Among the approaches he listed "above the line," meaning favored ideas, were "an accelerated draw-down of U.S. bases" that would reduce the number of outposts from fifty-five to somewhere between ten and fifteen by April 2007 and just five by July 2007. Other above-the-line ideas were to redefine the mission and "go minimalist"; to "begin modest withdrawals" and "start 'taking our hand off the bicycle seat' "; to withdraw American forces "from vulnerable positions" like cities and turn them into quick-reaction units that could swoop in when Iraqi security forces needed help; and to pull out most combat units, leaving behind enough special operations forces to target al-Qaeda, death squads, and Iranian elements. Among the "below the line" options deemed "less attractive" was a substantial troop increase.

Bush woke up that Monday morning at his Crawford ranch for the last day of the last campaign that would directly affect him. Rove briefed him on critical races. Of twenty recent polls in key districts or states, sixteen had moved in the Republican direction, and three were flat, Rove reported. While conventional wisdom had them losing the House and perhaps the Senate, Rove insisted they had a shot at holding both. He had written off ten or twelve House seats due to corruption scandals but figured Republicans could keep Democrats from capturing the fifteen seats they needed for a majority. Republicans, he added, should hang on to the Senate, albeit by a narrow margin. Bush agreed.

But this last campaign day would bring fresh indignity to the embattled president. He flew to Pensacola, Florida, as a favor to Jeb to boost the Republican candidate running to succeed him as governor, Charlie Crist. The schedule handed out on Air Force One listed Crist introducing the president at a rally. But Crist didn't show; he was too busy, he said, to be with the president of the United States. Instead, he campaigned in Jacksonville with John McCain. Crist was hardly the only Republican eager to keep his distance from a president with a 40 percent approval rating-just the only one impolitic enough to stand him up after inviting him. Bush was irked, and Rove downright angry. Rove "ripped the guy a new one" during a phone call from Air Force One, Joshua Bolten recalled, and Bush aides took to calling the governor "Chickenshit Charlie."

The rest of the president's day underscored his political situation. Rather than parachute into close races where he could make a difference, he made his last two stops in states where the elections were no longer in doubt, first Arkansas, where Asa Hutchinson was heading to a double-digit defeat in his bid for governor, and then Texas, where Governor Rick Perry needed no help cruising to an easy reelection. Bush's aides made sure Laura would be with him, knowing he was less anxious-and less testy-when she was around. At least the day ended with a raucous, pounding-music, shout-to-the-rafters rally that filled Reunion Arena in Dallas with thousands of Texans who welcomed their president with unbridled excitement. Feeling pumped up, Bush launched into a vigorous defense of his presidency and accused Democrats of opposing his national security policies without offering viable alternatives. He led the crowd in a call and repeat, telling them to ask Democrats, "What's your plan?" Bush added, "Harsh criticism is not a plan for victory. Second-guessing is not a strategy. We have a plan. Stick with us and the country will be better off."

But the truth was that Bush was second-guessing his own plan and had no intention of sticking with it. The next morning as the sun was rising just before 7:00 a.m., he left the ranch, his fifteen-vehicle motorcade passing the horses and goats and cows of the Texas countryside to the Crawford fire station, where he voted. Bush then boarded Air Force One bound for Washington and one of the most unpleasant days of his presidency. Arriving at the White House, he met in the Oval Office with Rumsfeld to complete the task he had assigned Cheney to start two days earlier.

"Mr. President, I've prepared this letter for you," Rumsfeld said, handing him his resignation.

Bush, his family instincts kicking in, asked after Rumsfeld's wife. "Is Joyce all right?"

"She's fine. And she's ready. She even typed the letter for me." He added, "Look, Joyce and I are tracking with you on this."

"This is hard for me," Bush said.

