The debate culminated the same day Bush signed the military commission order. Rumsfeld fired off a testy two-page memo. "Mr. President," he wrote, "I think it is a mistake for the United States to be saying we are not going to attack Kabul. To do so, tells the Taliban and the Al Qaida that Kabul can be a safe haven for them. The goal in this conflict is to make life complicated for the Taliban and the Al Qaida, not to make it simple."

But even as he wrote that, the Northern Alliance was already swarming into Kabul, making the point moot. Whatever commitments were made to stay out of the capital were disregarded when Northern Alliance commanders heard the Taliban had slipped out of the city in the middle of the night to retreat south. Moving into the city, the Northern Alliance commanders explained to their American patrons, was simply a matter of providing security for an abandoned population.

However it happened, the fall of Kabul capped an extraordinary five-week campaign to topple the Taliban, and Bush and Cheney were struck by the images of cheering Afghan men, raising fists, throwing off turbans, cutting off beards, and shouting, "Long live America!" This was not the end of the war. But the capture of the capital represented the first tangible victory in the emerging war on terror. The sensitivities of the Pashtun population and the Pakistani government would need to be managed, but despite the doubts the war strategy had worked. The challenge now was to pursue the remnants of Taliban forces to finish them off, destroy remaining al-Qaeda bases, and track down Osama bin Laden. It all seemed possible that day.

For the moment, it looked as though Bush and Cheney had accomplished what Britain and Russia had failed to do. Afghanistan, after all, was the place where empires went to die, as Condoleezza Rice, the Russia scholar, knew well. For the Russians, the disastrous, decade-long war in the twilight years of the Soviet Union was recent enough to remain deeply scarring. So there was some irony that even at this moment of triumph for the United States, Vladimir Putin was at the White House visiting.

Bush and Putin talked about Afghanistan and the future there. Putin certainly knew that military victories had a way of being ephemeral in the forbidding mountains and valleys of Afghanistan. And he had his own interests in what happened next. In the years since the Soviet withdrawal, Moscow had kept ties to the Afghans who now ran the Northern Alliance, financing their long fight against the Taliban. So while Pakistan resisted the Northern Alliance taking control in the capital, Russia was backing its allies against the Pashtuns. Afghanistan was once again at the center of a great game.

Bush and Putin had other issues to hash over during a working lunch as well. Bush had made clear since his campaign that he wanted to build a more limited version of Ronald Reagan's proposed Star Wars antimissile system to guard against rogue states like Iran, and to do so, he was ready to abrogate the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972. To Russia, no longer able to keep up with American military advances, throwing out the ABM Treaty seemed inherently destabilizing; no matter what Bush or anyone else said, any American missile defense system seemed certain to be aimed at neutralizing Russia's strategic nuclear strength.

But in the two months since the September 11 attacks, Bush and Putin had resolved to redefine the Russian-American relationship for a new era, and they were determined not to let the ABM dispute sour that. To put down a marker on a new partnership, they agreed to dramatically slash their nuclear arsenals, bringing them down to the lowest levels since the early years of the Cold War. In an exchange of unilateral but reciprocal announcements, each side committed to reducing its deployed strategic warheads to between seventeen hundred and twenty-two hundred, down from the six thousand allowed under the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or START, signed by Bush's father in 1991.

The next day, November 14, Bush met again with Putin, this time at his Crawford ranch. Bush was annoyed that a gusty downpour was marring the visit as he drove the Russian leader around the ranch in his pickup truck for forty-five minutes while his staff scrambled to move tables and the cowboy cooks hired for the occasion grilled in the rain. Bush grew more irritated later when Putin arrived an hour early for dinner. Realizing the mistake, Putin retreated back to the guesthouse until the appointed hour, but Bush barked at Condoleezza Rice and Karen Hughes. "Somebody forgot to tell Vladimir about the time change," he snapped. Rice knew that was aimed at her but could not help laughing at a former KGB officer flummoxed over something as simple as a time zone.

When another hour passed, the two leaders, their wives, and their advisers made the most of the intemperate weather, casting aside suits and ties for blue jeans and sweaters and a relaxed dinner of fried catfish and corn bread, followed by mesquite-grilled beef tenderloin and then birthday cake for Rice. The birthday girl entertained by playing piano, and some of the guests danced. Putin's wife, Lyudmila, wore a sequined vest in red, white, and blue. Bush chatted in broken Spanish with Igor Ivanov, the Russian foreign minister, to the consternation of aides from both sides who could not understand them.

