Bush grew testy. "So what's your plan, Condi?" he snapped. "We'll just let them kill each other, and we'll stand by and try to pick up the pieces?"

Rice was offended at the suggestion she was less committed to winning. "No, Mr. President," she shot back. "We just can't win by putting our forces in the middle of their blood feud. If they want to have a civil war we're going to have to let them."

Others in the room were stunned at the confrontation. In Bush's nearly six years in office, they had never seen Bush and Rice bark at each other. The heated exchange revealed just how deeply the war had scarred all of them. Bush seemed desperate for a Hail Mary pass to salvage a deteriorating situation, while Rice seemed to despair that it was too late.

Still angry, Rice followed Bush back to the Oval Office afterward.

"You know that's not what I mean," she told him. "No one has been more committed to winning in Iraq than I have."

Bush had cooled down. "I know, I know," he said softly.

Rice noticed what she thought was profound pain on his face. The war was eating him up inside. She backed off.

Rice was not alone in her skepticism. The same day, Rumsfeld, still a caretaker until Robert Gates was sworn in, sent Bush and Cheney a proposal developed by senior Pentagon generals to "accelerate the transition"-exactly the opposite of where the president was heading. The plan built on the option Rumsfeld had presented in his memo the day before resigning, although the generals' timetable was not as rapid. The number of American bases would be drawn down from fifty-five to thirty-seven by December 2007 and as few as twenty in 2008. Iraqis would assume control of security in all eighteen provinces by November 2007, and the American military mission would "formally conclude" by December 2007. "No increase in the level of U.S. forces can substitute for successful diplomacy in the region and in Iraq in getting the Iraqi Government to act," the memo said.

With the military establishment opposed, Bush turned to a dissident faction that had been urging a more robust troop presence. That weekend, military scholars at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) led by Frederick W. Kagan, a former West Point professor, conducted a multiday exercise to draft a plan to bolster American forces in Iraq, producing a forty-five-page paper urging that seven more army brigades and marine regiments be sent. General Jack Keane, the retired army vice chairman, then came to the White House on December 11 to make the case.

Keane was one of five military experts to brief Bush and Cheney that afternoon, replaying the Camp David summit, but this time the advocates for change were more determined to get through. Eliot Cohen, who had left Camp David in June kicking himself for not being blunter, did not hold back this time. Reprising arguments from his book Supreme Command, which the president had read, Cohen rebutted Bush's Lyndon Johnson analogy, saying the failure in Vietnam was not micromanagement but a failure to force a serious strategic debate. And he argued, it was time to replace his commander.

"One of the biggest problems is leadership," Cohen told Bush. "I have the greatest respect for General Casey but you need different leadership."

Bush was already thinking about that. "So who would you put in?" he asked.

"Petraeus," Cohen said.

Keane agreed, and he was equally direct. "Mr. President, to my mind, this is a major crisis," he said. "Time is running out." The solution, he argued, was a counterinsurgency approach aimed at protecting the population, which required more combat units.

But two other retired generals at the meeting, Barry McCaffrey and Wayne Downing, opposed more troops. "This is a fool's errand," McCaffrey said. Downing advocated a more aggressive use of special operations forces. Stephen Biddle, a scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations, went last and largely sided with Keane.

Biddle was struck by how grim the whole affair was, funereal even. While the experts talked, a phalanx of White House aides lined up behind them like a silent Greek chorus. Bush, he thought, seemed on the verge of clinical depression. "It was clear that Bush thought he was looking at a war he was about to go on the historical record as losing," Biddle recalled later. "He was clearly not happy. Everything suggested weight. His body looked like it felt heavy to him. He didn't smile. The tone was very somber. No joking around. No light-hearted anything."

Afterward, Keane and Kagan gave a private briefing to Cheney, outlining how a surge could work. They had a receptive audience. With his old friend Rumsfeld all but out the door, Cheney was becoming less inhibited about supporting a change in strategy, but he would not be the front man. That would be Keane, who was leading a revolt against the military hierarchy. The retired general had been drumming up support inside the administration and working clandestinely with officers who agreed with him, bypassing George Casey to consult with his deputy, Lieutenant General Ray Odierno, who wanted more forces. Meghan O'Sullivan likewise had been quietly consulting with David Petraeus, everyone's choice to succeed Casey. Keane's maneuvering was driving the military hierarchy crazy. "How is it that Jack Keane's getting in to see the vice president and we're not?" General Peter J. Schoomaker, the army chief of staff, complained to a fellow four-star officer. John Abizaid was equally aggravated. "I guess you have to resign from the military and go work for AEI if you are going to give military advice to the president," he told visiting civilians in Iraq.

