There was little precedent for this. Since the amendment was ratified in 1967, the only other time a president had temporarily passed his powers to a vice president came in 1985 when Bush's father stepped in while Ronald Reagan underwent intestinal surgery. Even then, as Reagan signed letters authorizing the transfer, he wrote that he did not think the Twenty-Fifth Amendment actually applied. The younger Bush had no such constitutional qualms in handing the reins to Cheney. "He's standing by," Bush told reporters, adding mischievously, "He'll realize he's not going to be president that long."

Sitting on a couch in a lounge at the Eucalyptus Cabin at Camp David, Bush signed identical letters to Speaker Dennis Hastert and Senator Robert Byrd, president pro tempore of the Senate, the two next in the line of succession behind Cheney, informing them that he would "transfer temporarily my Constitutional powers and duties to the Vice President during the brief period of the procedure and recovery." Alberto Gonzales, the White House counsel, took the letters by golf cart to the Willow Lodge, where the Camp David communications center faxed them at 7:09 a.m. Colonel Richard J. Tubb of the air force, the White House physician, then performed the procedure, finishing at 7:29 a.m. without finding any polyps. Bush awoke at 7:31 a.m., got up soon thereafter, ate a waffle, and played with his dogs. He signed another pair of letters to Hastert and Byrd "resuming those powers and duties effective immediately" and had them faxed at 9:24 a.m. Cheney spent two hours and fifteen minutes as acting president, mostly at the White House holding national security meetings, but took no publicly recorded actions.

BUSH'S NEW BEST friend increasingly seemed to be Tony Blair. As Bush mapped out a strategy for taking on Iraq, Blair was a full partner. Indeed, if Bush had failed to find his Bob Bullock in Washington, arguably he was finding him in London. "Here you have this liberal Labour leader, Tony Blair, and you have this conservative Republican from Texas, George Bush, and they see exactly eye to eye on the threat in Iraq," noted Karen Hughes.

Blair's team was sensing that summer that Bush's mind was already made up. "There was a perceptible shift in attitude," the British intelligence chief reported to Blair and his team, according to a July 23 memo. "Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action." The same memo summarized the foreign secretary's report: "It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran."

Bush would later deny that, but indeed every meeting on Iraq through the spring and summer had focused on how to attack Iraq-where they would send troops, who would be with them, how long it would take. With Cheney driving the conversation, little if any discussion was devoted to whether they should and what the consequences would be. When Richard Haass, the director of policy planning at the State Department, expressed concern to Condoleezza Rice that war with Iraq would dominate the administration's foreign policy, she brushed away his concerns, saying the president had made up his mind, a comment he took to mean that a "political and psychological Rubicon" had been crossed even though it would be months until military action began. "They were really beating the drums," recalled someone in the skeptic camp. Indeed, the British had a point; Bush decided to deal with North Korea through negotiations that included its neighbors in what would become known as the six-party talks. With Iraq, talks were not the goal.

Colin Powell decided to confront the issue one-on-one with the president. "I really have to see the president," he told Rice. "I have to do it alone without all the warlords in the room."

A meeting was set for August 5. Powell, returning from a trip to Asia, scribbled his points on a pad of paper through a long flight over the Pacific.

At 4:30 on the day of the scheduled meeting, Bush, Cheney, Powell, and the rest of the national security team received an update from Tommy Franks on Iraq. Donald Rumsfeld insisted no one take notes and collected the handouts afterward. Franks was planning a light-footprint invasion that would use far fewer troops than during the Gulf War a decade earlier and rely instead on speed and the much more advanced technology wielded by the modern military.

The discussion then turned to postwar planning. Cheney later recalled that Bush looked at George Tenet and asked how the Iraqi people would react to an American invasion. "Most Iraqis will rejoice when Saddam is gone," Tenet said, by Cheney's account. That was almost identical to the prediction Cheney would later make publicly, a forecast that would become a symbol of hubris. Cheney included the conversation in his memoir after leaving office to make clear he had a basis for his forecast, or at least to spread the blame.

After the meeting, Bush brought Powell over to the White House residence for dinner, then invited him to the Treaty Room on the second floor, a private study that had been used in the past for cabinet meetings and the signing of the treaty ending the Spanish-American War. Laura had stocked it with furniture from Ulysses S. Grant's era so Bush could use it as a home office.

