Again, O'Neill would recall an awkward pause before Cheney replied.

"Okay," the vice president said.

Cheney later tried again to arrange a smooth departure, having Andy Card call O'Neill at home that night to invite the secretary to meet with the president. But O'Neill declined and also rebuffed Card's request to wait to announce his resignation until they were ready to announce Lindsey's departure and the appointment of John Snow, the chief executive of CSX Corporation, to take over Treasury. Instead, O'Neill turned in his resignation letter the following morning.

"It wasn't difficult for me at all," O'Neill recalled, "because I was so disaffected, I was happy to go." He grew even more upset years later when he read Bush's memoir saying that "Paul belittled the tax cuts, which of course got back to me." O'Neill said he was straightforward in his opposition to the tax cuts. "When the president says it got back to him, it's a lie," he said. "I told him three times to his face. I've got to tell you, that's irritating as hell to me that the president would create this impression for the casual reader." O'Neill's departure also disappointed his patron, Alan Greenspan. "The Bush administration turned out to be very different from the reincarnation of the Ford administration that I had imagined," Greenspan said later. "Now, the political operation was far more dominant."

THE POLITICAL OPERATION was quickly absorbed by another drama. Senator Trent Lott, the Republican leader from Mississippi, made remarks at a hundredth-birthday celebration for Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina on December 5 that were seen as racially inflammatory. Lott noted that his home state had voted for Thurmond when he ran for president in 1948, adding, "If the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years either." What he did not mention was that Thurmond had run on a pro-segregation Dixiecrat ticket. Nick Calio, Bush's top congressional liaison, viewed the comments as just political flattery, a way of buttering up an old man, not a commentary on the issues Thurmond ran on more than a half century earlier. But over the next couple days, in the glare of blogs and cable television, they took on a life of their own, and Lott was forced to issue one apology after another.

By the time Bush flew to Philadelphia a week later for a speech about faith-based initiatives to an audience that included many African Americans, Lott's fellow Republicans were abandoning him. On Marine One heading to his plane on December 12, Bush told aides he felt he had no choice but to admonish Lott in his speech. How else would he have any credibility? If he said nothing, it would be interpreted as condoning a seemingly pro-segregation sentiment.

"People are going to think you are pulling the rug out from under him," Calio warned him.

"We are not doing that," Bush insisted. "We are not pulling the rug out from under him."

"Whether we are or not," Calio replied, "that is what people are going to think."

Calio asked if anyone had told Lott. Bush said no, then turned to Andy Card. "Andy, you are going to need to call him right away," Bush said, once more outsourcing personal conflict.

When Bush arrived in Philadelphia, he took the stage in front of a sign emblazoned "Compassion in Action." About a third of the way into his speech, he raised the Lott contretemps. "Any suggestion that the segregated past was acceptable or positive is offensive and it is wrong," he said to loud applause. "Recent comments by Senator Lott do not reflect the spirit of our country." The applause rose, and Bush raised his voice. "He has apologized and rightly so."

Watching on television, Lott felt sucker punched, especially by Bush's emphasis on the words "and rightly so." He could not quarrel with the conclusion but felt the tone was devastating. Senator Rick Santorum, who had accompanied Bush to Pennsylvania, called Lott from Air Force One. "The president just threw you under the bus," he said.

Lott called Bush to tell him he agreed with his comments, choosing not to express any hurt over the tone.

Bush sounded oddly upbeat. "Hang in there," he said.

He did not. Barely a week later, Lott was out as majority leader, replaced by Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, a Bush favorite. As Calio predicted, the White House was widely perceived to have cut Lott loose. Lott himself blamed Karl Rove. "I never could prove it was Karl," he said later, "but somebody was doing me in at the White House."

Cheney clearly disagreed with the White House and called Lott to express his concern. "It wasn't a call from the vice president," Lott said. "It was a call from a friend."