Keane's support was critical not because it drove the internal process but because it gave space for Bush to make the strategy change he was already inclined to make. If Bush overrode his commanders and Joint Chiefs, he had to have someone say this reflected good military judgment, not political second-guessing. He could hardly rebuff men with stars on their shoulders for the advice of thirtysomething aides like O'Sullivan with her Oxford doctorate and Brett McGurk with his Columbia law degree, neither of whom had served a day in uniform. "Keane is great as a validator," Hadley said.

But Bush wanted to avoid a confrontation with military leaders if he could help it. He knew that if military leaders testified before Congress opposing the new strategy, what little political support he still had would vanish. "If senior generals had resigned in protest over the surge, that might have been the straw that broke the camel's back in Congress," Karl Rove concluded. "Steve Hadley," recalled William Luti, "kept saying that the surge policy should come from the military." But Casey was "adamantly opposed" to adding more than two additional brigades and told Bush so by videoconference on December 12.

Isolated from his generals and even his closest adviser, Bush found support in an unlikely quarter. John McCain, a staunch supporter of the war and an equally strong critic of the way it was being run, sent Bush a private three-page letter the same day bluntly warning him that he would lose the war without more forces. McCain argued that the administration's approach had it backward: instead of hoping a political settlement would reduce violence, the administration should establish security to create space for political reconciliation. McCain cited Kagan's AEI study. "Without a basic level of security," he wrote, "there will be no political solution, and our mission will fail."

Dan Bartlett noticed how tense Bush was and proposed delaying the announcement of a new strategy.

The president looked relieved. Could they do that?

"We will fade it," Bartlett said, meaning take the heat. "Don't worry."

Even as he was moving toward a troop surge, Bush was entertaining his own doubts. At Henry Kissinger's suggestion, he had been reading A Savage War of Peace, Alistair Horne's history of the war in Algeria, and the lesson he took away was that more people actually died after the French withdrew. But when it came to Iraq, perhaps the cause was hopeless. Perhaps Rice was right, and he would be throwing more lives away in a losing cause. On separate occasions, he asked both Hadley and O'Sullivan if the war was lost and hope was gone.

"Hadley, do you think the surge can succeed?" he asked one day.

"Mr. President, I do," Hadley replied.

"Well, that is good," Bush said. "Because if you ever think it can't, you come and tell me. Because as long as we think we can succeed, I am in. But if we ever think we cannot succeed, I can't look the mothers of our men and women in uniform in the eye and keep sending them into battle."

30.

"Everybody knew this was the last bullet in the chamber"

As their motorcade crossed the Potomac River, President Bush and Vice President Cheney were on the same page. Increasingly convinced of the need for a surge and strategy change, Bush was determined to bring along the generals, and he needed Cheney to play his wingman.

The two were headed to the Pentagon to meet with the top officers in their supersecret conference center known as the Tank on December 13, going to their turf to show respect. Sitting in the car on the way, Bush and Cheney agreed to a good-cop, bad-cop routine, with the vice president asking tough, pointed questions, while the president held back to avoid chilling the discussion. "The president didn't want to come in with a point of view where the chiefs would say, well, he has already made up his mind," J. D. Crouch remembered. As Dan Bartlett put it, "Cheney was supposed to be the heavy."

General Peter Pace opened the discussion with recommendations from the chiefs to shift to a more advisory and training role, in effect accelerating the current transition strategy.

"The question is when do you shift to advising," the president said. "You don't want to do it too early."

Pace suggested Iraqi troops would be up to the test. "We need to get the Iraqi Security Forces in charge," he said.

As planned, Cheney jumped in, uncharacteristically engaging in debate in front of a group. "We're betting the farm on Iraqi Security Forces," he said. "Wouldn't it be better to make a major push with our forces to get it done?" He offered a grim picture of a destabilizing region if America lost in Iraq. "Suddenly it will be very dangerous to be a friend of the United States. There's an awful lot riding on this."

The case against the surge was made by General Peter Schoomaker, who came of age as part of the daring but failed mission to rescue hostages in Iran in 1980 and then became part of the new special operations forces created in the aftermath, serving in Grenada, Panama, Iraq, and Haiti. He had been lured back from retirement in 2003, in part by Cheney, to take over from Eric Shinseki as army chief of staff and had presided over long, multiple deployments that taxed his troops. As with the other chiefs, his statutory responsibility was the health of the force rather than any operational involvement in Iraq.