Bush listened as Powell ran through the points from his notepad: the consequences of an invasion, the cost to international unity, the possibility of oil price spikes, the potential destabilization of Saudi Arabia and other allies in the region. It would suck all the oxygen out of Bush's term. And most important, it would mean Bush would effectively be responsible for a shattered country, for twenty-five million people and all their hopes and aspirations.

"If you break it, you are going to own it," Powell told Bush. "It isn't getting to Baghdad. It is what happens after you get to Baghdad. And it ain't going to be easy."

Bush asked what he should do.

"We should take the problem to the United Nations," Powell said. "Iraq is in violation of multiple UN resolutions. The UN is the legally aggrieved party."

"Even if the UN doesn't solve it," he added, "making the effort, if you have to go to war, gives you the ability to ask for allies or ask for help."

But Powell also noted Iraq might give in, in which case Bush would have to take yes for an answer, even if it meant Hussein remaining in power.

Bush was struck by Powell's intensity and signaled that he was open to talking about it. "Colin was more passionate than I had seen him at any NSC meeting," Bush recalled.

ON AUGUST 15, ten days after dinner with Powell, Bush was at his ranch scrolling through newspaper clips when he came across an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by Brent Scowcroft, his father's close friend and former national security adviser. "Don't Attack Saddam" read the headline.

The column argued that war in Iraq could distract from the war on terrorism. "The United States could certainly defeat the Iraqi military and destroy Saddam's regime," Bush read. "But it would not be a cakewalk. On the contrary, it undoubtedly would be very expensive-with serious consequences for the U.S. and global economy-and could as well be bloody." An invasion of Iraq "could well destabilize Arab regimes in the region" and mean "a large-scale, long-term military occupation."

Bush was livid, knowing the piece would be seen as a message from his father or at least repudiation by his father's inner circle. "He was pissed off and let anybody within shouting distance know, including Condi," recalled Dan Bartlett. "He would just rail at her about it-knowing that it wasn't her fault." Rice was a Scowcroft protegee and likewise felt blindsided. She told the president that Scowcroft was just a cautious person on such matters but she would call him. Bush then called his father, who tried to calm him down. "Son, Brent is a friend," he said. Cheney read the piece too and thought Scowcroft was stuck in the past, revealing a "pre-9/11 mind-set, the worldview of a time before we had seen the devastation that terrorists armed with hijacked airplanes could cause."

Rice called Scowcroft and scolded him for taking his views public without talking with her first. "Brent, you know, I wish you had just come and sat down and told me those things," she recalled telling him. Scowcroft responded that he never meant to criticize the president. He just "thought it might be helpful to calm down some of the war talk," as Rice paraphrased him. It was a hard conversation. As Scowcroft later put it, "I got taken to the woodshed." But the reality was that Scowcroft had felt shut out of the new administration and resorted to the pages of a national newspaper because he did not think the White House would listen to him. The headline, written by an editor, may have been blunter than he would have liked, but he did not quarrel with it. He thought the drive for war was a mistake and missed the more fundamental problem in the region, the unsettled dispute between Israelis and Palestinians. Scowcroft felt offended at the notion that the first Bush administration had failed by not taking Hussein out in 1991. "All the neocons were saying, 'Finish the job,' " he said. "In fact, the president said that." While Scowcroft denied writing the piece at the behest of the president's father, there were those who never believed him. "The Scowcroft piece in the Wall Street Journal could not have been without HW's approval," said one person close to the Bush family.

The next day, August 16, Powell made his pitch to the National Security Council for the UN route, with Bush participating by video from the ranch and Cheney from his Wyoming home. Cheney understood that Bush had already decided to go along with Powell. But privately he disdained the United Nations as a feckless debating society corrupted by the likes of Hussein and incapable of taking a stand. A lengthy diplomatic campaign would only give Hussein time to expand his arsenal, find a way to hide his weapons, or, worst of all, carry out an attack on the United States or its interests overseas.