THE CONTRETEMPS WAS only a temporary distraction from Iraq. In response to the UN resolution, Saddam Hussein turned in a twelve-thousand-page declaration maintaining he had no banned weapons. Cheney wanted to immediately judge it a lie and declare Iraq in "material breach" of the resolution, but Bush opted to let his government's experts evaluate the document first. In the end, they still wound up at the same place, and on December 19 the United States deemed the declaration inadequate and a "material breach" of Iraq's obligations. But Bush would wait for the newly readmitted UN inspectors to have a chance to work, much to Cheney's frustration.

As Cheney pressed him to move more assertively, Bush received a call one day in December from Karen Hughes, who was back in Texas watching developments with increasing alarm. She worried that he might feel pressured into going through with an invasion even if he did not think it was a good idea simply because he had given the speech at the United Nations. "I suggested that he shouldn't feel that he had to go to war, that there were other ways that we could basically back off of that rhetoric in an effective way," she recalled. Bush assured her he did not feel that way. Once again, Hughes did not tell her friend directly that she opposed going to war, but in her own way she was doing what she could to head it off, offering him an exit ramp.

Whatever doubts Bush harbored were fueled just a few days before Christmas. In the face of Hussein's continued denials, Bush asked the CIA to lay out its best case that Iraq really did have banned weapons. On December 21, with much of Washington out Christmas shopping, Bush and Cheney took their places in the seats in front of the fireplace in the Oval Office. Condoleezza Rice, Andy Card, Scooter Libby, and George Tenet watched from the sofas as John McLaughlin, the deputy CIA director, presented the intelligence.

Where Tenet was a cigar-chewing backslapper, McLaughlin was a professorial agency veteran, as dry in his manner as his boss was exuberant. As he went through the material, he noticed that he did not seem to be persuading anyone. "I was very careful in the presentation," he said later. "I wasn't trying to sell anything. I was basically saying, this is what we think we can confidently say."

Bush was not impressed. "Nice try," he told McLaughlin. "It's not something that Joe Public would understand or would gain a lot of confidence from."

The president turned to Tenet. "I've been told all this intelligence about having WMD, and this is the best we've got?"

"It's a slam dunk," Tenet told Bush, and then repeated the phrase.

Bush took comfort from Tenet's confidence, later calling it "very important" to him. Tenet, however, felt his comment was taken out of context and that he meant that sharpening the public presentation would be a slam dunk, not the intelligence itself, a conclusion McLaughlin shared. It was a subtle distinction, and Tenet had offered strong assurances on other occasions. But in any case, Bush asked some lawyers on his staff to frame the material the way they would in court. The same day, he received a vaccination for smallpox in solidarity with all the troops he had ordered vaccinated.

For a brief moment, Bush confronted uncertainty. After months of barreling toward a seemingly inevitable conflict, he turned to Rice in the Oval Office and directly asked her the question he had not posed to most of his other advisers.

"Do you think we should do this?" he asked abruptly.

Rice felt the weight of the moment.

"Yes," she said. If Hussein did not respond, they would have no choice.

With troops already pouring into the Middle East in preparation for possible action, Bush retreated to Camp David for the holidays. He talked privately with his father. While even the former president's friends believed he opposed the aggressive policy, Bush later wrote that his father backed his approach.

"You've got to try everything you can to avoid war," he quoted his father telling him at Camp David. "But if the man won't comply, you don't have any other choice."

Just as his father wrote him and his siblings a heartfelt letter on the eve of the Gulf War, the younger Bush now sat down to write to his twin daughters.

"I pray that the man in Iraq will disarm in a peaceful way," he wrote. "We are putting pressure on him to do just that and much of the world is with us."

"PEOPLE WILL GREET the troops with sweets and flowers."

Bush and Cheney were meeting in the Oval Office on January 10, 2003, with three Iraqi dissidents, who were reassuring them that American forces would be welcomed if they invaded. Kanan Makiya, author of the book Republic of Fear, was painting a picture that resembled the Americans liberating Paris from the Nazis.

How long would American troops have to stay?

Two or three years, the dissidents estimated.

That was longer than the six months Bush had told members of Congress but still a reasonable time frame as far as he was concerned. It was all beginning to feel more real, more inevitable. If diplomacy were ever really an option, by now it felt like a box-checking exercise to get to the war everyone knew was coming.