Schoomaker argued a surge would not bring down violence, noting that there had been several temporary troop buildups over the years, usually in advance of Iraqi elections in anticipation of possible trouble, without changing the overall arc of violence. In what Bush took to be a reference to the new Democratic Congress, the general seemed to suggest the political system would not tolerate a months-long buildup.

"I don't think that you have the time to surge and generate enough forces for this thing to continue to go," Schoomaker told the president.

"I am the president," Bush shot back. "And I've got the time."

Schoomaker's job was to provide military counsel. "Thanks very much for the political advice," Bush said sharply, "but I will take care of the politics. That is my job."

Undeterred, Schoomaker said a surge of five brigades would actually affect fifteen brigades-five in Iraq whose tours would have to be extended, another five whose rotation would have to be accelerated to increase the number of troops in the theater, and another five to move up the queue to backfill. "My concerns were practical ones of force generation and sustainment at that particular point in time," he recalled later.

To Bush, he put it bluntly. "We're concerned we're going to break the army," the general said.

Bush, who was supposed to let Cheney do the debating, could not help himself. He leaned forward. "Let me tell you what's going to break the army," he said. "What's going to break the army is a defeat like we had in Vietnam that broke the army for a generation."

The generals took the point. But they worried that committing everything to Iraq would leave little in case of a flare-up elsewhere in the world.

Again, Bush turned the argument around: better to fight the war America was already in than worry about a war that had not actually happened.

To take the sting out of the encounter, Bush told the generals that he planned to increase the overall size of the armed forces, which should alleviate the pressure, and send more civilians to Iraq, a longtime sore point for the military. But the generals walked out unconvinced. Indeed, Schoomaker took his dissent public the next day, December 14, during testimony before a congressionally chartered commission, warning that "we will break" the military with the current pace of war-zone rotations. Afterward, he told reporters that "we should not surge without a purpose and that purpose should be measurable and get us something."

Two days after the Tank meeting, Bush and Cheney returned to the Pentagon for a full honor review marking Rumsfeld's departure. Bush was gracious, but Cheney heaped praise on his former boss in a way that seemed to hint at loss. Rumsfeld, he said, was "a man of rectitude" and "the very ideal of a public servant," a man who "emanates loyalty, integrity, and above all love for this country and a devotion to its cause." In a comment some took as a subtle rebuke of Bush's decision to oust Rumsfeld, Cheney concluded, "I believe the record speaks for itself: Don Rumsfeld is the finest secretary of defense this nation has ever had."

To win over the Joint Chiefs, Bush decided to publicly signal his willingness to expand the overall size of the military. On December 19, he summoned reporters from the Washington Post to the Oval Office to announce that he would support a force increase. "We need to reset our military," he told them. "There's no question the military has been used a lot." The move was a significant reversal after years of denying the need for more men and women in uniform. When John Kerry proposed adding forty thousand to the armed forces during the 2004 campaign, the Bush administration had dismissed him. As late as June 2006, the administration argued that better technology and tactics meant no additional capacity was needed. But now Bush authorized Robert Gates to explore adding seventy thousand soldiers and marines.

As he sat with the reporters in the Oval Office that day, Bush hinted that a surge was on the way, arguing that the midterm election was a mandate not to leave Iraq but to find a way to succeed. Still, he was ready to concede for the first time what everyone else had for a while: the war effort was failing. Just two months after declaring that "absolutely, we're winning" in Iraq, Bush adopted a formulation Peter Pace had used at a congressional hearing. "We're not winning, we're not losing," Bush said. Asked about his previous statement, Bush recast it as a prediction, not an assessment. "Yes, that was an indication of my belief that we're going to win," he said.

Robert Gates had just been sworn in as defense secretary, and John Abizaid announced his retirement. George Casey would be on the way out soon too, with David Petraeus on track to be his successor. Within weeks, the president who had boasted of deferring to the military had swept aside the leaders of the war effort. As with Rumsfeld, Bush chose not to blame Abizaid or Casey. He offered Abizaid the position of national intelligence director, only to be turned down. As for Casey, Bush told Gates to take care of him. He would soon be named army chief of staff.

Casey was still fighting the surge, certain that it was a mistake. Recognizing that Bush was determined to add troops, Casey recommended just two brigades be sent, with a third stationed in Kuwait in case it was needed and two others kept on deck in the United States. He convinced Gates when the new defense secretary made his first trip to Iraq since taking office. On the flight back, Gates worked on a recommendation for two brigades. "Our commanders do not want more additional force than these approximately 10,000," he wrote in talking points for a meeting with Bush. "It would be difficult to resource a more aggressive U.S. approach due to the stresses and the strains on the force," and forcing more on a reluctant Iraqi government "would undermine much of what we have accomplished over the past two years."