Watching election returns that night was no easier. All around the country, Republican incumbents went down. Several prominent members of the class of 1994, swept in by Newt Gingrich's revolution, surrendered seats, including Senators Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and Mike DeWine of Ohio as well as Representatives Charles Bass of New Hampshire and J. D. Hayworth of Arizona. Bush watched as Republicans lost seats held by scandal-tarred congressmen like Tom DeLay, Mark Foley, and Robert Ney. Worse, with the former navy secretary James Webb clutching a narrow lead in Virginia over Senator George Allen, it looked as if the Senate would fall as well. Bush called some of those who survived and then retreated to another room to smoke cigars with some of the other men.

THE NEXT DAY, Bush arrived in the Oval Office and soon found Joshua Bolten coming in to brief him. Every morning, Bolten made it a habit to begin the day by thanking Bush for the privilege of serving.

"Even today," he added on this morning.

"Especially today," Bush retorted lightly.

The president gathered himself and headed to the East Room for a postelection news conference, marching alone down the hall along the red carpet with cameras recording each step. He made a point of being lighthearted. "Why all the glum faces?" he asked. But he acknowledged the defeat and promised to work with Democrats on issues like a minimum wage hike, energy, and immigration. "Look, this was a close election," he said. "If you look at race by race, it was close. The cumulative effect, however, was not too close. It was a thumpin'."

Thumpin' or no, he refused to see it as a repudiation of his leadership, instead blaming congressional scandals, turnout efforts, and even the vagaries of ballot law. "I believe Iraq had a lot to do with the election," he said, "but I believe there were other factors as well."

Still, he tweaked his chief political strategist. Asked to update his reading contest with Rove, Bush said tartly, "I'm losing. I obviously was working harder in the campaign than he was."

Rove, sitting off to the side, forced a smile and looked down at his lap.

The real news of that morning's news conference, of course, was Bush's decision to push out Rumsfeld in favor of Gates. The country was stunned at the bombshell. On Capitol Hill, Republican allies were spitting mad, convinced that waiting until after the election had cost them their majorities. When Bolten called Scott Palmer, the Speaker's chief of staff, to give him a heads up, there was just angry silence on the other end of the phone. Bolten would have to drop off a presidential trip to Asia to stay home, absorb the heat, and calm the caucus. Out in the field, at least some generals and diplomats breathed relief. "We shed no tears in Kabul," noted the ambassador, Ronald Neumann. In the White House complex itself, a day that had begun "in a complete depression" was suddenly transformed, and there was "rejoicing and celebration among White House staff," as one National Security Council official recalled. "It was almost more important" than the election loss. "People were like, thank God, finally it is here, and why didn't he do this earlier? It was seen as liberating at the White House."

In the end, Rumsfeld was a contradiction; demanding yet not decisive, he ran roughshod over subordinates yet deferred to them on a failed strategy for too long. In his memoir years later, he rued not being more interventionist. Bush, though, was careful not to blame Rumsfeld. In his mind, Rumsfeld was only carrying out the direction he himself had set. After resisting pressure to get rid of Rumsfeld for years, Bush was determined to provide as graceful an exit as possible. "Don Rumsfeld has been a superb leader during a time of change," the president said. "Yet he also appreciates the value of bringing in a fresh perspective during a critical period in this war."

As Bush talked, he already knew what the audience did not, that he was thinking about sending more troops to Iraq rather than pulling them out as the newly elected Democrats (and even Republicans like Mitch McConnell) wanted him to do. The apostle of staying the course was laying the groundwork for a radical change of strategy. "Somehow it seeped in their conscious," he said of voters, "that my attitude was just simply 'stay the course.' 'Stay the course' means, let's get the job done, but it doesn't mean staying stuck on a strategy or tactics that may not be working. So perhaps I need to do a better job of explaining that we're constantly adjusting. And so there's fresh perspective-so what the American people hear today is we're constantly looking for fresh perspective."

Even now, having announced the decision to oust Rumsfeld, Bush misled the public about how long it had been in the works. Reporters reminded him of his interview just a week earlier when the president said Rumsfeld would be around until the end.