"We are seeing a historic change in relationship between Russia and the United States," Bush said in his toast. "Usually you only invite friends to your home, and I feel that is the case here."

"I've never been to the home of another world leader," Putin responded, "and it's hugely symbolic to me and my country that it's the home of the president of the United States."

The visit smoothed the way for Bush to formally pull out of the ABM Treaty a few weeks later. Putin told Bush he would publicly oppose the decision but would not let it disrupt their relationship. Still, he wanted something too-a new treaty codifying the nuclear arms cuts they had just announced. To the Russians, treaties ratified their importance on the world stage long after the years of Soviet dominance. Bush, on the other hand, had no taste for drawn-out Geneva negotiations, and Cheney argued strongly against it. But Bush was eager to accommodate Putin and agreed to draft a treaty.

"MR. VICE PRESIDENT, this is the thing we all feared the most. This changes everything."

George Tenet was briefing Bush, Cheney, and Rice on the investigation into the Pakistani scientists accused of helping Osama bin Laden figure out how to build a nuclear device. The situation, he told them, was every bit as chilling as feared when the scientists were arrested a month earlier.

One of the scientists was Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, a former chairman of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission and an open admirer of the Taliban. Mahmood had met twice with bin Laden, who grilled him on how to build a bomb. Mahmood was an expert in enriching uranium but had no experience creating a weapon, so bin Laden pressed him to connect him with other Pakistani scientists who did. Bin Laden hinted he had already obtained black-market fissile material from the former Soviet Union with the help of an allied radical group, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. Mahmood told interrogators he had not helped bin Laden, but he failed half a dozen lie detector tests.

Cheney asked if they thought that meant al-Qaeda did have a nuclear weapon. A CIA analyst accompanying Tenet said no, probably not, but he could not say for certain.

"If there's a one percent chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al- Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon," Cheney replied, "we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response."

He meant not that they should overlook evidence to the contrary but that the consequences of terrorists with a nuclear weapon were so unimaginable that the normal risk calculations did not apply. Judgments like "high confidence" or "low confidence" used by intelligence agencies or legal concepts like "preponderance of the evidence" had no meaning in a world of weapons that could wipe out a city in an instant. With that, he outlined a new way to evaluate the dangers he saw confronting the nation.

In that context, Cheney believed, it was not enough to simply keep a dangerous figure like Saddam Hussein in a box. The policy of containment over the past dozen years no longer seemed adequate. Hussein had been found after the Gulf War not only to have chemical weapons but to be pursuing nuclear bombs. What if he eventually succeeded? Even if he did not use them himself, what if he gave them to the likes of bin Laden? With the fall of Kabul, Bush and Cheney began thinking more seriously about what to do about Iraq.

After the National Security Council meeting on November 21, Bush pulled aside Donald Rumsfeld.

"Where do we stand on the Iraq planning?" he asked.

Rumsfeld told him he had reviewed the plan and, as expected, it was just a version of Desert Storm. To revamp it, Rumsfeld said, he needed to bring more people into the loop.

Fine, Bush said, but keep it in the building.

Later that day, a fifth and final victim of the anthrax attacks died in Connecticut. Investigators were still years away from cracking the case, but the attacks had subsided. This was, somehow, an isolated case, not the existential threat Cheney feared, not the 1 percent peril. That, he worried, could still come.

But while attention moved to Iraq, the war in Afghanistan was hardly over. A prison uprising in Mazar-e Sharif left a CIA operative named Johnny Micheal Spann dead on November 25, the first American killed in action in the war on terror. Captured at Mazar was a young American Muslim, John Walker Lindh, who would be brought home to face charges for joining the Taliban. And American Special Forces and their Afghan allies had chased bin Laden and hundreds of his followers to the forbidding mountain stronghold of Tora Bora near the Pakistani border.

Before them lay the chance to capture or kill the mastermind of the attacks on America. But Rumsfeld and Tommy Franks were sticking to their strategy of using American airpower while relying on Afghan troops on the ground. Fewer than a hundred American special operations troops and CIA operatives were in the area, and while B-52s dropped 700,000 pounds of ordnance, the Afghan warlords recruited by the Americans simply pocketed bags of U.S. cash, then let bin Laden escape.

