For eight years, Stephen J. Hadley has observed President Bush up close.
As the president's national security advisor throughout the second term, and on many occasions before that as the deputy national security advisor, Hadley has traveled the world with the president, has cleared brush with him in Crawford, and briefed him daily on developments around the world.
He was there for discussions leading up to the surge in Iraq. Afghanistan? 9/11? North Korea? Iran? Hugo Chavez? Human rights and the Beijing Olympics? Russia? Georgia? All were in his portfolio.
If the word "crisis" was attached to it -- save, perhaps, for the stock market and Katrina -- it is only a slight exaggeration to say there's a good chance the debate went through Hadley's office at the northwest corner of the White House West Wing.
The vantage point for tracking the president could hardly be better.
Bush, Hadley said today, is "remarkably unaffected by eight years as president in terms of who he is, what he stands for, what he thinks of himself."
He spoke with a small group of reporters in the Roosevelt Room, across a small corridor from the Oval Office.
He was responding to a question about whether in its second term the administration had adopted a more pragmatic and less ideological approach to both foreign policy and economic matters, compared with the first term.
"Situations change," Hadley said, referring specifically to the Middle East, which he said was "a very different place" these days compared with 2001. Therefore, he said, the way the administration approaches it has naturally undergone change.
Of course no presidential aide wants to say the boss has eased back on his core principles. Nor would one want to say that the boss had not grown and adapted over eight years.
Hadley put it this way: "We've tried to be flexible. We've tried to learn."
-- James Gerstenzang
Photo: Stephen J. Hadley, left rear next to Vice President Dick Cheney, in the White House Roosevelt Room, 2006. Credit: Eric Draper / The White House
Suddenly it seem everyone is weighing in on whether George W. Bush will be remembered kindly or poorly by history.
Conservative columnist George Will issued a blistering attack on the White House Thursday night for bailing out mismanaged Wall Street giants, saying Bush's intervention makes him a liberal.
"Where is the Bennigan's bailout?" he said in a speech before the West Michigan Regional Policy Council, asking why the administration would bail out AIG and not Bennigan's restaurant chain, which recently declared bankruptcy. He added:
We may be witnessing the most left-wing, the most liberal administration in U.S. history. This is an astonishingly interventionist administration.
Another conservative columnist, Charles Krauthammer, interviewed Bush on Monday and came away impressed at his calm and "confidence in eventual historical vindication. In a Washington Post article titled "History Will Judge," Krauthammer said:
It is precisely that quality that allowed him to order the surge in Iraq in the face of intense opposition from the political establishment (of both parties), the foreign policy establishment (led by the feckless Iraq Study Group), the military establishment (as chronicled by [Bob] Woodward) and public opinion itself. The surge then effected the most dramatic change in the fortunes of an American war since the summer of 1864.
Finally, there's Politico.com's Roger Simon, who argues that Bush has been absent without leave during the most traumatic financial crisis in years. He argues that Bush has done little more than issue a few words, "a very few words. Delivered with the greatest reluctance."
Thursday's remarks, he noted, were two minutes long.
That’s right, two minutes. Delivered, according to the official White House transcript, from 10:15 a.m. EDT to 10:17 a.m. EDT. Maybe you missed it. Maybe you were at work. Maybe the president doesn’t care. Maybe that’s the problem.
George W. Bush will continue to draw a paycheck until noon on Jan. 20, 2009. (If there is still any money left in the U.S. Treasury to pay him, that is.) But what has he been doing to earn his pay lately? Not calming fears among his fellow citizens about their life savings, that’s for sure.
So you be the judge. Is Bush a conservative turned socialist? A stalwart war president who will be vindicated by history? An uncaring president blind to suffering of American citizens? We await your thoughts.
To hear President Bush tell it, there is one reason, overall, that violence has fallen in Baghdad: The surge.
It was the surge, he said last week, that allowed the U.S. to begin withdrawing troops from Iraq. "Since we launched the surge last year, violence has fallen to its lowest point since the spring of 2004," he said in his radio address last Saturday. And just two days ago, he said of the surge: "The United States and the world is better off because of it."
Not so quick, according to a team of UCLA researchers.
Studying satellite imagery of night light in Baghdad neighborhoods dominated by Sunni residents, they came up with an alternative conclusion: The Sunni Muslims and Shiite Muslims had largely stopped killing each other by the time the "surge" of U.S. troops arrived in 2007.
In other words, the remaining Sunnis, defeated, turned out the lights and left. And then the U.S. troops came in.
