slam into Baghdad.

THE ACCIDENTAL CANDIDATE
Gail Sheehy
Vanity Fair

The Miami Air charter belches ominously before takeoff from La Guardia to Detroit in late June. The pilot mumbles something about a compressor stall, "nothing to be alarmed about." After a 20-minute delay, it is Governor George Bush himself who saunters down the aisle toward the press section. He rolls back on his heels and throws his hands up in the air. "Haaay, don't worry about it." Big grin. "This is the optimistic campaign."

He leans against a reporter's seat with one hand poised on his hip, confident, handsome, infectiously informal, full of energy and benign mischief. His face is a constant play of expressions, most of them clownish or mocking. "Anybody got any questions?"

"I do," I call out, raising my hand.

"Nooo real questions." He thrusts out his hands in halt mode. "Just chatting." And he launches into a marathon of small talk for over an hour. Bush knows full well the value of cultivating the press. He has a little tease for each reporter: "Hey, are you gonna give me glass half full or half empty?" Or "What about you—will you be stalkin' me, too?" It's a more jolly campaign than most. Bush sets the tone: "We're like a little old travelin' family—the whole experience..."

...He likes best to run in the hammering heat of the Texas noonday sun, and he hits the concrete running. No warm-up, no stretching. George Bush is a "red-ass in a hurry," as the sportswriters say in Texas, meaning he has a whole lot of energy and aggression to burn off or he's likely to blow. He has always been that way. When Barbara Bush took her 13-year-old son and his best friend, Doug Hannah, to play golf at her Houston club, George would start cursing if he didn't tee off well. His mother would tell him to quit it. By the third or fourth hole he would be yelling "Fuck this" until he had ensured that his mother would send him to the car.

"It fit his needs," says Hannah. "He couldn't lose."

Once, after his mother banished him from the golf course, she turned to Hannah and declared, "That boy is going to have optical rectosis." What did that mean? "She said, ‘A shitty outlook on life.'"

Even if he loses, his friends say, he doesn't lose. He'll just change the score, or change the rules, or make his opponent play until he can beat him. "If you were playing basketball and you were playing to 11 and he was down, you went to 15," says Hannah, now a Dallas insurance executive. "If he wasn't winning, he would quit. He would just walk off.... It's what we called Bush Effort: If I don't like the game, I take my ball and go home. Very few people can get away with that." So why could George get away with it? "He was just too easygoing and too pleasant."

Another fast friend, Roland Betts, acknowledges that it is the same in tennis. In November 1992, Bush and Betts were in Santa Fe to host a dinner party, but they had just enough time for one set of doubles. The former Yale classmates were on opposite sides of the net. "There was only one problem—my side won the first set," recalls Betts. "O.K., then we're going two out of three," Bush decreed. Bush's side takes the next set. But Betts's side is winning the third set when it starts to snow. Hard, fat flakes. The catering truck pulls up. But Bush won't let anybody quit. "He's pissed. George runs his mouth constantly," says Betts indulgently. "He's making fun of your last shot, mocking you, needling you, goading you—he never shuts up!" They continued to play tennis through a driving snowstorm.

"George would say, 'Play that one over,' or 'I wasn't quite ready,'" says Bush-family friend Bo Polk Jr.

It is something of an in-joke with Bush's friends and family. "In reality we all know who won, but George wants to go further to see what happens," says an old family friend, venture capitalist and former MGM chairman Louis "Bo" Polk Jr. "George would say, ‘Play that one over,' or ‘I wasn't quite ready.' The overtimes are what's fun, so you make your own. When you go that extra mile or that extra point ... you go to a whole new level..."

...Any question about his motivations or the major turning points in his life or his midlife spiritual redemption—although he campaigns on it—raises the hackles and invites a curt response from George W. Bush. "It's not that complicated," he tells reporters, or "I'm not really the type to wander off and sit down and go through deep wrestling with my soul."

Normally, people would take a man at his word. Except when he is running for president. And not when he is running what sounds more like an evangelical movement than a political campaign, and fervently declares, as Bush does, that "to truly change the culture we must have a spiritual renewal in the United States."

"I didn't see any change in his behavior," an ex-partner says of Bush's religious conversion.

Surprisingly, some of his closest friends were not aware of any momentous passage or prodigal son's return or any great religious awakening. For instance, during the period in the mid-80s when, Bush says, he found Christ and gave up drinking and "got right with God," Mike Conaway, who worked with him every day from January 1982 until September 1986, says, "I didn't see any change in his behavior." Curiously, Bush never sat down and talked with his prep-school and college roommate, Clay Johnson, who works with Governor Bush as his chief of staff, about "his increased religiosity. If he describes himself as born-again, that's what it is," says Johnson uncomfortably. "But I think a born-again is somebody who has felt a sudden passion.... George is not somebody that would lament openly or opine openly or emote openly or grieve openly or jubilate openly."

His conversion certainly didn't come about as a result of contemplating past sins. He proudly rejects introspection and has no interest in looking back over the "youthful indiscretions" that characterized his first 44 years. In interviews Bush repeatedly says, "I'm not one of those people who say, ‘Gosh, if I'd have done it differently, I'd have ... '" He pauses for a few seconds to contemplate his life, then confidently concludes, "I can't think of anything I'd do differently."

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