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Friday, March 21, 2003

By Ann McFeatters, Post-Gazette National Bureau

WASHINGTON -- Six weeks after he became president, President Bush called a meeting of his closest foreign policy advisers. He told them that he wanted to talk about Iraq and, specifically, about getting rid of Saddam Hussein.

	Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld briefs reporters on U. S military operations against Iraq during a news conference yesterday at the Pentagon. (Dennis Cook, Associated Press)

Two years later, as a commander-in-chief of U.S. armed forces, Bush has now sent 300,000 troops to war. In that endeavor, he is relying for advice almost exclusively on that same inner circle -- including most of the top figures who fought the first Persian Gulf War at his father's side in 1991.

Like former President Ronald Reagan, Bush is not the kind of manager who micromanages. Instead, aides say, he sets a strategy -- disarm Iraq and capture, kill or exile Saddam -- and then asks his inner circle how they propose to accomplish it.

As the battle plans began emerging last September, Bush would ask questions but leave most details in the charge of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, 70, who also ran the Pentagon when Gerald Ford was president.

It was Rumsfeld's decision to turn over most daily control of Operation Iraq Freedom to Army Gen. Tommy Franks, 57, of the Central Command, who will have more authority than former Army Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf had in the 1991 war.

A relatively new member of the president's inner circle is Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman. Bush is said to admire Myers' calm, down-to-earth and direct manner of conveying information.

Vice President Dick Cheney, 62, who was defense secretary in 1991, has become Bush's right-hand man, deferential in group meetings but reportedly extremely candid with the president in private. Aides said Cheney had been consistent in urging that it was time for a military strike against Iraq.

Now that the conflict has been launched -- and while diplomacy is on a back burner until post-war planning becomes urgent -- Secretary of State Colin Powell, 65, who was Joint Chiefs chairman in 1991, is less visible in the Oval Office. His main role, aside from running the State Department, is to bring aboard more members of what the White House is calling the Coalition of the Willing. That group now numbers 40 nations, Powell told the Cabinet yesterday, although he conceded that most aren't providing direct military or financial aid.

The top official who is in and out of the Oval Office more than any other is national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, 48, who also worked in the first Bush White House. She briefs the president almost around the clock about international developments and is usually the first to call him each morning, often at 6 a.m. -- or earlier in the event of an overnight crisis.

Bush, who arrives in the Oval Office at 6:50 a.m. most weekdays, expects his daily intelligence update from CIA Director George Tenet, 50, to be one of the first briefings he gets. Former President Bill Clinton initially appointed Tenet, but Bush discovered that he liked the low-key Tenet as director of central intelligence and decided to keep him on.

The gatekeeper, who keeps meetings from running too long and decides who gets face time with Bush, is White House chief of staff Andrew Card, 56, a former structural engineer who also served the president's father as a deputy chief of staff.

The "face" of the war appears to be Rumsfeld, at least until Franks' "shock and awe" military bombardment gets under way. The defense secretary already is familiar to TV viewers from his regular Pentagon briefings..

Yesterday, Rumsfeld advised the Iraqi people, "Let me say that the day of your liberation will soon be at hand." He told them not to go to work, but instead stay home and listen to the radio for instructions -- beamed in Arabic via U.S. military electronic jamming of Iraqi airwaves -- about what to do "to remain safe and out of the line of fire," as well as how to obtain food, water and medical supplies. He also urged Iraqis not to attempt to flee to neighboring countries. Once Saddam is out of power, he pledged, "Coalition forces will stay only as long as necessary to finish the job, and not a day longer."

More than anyone else, including the elder Bush, it has been Cheney who has helped the current president define his thinking on Iraq. After the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, the administration's conservative hard-liners -- especially Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and then Rumsfeld -- began openly agitating for a military strike against Saddam.

But Cheney decided at that point that such a widening of the war on terror was too risky because the military wasn't fully prepared. Moreover, he felt that a move against Baghdad could cause ruptures in the new anti-terror alliance with Arab states that the United States was then forging, and that Americans were feeling too wounded and vulnerable for a sustained military operation that wasn't aimed directly at al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden.

Even though Cheney had privately harbored doubts about not going after Saddam at the end of the 1991 war, he told Pentagon civilian leaders that the timing in 2001 wasn't right, but also emphasized that they should ready the military for the day when it would be.

On March 20, 2002, senior military leaders told senators of their concern that they lacked the manpower to continue deployments in Bosnia and Afghanistan while taking on the large -- albeit lately less formidable -- Iraqi army. After that congressional hearing, Cheney sent word to the Pentagon that such talk was to cease.

He vowed that getting rid of Saddam was a task that this president intended to accomplish.

Ann McFeatters can be reached amcfeatters@nationalpress.com or 1-202-662-7071.