Cheney had been meditating on the meaning of September 11 and read a new collection of essays by Victor Davis Hanson called An Autumn of War. They made such a powerful impression on him that he invited Hanson for a visit. Cheney was particularly interested in the classically tragic view, from Sophocles to the American Western, that there are not always good and bad choices, but bad and worse choices. For Cheney, leaving Hussein in power was worse than the bad choice of taking him out. He had no doubts that Hussein had weapons. He remembered how wrong intelligence assessments of Iraq had been before the Gulf War. He remembered sitting in his Pentagon office listening to intelligence analysts tell him Iraq was at least five or ten years away from having a nuclear weapon, only to discover after the war that it was in fact much closer, perhaps even just a year away. The lesson he took was clear: if anything, intelligence assessments tended to underestimate the threat, not the other way around.

But Cheney was hearing from friends that Scowcroft's view was on the rise and that the White House had better explain to the public what was so vital about Iraq. On August 18, he heard from Senator Trent Lott, the Republican leader.

"Dick, I think you may have a big problem here with public perceptions of a possible Iraq war," Lott told him. "The case hasn't been made as to why we should do it."

"Don't worry," Cheney said. "We're about to fix all of that. Just hold on."

Before he could fix it, another old friend weighed in. On August 25, Bush and Cheney picked up the New York Times and found unsolicited advice from James Baker, the former secretary of state whom Cheney had first plucked out of obscurity in the 1970s and who had overseen the 2000 recount that put the current team into office. Unlike Scowcroft, Baker did not directly oppose war with Iraq, but he urged the president to seek a new UN Security Council resolution requiring Iraq to submit to no-warning inspections and "authorizing all necessary means to enforce it," presumably including force. "Although the United States could certainly succeed, we should try our best not to have to go it alone, and the president should reject the advice of those who counsel doing so," Baker continued. By that, he meant Cheney.

CHENEY TOOK HIS rebuttal public the next day, as he made good on his promise to Lott to fix things. He had commissioned a tough speech to deliver to the Veterans of Foreign Wars. Where Bush would edit speeches line by line, Cheney tended to accept speeches in whole or not, and when he did make changes, they were fully formed paragraphs written out neatly by hand without mistakes. This would be the longest speech of his vice presidency to date, and he wanted it right.

Addressing the aging warriors in the Nashville convention hall, Cheney dispensed with any of the caveats about Iraq. "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction," he said. "There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us." He went beyond simply asserting that Hussein had chemical and biological weapons. "We now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons," Cheney said. He added, "Many of us are convinced that Saddam will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon."

As a result, he went on, there was no point in sending inspectors back in, even though that was exactly what Bush was thinking about doing. "Against that background," Cheney said, "a person would be right to question any suggestion that we should just get inspectors back into Iraq, and then our worries will be over. Saddam has perfected the game of cheat and retreat, and is very skilled in the art of denial and deception. A return of inspectors would provide no assurance whatsoever of his compliance with U.N. resolutions. On the contrary, there is a great danger that it would provide false comfort that Saddam was somehow back in his box."

When Powell heard about the speech, he erupted in anger and called Rice. "Condi, anybody look at this speech?" he demanded, and took her halting answer to mean not really. "He is undercutting the president before the president has tossed the pitch."

Rice agreed Cheney had gone too far. "I will fix it," she told Powell.

The president, vacationing in Crawford, was aggravated too. "Bush was hot about it; he was not pleased," Ari Fleischer said later. "It wasn't him. It wasn't Bush's point of view." But the president chose not to confront Cheney, instead telling Rice to do it.

"Call Dick and tell him I haven't made a decision," he told Rice.

She walked back to the Governor's House, the separate building where she stayed while at the ranch, and got the vice president on the phone. "The president is concerned that your speech is being read as a decision to skip the UN and challenge Saddam unilaterally," Rice recalled telling Cheney. "It's cut off the president's options."

The vice president agreed to soften the language in a follow-up speech to veterans of the Korean War in San Antonio three days later and told her to call Scooter Libby with the exact language she wanted. She did and later claimed he read it verbatim in the next speech.

But the new wording was only slightly less dismissive of the diplomatic route: "Many have suggested that the problem can be dealt with simply by returning inspectors to Iraq. But we must remember that inspections are not an end in themselves. The objective has to be disarmament." Cheney added, "With Saddam's record of thwarting inspections, one has to be concerned that he would continue to plot, using the available time to husband his resources, to invest in his ongoing chemical and biological weapons programs, and to gain the possession of nuclear weapons." Powell did not find the revised version much more to his liking.

