From the Start, Bush Plan Was to Use the Big Stick

At midmorning Friday in the White House’s basement-level Situation Room, President Bush asked his advisors: “Is Tommy Franks ready to go?”

Yes, came the reply; Gen. Franks, commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, said his preparations were complete.

“All right,” Bush said quietly. “Then we’re ready to go.”

At that point, the president set Sunday as the date for U.S. airstrikes against Afghanistan to begin, an aide who was present recounted.

But last week’s decisions were merely the final links in a chain that began on Sept. 11, the day terrorists slammed hijacked jetliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, aides said.

Bush advisors say the president decided from the start that he wanted to launch a large-scale military response to the attacks, and every step along the way refined--but did not change--that initial choice.

Asked whether Bush ever considered an option that did not include military action, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice replied firmly: “No.”

Instead, aides said, the 26-day delay between the terrorist attack and the U.S. military response occurred partly because it took time to plan a comprehensive military campaign targeting Afghanistan, partly because it took time to cement the support of neighboring Muslim countries such as Pakistan and Uzbekistan--and partly because military force was only part of a larger effort.

“The president from the very beginning said, I want to do something that is effective, . . . [and] that military power was but one element of this broad campaign,” Rice told reporters Monday in an interview offering the most detailed look so far at the administration’s decision-making.

“It was quite deliberate that other things happened first,” she said, citing moves to freeze terrorist organizations’ finances, worldwide law enforcement sweeps against terrorist cells and diplomacy to isolate Afghanistan’s Taliban regime.

“So he didn’t feel any rush to get to the military piece, because the campaign had begun,” she said. “We were making progress.”

Bush made several early decisions that would shape events over the ensuing weeks, Rice and other aides said. He decided that he wanted a sustained campaign against terrorism, not just a one-shot retaliation. (The Pentagon had a plan “on the shelf” for a smaller, quicker reprisal raid, but neither Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld nor any other advisor promoted it as an appropriate response to the Sept. 11 attacks, one aide said.)

A bigger campaign meant Bush needed worldwide support, and that helped nudge him toward a second choice: focusing the war against Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda organization and its protectors in Afghanistan, and to defer major action against other unfriendly countries such as Iraq. That decision, made at a National Security Council meeting on Sept. 17, settled a debate among his advisors over how broad the war against terrorism should be.

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz wanted the targets to include such countries as Iraq; at the end of the Persian Gulf War, Wolfowitz, then the third-ranked defense official, argued that the U.S. and its allies should have gone after Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had argued against advancing on Baghdad to overthrow Hussein, warned that a longer list of targets in the war on terrorism meant a shorter list of allies. Powell won.

That same Sept. 17 meeting produced Bush’s four demands to the Taliban--demands his advisors privately did not expect the regime to meet: that they turn over Bin Laden and his lieutenants, close all terrorist camps, allow U.S. forces into the country for inspection visits and release imprisoned foreign aid workers.

Once Afghanistan was the focus, officials found themselves working on other pieces of the puzzle: talking with Taliban opposition forces, making contact with the exiled king, planning humanitarian aid for millions of hungry Afghans.

“One thing that [Bush] was very focused on through this entire period of time was the humanitarian piece,” Rice said. “ . . . I think he understood that in broad strategic terms, making very clear that this was not a war against the Afghan people was extremely important to what we were trying to achieve.”

But the military offensive was central.

“After the Sept. 11 attacks, the president’s view was [that] he now had a self-defense case,” Rice said. “He now had to take this to the terrorists, where they lived. . . . You know, the best defense is a good offense.”

During the week of Sept. 24, Bush was briefed on the military’s “concept of operations,” a broad outline of what the armed forces planned to do to weaken the Taliban and pursue Bin Laden, she said. “That then was followed by a kind of operational plan that takes the concept and begins to put in more concrete terms.”

By last Tuesday, the final military plan was ready. At the same time, Bush was pursuing other pieces of his agenda, shaped by both the Sept. 11 attacks and the nation’s slumping economy: a new economic stimulus proposal; a mandate for the new Office of Homeland Security; even the reopening of Washington’s Reagan National Airport--a “difficult decision” that divided his advisors, counselor Karen Hughes noted.

“Last week was a month long,” Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. said, according to Hughes.

Last Tuesday, the National Security Council met in the Situation Room at 9:30 a.m.--a meeting held almost every day since Sept. 11. Bush went around the table and asked for reports on military preparations, including the issue of whether nearby countries had agreed to landing rights for U.S. planes, Rice said.

By the end of the meeting, she said, Bush “was confident that we probably had in place the military piece to be ready to go on the weekend.” But first, he asked Rumsfeld to visit four key Muslim countries in the area--Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan and Turkey--for “a final look with the front-line states about what was going to be permitted” to U.S. forces.

Rumsfeld reported back from each stop: The front-line states were on board.

Meanwhile, Bush called in Hughes, his top communications advisor, and told her military action was on the way. “He asked me to start thinking about an address to the nation,” she recounted. “He said, ‘The Bush administration will enforce its doctrine’ “--referring to his declaration that countries that harbor terrorists will be treated as hostile.

On Friday, with Rumsfeld still on the road, Bush decided that Sunday would be the day for the first airstrikes, if no unforeseen obstacles appeared. He telephoned foreign leaders and worked with Hughes on his speech.

On Saturday, at Camp David, Bush held one last security council meeting, with the newly returned Rumsfeld and most other participants joining over secure video links.

“On Saturday, there’s one last check to make sure that everything is ready: the diplomacy is in place, the allies are in place, the military is in place,” Rice said.

“For a commander-in-chief at that moment, he needs to look at his military advisor and then he needs to look at his national security team and say, ‘Are we ready to go?’ And that’s what that was,” she said.

Hughes, who was also at Camp David, said the atmosphere was “somber.”

“We all tried our best to try to be somewhat normal,” she said. “There was, you know, a football game on in the background . . . [but] there was a weighty feel to the weekend.”

On Saturday night, Bush worked with Hughes, Rice, Card and chief speech writer Michael Gerson on the remarks he would make the next day. The president telephoned the four top leaders of Congress, House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.), Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.).

On Sunday morning, Bush called Russian President Vladimir V. Putin and other foreign leaders. He hurried through a ceremony at the National Fallen Firefighters Memorial in the Maryland mountains near Camp David. He returned to the White House only hours before the first airstrikes would launch.

About 12:30 p.m. EDT Sunday, Rumsfeld telephoned from the Pentagon and told Rice: “The operation has begun.” Rice walked into the Oval Office and told Bush: “We’ve got a report.”

“The interesting thing, of course, about something like this is that once the operation starts to unfold, it’s unfolding--and you’re not participating in its unfolding,” Rice said with a laugh.

So, after Bush gave his speech, the president ordered sandwiches for his aides. They gathered in front of a big-screen television set to see what would happen next.

“It had been a very intense, very hectic 24 or 48 hours,” Hughes said. “And we were sitting, waiting for the secretary of Defense to come out and brief. . . . And I remember looking at everyone and saying: ‘What do we do now?’ ”

Rice, a veteran of past foreign policy crises, provided the answer. “Now we wait.”