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Cheney's Long Path to War

The Hard Sell: He sifted intel. He brooded about threats. And he
wanted Saddam gone. The inside story of how Vice President Cheney
bought into shady assumptions and helped persuade a nation to invade
Iraq

By Mark Hosenball, Michael Isikoff and Evan Thomas
NEWSWEEK


Nov. 17 issue - Every Thursday, President George W. Bush and Vice
President **** Cheney have lunch together in a small dining room off
the Oval Office. They eat alone; no aides are present. They have no
fixed agenda, but it's a safe assumption that they often talk about
intelligence-about what the United States knows, or doesn't know,
about the terrorist threat.

THE PRESIDENT RESPECTS Cheney's judgment, say White House aides, and
values the veep's long experience in the intelligence community (as
President Gerald Ford's chief of staff, as a member of the House
Intelligence Committee in the 1980s and as secretary of Defense in
the George H.W. Bush administration). As vice president, Cheney is
free to roam about the various agencies, quizzing ****ysts and top
spooks about terrorists and their global connections. "This is a
very important area. It's the one the president asked me to work on
.... I ask a lot of hard questions," Cheney told NBC's Tim Russert
last September. "That's my job."

Of all the president's advisers, Cheney has consistently taken the
most dire view of the terrorist threat. On Iraq, Bush was the
decision maker. But more than any adviser, Cheney was the one to
make the case to the president that war against Iraq was an urgent
necessity. Beginning in the late summer of 2002, he persistently
warned that Saddam was stocking up on chemical and biological
weapons, and last March, on the eve of the invasion, he declared
that "we believe that he [Saddam Hussein] has in fact reconstituted
nuclear weapons." (Cheney later said that he meant "program," not
"weapons." He also said, a bit optimistically, "I really do believe
that we will be greeted as liberators.") After seven months,
investigators are still looking for that arsenal of WMD.