The day after meeting with the Iraqi dissidents, Cheney summoned Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the longtime Saudi ambassador, to the White House. The vice president asked Donald Rumsfeld and Richard Myers to join them. Just as he had done with Colin Powell before the Gulf War, Cheney gave Bandar a secret heads-up on the war plan.

"The president has made the decision to go after Saddam Hussein," Cheney told Bandar.

Rumsfeld was surprised. That was the first time he had heard it put that definitively.

Bandar was skeptical. "Is Saddam going to survive this time?" he asked.

"Bandar," Cheney said, "once we start this, Saddam is toast."

After Bandar left, Rumsfeld raised Cheney's comment with the vice president. "This is the first time I have heard that," Rumsfeld remembered saying. But Cheney was mum about how he knew that and what the president had told him. Rumsfeld just assumed Bush had clued in his vice president in a way he had not done with the rest of the team yet. "He obviously knew what he was talking about," Rumsfeld later reflected.

While Bush had never directly asked his team the fundamental question of whether they should go to war, he realized as the time approached that he would need to lock down their support. None was more critical than Powell, the one person in government with stature rivaling the president's. Bush asked his secretary of state to stay behind after an Oval Office meeting on January 13.

"I really think I'm going to have to do this," Bush said as they settled into the wing chairs.

"You're sure?" Powell asked.

Yes, he was.

"You understand the consequences," Powell said.

He did. "Are you with me on this?" Bush asked. "I think I have to do this. I want you with me."

Powell had tried to slow the Bush-Cheney war drive and give the president off-ramps to avoid an invasion if possible. He had expressed misgivings about the way the confrontation was being handled. But he had never flatly opposed going to war with Iraq, and he did not in this moment of truth either.

"Yes, sir," he said, "I will support you. I'm with you, Mr. President."

Bush was pleased. "Time to put your war uniform on," he said.

Still, Bush agreed to play out the diplomacy a little longer. He was running into fierce resistance from France and Germany. When the French foreign minister declared that "nothing today justifies" war in Iraq, Powell felt "blindsided" and "was livid." Rumsfeld fired back by dismissing "Old Europe" as opposed to New Europe, meaning the recently liberated countries of Eastern Europe that, fresh from Soviet domination, were more willing to take on another totalitarian regime.

Bush decided to make one more effort to convince the world of Iraq's perfidy, and on January 27 he asked Powell to present evidence to the United Nations. He envisioned a moment like when Adlai Stevenson confronted Soviet envoys with evidence of the deployment of nuclear missiles in Cuba.

"We've really got to make the case and I want you to make it," Bush said. "You have the credibility to do this. Maybe they'll believe you."

Like Bush, Cheney was all too aware that Powell exceeded both of them in international credibility. "You've got high poll ratings," he told Powell after discussing the presentation. "You can afford to lose a few points."

But first, Bush had his own moment on the stage. On the night of January 28, he entered the House chamber glad-handing lawmakers along the aisle as he made his way to the rostrum for his State of the Union address. This would be yet another of those speech-of-a-lifetime moments that he liked to mock, but this speech of a lifetime was a genuine turning point, one leaving little doubt about the looming confrontation with Iraq. Indeed, editors at the New York Times initially wanted their story on the speech to say that Bush had, in fact, effectively declared war, until its correspondents in Washington convinced them to tone down the language and stick to what he actually did say.

As he had in Cincinnati three months earlier, Bush laid out his bill of particulars, asserting that the Iraqis at one point had materials sufficient to produce more than twenty-five thousand liters of anthrax, more than thirty-eight thousand liters of botulinum toxin, and as much as five hundred tons of sarin, mustard, and VX nerve agent. He claimed Iraq at one point had several "mobile biological weapons labs," specially equipped trailers designed to produce germ warfare agents. Following Cheney's lead, Bush contended that Hussein was again on the trail of nuclear weapons, citing the much-debated aluminum tubes. And he uttered 16 words that would later overshadow the other 5,400: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

That was the same claim George Tenet had gotten taken out of the Cincinnati speech. But when the State of the Union draft was distributed to top advisers the day before, Tenet handed it off to his staff.