Written by three members of UCLA's geography department and one political scientist, it states that "the overall night light signature of Baghdad" increased from 2003, when the United States invaded Iraq, to 2006, and then declined dramatically from March 20, 2006 through Dec. 16, 2007.
The report notes:
The decrease in the night light signatures was not uniformly distributed across the city. The neighborhoods of East and West Rashid have experienced the greatest decline in night lights during the period of the surge. This pattern of declines appears associated with ethno-sectarian violence and neighborhood ethnic cleansing...
The professors found no similar decline in night light in four other large cities, Kirkuk, Mosul, Tikrit and Karbala.
"Our findings suggest that the surge has had no observable effect," they wrote.
With Gen. David H. Petraeus at his side in the Oval Office, President Bush said he saw in the attack today at the U.S. embassy in Yemen a reminder that danger still lurks.
Petraeus, who just one day earlier took part in a command handover as he completed his assignment leading the U.S. forces in Iraq, is taking over as head of U.S. Central Command, responsible for U.S. military operations across the Middle East.
The attack was a reminder too of the importance of Petraeus' new job, Bush said.
"We are at war with extremists who will murder innocent people to achieve their ideological objectives," the president said.
Their goal, he added, is to kill, "to try to cause the United States to lose our nerve and to withdraw from regions of the world. And our message is, is that we want to help governments survive the extremists."
-- James Gerstenzang
Photo: Pablo Martinez Monsivais / Associated Press
It is the central charge against the Bush White House, that the administration lied its way into a war in Iraq.
For years, left-wing pundits and groups like MoveOn.org beat the drums with this accusation. The White House response: We were just acting on the same intelligence everyone else had -- evidence, which turned out to be faulty, that Iraq's Saddam Hussein was harboring weapons of mass destruction.
Now comes Dick Armey, once House Majority Leader, who described a classified one-on-one briefing in the vice president's hideaway office in the U.S. Capitol where he says Vice President Dick Cheney went beyond that into outright deception.
According to a new book on Cheney called "Angler," by Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman, Armey, a Texas Republican, had spoken out against the war. Cheney was trying to change his mind. So the vice president told him the threat from Iraq was actually "more imminent than we want to portray to the public at large." In Armey's account, Cheney told him:
Iraq's "ability to miniaturize weapons of mass destruction, particularly nuclear," had been "substantially refined since the first Gulf War," and would soon result in "packages that could be moved even by ground personnel....We now know they have the ability to develop these weapons in a very portable fashion, and they have a delivery system in their relationship with organizations such as Al Qaeda."
"Did Dick Cheney ... purposely tell me things he knew to be untrue?" Armey said. "I seriously feel that may be the case...Had I known or believed then what I believe now, I would have publicly opposed [the war] resolution right to the bitter end, and I believe I might have stopped it from happening."
His arm in a blue sling (the result of elective arm surgery, say aides), former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld returned to the Pentagon today to help dedicate the nation's first major 9/11 memorial and deliver his first speech since leaving the secretary's job two years ago.
On 9/11, Rumsfeld was in his office at the Pentagon, and helped folks escape the burning building. President Bush today called him "a first responder."
But Rumsfeld has also been a lightning rod for opposition to the war in Iraq. He was blamed for signing off on torture during interrogation of terrorist suspects at Guantanamo. He was derided for telling a soldier who complained about inferior military equipment, "You go to war with the army you have." He was villainized for the deaths of more than 4,000 soldiers in a conflict that critics -- including former generals -- said was a mismanaged war.
Maybe all that was weighing on him as he rose, the first speaker of the day. Or maybe he was overwhelmed by completion of the memorial, built from private funds, to which he and his wife Joyce contributed $250,000.
Whatever the case, Rumsfeld choked up at various points in his remarks. Army Times said Rumsfeld's words "seemed to most eloquently capture the essence of the new memorial." Some of what he said:
Here beneath these sloping fields of Arlington National Cemetery, fields that hold our nation’s fallen, this building stands as a silent monument to the resolve of a free people. And so too this memorial in its shadow will stand not only as a symbol of a nation’s grief, but as an eternal reminder of men and women of valor who saw flame and smoke, stepped forward to save and protect the lives of their fellow Americans on September 11th.
Let it also remind each of us of those who have volunteered to serve in our nation’s armed forces before and every day since. Our nation’s military has stood strong in this new age of peril, determined that what happened here seven years ago must not happen again.
President Bush's announcement this morning that he will be withdrawing 8,000 troops from Iraq highlights the dilemma he is causing Barack Obama and the Democratic presidential campaign.
It was almost predictable.