Some in Washington pressed Bush and Cheney to send more American troops. The marines had landed near Kandahar the same day as Spann's death, and Brigadier General James Mattis believed he could swing up to Tora Bora. Hank Crumpton, who was leading the CIA's operations in Afghanistan, brought his concerns to the White House, imploring Bush to send the marines to block escape routes.

"We're going to lose our prey if we're not careful," he said.

"How bad off are these Afghani forces, really?" Bush asked. "Are they up to the job?"

"Definitely not, Mr. President," Crumpton said. "Definitely not."

But Bush deferred to Franks, who argued it would take weeks to deploy significant numbers of American troops and even then they could never seal the area. Sending enough forces quickly enough to make a difference would have been a formidable challenge-commanders estimated that deploying one thousand to three thousand troops would have required hundreds of helicopter flights over a week-and still might not have stopped bin Laden from escaping. But relying on the Afghans had clearly backfired. On December 16, bin Laden and a phalanx of his fighters slipped out of Tora Bora and disappeared into Pakistan. In his desire to let the military call the shots, Bush had missed the best opportunity of his entire presidency to catch America's top enemy.

AS BUSH SETTLED into Camp David for the holidays, friends noticed that he seemed more distant than usual. "He was totally disengaged with anything around him other than what was happening" overseas, noticed Charlie Younger, the president's childhood friend. "He would walk in the woods and walk with his dog, very contemplative and distant, a lot on his mind. He wasn't his usual self even when it was time to eat." In the eight years of his presidency, this was the only time Younger saw him this way.

He had plenty on his mind. On December 22, an al-Qaeda follower, Richard Reid, tried to ignite explosives in his shoes on a flight bound for Miami, only to be tackled by alert fellow passengers. The country clearly was still at risk. That "had a big impact on me," Bush said later. The same day, a courageous Pashtun tribal leader named Hamid Karzai was installed as Afghanistan's interim president. But that only prompted Bush to turn attention again to Saddam Hussein, summoning Franks to Crawford on December 28 for an update on contingency plans to invade Iraq.

It was a cold Texas morning, and Bush was wearing jeans, a plaid shirt, and boots when he took the general and his operations director, Major General Victor "Gene" Renuart of the air force, into a double-wide trailer that had been turned into a secure communications center. The men sat at a small oak table facing a plasma screen at the other side of the room, and with the touch of a button the screen opened into separate rectangles showing other members of the war cabinet. Cheney joined the teleconference from the second-floor study of his Wyoming home. Rumsfeld was at his home in Taos, New Mexico, while Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, George Tenet, Andy Card, and Richard Myers were in the Situation Room at the White House.

They started with a quick briefing on Afghanistan, and Bush took the opportunity to rib Franks about reports of his recent visit. "Tommy, what's this I hear about your dodging missiles over Kabul?" he asked.

"Nothing serious, Mr. President," he replied. "Been shot at before."

"Tommy," he replied, "I don't want you to go getting yourself killed. That's the last thing we need. Got work for you, important work."

The "important work" Bush had in mind for him was Iraq. The military had not significantly updated its contingency plan for Iraq, Operations Plan 1003, since 1998, and it essentially advanced the same sort of strategy used in the Gulf War-an assault force of 400,000 assembled over a six-month buildup. No one thought that was suitable anymore, including Franks. The general noted that Iraq's army had shrunk from 1 million men to about 350,000 today.

"General Franks," interrupted Cheney, who had overseen the last assault on Iraq. "You've described an Iraqi force around half the size it was when the Gulf War began. Does that mean it is only half as effective?"

"Sir, smaller does not necessarily mean weaker," Franks replied. He noted that the Republican Guard, while fewer in number, was still well manned and armed.

"What do you think of the plan, Tommy?" Bush asked.

"Mr. President, it's outdated," he answered. Aside from the long buildup, he said, it did not account for the fact that American weaponry was tremendously more effective than a decade earlier.

Franks presented what he called a new commander's concept, a four-phase plan with three different options. He could begin a ground war with as few as 100,000 troops while other forces continued to flow into the region, building up to 145,000; if necessary, the force could grow to 275,000. Tenet noted that Iraq would be significantly different from Afghanistan. While Afghanistan was a primitive land governed by tribes and warlords commanding untrained fighters, Iraq was relatively modern with an organized, equipped army. Moreover, there was no Northern Alliance for the United States to team up with in Iraq. American intelligence had burned a lot of bridges since the end of the Gulf War because of a failure to help Shiites during their 1991 uprising and various failed plots to topple Hussein later in the 1990s.