BUSH AND CHENEY planned to meet with the generals two days later to go over the war plan. This would be one last chance for the nation's highest-ranking officers to express misgivings.

Bush strode into the Cabinet Room, where he found the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the regional commanders all smartly decked out in uniform. As one person in the room remembered it, the president started out with a full-throated embrace of his defense secretary, who had come to see him right before the meeting. "Don Rumsfeld has my full support," the president said. "I think he's doing a great job."

Then he turned to the topic of the day. "Do any of you have concerns about the war plan?"

At least some in the room got the message. Bush was backing Rumsfeld against any revolt by the uniformed leaders.

Some of the chiefs had been worried about Tommy Franks's light-footprint plan. At one point, they had given him enough of a hard time that he dismissed them to their faces as "Title X motherfuckers," referring to the statute creating the Joint Chiefs. But here in front of Bush and Cheney, they expressed confidence in the plan.

The only one who offered real concerns was General Eric Shinseki, the army chief of staff. He ticked off several issues that worried him, including flow of forces, supply lines, and the lack of a northern approach from Turkey, which so far had not agreed to let American troops use its territory to attack Iraq. Some in the room considered his comments to be relatively minor and not a challenge to the thrust of the war plan. Others saw them as more significant; while delivered in a mild-mannered way, Shinseki's critique undercut the fundamental strategy. "It's the only time in my life where I felt like you could hear the hinge of history turn," said Kori Schake, an NSC official in the room. "The president clearly didn't know what to do." So he thanked Shinseki and moved on.

Bush met the next day, January 31, with Tony Blair, who flew in from London to press the president to seek a second Security Council resolution explicitly declaring Iraq in material breach and authorizing war. The Bush team did not think it was needed, relying on the "serious consequences" language of the November resolution. For once, Cheney and Powell were on the same side. But Blair made a strikingly personal case that his government was at risk of falling. Besides, he argued, it "would give us international cover." Bush agreed, overruling Cheney's objections and promising to "twist arms and even threaten" to get the votes, according to notes taken by the British side paraphrasing him.

During their discussion, Bush made clear he had decided to go to war regardless of what the inspectors found or the Security Council decided. Indeed, he told Blair he had tentatively set the date: March 10. "This was when the bombing would begin," David Manning, a foreign policy adviser to Blair, wrote in a five-page memorandum summarizing the meeting. As a result, Manning wrote, "Our diplomatic strategy had to be arranged around the military planning." Blair indicated that he was "solidly with the President and ready to do whatever it took to disarm Saddam."

Much of the discussion concerned justifying the war, possibly even deceiving the world with a manufactured provocation. "The US was thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in UN colours," Manning wrote, attributing the idea to Bush. "If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach." Bush predicted the Iraqi army would "fold very quickly" and the elite Republican Guard would be "decimated by the bombing." Choosing optimism over history, Bush "thought it unlikely that there would be internecine warfare between the different religious and ethnic groups," Manning wrote.

The stakes for Powell's presentation to the United Nations had just gone up. It was not enough to put on a compelling case; it had to be so powerful that it would convince France and other skeptical Security Council members to back a second resolution. Powell was handed a forty-eight-page draft compiled by Cheney's staff, led by Scooter Libby with the help of John Hannah, Neil Patel, and Samantha Ravich, outlining not just alleged weapons but also Hussein's ties to terrorism and human rights abuses. The idea was a two- or three-day presentation. Powell scanned through the report and quickly rejected an extended show. Instead, he would speak for an hour or two, focused largely on weapons. After all, that was the subject of prior resolutions; that was the argument that had sold Richard Gephardt and many Democrats.