"Did you know at that point you would be making a change on Secretary Rumsfeld?" a reporter asked.

"No, I did not," Bush said. "And the reason I didn't know is because I hadn't visited with his replacement-potential replacement."

"But you knew he would be leaving, just not who would replace him?" the reporter followed up.

"No, I didn't know that at the time."

While it was true that Bush had not yet met with Gates at the point he talked with the wire service reporters, he did in fact know he would be moving Rumsfeld out by that point; he had told Cheney just the day before. He did not disclose that to the reporters during either the preelection interview or the postelection news conference. Instead, he tried to parse the question by rationalizing that no decision could be made until he had his final conversation with Rumsfeld and offered the job to Gates.

Richard Keil, the reporter who had gone running with Bush on the morning of September 11, reminded the president that in the same interview he had also said Cheney would be around until the end of the administration.

"Does he still have your complete confidence?" Keil asked.

"Yes, he does," Bush said. "The campaign is over. Yes, he does."

"And he'll be here for the remainder of your term?"

"Yes, he will."

PART FIVE.

29.

"The elephants finally threw up on the table"

He had lost Congress, he was at risk of losing the war, and now President Bush was clenching his jaw so hard his teeth were hurting. The uncertainty of the path ahead was gnawing at him, and as he labored to maintain presidential demeanor amid the adversity, he kept grinding his teeth against each other to the point of pain. "I'm just thinking about what I'm going to do in Iraq, and I'm grinding my teeth," he told Dan Bartlett.

Bush knew what many wanted him to do-bring troops home. The newly elected Democratic Congress, the liberal pundits, the generals, some of his father's advisers, and even some Republican allies, all thought it was time to begin withdrawing. In those dark days following the elections, Bush felt as if he were barely holding it all together. "He really felt strongly that it was his sheer force of will that was holding the line between winning and losing the war," recalled Karen Hughes, "that everybody else was ready to abandon it, and that only his force of will was keeping us there and that if he had backed off in any way that it could have ended very differently."

One of the few backing him up was Vice President Cheney, who seemed impervious to outside pressure. But the relationship between president and vice president had grown strained. Bush had cut Cheney out of weeks of deliberations about what to do about Donald Rumsfeld, bringing him in only once the decision had been made. As Bush began reconsidering the transition-and-withdraw strategy implemented by Rumsfeld for three years, he had put Stephen Hadley in charge of reviewing their choices, propelled largely by the young aides Meghan O'Sullivan, Brett McGurk, and Peter Feaver.

With Rumsfeld on the way out, Cheney began to speak up. When Bush invited Cheney, Hadley, and Condoleezza Rice to come upstairs to the residence on November 9, a couple of days after the election, to talk about what to do next, the vice president urged them not to waver. He expressed concern that the election results would convince Iraqis that Americans had lost their will. Bush was on the same wavelength. Even from Baghdad, the change in tone was apparent. On the first videoconference after the election, George Casey, the general advocating a drawdown, was struck by the president's attitude toward him. "He was noticeably colder," Casey recalled.

Hadley gathered advisers in his office two days later to consider how to proceed. From the start, lines were forming. Rice, influenced by two advisers, Philip Zelikow and David Satterfield, argued they could not stop a civil war and should pull back, focusing on a more limited mission of striking al-Qaeda but otherwise letting Iraqi forces deal with sectarian violence and deploying American troops only to stop widespread massacres like the one at Srebrenica during the Bosnian War in 1995.

"It should not take a large force to do that," Rice said. "We find the lower power brokers and deter them, buy them off, cajole. The red line is no mass killings."

Hadley, normally deferential to Rice, pushed back. "So we've gone from clear, hold, build to buy, deter, cajole?" he asked. "That's moving the goal posts."

O'Sullivan argued for an escalation of troops, and for the first time it sounded as if Hadley agreed.

Zelikow pointed out what a major gamble that would be.