Bush told Rumsfeld and Franks to keep working on the plan. He hoped diplomacy and pressure would force Hussein to disarm, but he said they needed to prepare in case that did not happen. "We cannot allow weapons of mass destruction to fall into the hands of terrorists," Bush declared. "I will not allow that to happen."

With that, the meeting ended. While bin Laden was escaping in the mountains, Bush and Cheney were focusing on Iraq.

THE SEPTEMBER 11 attacks managed to change the dynamics even on Bush's domestic program at least for a while. For months before the attacks, working with his new friend Ted Kennedy, Bush had been pushing Congress to pass an education reform program called No Child Left Behind, after a campaign slogan. In exchange for an infusion of money, schools would test students in math and reading from grades three to eight and once in high school, with the goal of every child meeting basic proficiency by 2014. States would set their own standards and tests. Schools that did not measure up would face sanctions, and their students would be allowed to transfer. Kennedy, deeming it "flawed but necessary," considered it the most important education law in a quarter century. Yet it had run into strong headwinds from left and right. Liberals did not like the emphasis on testing, while conservatives did not like Washington dictating how schools run. Republican lawmakers cobbled together a plan to derail the program with an amendment giving states more flexibility. Bush summoned the sponsor to the White House to pressure him to drop it.

But in the weeks after September 11, Bush and Kennedy suddenly found lawmakers more pliant. "There was almost a feeling of what can we do in our area to come together?" recalled Sandy Kress, the president's education adviser. "Oddly," he added, remembering that Bush's trip to Florida was to promote education reform, "the feeling of the need to come together and do something together kind of partly, as a response to this, was far more powerful than any talk we would have given that day." With many opponents swallowing misgivings, Congress passed the plan by large margins just before Christmas in perhaps the most significant bipartisan domestic victory of Bush's presidency. And now, on January 8, Bush embarked on a fly-around with Kennedy, John Boehner, and other legislative architects to celebrate the victory. He signed the bill in Boehner's state of Ohio, then flew to Boston in the late afternoon to showcase his partnership with Kennedy.

On this one issue at least, he had found his Bob Bullock. "You know," he told a crowd at Boston Latin School, "I told the folks at the coffee shop in Crawford, Texas, that Ted Kennedy was all right. They nearly fell out." He smiled as the crowd laughed. "But he is. I've come to admire him. He's a smart, capable senator. You want him on your side, I can tell you that." Bush went on to recall how Kennedy hosted and comforted Laura Bush during the September 11 attacks. "Not only are you a good senator, you're a good man," the president said, using the highest form of compliment in the Bush lexicon.

By the time he got back to Washington, though, Bush's mind was already drifting back to other weighty issues. Kress recognized that education, as important as it was to Bush, would recede for a time.

"The president is in another place," he told colleagues.

As it happened, the fly-around with Kennedy marked the end of the postSeptember 11 unity in Washington. Even before the two boarded Air Force One together, the bipartisan spirit had begun to fray. Democrats blamed Bush for not doing enough for an economic stimulus package that failed to pass, while the president took umbrage at an anonymous quotation in the New York Times attributed to a Democratic aide calling him "disengaged." Bush's advisers blamed that on Tom Daschle, once the president's hope for a partner but increasingly the White House poster boy for obstructionism. Daschle attacked Bush's economic policies in a speech on January 4, 2002, indicting him for the "most dramatic fiscal deterioration in our nation's history." Bush fired back the next day at a town hall meeting in California, declaring, "Not over my dead body will they raise your taxes." It was a long time since his spontaneous hug with Daschle.

Tension between the White House and the Senate Democratic leader rose even further when Cheney called one day in January. The vice president was concerned about Senate hearings into what happened before September 11 and pressed Daschle to rein them in.

"This would be a very dangerous and time-consuming diversion for those of us who are on the front lines of our response today," Cheney told him. "We just can't be tied down with the problems that this would present for us. We've got our hands full."