Powell handed the Cheney draft to Lawrence Wilkerson, his chief of staff, and asked him to go to the CIA to vet it. Skeptical of Cheney's war fever, Powell wanted everything to be airtight. Wilkerson went to Langley with Hannah and others to go through the draft. But he quickly concluded it was thin. After six hours, he threw the document on the table. "This isn't going to cut it, ladies and gentlemen," he exclaimed. "We're never going to get there." George Tenet suggested they discard the Cheney draft and use the National Intelligence Estimate. By now, Powell had concluded that the Cheney draft was "a disaster" and "incoherent," so he personally went to Langley for three nights, two of them with Rice in tow. The State Department's intelligence unit sent him a memo identifying thirty-eight allegations that were "weak" or "unsubstantiated" and later identified another seven. Overall, thirty-one of the forty-five weak assertions were taken out. But that meant Powell agreed to make fourteen allegations that his own specialists thought were flimsy, including the claim about aluminum tubes.

Cheney was aggravated that Powell was tossing out most of the terrorism case and pressed him, to no avail, to put some of it back in. Ever since the September 11 attacks, Cheney had been gripped by a report from the Czech intelligence agency that Mohamed Atta, believed to have been the lead hijacker, had been spotted in Prague meeting with an Iraqi intelligence officer on April 9, 2001. But American intelligence had disavowed the report, finding no evidence that Atta had been there other than the single source who told the Czechs, and plenty of evidence that he was not. Among other things, the FBI found indications that Atta was in Virginia Beach on April 4 and Coral Springs, Florida, on April 11, and that his cell phone was used in Florida on several days in between, including April 9. There was no evidence that Atta had left the United States or entered the Czech Republic.

Cheney remained fixed on the supposed Prague meeting long after intelligence analysts had discredited it. He first called it "pretty well confirmed" in a December 2001 interview, then, when more information came in, modified his language in subsequent appearances, saying it was "unconfirmed" but still holding out the possibility that it was true. Indeed, Cheney had been waging a quiet battle with the CIA for a year over suspected ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda. Scooter Libby, Douglas Feith, and others found indications of contacts over the years and argued that showed a relationship even if not an out-and-out alliance. The CIA prepared several reports, including a document on June 21, 2002, titled "Iraq & al-Qa'ida: Interpreting a Murky Relationship." The most recent had been published on January 29, the day after Bush's State of the Union address, but only after Jami Miscik, the deputy director for intelligence, stormed into Tenet's office threatening to resign unless Libby stopped pushing for changes. The paper concluded there had been contacts over the years and moments when Iraq seemed to provide safe haven for terrorists. But it did not connect Iraq with Septem- ber 11 and found no evidence of "command linkages." Libby and his allies countered that the Taliban did not "command" al-Qaeda either but supported it and that was enough under the Bush Doctrine. Cheney, Libby, Feith, and Paul Wolfowitz thought it was the CIA that was politicizing the intelligence by straining so hard to avoid seeing the ties.

With Powell heading to the United Nations, Rumsfeld revived a favorite idea, suggesting Bush reconsider an immediate strike against the suspected chemical weapons facility run by Ansar al-Islam and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi near Khurmal in northern Iraq. It was not the first time Cheney or Rumsfeld had brought the topic back up since the president rejected it the previous summer. But now Rumsfeld argued that Powell's testimony would make clear the Americans knew about the camp and Zarqawi and his compatriots would evacuate before they could be taken out.

"We should hit Khurmal during the speech," Rumsfeld said, "given that Colin will talk about it."

"That would wipe out my briefing," Powell protested. Besides, he added, "We're going to get Khurmal in a few weeks anyway."

All attention was on the diplomacy and the war plan. With Rumsfeld's Parade of Horribles in mind, Tommy Franks briefed the White House repeatedly on the plans to penetrate a Fortress Baghdad-that is, the urban warfare many feared at the end of the invasion. But there was little focus on what would come next.

When Rice finally managed to arrange a briefing for Bush on "rear-area security," as they called it, the president, knowingly or not, diminished its importance.

"This is something Condi has wanted to talk about," he said, opening the meeting.

Rice immediately detected the generals losing interest, once they realized it was her issue, not the president's.

"If he had done that to me, I would have resigned," Hadley told her afterward.

"Yeah, I know," she said. "But what is that going to solve?"