"We'd be betting the whole house on it," he said.

"Yeah," Hadley agreed, "the house and the whole farm."

"The house, the whole farm, and the ranch," Rice added pointedly.

Hadley understood the risks, having just returned from a fact-finding mission to Iraq. He was profoundly disturbed about Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who said many of the right things but "is either ignorant of what is going on, misrepresenting his intentions," or "his capabilities are not yet sufficient to turn his good intentions into action," Hadley wrote in a classified memo to Bush. Even if they sent more troops, could they trust their erstwhile partner?

The new order on Capitol Hill would also be an obstacle, and Bush got a vivid taste of it on the evening of November 13. Hosting a reception for new members of Congress, the president sought out James Webb, the Democrat whose victory in Virginia had put his party over the top in the Senate. Bush had read about Webb's emotionally powerful criticism of the Iraq War, born in part out of conversations with a son serving in the marines there. The president wanted to reach out to Webb and praise his son's service. But Webb avoided Bush during the reception in the State Dining Room and refused to go through the receiving line to have his picture taken with the president.

"How's your boy?" Bush asked when he found Webb.

"I'd like to get them out of Iraq, Mr. President," Webb responded brusquely.

"That's not what I asked you," Bush responded. "How's your boy?"

"That's between me and my boy, Mr. President," Webb replied coldly.

IN THE DAYS after the thumpin', Karl Rove pored over the numbers like a forensic scientist, sifting them for evidence that the election was not a repudiation of the president, no matter what everyone else thought. Anyone who wandered into his windowless West Wing office with four Abraham Lincoln portraits would get the riff. "Get me the one-pager!" he would cry out to an aide.

The one-pager, a single sheet of paper filled with a stream of numbers, made the case that Bush was not at fault. Of the twenty-eight House seats Republicans lost, ten were due to individual scandals, Rove concluded. Another six were lost because incumbents did not recognize and react to the threat quickly enough. That left twelve other lost seats, fewer than the fifteen that Democrats needed to capture the House. So without corruption and complacency, Rove argued, Republicans could have kept control despite Bush's troubles and the war. "The Republican philosophy is alive and well and likely to reemerge in the majority in 2008," Rove declared.

Rove had a point. Anyone who thought 2006 represented a lasting shift in American political philosophy was overreading the results, and it was true that corruption scandals had taken a toll. Still, disenchantment with Bush and the war was hardly a minor issue. Exit polls found that 36 percent of those casting ballots said they were voting to oppose Bush, compared with just 22 percent who were voting to support him, a differential that clearly hurt Republican incumbents in close races. Overall, 57 percent of the voting public disapproved of Bush's handling of his job. Those numbers were almost identical with those on Iraq, with 56 percent disapproving of the war and 55 percent favoring withdrawal of some or all troops.

One unlikely source of advice for Bush following the midterm debacle was his predecessor. In the weeks after the election, Bush found himself talking with Bill Clinton about the nature of partisanship in Washington and the opportunities of the presidency. An unlikely friendship was developing. "He would call every now and then," Clinton said later. "We would talk. I just made it a project. I wanted to figure him out and get to know him." In their talks after the midterm elections, Bush complained that no matter how much he wanted to work with the other party, the structural forces of Washington tore them apart-the cable shout-a-thons that encouraged conflict, the congressional leadership organizations that enforced party-line discipline, the rapid-response units that churned out acid e-mails long after campaign season. The mere discussion of bipartisan collaboration, Bush lamented, was seen as a betrayal of principle. Not that Bush was above partisanship. He had just come off a campaign where he had suggested the other party opposed going after terrorists. But now he faced a Congress of another party, much as Clinton had after the midterm elections of 1994.