Cheney had a legitimate point; hearings would consume enormous time at a perilous moment. But they also represented a profound political risk. Washington loved finding a scapegoat, and there was plenty of potential for second-guessing how the government failed to stop the deadliest attack on American soil.

Democrats knew that too, and if the vice president's resistance to inquiry invariably involved a mix of substantive and political calculations, so did the opposition's interest in investigating. And to the extent there was any hesitation to inject politics into national security, that faded on January 18 when Karl Rove addressed the Republican National Committee's winter meeting in Austin.

"Americans trust the Republicans to do a better job of keeping our communities and our families safe," Rove told the party faithful. "We can also go to the country on this issue, because they trust the Republican Party to do a better job of protecting and strengthening America's military might and thereby protecting America." On the one hand, Rove's statement was unremarkable-the president's chief political strategist talking to a political audience about an upcoming election and an issue that historically had been a Republican strength. But coming just four months after the attacks, Rove's remarks gave the impression that the White House was using the war on terror for partisan advantage. Democrats reacted with equal parts outrage and eagerness to accuse the other side of politicizing the war. A "shameful statement," declared Richard Gephardt. "Nothing short of despicable," exclaimed Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic National Committee chairman.

INSIDE THE ADMINISTRATION, Bush was mediating another intense clash. Cheney and other advisers were debating what to do with prisoners captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere. With no appetite to bring them to American soil, where they might be given rights by American courts, the Bush team settled on the navy base on the tip of Cuba, a legal no-man's-land where prisoners could theoretically be held beyond the reach of judges. Some might be put on trial in the military commissions Cheney had gotten Bush to authorize in November, but others might not be, and the vice president did not want judges second-guessing the White House's decisions.

Hooded, chained, and clad in orange jumpsuits, the first twenty prisoners arrived on the sunny, warm island after a long flight from Afghanistan on January 11. Navy engineers had hastily assembled several dozen outdoor cells made from chain-link fences on a cement slab, an open-air prison that came to be called Camp X-Ray. Pictures of their arrival were beamed around the world, signaling a new era. Whatever the legal wisdom behind choosing Guantnamo, releasing photographs of those first arrivals backfired, searing an image of a crude and even barbaric place, an image that would linger long after modern, humane facilities were constructed.

Bush decided after their arrival that neither al-Qaeda nor Taliban captives would be covered under the Geneva Conventions, adopting the reasoning of a forty-two-page memo drafted by John Yoo at the Justice Department and dispensing with the thirty-seven-page rebuttal from William H. Taft IV, the top lawyer at the State Department and great-grandson of a president, who called Yoo's factual assumptions and legal analysis "seriously flawed." Both Richard Myers, at the Pentagon, and Colin Powell, traveling in Asia, were alarmed when they learned of Bush's decision. The general and the retired general were deeply invested in the notion of laws of war. That the United States, which had done more than any nation to institute international standards, would simply toss them aside when they were inconvenient struck them as unwise and potentially even dangerous to American troops if they were ever captured. Powell made his case in the Oval Office with Bush, who agreed to let the issue be debated before the full National Security Council.

Soon after, Bush and Cheney sat down with the National Security Council to discuss detainee policy. Powell and Myers teamed up to argue for Geneva. Even if fighters were not deemed prisoners of war under Geneva's definition, they should have hearings to determine whether they qualified. Cheney and his allies were appalled that what they saw as a slavish devotion to process would prevent them from interrogating prisoners who might have information that would stop another September 11. Al-Qaeda was not a party to Geneva, and its fighters did not wear uniforms or constitute a legitimate army waging legal warfare. Cheney's team adopted Yoo's analysis that while Afghanistan had signed Geneva years ago, the country had since become a failed state and therefore no longer constituted a party to the conventions, a novel interpretation not explicitly envisioned by treaty provisions.

"We have an image to uphold around the world," Powell countered. "If we don't do this, it will make it much more difficult for us to try and encourage other countries to treat people humanely."

Myers seconded him on moral terms. "Mr. President," he said. "You'll notice that everybody here's with a lawyer. I don't have a lawyer with me. I don't think this is a legal issue."

But John Ashcroft now advanced the Yoo analysis, saying Afghanistan was no longer a real nation and al-Qaeda and the Taliban were essentially a "coalition of pirates."

"Would you apply the Geneva Conventions to Iraq?" Bush asked Ashcroft.