When Jack Keane heard about the mini-surge plan, he was alarmed and alerted John Hannah, the vice president's national security adviser. Meghan O'Sullivan was equally disturbed and reached out to Petraeus to see if he thought he could do what needed to be done with two brigades; Petraeus made clear he needed as much force as she could deliver. Petraeus, although still not publicly announced to take over in Iraq, called Pace to protest. "Look, Chairman, this is sort of awkward, but I can't go over there if it's two plus three," he said. "Don't bother. You might want to think about a different commander."

Bush headed to Crawford for Christmas, then invited the national security team to come down for a critical meeting on Iraq. Condoleezza Rice arrived the afternoon of December 27, a day early, to visit alone with the president. She found him on the porch of the ranch house and sat down to talk.

She had come to terms with what she knew would be Bush's decision and even convinced herself to support it after calling Ray Odierno in Baghdad and listening to him describe how the extra troops would be married to strategy changes.

"You're going to do it, and it's the right thing to do," she told Bush. "I'm there and I'll do everything I can to support it. But, Mr. President, this is your last card. It had better work."

She got up and walked away.

The next day, the rest of the team arrived. Gates presented the two-brigade mini-surge option advanced by Casey, but Bush shut it down quickly.

"No, I am going to commit five brigades," he said. "If I go to the American people and say I am going to commit two and then more if I need it, what I am really telling them is I don't know what I am doing."

What's more, making the deployment of each additional brigade a separate decision would make each one "another Washington Post debate," reopening the fight again and again, as J. D. Crouch put it. If Bush was going to take the heat for an unpopular decision, better to do it all at once. He also decided to send a couple of battalions of marines to Anbar Province, where Sunni leaders alienated by al-Qaeda were beginning to switch sides. Hadley and Crouch had argued for the Anbar deployment as well as reinforcements for Baghdad on the theory that it would be a powerful statement to take back an area deemed lost to the enemy.

So there was a plan. It had taken months, while more blood was spilled. But Bush and Cheney believed they had a chance to turn the situation around. And none too soon. The year ended with two macabre milestones out of Iraq. On December 30, Saddam Hussein was executed in a chaotic scene captured on cell phone video, with Iraqis in the room taunting him in his last moments of life. "Go to hell," one yelled, while others chanted the name of Moqtada al-Sadr before Hussein's neck was snapped by a hangman's noose. A day later, New Year's Eve, the American casualty toll hit three thousand.

BUSH OPENED 2007 preparing for the most explosive move of his presidency. Despite his decision at Crawford, the speech announcing the surge included brackets where the number of new forces would be inserted. Surge advocates were frustrated that the two-brigade option still seemed to be alive. "We've decided to be a bear," Crouch protested to Stephen Hadley. "So let's be a grizzly bear."

But George Casey seemed to have enlisted Nouri al-Maliki and passed word to Washington that the Iraqi leader would only accept two brigades. When Hadley brought the news to Bush on January 4, shortly before a secure videoconference with Maliki, the president snapped.

"Enough! Does the guy want to win or not?" he demanded. Aides were not sure whether he meant Casey or Maliki. "I'm building a plan to win this thing. We're not going to short-change it. Tell him that."

"You might want to tell Maliki that," Hadley offered.

Bush headed out the door toward the Situation Room. "I'm about to," he said. "So let's go."

Mumbling to himself while walking down the corridor, Bush seemed exasperated. "If we're not there to win, why are we there?" he asked out loud.

On the videoconference, Bush asked that both sides clear the room so that he could have a private confrontation with Maliki.

"I'll put my neck out if you put your neck out," Bush told him.

Maliki agreed.

The speechwriters were told to take out the brackets and insert five army brigades for Baghdad plus two marine battalions for Anbar Province. It was the final purge of the old strategy as well as the beginning of a new mentoring relationship between Bush and Maliki. For months to come, Bush would make a point of talking with Maliki every week, nudging him into demonstrating more leadership.