At the same time, George Tenet was upset that the speech had never been cleared with his agency and felt the assertions "went well beyond what our analysis could support." But he never challenged Cheney, reluctant to insert himself into policy making-a reluctance he would come to regret. "I should have told the vice president privately that, in my view, his VFW speech had gone too far."

12.

"A brutal, ugly, repugnant man"

What are we talking about Iraq for? Where is this coming from?"

Karen Hughes watched Vice President Cheney's speech from her kitchen table in Austin. President Bush's longtime confidante and muse, she had just recently left her White House job and returned to Texas to spend more time with family. But she remained a key outside adviser to the president and did not like what she was seeing.

As a political specialist, Hughes had not been part of the months of deliberations in the Situation Room or privy to the planning Donald Rumsfeld and Tommy Franks had been conducting at the president's request. To her, the intense focus on Iraq seemed totally out of the blue. The whole idea of going to war with Iraq struck her as a distraction. She did not see the connection to September 11 that Cheney did, and to her it seemed as if Bush were being steered down a path toward a dangerous confrontation.

She called the president in Washington to express her concern. What's going on? she asked. Why is Iraq suddenly so prominent on the agenda?

He told her there were plenty of reasons that he needed to take on Saddam Hussein, not just the connections with terrorists Cheney saw. If she was so troubled by the prospect, he said, then she should get together with Condoleezza Rice, who could walk her through the reasons.

Hughes agreed to do that, and soon she met Rice for dinner. Rice knew how much Hughes cared about Bush and recognized that she needed to reassure the Texas adviser. She laid out for Hughes a series of factors driving the focus on Iraq: It was the only place in the world where American airplanes were being shot at as they enforced the no-fly zone. Hussein had a history of bullying neighbors and using chemical weapons on his own people. The last time America went to war with him, intelligence agencies discovered he was further along in his nuclear program than they had known.

In light of September 11, Rice said, the United States had to reassess threats. Tolerating someone as dangerous as Hussein no longer seemed tenable.

Hughes was impressed by the arguments, but they did not completely convince her. If Bush really was heading toward confrontation with Iraq, then she wanted to make sure he kept as much flexibility as possible so he was not railroaded into a war he did not really want.

She was not the only old friend from Texas who worried as they watched Bush barreling down the road to a clash with Hussein. His lifelong friend Joe O'Neill was among those in the president's longtime circle who agreed that Bush had to attack Afghanistan after September 11 but considered invading Iraq a bad idea. They worried he was being pushed into it. Yet these friends generally kept their doubts to themselves. "I didn't volunteer it," O'Neill recalled. "It's not my job."

The drive to war accelerated after Labor Day as the president and Congress returned to Washington. On September 4, Bush summoned congressional leaders to ask for a resolution of force against Iraq. Some in the room were surprised, having assumed the White House had no intention of seeking congressional input. But now the president was in effect putting them on the hook, forcing them to choose one way or the other-confront Hussein or not?

"Saddam Hussein is a serious threat to the United States, to his neighbors, and to the people who disagree with him inside Iraq," Bush told the leaders. "Doing nothing is not an option and I hope Congress agrees." He added that he planned to press the United Nations to sign on as well. "Saddam Hussein has stiffed the United Nations Security Council," Bush said. "He sidestepped, he crawfished. He has no intention to comply. If the UN wants to be relevant, they need to do something about it. The fact that the world has not dealt with him has created a bigger monster."

After ten minutes, he opened up the floor. The lawmakers asked him what new evidence of banned weapons the United States had and whether military action would be unilateral. Bush said there was plenty of evidence and that he would prefer to have the backing of the United Nations but would go it alone if necessary.

"I will be with you on condition we level with the American people-we have to stay a while," Senator Joseph Biden, the Democratic chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, told him.

"You're right," Bush responded.

"If you can get it done without staying," Biden added, "we'll give you the Nobel Peace Prize. I'll support you for president."

"I don't know whether that will help me or hurt me," Bush joked.

But other Democrats were upset. Senator Tom Daschle recognized that the timeline would mean Congress would be debating war right before the election. Remembering Karl Rove's comments on taking the war to voters, Daschle suspected political motivations.