"Yes, Mr. President," Ashcroft said. Iraq was a legitimate nation.

"But you can say that Saddam Hussein is a pirate too," Bush said.

Cheney said the Taliban and al-Qaeda were not lawful combatants. "We all agree that they'll be treated humanely," he said. "But we don't want to tie our hands."

In the end, Bush backed off the original interpretation somewhat, but his compromise made little practical difference. He signed an executive order on February 7 finding that while Geneva did not apply to al-Qaeda terrorists, it did cover the war against the Taliban government. But Bush then determined that even under Geneva's own definitions, Taliban soldiers across the board were illegal combatants and therefore did not qualify as prisoners of war. The United States would treat detainees, "to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of Geneva," he ruled, language that gave the government all the wiggle room it needed to write its own rules.

Bush was preparing to thrust the issue of war onto the national table in an even more dramatic way. With his State of the Union address coming up, he asked his speechwriters to outline a doctrine for a new age when the United States must confront terrorism and unconventional weapons like chemical, biological, or nuclear arms. Michael Gerson assigned David Frum to come up with a line or two about Iraq. Frum thought about the alliance between terror states and terror organizations, and for whatever reason it made him think about the Axis powers of World War II. He scribbled down the phrase "axis of hatred" to describe the modern-day nexus confronting the United States. Gerson liked it but, playing off a favorite Bush word, changed it to "axis of evil."

At first, Iraq was the only country named, but Condoleezza Rice and Stephen Hadley worried that would make it look as if the president were ready to go to war with Iraq. So the speechwriters added Iran, the sponsor of Hamas and Hezbollah, and North Korea, an aspiring nuclear state suspected of spreading dangerous weapons and technology to rogue nations. Hadley then had second thoughts about including Iran, since there were stirrings of democracy there. "No, I want it in," Bush said. "I want to turn up the pressure on Iran." Gerson made no objection. "It didn't seem particularly controversial to use these as examples of state sponsors of terror," he said. Powell and his deputy, Richard Armitage, read the speech and had no problem with the phrase either.

On the evening of January 29, Bush strode into the House chamber and delivered perhaps the most memorable line of his presidency. "States like these and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world," he said. "By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States. In any of these cases, the price of indifference would be catastrophic."

When Bush finished to applause, his staff thought the major takeaway would be his commitment to "the non-negotiable demands of human dignity" in the Muslim world, including rule of law, free speech, religious tolerance, and women's rights. To the extent that anyone picked up on "axis of evil," they misjudged what would provoke controversy. "We were more focused on the 'evil' part of it as opposed to the 'axis' part of it," Dan Bartlett said later. The word "evil" consistently rubbed some on the left the wrong way. It never dawned on them that the word "axis" would become the issue. They meant an axis between rogue states and terrorists, not a link between three disparate countries nor a target list. "The reason it was an axis was not because they were in alliance. The reason it was an axis was because they were all three separately doing the same thing, both pursuing weapons of mass destruction and supporting terror," Hadley said later. "We thought it was a figure of speech, and nobody thought that somebody would think that we were alleging that they were actually in league with one another."

The phrase bothered even some hawks, like Paul Wolfowitz. But Bush did not care. He liked it and had no regrets. "It was not the president's habit to feel like, let's back off because of criticism," Gerson reflected. Indeed, Bush grew irritated when he picked up the New York Times on January 31, two days after the speech, and saw that some aides had tried to tone down the language. On the road for a postState of the Union trip to promote a new volunteerism initiative that would eventually become the USA Freedom Corps, Bush called Rice in Washington to tell her there would be no retreat from the line. When Ari Fleischer arrived in his hotel suite, Bush told him to quash any suggestion that the White House was backing off. Bush thought it was "quite cowardly for people to read into my intentions when they don't know me."

11.

"Afghanistan was too easy"

The presidential limousine pulled up to the Badaling section of China's Great Wall on a Friday afternoon in February. President Bush got out for a quick tour. He had last visited twenty-seven years earlier while his father was the American envoy. Now he was back as president, fresh from lunch with China's leader.

Bush was taken to a section of the wall that Richard Nixon had visited in 1972 during his historic opening to the Middle Kingdom.

"Where did Nixon stop?" Bush asked his guide.

Right where you are, the guide said.

"Let's go about a hundred yards more," Bush said.