Bush had no intention of compromising with Democrats on Iraq. With the election over, he ordered Hadley to merge the White House review with those at the Pentagon and State Department. Hadley put his deputy, J. D. Crouch, in charge. Crouch convened hours-long meetings in a conference room named for Cordell Hull in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the White House. The discussion focused at first not on troop levels but on the broader environment. They debated whether Americans were material or immaterial to the fighting going on; in other words, could they really influence the situation, and if so, how? Should they focus on protecting the civilian population, as Lieutenant General David Petraeus described in his new counterinsurgency manual, rather than just killing the enemy and retreating at night to large bases? Everyone agreed that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki needed to commit to going after Shia militias, not just Sunni insurgents.

A few days into the review, Hadley dropped by to make clear that whatever they produced, one option had to be a surge of additional troops. Everyone understood this to be where Bush was headed. But other options were debated as well. Zelikow and Satterfield had developed the "ring around the fire" approach that Rice had articulated-pull American troops out of Baghdad while Iraqi forces dealt with the sectarian violence and intervene only to stop mass slaughter. Cheney's national security adviser, John Hannah, presented a paper suggesting the United States had been too eager to woo the disgruntled Sunni minority and perhaps it was better to invest in the Shia and Kurds, a scenario dubbed the "bet on Shiite" approach or the "80 percent solution" after their combined proportion of the population. Hannah had not shown the paper to Cheney but assumed he would agree.

Either way, the military hierarchy, influenced by John Abizaid and George Casey, strongly resisted more troops, viewing it as just worsening the problem. Lieutenant General Douglas Lute, representing the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Crouch's meetings, presented a memo arguing for an accelerated transition and withdrawal, essentially doubling down on the current approach. Crouch, remembering the William Luti study, asked Lute if the military could hypothetically add five brigades. Lute argued no.

During a break, Brett McGurk asked Lute if it was truly impossible.

"You could do it," he replied. "You just won't have an American army left. So you know, it's kind of up to you."

BUSH GATHERED HIS national security team at 5:00 p.m. on November 26, the Sunday after Thanksgiving. He picked the Solarium, a hideaway on the third floor of the White House residence with windows on three sides, olive walls, a magnificent view of the Washington Monument, and a cozier feeling than many rooms in the aging mansion. It had seen its share of history, most famously Dwight Eisenhower's sessions rethinking the Cold War. John F. Kennedy used it as a schoolroom for his daughter, Caroline. Richard Nixon told his family in that room that he would resign the presidency. Ronald Reagan recuperated from his attempted assassination there. Bill Clinton used it to prepare for grand jury testimony in the Monica Lewinsky case. Bush, on the other hand, had rarely used it. Rice, who spent more time in the residence than probably any other adviser, had never seen it before. But Bush hoped to shake things up.

The meeting opened with a briefing by Crouch, who presented a dozen or so slides outlining his team's assessment of where things stood in Iraq. Perhaps the most important was "Key Assumptions," summarizing how the staff had revisited its previous theories to discover that they were no longer true, and some maybe never had been. In the past, the chart read, the White House believed that "political progress will help defuse the insurgency." Now it concluded that "political and economic progress are unlikely absent a basic level of security." In the past, the White House assumed the "majority of Iraqis will support the Coalition and Iraqi efforts to build a democratic state." Now, it read, Iraqis were "increasingly disillusioned with Coalition efforts." The chart indicated the White House wrongly assumed that dialogue with insurgent groups would reduce violence, that other countries in the region had a strategic interest in a stable Iraq, and that Iraqi security forces were gaining strength. Instead, dialogue had not worked, Arab states had not fully supported the Iraqi government, and many Iraqi forces were "not yet ready to handle" the security threat. There on a single page was a revolution in thinking by the Bush team and a remarkable turnaround for a president loath to admit mistakes. Now the question was what to do with the new assumptions.

O'Sullivan had been assigned to prepare the part of the briefing titled "Emerging Consensus" and thought it was "the hardest and worst memo I ever wrote" because, as she told Hadley, "there is no emerging consensus." In the Solarium that evening, Crouch took what she had prepared and said that changing the dynamics on the ground in Iraq "may take additional forces." But the lack of consensus quickly became apparent. After all of their clashes over the years, Rice and Donald Rumsfeld, who was a lame duck pending Robert Gates's confirmation hearings, found themselves on the same side opposing a surge, although they advocated different alternatives.