Even a Republican leader thought war with Iraq was a fool's errand. "If you invade Iraq, you're going to win the war in two or three weeks and then you're going to own the place and you'll never get out of it," Dick Armey, the House majority leader, told him. "It'll be such a burden on your presidency you'll never be able to complete your domestic agenda."

Bush tried to reassure Armey. "Will you just hold your fire until we have a chance to fully brief you?" he asked.

Armey agreed.

Later that day, Bush sent Rumsfeld to Capitol Hill to brief the Senate. About two-thirds of the members showed up, but the session was "a disaster" that might have "destroyed all of the good will and ground work that the president accomplished during his meeting this morning," a White House aide wrote in a memo that night. "I found myself struggling to keep from laughing out loud at times, especially when Sec. Rumsfeld became a caricature of himself." He refused to share even the most basic intelligence, the aide wrote. "There is a lot of clean up work to do here."

BUSH, CHENEY, AND the rest of the national security team gathered at Camp David on the evening of September 6 in preparation for a meeting the next morning about the president's upcoming speech to the United Nations. It was almost a year to the day since the fateful Camp David meeting that set the administration's course in Afghanistan. Now the team was back in the Maryland mountains to figure out what to do next.

While Powell had won the day by convincing Bush to go to the world body, the unsettled question was whether he would ask for a new resolution. That was a rat hole Cheney wanted to avoid. Tying their hands to the bureaucratic morass to win what he called "yet one more meaningless resolution" was a mistake, one that would only give Hussein more time. When the team sat down in Laurel Lodge, Cheney argued that inspectors would not be Americans and could be fooled by Hussein, muddying the waters. Powell maintained that a resolution was needed to show the world that the United States was willing to do everything possible before turning to force. Then if war did come, Powell said, they would be in a stronger position to build a broad coalition. Bush did not make up his mind at that moment, but issued a dire conclusion. "Either he will come clean about his weapons," he told the group, "or there will be war."

In years to come, some in the war cabinet, including Donald Rumsfeld and George Tenet, would say there was never a single moment when the national security team debated the fundamental question of whether going to war was a good idea, nor any point when Bush asked his advisers directly whether he should attack Iraq. Indeed, the discussion at Camp David that day focused largely on tactics. Yet others saw it as the turning point, the juncture at which Bush resolved to go forward. "It was very much on everybody's minds that you don't give this speech and then not follow through," Dan Bartlett said. Whatever reservations anyone harbored, no one in the room challenged the core judgment that Iraq was worth a war. "In neither this meeting nor any other I attended did any of the president's advisers argue against using military force to remove Saddam from power," Cheney said later. "Nor did anyone argue that leaving Saddam in power, with all the risks and costs associated with that course, was a viable option." Rice, who would clash with Cheney on so many other issues, agreed on that point. "There was no disagreement," she said. "The way ahead could not have been clearer."

For Bush, the decision on how to proceed with the United Nations was sealed that night when he and Cheney had dinner with Tony Blair, who flew from Britain for the sole purpose of convincing the Americans to seek a resolution. Blair told Bush and Cheney that winning a Security Council endorsement would make it easier to forge a true international coalition and expressed fear of the consequences of the United States and Britain going it alone. Cheney looked "very sour throughout," Blair's adviser Alastair Campbell recalled. The British were struck that the vice president attended all the meetings, including the one normally restricted to the leaders, which brought home "as never before Cheney's influence in the Bush administration."

During the session that included aides, Campbell told Bush they needed to understand anti-American sentiment around the world; a lot of it was jealousy, he said, but some was fear of American power. The rhetoric from Washington had not helped.

"You mean we shouldn't talk about democracy?" Cheney snapped.

Not if it came across as a message about Americanization, Campbell retorted.

Bush agreed to seek the resolution from the Security Council. "I think ultimately he bought the idea that this was going to be a whole lot easier if we had a coalition behind us," Blair recalled. That was part of it, but a lot of it was Blair himself. Bush was impressed. "Your man has got cojones," he told Campbell. As the prime minister was leaving after just six hours on the ground, Bush joked, "I suppose you can tell the story of how Tony flew in and pulled the crazed unilateralist back from the brink."

