Bush: ‘I Gave Them Fair Warning’

President Bush walked into the Oval Office on Sunday morning, looked at his spokesman and remarked, “I gave them fair warning.”

B-2 stealth bombers had departed on their missions to Afghanistan hours earlier. Submarines were preparing to launch cruise missiles.

Just before 1 p.m. EDT, only 20 minutes after the first munitions struck, Bush peered into a television camera brought into the White House Treaty Room and told the nation: “On my orders, the United States military has begun strikes against Al Qaeda terrorist training camps and military installations of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

“We’re a peaceful nation,” he said. “Yet, as we have learned, so suddenly and so tragically, there can be no peace in a world of sudden terror. In the face of today’s new threat, the only way to pursue peace is to pursue those who threaten it.”

He cautioned against anticipating quick victory, saying the military action was just one step.

“Given the nature and reach of our enemies, we will win this conflict by the patient accumulation of successes, by meeting a series of challenges with determination and will and purpose,” the president said.

Twenty-six days after terrorists struck, the United States was striking back.

For Bush, Sunday was a day divided by a stark line between public and private segments. In public, he led a ceremony of mourning for fallen firefighters. In private, he tracked the reports on the initial hours of the U.S. and British strikes on targets in Kabul and Kandahar.

Recounting the president’s day, White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer said the military plans that led to Sunday’s strikes were in motion Saturday evening. The president was at Camp David for the weekend and had conferred by videoconference with the National Security Council in the morning. About 7:30 p.m., Bush called the two top Republicans and the two top Democrats in the House and Senate to tell them of the impending military action.

By then, Karen Hughes, his counselor, and Michael Gerson, his chief speech writer, were at the president’s retreat in Maryland’s rolling Catoctin Mountains, working on the 6 1/2-minute speech Bush would deliver Sunday.

“These carefully targeted actions are designed to disrupt the use of Afghanistan as a terrorist base of operations and to attack the military capability of the Taliban regime,” Bush said.

He had given the Taliban his demands more than two weeks ago; none was met, he said. “And now, the Taliban will pay a price.”

“Determined” and “resolute” were the words Fleischer used to describe Bush’s mood, and the president’s remarks, first drafted more than 12 hours before he delivered them, buttressed that message:

“The battle is now joined on many fronts. We will not waver, we will not tire, we will not falter, and we will not fail. Peace and freedom will prevail.”

During the day, the president returned from Camp David to the White House, touching down on the South Lawn at 10:30 a.m. EDT, just two hours before the first targets were hit. Then, he shifted operations back and forth between the West Wing, where the Oval Office is situated, and his residence in the White House mansion.

Just after addressing the nation, he sat down to an informal lunch of sandwiches around the long, polished table of the Roosevelt Room, a windowless sanctum just across a corridor from the Oval Office.

He spoke by telephone with Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian president, and with Jacques Chirac, the French president, among others.

Fleischer, his spokesman, said Americans need to be vigilant. “This is a war,” he said.

Nearly from the start, when four hijacked airplanes were flown into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania, Bush had expected nothing else.

The Taliban had shown no readiness to meet his conditions--to turn over terrorist suspect Osama bin Laden, for one--and he held out no hope that the conflict could be avoided, Fleischer said.

And so, on Sunday, the president drew for the nation the military plan, one intended to destroy the terrorist camps, disrupt the communications network there and hamper the training of new recruits.

“Initially the terrorists may burrow deeper into caves and other entrenched hiding places,” he said. “Our military action is also designed to clear the way for sustained, comprehensive and relentless operations to drive them out and bring them to justice.”

Even as bombers were en route from the American heartland, and his speech to the nation announcing the action was only three hours away, the president was making yet one more public appearance.

In Maryland’s quiet rolling hills not far from Gettysburg and the nation’s most famous battlefield cemetery, he honored those who on Sept. 11 were among the first casualties in this, another war fought on the American homeland.

More than 300 of them in New York, Bush said, “knew their duty” and rushed into the inferno that the World Trade Center had become.

He hurried through his remarks there at the 20th annual National Fallen Firefighters Memorial Tribute in Emmitsburg, delivering them before at least one television network could carry them live.

And he gave not a hint of the battle about to come.