The next morning, Bush made his nomination of Petraeus official. At five feet nine and 150 pounds, Petraeus was surprisingly slight for such a commanding figure. He was legendarily driven, survived a bullet to the chest during a training exercise, and embodied the modern ethos of scholar-soldier. He had led a division in the invasion of Iraq and later returned to train Iraqi troops. He stirred resentment in the Pentagon for his high profile; when Newsweek put him on the cover with the headline "Can This Man Save Iraq?" Donald Rumsfeld "went ballistic" on a conference call and snapped, "It is not for David Petraeus to save Iraq." But Petraeus saw from the start what Rumsfeld and others had not. "Tell me how this ends," he remarked to Rick Atkinson, a journalist traveling with him during the original invasion in 2003, a comment that came to define the war: Now it would be up to him to figure that out.

For Bush, there was now the matter of the speech announcing the surge. His advisers debated the best venue. There was talk of the Map Room, but Laura Bush noticed a grandfather clock in the background and thought if it was ticking in the middle of the speech-or frankly, if it was not-it would be a bad metaphor. She suggested the Library instead, deeming it warmer than the Oval Office with its bookshelves and fireplace.

On a morning before the speech, Bush found himself alone in the Oval Office with Meghan O'Sullivan. Bush was about as isolated as a president could be, and his staff felt compelled at times to offer encouragement.

"Mr. President," O'Sullivan ventured, "I know you feel really alone right now, but I want you to know that you are not alone. I am standing there with you."

If Bush was amused or irritated to be getting a pep talk from a young aide, he did not show it. "Thanks, thanks," he said simply, and then walked out the door.

The address was drafted to acknowledge the mistakes made in Iraq while vowing to fix them. More than any speech Dan Bartlett had gotten Bush to give, this would be when the president would most forthrightly admit errors and take responsibility while pivoting to demand that the country not give up yet. It was a hard balance to strike. Too far one way would embolden those ready to pull out; too far the other would only fuel the narrative that Bush was detached from reality.

As Bush practiced, the tension in the room was unlike that before any address he had given. If ever there were a speech with his presidency riding on it, this was it. He had to buy time for Petraeus to build up forces, shift the strategy, and make enough visible progress to keep Congress from cutting off funding. Seventy-three percent of Americans thought the war in Iraq was going badly, 61 percent opposed the idea of sending significantly more troops, and 54 percent wanted to withdraw all American forces immediately or within twelve months.

Bush knew all that as he ran through the text given him by his speechwriters. He fiddled with sections he thought should be clearer, and aides interrupted at times to tell him he was mumbling one passage or another. After one too many suggestions from the staff, Bush told them to stop. He ran through the speech in its final form. Usually, when Bush was done with a practice, he simply bounded away from the lectern and headed off to the next thing on his schedule. This time, though, he just stopped and stared down at the text amid a surreal silence in the room. What exactly was going through his head was anyone's guess, but to aides it seemed as if he were a man on a mountain all by himself, desperately trying to get down.

It only lasted perhaps twenty seconds before Hadley spoke up and said, "Let's go." Bush looked up from his reverie.

"All right," he agreed, "let's go."

WHEN THE RED LIGHT on the camera came on that night, January 10, Bush, as he often did, looked uncomfortable, stiff, and small, "wound tightly," as J. D. Crouch put it, not the robust figure his advisers saw in private. But Bush tried to connect with the frustrations of the country while pleading for more time. "The situation in Iraq is unacceptable to the American people-and it is unacceptable to me," he said. "Our troops in Iraq have fought bravely. They have done everything we have asked them to do. Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me."

He laid out his plan to send 21,500 more troops-it would later grow to 30,000-to carry out a strategy aimed at protecting the civilian population. The change in strategy was as important as the number of troops, he explained. Bush dismissed calls to leave Iraq, arguing that letting the enemy win would hobble the United States for years. "We carefully considered these proposals," he said of recommendations to withdraw, "and we concluded that to step back now would force a collapse of the Iraqi government, tear the country apart, and result in mass killings on an unimaginable scale. Such a scenario would result in our troops being forced to stay in Iraq even longer, and confront an enemy that is even more lethal. If we increase our support at this crucial moment and help the Iraqis break the current cycle of violence, we can hasten the day our troops begin coming home."

Aides were disappointed. On paper, the speech was coherent and compelling, but Bush's delivery was not. The speech did not have "a lot of persuasive power," Matthew Scully, the speechwriter who had left the White House but came back during this period to help with the next State of the Union address, told colleagues. J. D. Crouch thought the crushing tension and enormous stakes came through in the president's presentation. "Watching his facial expressions, I think you can really see that his heart was in it but his mind was telling him this is going to be bad," Crouch remembered. "Not that he didn't believe. It is like, 'I have to do this, it is the right thing to do, I am going to see it through. But no one is going to stand up and cheer.' You could see it on his face."