As he had all along, Rumsfeld maintained it would be up to the Iraqis to solve the problem. "The Iraqis need to pull up their socks," he said, a phrase he repeated at least three times by another participant's count. Hedging his bets, Rumsfeld allowed that if more forces were needed temporarily, then the president should do that. But he argued that more forces by themselves were not going to help unless they were doing something concrete. Otherwise, he said, "you are just sending more targets over there."

For her part, Rice again advanced the pullback strategy developed by Zelikow and Satterfield and challenged the notion of American forces providing population security. "So are we now responsible for the security of the Iraqi population or is that the job of their government?" she asked.

The conversation lasted roughly two hours-more informal yet more intense than a Situation Room meeting. Hadley argued something had to be done to stop the violence, while General Peter Pace, the Joint Chiefs chairman, expressed skepticism that the military could pull off what was being asked. Bush let the debate play out, interjecting questions but not tipping his hand. "That meeting is where the elephants finally threw up on the table," Crouch said later. "In other words, they finally expressed their views in front of the president. Everybody knew this was the moment-speak now or forever hold your peace."

Bush made no decision, and Crouch and O'Sullivan left deeply discouraged. "I sort of walked out of that meeting a little bit with my tail between my legs, because it seemed like a morass of contrary views," Crouch said. O'Sullivan thought the meeting "went horrendously" and worried no real change would result. Playing it over in her mind, she decided to stop at a grocery store on the way home. When she made it into the parking lot, her phone rang. It was Dan Bartlett, who wanted to take her temperature.

"How do you think the meeting went?" he asked.

"It is an impending disaster," she said. "Things are being seriously misrepresented to the president."

The two talked for forty-five minutes while the heater in her car ran. She explained they had analyzed a surge and believed it could work. All the alternatives, she said, were much worse, and their current path was catastrophic. When they finally hung up, O'Sullivan discovered her car battery had died.

BUSH KNEW no new strategy would work unless the Iraqis stepped up, and he flew to Amman, Jordan, to meet with Nouri al-Maliki. The meeting was already awkward because Hadley's memo disparaging Maliki had shown up in the New York Times, in what many in the White House assumed was a Pentagon leak designed to deflect blame for the deteriorating situation.

Maliki surprised Bush with his own plan for salvaging the war, handing him a PowerPoint document with the seal of the Iraqi government on the cover. Maliki proposed adding four more Iraqi brigades to Baghdad while American troops moved out of the city. He would take charge of reimposing security on the capital. Bush instantly deemed the idea impractical because Iraqi security forces were not up to the task, but he was impressed by the desire to lead.

Bush asked to see Maliki alone, and the two slipped away with their translators.

"The political pressure to abandon Iraq is enormous," Bush told him. "But I am willing to resist that pressure if you are willing to make the hard choices."

For the first time, Bush embraced a surge. "I'm willing to commit tens of thousands of additional American troops to help you retake Baghdad. But you need to give me certain assurances."

Maliki had to promise that Iraqi forces would be evenhanded, challenging Shia as well as Sunni militants, including the powerful Moqtada al-Sadr. Maliki also had to stop interfering with American military operations. Maliki agreed. It was a major turning point. As Bush boarded Air Force One for the flight home, he had all but decided that he would send more troops. Now he had to figure out how to bring along the rest of his government.