Still, Bush and Cheney were ready to take their case to the public. Andy Card had told a New York Times reporter in an article that appeared the day Blair visited that they had waited until now because "from a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August." Now it was September, time to launch the product. When reporters from the Times called to ask what intelligence agencies knew about Hussein's weapons, officials shared one of the most alarming conclusions found in the reports being sent to Bush and Cheney. On September 8, the Times duly reported that Iraq had bought aluminum tubes that could be used for centrifuges to enrich uranium. Officials added that the first sign of a smoking gun might be a mushroom cloud, a clever phrase Michael Gerson had come up with.

That same day, Cheney and Rice went on the Sunday talk shows and cited the story as if it were somehow independent confirmation of their case. "There's a story in the New York Times this morning," Cheney said on NBC's Meet the Press. "It's now public that, in fact, he has been seeking to acquire, and we have been able to intercept and prevent him from acquiring through this particular channel, the kinds of tubes that are necessary to build a centrifuge." Asked if Hussein already had a nuclear bomb, Cheney said he could not say. "I can say that I know for sure that he's trying to acquire the capability." Rice, on CNN's Late Edition, even used the anonymous quotation, saying, "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

Cheney rode to the Pentagon on September 11, the first anniversary of the attacks, to join Rumsfeld in briefing three dozen senators about Iraqi weapons. Joined by George Tenet, they were so aggressive that some senators left assuming an invasion was a foregone conclusion. "It was pretty clear that Rumsfeld and Cheney are ready to go to war," Senator Max Cleland wrote afterward in a note to himself. "They have already made the decision to go to war and to them that is the only option."

BUSH FLEW TO New York for the UN General Assembly session the next day. One year after the attacks that had unified the world, he was returning a different figure in a different moment. Anxious about protecting his country, eager to strike out at its enemies, he had lost fifteen pounds and much of whatever innocence he had brought to the office.

The speech was in flux almost until the last minute as Cheney and Powell shadowboxed over how explicitly to ask for a new resolution. Taking the lectern, Bush saw a sea of unsmiling faces, many listening intently to bulky white devices on their ears that would translate his words into dozens of languages. Bush collected himself and launched into his talk, part persuasion, part lecture. He started with the carrot, announcing that the United States would return to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, or UNESCO, years after withdrawing amid complaints of corruption. The delegates applauded with their approval. It would be the only time they would interrupt to clap.

"Our greatest fear," Bush went on to say, "is that terrorists will find a shortcut to their mad ambitions when an outlaw regime supplies them with the technologies to kill on a massive scale. In one place, in one regime, we find all these dangers, in their most lethal and aggressive forms, exactly the kind of aggressive threat the United Nations was born to confront." He laid out an indictment of Iraq's failure to abide by UN resolutions, daring the body to confront Baghdad. "We know that Saddam Hussein pursued weapons of mass murder even when inspectors were in his country," Bush continued. "Are we to assume that he stopped when they left? The history, the logic, and the facts lead to one conclusion: Saddam Hussein's regime is a grave and gathering danger."

And soon he came to the point: "My nation will work with the U.N. Security Council to meet our common challenge," he said. "If Iraq's regime defies us again, the world must move deliberately, decisively to hold Iraq to account."

Powell and Rice, following along in the audience, realized Bush had left out the critical line about seeking a resolution. After so much back-and-forth, a draft without the updated language had been fed into the teleprompter. All that work, all that fighting, and in the end he would skip the essential point because of a logistical screwup?

As Powell and Rice grew agitated, Bush recognized the omission and ad-libbed it. "We will work with the U.N. Security Council for the necessary resolutions," he said.

His advisers were relieved. But wait a minute. Had he said resolutions, plural? Did that extra letter commit them to coming back to the council more than once? That could be a problem.

Just as important, though, were two sentences that followed. "The Security Council resolutions will be enforced-the just demands of peace and security will be met-or action will be unavoidable," Bush went on, picking up the text again. "And a regime that has lost its legitimacy will also lose its power." It was all but a declaration of war dressed up in an ultimatum: Bow to these demands, or our forces will topple your government. In the most public of forums, the president of the United States had signaled the coming showdown as clearly as he could.

Twenty-five minutes after he had begun, Bush wrapped up and looked out at the audience knowing he had not won it over. "It's like speaking to the wax museum," he observed afterward. "No one moves."