The more he does to take the Iraq war off the front page -- and remember, it was the war, more than anything else, that propelled Obama's rise through the Democratic presidential field -- the more the president does to clear the playing field for John McCain and the Republican campaign to dictate the elements of the political debate.
While neither the Iraq war nor the war in Afghanistan appears to be emerging "as a defining issue of contention between the candidates," the BBC notes, the announcement of troop withdrawals from Iraq helps McCain argue that he was correct in advocating a "surge" of troops when the president opted for that course in January 2007.
And, Adam Brookes of BBC News in Washington writes, Bush's announcement that some 4,000 soldiers and Marines will be headed for Afghanistan is unlikely to have more than a "limited direct impact on the race," because Obama has been arguing that "Iraq distracted the US from the more pressing business of Afghanistan."
So, even as he keeps a distance from the political battlefield, the president's battlefield maneuvers nonetheless touch the politics back home.
President Bush visited today with wounded troops at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. It is one of his regular stops: visiting with those injured in Afghanistan and Iraq and, separately, with relatives of those killed in the wars.
He made the trip to the large hospital several hours after announcing that he was resuming the withdrawal of troops from Iraq, which he had put on hold several months ago, and that several units originally scheduled to go to Iraq would instead be sent to Afghanistan.
The hospital visit, he said, was "an interesting experience."
"On the one hand," he said, "you see the horrors of war. On the other hand, you see the courage of the people that have volunteered to serve."
President Bush announced today that he is bringing 3,400 support personnel home from Iraq, with a Marine brigade to follow in November and an Army brigade in February, after he leaves office.
This small reduction in troop levels in Iraq and the continued apparent rejection of any timetable for further reductions is simply a continuation of the Bush administration's open-ended commitment in Iraq. It takes the pressure off of the Iraqi leaders to take the political steps essential to ending the conflict.
After five and a half years of war, President Bush will leave office with nearly as many U.S. troops in Iraq as were there before the "surge" began in January 2007. The continued heavy commitment of U.S. forces is hampering our ability to fight the real war against terrorism in Afghanistan, is hurting our military readiness, and is extending the strain of long deployments on our military families. The President is incapable of finding a way to make our troops the beneficiaries of whatever improvements there have been in security in Iraq.
It's time to change our foreign policy. I will succeed in Iraq by responsibly removing our combat brigades and pressing Iraqis to stand up for their future. I will rebuild our military. I will finally have a comprehensive strategy to finish the job in Afghanistan.
...Last week we heard a lot of tough talk in St. Paul, but we didn't hear much about the Bush-McCain record. Because seven years after 9/11, we are still fighting a war without end in Iraq and we still haven't taken out the terrorists responsible for 9/11.
In remarks prepared for an audience of military officers, President Bush is announcing on Tuesday a new draw-down of troops in Iraq and an increase of American forces in Afghanistan.
The president's speech outlines an anticipated shift in forces, reflecting what he is presenting as the success of the "surge" that he announced in January 2007, but also the ongoing violence in Afghanistan, where the U.S.-led coalition has met renewed resistance from the Taliban.
The result: When he leaves office, Bush will hand over to his successor an Iraq scenario in which the troop levels are headed downward, and, he says, if current trends on the ground continue, further reductions will be possible in 2009.
But Bush's plan to instead shift forces to Afghanistan may give ammunition to the argument of his critics: that while focusing on Iraq, the president paid too little attention to the resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan.
In remarks prepared for delivery at the National Defense University in Washington, Bush, according to a text of his speech made public this afternoon by the White House, is saying:
Here is the bottom line: While the enemy in Iraq is still dangerous, we have seized the offensive, and Iraqi forces are becoming increasingly capable of leading and winning the fight. As a result, we have been able to carry out a policy of return on success -- reducing American combat forces in Iraq as conditions on the ground continue to improve.
The president says that "over the next several months, we will bring home about 3,400 combat support forces." He said these include aviation personnel, explosive ordnance teams, combat and construction engineers, military police and logistical support forces.
More troops -- a Marine battalion in Anbar province -- are scheduled to be taken out in November, and an Army combat brigade is set to be removed in February 2009.
"This amounts to about 8,000 additional American troops returning home without replacement," Bush says.
As for the buildup in Afghanistan, the president says that a Marine battalion will be on its way there in November -- instead of going to Iraq. And an Army combat brigade will follow in January.
James Gerstenzang and Johanna Neuman are reporters in The Times' Washington bureau. Between the two of them, they have covered the White House, diplomacy, military affairs, the environment, international economics, trade and Congress. They have both spent time in Crawford, Texas.