On December 6, Bush and Cheney hosted the Iraq Study Group, a bipartisan collection of elder statesmen assigned by Congress to recommend a way forward in the war. It was headed by James Baker, one of the prime architects of the first Bush presidency and the operative who helped ensure the ascension of the second, and Lee Hamilton, the former Democratic congressman and 9/11 commission vice chairman. "The situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating," read the first line of the group's report. The report outlined a path to what Hamilton would later call "a responsible exit." It recommended opening a new dialogue with Iran and Syria, intensifying Middle East peace efforts, and, most critically, withdrawing all combat forces from Iraq by the first quarter of 2008. In essence, the study group had picked up the Rumsfeld-Abizaid-Casey plan for transferring responsibility to the Iraqis.

"We're not giving you this report to vex you or embarrass you," the former senator Alan Simpson, Cheney's close friend who served on the panel, told the president. These were serious recommendations, and Simpson said he hoped Bush would look at them.

"Oh, I will," Bush said.

Simpson turned to Cheney. "Now you read this, Richard Bruce," Simpson said.

"I will," Cheney said.

Cheney, typically, held his own counsel, although no one in the room thought he agreed with the report. Bush, on the other hand, asked questions and seemed to listen. "While I knew he was not entirely sympathetic with some of the things we were saying," recalled Leon Panetta, a Democratic member who would go on to serve as CIA director and defense secretary after Bush left office, "I felt in the least, especially considering where the war was at that point, that he would think pretty seriously about what we had to say."

For all his politeness, though, Bush had already moved well beyond what the study group was recommending, and Cheney dismissed the report, saying it "was not a strategy for winning the war." Baker tried to help, privately urging Bush aides to read this page of the report, where the panel said in passing that it could "support a short-term redeployment or surge of American combat forces to stabilize Baghdad" on the way to the early 2008 withdrawal.

The next morning, December 7, Bush was to see Tony Blair and then jointly address reporters. But when Cheney saw the text of the president's opening remarks, he noticed the word "victory" had been taken out of an earlier draft.

"Mr. President, you can't refuse to talk about winning," he said. "That will be a huge signal that you no longer believe in victory."

Bush agreed and used the word "victory" at the news conference. He tried to finesse the Iraq Study Group report, calling it "worthy of serious study" and insisting he too wanted troops to come home even if he did not accept the study group's timetable. "I've always said we'd like our troops out as fast as possible," he said.

But he bristled when a reporter asked if he was "still in denial about how bad things are in Iraq."

He glared at the reporter. "It's bad in Iraq," he said sharply. "Does that help?"

At 4:00 that afternoon, Cheney and Rice debated Iraq strategy at a national security meeting without Bush. Cheney argued that the outcome mattered too much to simply withdraw and let Iraqis fight among themselves. But Rice remained opposed to a troop buildup. "I was really skeptical of whether a surge was really going to work," she explained later. "If we were going to use the same old strategies, we were just going to get more people killed."

The depth of Bush's political problems became clearer that evening as a Republican senator rose on the floor without warning to deliver an anguished speech breaking with the White House over the war. Senator Gordon Smith of Oregon, a quiet, self-effacing moderate who had "tried to be a good soldier," had grown disaffected. He had read John Keegan's history of World War I and was haunted by its lessons. Next he read Fiasco, the history of the first years of the Iraq War by Thomas E. Ricks. That winter morning, he woke up, turned on the news, and saw reports of more American soldiers killed in Iraq.

"I for one am at the end of my rope when it comes to supporting a policy that has our soldiers patrolling the same streets in the same way and being blown up by the same bombs day after day," Smith said on the floor. "That is absurd. It may even be criminal. I cannot support that anymore." A fellow Republican senator called it "a tipping point"-exactly what Bush feared. Republican support for Bush and the war was fraying.

WHEN CHENEY SHOWED UP for an Iraq meeting the next day, December 8, he was disturbed to see that instead of presenting Bush with a crisp choice, the formal agenda papered over the differences he had with Rice. But the real tension during that meeting came between Bush and the woman who was supplanting Cheney as his most influential adviser. Rice made the case that any additional commitment by the United States might be pointless unless Iraqi leaders stepped up.

If they did not want to secure their own population, she argued, why should the United States?