AFTER DAYS OF scrubbing, Powell flew to New York and took the chair in the Security Council chamber on February 5. He made sure George Tenet sat behind him to show the CIA had endorsed the evidence. Playing recordings of intercepted conversations and holding up a vial to show how little anthrax was needed to inflict mass casualties, Powell went through the case methodically. Bush watched on television in the dining room off the Oval Office, munching crackers and cheese and sipping Diet Coke. Rice joined him toward the end. They felt it went well. "He persuaded me," wrote Mary McGrory, the legendary liberal Washington Post columnist, "and I was as tough as France to convince."

Not quite, as it turned out. France remained unconvinced, as did Germany. Bush had been counting on his friend Vladimir Putin to support him, or at least not stand against him. But that reflected a profound misunderstanding of Putin and how Russia saw its place in the world. Putin wanted to be compensated for lost business with Iraq, a demand that went unmet. His shift to overt opposition came during a trip to Berlin and Paris, where he was treated like visiting royalty. Before leaving, Putin had said "we share the position of our American partners" in pushing Iraq to cooperate with inspectors and disarm. But then President Jacques Chirac met him at the Paris airport and escorted him down the Champs-elysees lined with French and Russian flags for a ceremony at the Arc de Triomphe. On February 10, Putin stood by Chirac's side and declared, "Russia is against the war." The next day he suggested Russia would use its veto at the Security Council to stop "an unreasonable use of force."

In the United States, the bitterness against the French was growing. A Florida bar owner dumped his entire stock of French wines into the street in protest. A North Carolina restaurateur renamed French fries on the menu "freedom fries." Congressional Republicans went one step further, relabeling not only fries at the U.S. Capitol cafeteria but also French toast, which became "freedom toast." More seriously, administration officials proposed blocking France and other countries that opposed them from obtaining postwar oil and reconstruction contracts. "France is clearly trying to destroy NATO in favor of the EU," Rumsfeld told Bush in a memo on February 18, discounting the European view that there were better ways of confronting Hussein than war. "France is trying to define its role in the world by its opposition to almost everything the US proposes." He went on to say that he, Rice, and Powell agreed they should move more NATO decision making away from the North Atlantic Council to the alliance's Defense Policy Committee, an arm that did not include the French. The feelings of animosity were mutual. "We need a lot of Powell and not much of Rumsfeld," Prime Minister Jose Mara Aznar of Spain told Bush during a visit to Crawford a few days later.

The diplomatic maneuvering was testing Cheney's patience. He summoned the French ambassador to his residence.

"Is France an ally or a foe?" Cheney asked pointedly.

An ally, the surprised ambassador answered.

"We have many reasons to conclude that you are not really a friend or an ally," Cheney said.

As far as Cheney was concerned, the UN track was a waste of time. Every passing day just increased the threat and gave Hussein more time to prepare. Finally, at one of his weekly lunches with the president in the dining room off the Oval Office, he snapped.

"Are you going to take care of this guy or not?" Cheney demanded impatiently.

It was a particularly impertinent question to ask the president, and Bush was so surprised that it would stick in his mind years later.

He told Cheney that he was not ready to move yet.

"Okay, Mr. President, it's your call," Cheney said. "That's why they pay you the big bucks."

He tempered the sharpness with a smile, but the point was made. Cheney was afraid Bush was going wobbly.

THE STRAIN WAS getting to Bush's father, watching on the sidelines from Texas. When the elder Bush noticed a column supporting his son by the writer Walt Harrington, he picked up a pen and wrote to him: "Walt, he does not want war. He does want Iraq to do what it has pledged to do. Have you ever seen a president face so many tough problems all at once? I haven't."

A few weeks after Bush and Cheney met with the commanders, the quiet tension between Rumsfeld and the uniformed military broke into the open as Eric Shinseki, the army chief of staff, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee on February 25.

"General Shinseki," asked Senator Carl Levin, the Democratic chairman, "could you give us some idea as to the magnitude of the Army's force requirement for an occupation of Iraq following a successful completion of the war?"

Shinseki ducked. "In specific numbers, I would have to rely on combatant commanders' exact requirements," he said.

Levin pressed. "How about a range?" he asked.

Then Shinseki offered a thought that had been swimming around his head for a while, although he had not offered it during his meeting with the president. "Something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers are probably, you know, a figure that would be required," he said.