Bush was nothing if not competitive. He spent his youth competing against his father's legacy, as a student at Andover and Yale, as a military pilot, as an oilman, as a candidate for Congress, almost always falling short. He finally found success as the owner of the Texas Rangers. As president, Bush prided himself on outlasting Secret Service agents on the running trail and challenged aides to earn their way into the Hundred Degree Club reserved for those who finished three miles on the ranch with the thermometer in triple digits. Later in his presidency, he would get into a reading contest with Karl Rove, measured not just by the number of books read but by the number of pages and even square inches of text.

Of course, it requires a certain competitive streak to run for president in the first place. How many people look in the mirror and conclude that in a country of 300 million, there is no one better to lead it? Once reaching the White House, a president invariably compares himself with the forty or so other men who held the office. How did Abraham Lincoln save the country? How did Theodore Roosevelt earn his way onto Mount Rushmore? How did Franklin Roosevelt take on depression and war? Bush was determined to be not just a good president but a great president. No "small ball" for him, as he put it, derisively referring to his predecessor's strategy of advancing incremental initiatives. He came to office with expansive visions: he would transform education, Medicare, Social Security, the military, the culture in Washington even. The attacks of September 11 gave him a chance to transform the world. It was not enough to quote Franklin Roosevelt. He wanted to be the one others quoted.

On that at least, he had succeeded. His "axis of evil" phrase had reverberated across the globe. The members of the theoretical axis unsurprisingly denounced him for "political immaturity and moral leprosy," as the North Korean Foreign Ministry put it. But American allies were also perturbed. While willing to help in Afghanistan, they were not eager for war elsewhere and saw Bush's rhetoric as saber rattling. The European Community's foreign policy commissioner warned America against "unilateralist overdrive." When Bush arrived in South Korea on his way to China, he was greeted by demonstrators holding up banners that read, "Who Is in Axis of Evil? You, Mr. Bush!"

His trip to South Korea, Japan, and China was his first chance to see up close the ripple effects of his speech. The truth was he did not mind all the consternation. If three simple words had managed to focus attention on the world's outliers and perhaps even scare them into thinking they faced possible American action, so much the better. He used the trip to calm allies without retreating from the sentiments he had expressed. Indeed, while visiting the South Korean side of the demilitarized zone, he was told that a museum on the other side exhibited axes used to kill two American service members in 1976. "No wonder I think they're evil," Bush said.

But it was not the North Koreans who were at the top of Bush's and Cheney's minds. From the start, they had seen Saddam Hussein as the nation's central threat. The "axis of evil" speech was not a declaration of war, and there were still plenty of ways to avoid an armed showdown, but it set Bush and Cheney on a course that would dominate the rest of their time in office.

The looming confrontation brought to a head a long, complicated conflict between the Bush family and Saddam Hussein. The relationship actually began as one of pragmatic friendship in the 1980s when Hussein was at war with Iran, the main American enemy in the region, and George H. W. Bush was vice president in an administration that offered to help. Through Arab intermediaries, Bush advised Hussein to intensify the bombing of Iran, according to a 1992 New Yorker article. Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, though, proved a strategic miscalculation that put him on the opposite side of a Bush and Dick Cheney at the Pentagon.

In April 1993, after the Gulf War, the former president went to Kuwait for a hero's welcome, and a group of Iraqis crossed the border in what was called a thwarted attempt to kill him. Among those on the trip who could have been killed were Barbara Bush and Laura Bush. George W. Bush had stayed in Texas, where he was preparing to run for governor. Some later questioned the seriousness of the assassination attempt or its connections to Baghdad, but the incident was a jarring moment for the Bush family. Running for president, the younger Bush in November 1999 said he would not repeat his father's mistake of leaving Hussein in power. "No one envisioned him still standing," he said. "It's time to finish the task." At a debate a couple of weeks later, Bush was more explicit. "If I found in any way, shape, or form that he was developing weapons of mass destruction," he said, "I'd take them out."

As Bush and Cheney turned up the pressure on Iraq in the beginning of 2002, many could not help wondering how much it was due to the president's desire to finish what his father started-or to succeed where he had failed. "He cut and run early," Bush once said of his father. While he steadfastly denied any personal motivations, even some of his best friends wondered if Bush targeted Hussein out of a sense of unfinished family business. "Whether he did or not, only God can tell," said Joe O'Neill, his lifelong Texas friend. "I don't know if we'll ever know that."