THE DRIVE FOR war was not helped when Bush saw on September 16 that Lawrence Lindsey, his top economics adviser, had told the Wall Street Journal that it could cost $100 billion to $200 billion. In fact, Lindsey was just thinking out loud, not offering a formal projection. He was actually saying that war costs would not have a major economic impact and would be worth it to protect the country from future attack even if it cost between 1 percent and 2 percent of the nation's gross domestic product, which at the time would mean $100 billion to $200 billion. The Gulf War had cost 1 percent of gross domestic product, and Vietnam between 1.5 percent and 2 percent.

But the raw numbers looked enormous compared with predictions by other officials. Lindsey realized his colleagues "were furious" that he was so off message. "At that time, message discipline on Iraq was the functional equivalent of radio silence," he later concluded. Bush himself was edgy the next time he saw him. "So, Lindsey, you're estimating the cost of wars I'm not even planning yet?" Bush asked. Publicly, the White House tried to shoot down his statements. Mitch Daniels, the budget director, was sent out to say that the Lindsey numbers were "likely very, very high."

The issue complicated Bush's campaign to win support in Congress. On September 19, he met behind closed doors with nearly a dozen House members from both parties at the White House, and Representative Howard Berman, a California Democrat, asked if Daniels would be willing to spend the money needed for nation building after Saddam Hussein was toppled.

"Mark my words-yes, we will spend the necessary money," Bush responded.

Several other members urged him to emphasize the threat in his speeches.

"I am well aware," Bush said. "He tried to kill my dad."

With those private words, Bush hinted at the complicated mix of motivations driving him. But he was also thinking bigger than simple retribution. The next day, the White House released a new National Security Strategy, building on the president's West Point speech on preemption. Defeating global terrorism was among the eight goals, as to be expected, but it was the second one listed. Number one was "champion aspirations for human dignity." Many missed the point: Bush was increasingly defining his mission beyond just confronting threats to American security. That evening, he hosted Republican governors for dinner in the State Dining Room. With no reporters present, Bush condemned Saddam Hussein as "a brutal, ugly, repugnant man" but then alluded to the broader agenda. "I'm gonna make a prediction," he told the governors. "Write this down. Afghanistan and Iraq will lead that part of the world to democracy. They are going to be the catalyst to change the Middle East and the world."

At the same time Bush and Cheney were lobbying lawmakers for bipartisan support, they were also waging a fiercely partisan campaign to win the upcoming midterm elections. Just as Karl Rove had forecast, they were taking their national security case to the American public and winning. One of their most cutting arguments concerned the proposed Department of Homeland Security, an idea Bush opposed for nine months after Septem- ber 11 but now supported, although he was bogged down in a dispute over collective bargaining rights for its employees. Bush wanted to run the department with as little red tape as possible, while Democrats defended the interests of organized labor, a core constituency. To campaign audiences, though, Bush cast it as a sign of Democratic weakness.

"The Senate is more interested in special interests in Washington and not interested in the security of the American people," he declared in a speech in New Jersey on September 23. Democrats were livid. Tom Daschle marched to the Senate floor two days later to denounce Bush's comments as "outrageous, outrageous." But Republican candidates picked up the theme. In Georgia, the Republican challenger, Saxby Chambliss, ran an ad attacking Senator Max Cleland, the incumbent Democrat who had lost three limbs at Khe Sanh in Vietnam. The ad showed pictures of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, then reported that Cleland voted against Bush's homeland security proposals and therefore lacked "the courage to lead."

THE DAY BEFORE Daschle's speech, Cheney slipped into his official car for the short drive to Capitol Hill. Arriving at his office on the House side, he met with Dick Armey, the skeptical Republican leader.

"Now Dick, when I lay all this out for you and you see all this evidence, I know you're going to agree with me," Cheney said.

Armey could not help noticing that Cheney said he would agree "with me," not "with the president." For a half hour, Cheney laid out the case, showing photographs of aluminum tubes and satellite images of structures he called weapons facilities and walking Armey through the history of the Gulf War and UN inspections. Most ominously, Cheney warned that Hussein might be able to miniaturize weapons and put them in a suitcase. And he emphasized again what he saw as the links between Iraq and al-Qaeda.

Cheney grew grim and laid out the worst-case scenario. "Dick, how would you feel if you voted no on this and the Iraqis brought in a bomb and blew up half the people of San Francisco?"

Armey was suitably scared but still dubious.

"You're going to get mired down there," he predicted.