To sell the plan, Bush spent the next day surrounded by uniforms. In the morning, he bestowed a Medal of Honor posthumously to a marine who had saved his colleagues by falling on a grenade, tearing up as he presented it to the slain man's family. Then he flew to Fort Benning, Georgia, where he joined camouflage-clad army soldiers in the chow line and made his case again for the surge.

He seemed listless, and so did his audience. At one point, he prepared to meet more families of dead soldiers. As he was about to enter the room, he paused, bowed his head for a moment in seeming prayer, and steeled himself before stepping inside. On Air Force One on the flight back to Washington, he remained cloistered in his cabin, preferring to be alone rather than visit the staff as they had been told he would.

When he returned to the White House, Condoleezza Rice stopped by to check in. She and Robert Gates had been on Capitol Hill testifying on behalf of the surge.

"So how did it go?" Bush asked Rice.

"Not very well," she said, sitting by him in front of the fire. "We have a tough sell."

That barely covered it. The questioning had, in fact, been brutal. Senator Chuck Hagel, the outspoken Republican maverick, accused her of not telling the truth, while condemning the surge as "the most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam." Senator George V. Voinovich, another Republican, told her he had supported Bush and "bought into his dream" but "at this stage of the game, I don't think it's going to happen." Overall, the reaction to Bush's speech had been almost uniformly negative. Bush aides knew most Democrats would hate it but thought some might be supportive; instead, Democrats universally condemned Bush for ignoring the message of the elections, and Hagel and Voinovich were not the only Republicans jumping ship. House Republicans were collecting signatures on a letter opposing the surge.

Peter Wehner grew so alarmed he sent an e-mail to Joshua Bolten, Karl Rove, and Dan Bartlett on January 12, warning that the presidency was on the line. Wehner envisioned moderate Republican senators like Richard Lugar and John Warner marching to the White House to tell Bush no one would support the war anymore and it was time to get out, not unlike Barry Goldwater and other Republicans finally telling Richard Nixon to resign. "The country was tired of the war, and that was clearly our last chance," Wehner remembered. "Everybody knew this was the last bullet in the chamber."

For the president, it was, as Laura Bush later put it, "the loneliest of George's decisions." Rice saw the isolation as well. "It's such a lonely job," she said. "Nobody, no matter how close you are to the president, he carries that burden in many ways alone." This was never more true than during the run-up to the surge decision. Almost no one, it seemed, supported it, at least at first, not the outgoing commanders in Iraq, not the Joint Chiefs of Staff, not the Iraq Study Group, not the Iraqi prime minister, not Congress, not the public, not even his secretary of state and closest adviser. Against odds, thanks to Hadley's orchestration, Bush had managed the process so that the Joint Chiefs ostensibly had come around with the promise of increases in army and marine corps manpower, Maliki had bought in, and Rice had swallowed her concerns. But papering over differences was not the same thing as forging unity. On this, Bush had Cheney, Hadley, John McCain, Jack Keane, and not many more.

When he felt sorry for himself in those dark days, Laura reminded him that he chose to run for president. "Self-pity is the worst thing that can happen to a presidency," Bush told the writer Robert Draper. "This is a job where you can have a lot of self-pity." He tried to avoid showing it to his staff or the country. "I've got God's shoulder to cry on," he said. "And I cry a lot. I do a lot of crying in this job. I'll bet I've shed more tears than you can count, as president. I'll shed some tomorrow."

A little more than a week after the surge announcement, Bush invited to the Oval Office a dozen aides who helped fashion the new strategy, including Hadley, J. D. Crouch, Meghan O'Sullivan, Brett McGurk, Peter Feaver, and William Luti. He thanked them and posed for photographs. But he lingered afterward and seemed in a rare contemplative mood. He talked about Abraham Lincoln, pointing to the bust in the office and remembering how rough that presidency was.

"Thinking about what Lincoln went through lends some of that perspective to things," he said.

He noted that he had just read a Lincoln biography and during the darkest days only two groups supported the sixteenth president, the evangelicals, although they were not called that at the time, and the army. "You know, I am no Lincoln," aides remembered Bush saying, "but I am in the same boat."

He moved on to Iraq. "I know the decision's unpopular, the decision to surge," he mused. "I made mistakes and said so in my speech. All of the mistakes, they rest right here, with me. But you know what? There's great pressure not to lead-not to act. There's pressure to say, 'Oh, well, this is too damn hard, too risky, let's not do it.' "