Still, even if that was a part of it, however subconsciously, it was not the whole picture. For one thing, Cheney and others, like Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Scooter Libby, and Douglas Feith, were vigorous proponents of action against Iraq without any paternal interest. Cheney had served in the previous Bush administration and had agreed to halt the Gulf War without marching to Baghdad on the assumption that Hussein would eventually be toppled anyway, a decision that now haunted him.

The sense that Hussein was a menace who could not be left in power was shared across party lines. Bill Clinton signed legislation declaring regime change American policy toward Iraq. Hussein was the only one in the world taking shots at American service members on a regular basis in the no-fly zones. He had flouted UN resolutions calling for disarmament and maintained a murderous grip over his people. As far as anyone knew, he still harbored ambitions for chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons far more devastating than box cutters, and he had demonstrated a ruthless willingness to use deadly gas on his Iranian neighbors and on his own people during a Kurdish uprising.

In the aftermath of September 11, Bush and Cheney fell back on the thinking of their generation, the nation-state paradigm. Going after a stateless, formless enemy like a terrorist network was unfamiliar. Going after Iraq fit more neatly into their experience. "Every one of us, our entire worldview of foreign affairs was put together in an era of great-power conflict-good versus evil, us versus them," said one administration official who worked on Iraq and supported action, only to regret it later. "Fundamentally, the problems we faced after 9/11 did not lend themselves to the great-power conflict model. Stateless enemy. And so people have said, why did George Bush use this language-us versus them, smoke them out, hunt them down? It's because that's all he knew and that's all everybody knew."

His success at toppling the Taliban fed the desire to hit another target. Bush did not want to be like Clinton flailing ineffectually at shadows. Taking on tyrants, rooting out terrorists, confronting rogue states with weapons of mass destruction, and perhaps even planting a seed for democracy were missions worthy of a great president. Afghanistan seemed to show that America could force change in a region swarming with people who wanted to do it harm-never mind that Special Forces were still chasing al-Qaeda fighters from Tora Bora into the treacherous mountains of Shahikot south of Kabul.

The anger over September 11 seemed to demand more. Afghanistan was not enough. While Bush and Cheney had Iraq in their sights for a long time, they were responding to public appetite for action. For the first time in more than a generation, the country was willing to be assertive overseas. A poll taken just before the "axis of evil" speech showed that 77 percent of Americans supported military action in Iraq and just 17 percent opposed it. In a separate poll, almost an identical number, 76 percent, thought Hussein provided help to al-Qaeda, and another poll released around then found that 72 percent said it was very or somewhat likely that Hussein was "personally involved in the September 11 attacks." Memories of the Twin Towers were still fresh. "The only reason we went into Iraq, I tell people now, is we were looking for somebody's ass to kick," said the administration official who worked on Iraq. "Afghanistan was too easy."

ON A CHILLY, dry day in February, Cheney sat down with his CIA briefer to go through the latest intelligence. While Bush preferred a more interactive briefing, Cheney tended to read the documents while the briefer sat quietly waiting in case he had any questions. He usually did. On this morning, Cheney found a report from the Defense Intelligence Agency, or DIA, titled "Niamey Signed an Agreement to Sell 500 Tons of Uranium a Year to Baghdad."

The report, dated February 12, 2002, caught Cheney's eye. Niamey was the capital of Niger, an African country with significant uranium deposits. Iraq had no civilian nuclear energy program, and the only reason it could want uranium from Africa was to fuel a bomb. The uranium would have to be enriched, no easy task and not one that Iraq had mastered. But if it were, five hundred tons by one calculation would be enough to make fifty weapons. The report was based on information from a foreign intelligence service, and Cheney asked his briefer to find out what the CIA thought of it.

By this point, Cheney was hunting for evidence that Iraq had chemical, biological, and even nuclear weapons in violation of its obligations under the UN Security Council resolutions that followed the Gulf War. For years, American intelligence agencies had assumed that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons, but they had been without a window into Iraq ever since UN inspectors left at the end of 1998 just before Clinton launched a four-day bombing attack for failing to cooperate adequately. Nothing in the interim had made intelligence analysts in the United States or Europe think Hussein had abandoned his weapons programs or his ambitions for them. The request from Cheney put the CIA on high alert to confirm the Niger report.