"We Will Not Fail"

By Michael Elliott

For a new kind of war, it had an old sort of start. In the places where soldiers and sailors live--in Norfolk, Va.; Fort Bragg, N.C.; in a hundred other towns of the Republic and far beyond its shores--the rhetoric of impending battle was rendered into the humdrum details of military life. Bills were paid; kit bags packed; wives, husbands and children hugged. Patriotism hung in the air, as palpable as the first chills of fall; flags sprouted on a million lapels and fluttered from a thousand taxicabs in a wounded but defiant New York. On television, the reports came from Islamabad, not as they had a decade ago from Riyadh or Baghdad or Amman. And as predecessors in his high office--including his father--had done before, George W. Bush drove from the White House to the Capitol, and in an address to Congress and the watching world, discharged the weightiest responsibility that any President can ever be asked to shoulder. Americans, Bush said, had to prepare for a "lengthy campaign unlike any other we have ever seen." That this will be a real war was made explicit. "I've called the armed forces to alert," said Bush, "and there is a reason. The hour is coming when America will act, and you will make us proud."

Other Presidents have issued a call to arms. But few have cast their challenge in terms as wide as Bush's. The war to find, stop and defeat "every terrorist group of global reach," he said, was "civilization's fight." That fight, indeed, has already started, as law enforcement officials attempt to discover who was behind the atrocities and how they might be brought to justice. And it is a fight in which the forensic processes of the criminal-justice system promise to be augmented by the thud and thump of military action.

In his speech, Bush spoke directly to the Taliban, the radical Islamic regime that rules Afghanistan and harbors Osama bin Laden, leader of the al-Qaeda network, which is the prime suspect in the Sept. 11 atrocities. Bush demanded that the Taliban hand over all terrorist leaders to U.S. authorities. The Taliban has not done so, demanding, in turn, proof that bin Laden is guilty. If the Taliban does not shift from that position, a shooting war seems inevitable. Sources tell TIME that the first, secret deployment orders issued to the Air Force and Navy set a goal of having warplanes ready for action by Sept. 24. For most of last week, Pentagon officials worked to polish a war plan that is likely to supplement the bombing with missions by special-forces units against terrorist training camps in Afghanistan; the plan also contemplates the introduction of ground forces, if needed, which could tilt the balance of power in the country to the elements that oppose the Taliban--although finding a stable government for Kabul would be difficult.

This war will not be for the fainthearted. Sources tell TIME that the Administration is considering altering the ban on assassinating enemies of the U.S., adopted 25 years ago. Bin Laden, the Administration believes, is not covered by the ban; as one who has waged an act of war against the U.S., he is considered fair game in any military operation. But a change in policy might help the fight against other leaders of international terrorism. Guns and bombs, however, are not the whole story. "We should not overemphasize the military part of this," says a senior White House adviser. Bush's war is one that will be fought sometimes on fronts where there are no foxholes, without the benefit of night-vision goggles and precision-guided missiles. It will involve actions that are economic, financial, political and even religious. Nor will the war be fought only in the folds of Afghanistan's rugged corrugations. The kind of group responsible for the attacks, as a former U.S. diplomat says, cannot simply be "a guy talking on a cell phone in a cave." It surely includes members of a "network that is deep within the society of the United States, Germany and other countries." The battlefields of the new war, it follows, will include the countinghouses of Swiss banks, the teeming cities of North Africa and the Middle East--and the suburbs of New Jersey, Michigan, Paris and Hamburg. "This is as complete a war effort as mankind has ever seen," says Senator Chuck Hagel, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee.

That said, historians, as they must, will peer into their occluded mirrors to find the closest parallel to such a challenge. Is it the Monroe Doctrine, which warned the nations of the Old World to keep their snouts away from the feeding troughs of the New? Or--less happily--is the analogy to Woodrow Wilson's determination to make the world safe for democracy, a crusade disavowed at home and mocked abroad and whose ending was the greatest charnel house the world has ever known? History tells us this at least: when nations take upon themselves a global responsibility to rid the world of a shameful practice, they had better prepare for the long haul. In the early 19th century, it took the British navy the better part of 50 years to close down the Atlantic slave trade. If Bush is serious, he has laid upon his successors a task hardly less demanding than the one he has adopted for himself. In just such fashion did Harry Truman in 1947 commit his nation to a 40-year-long cold war against totalitarian communism.

It takes nothing away from Bush, and the clenched-jaw poise with which he delivered his speech to Congress, to say that but two weeks ago, few would have thought him adequate to the task he now faces. At first blush, there is little in the President's background that equips him for his new mission. He is not a young man--10 years older than John F. Kennedy was at the time of the Cuban missile crisis, only four years younger than Franklin D. Roosevelt, on the original day of infamy. But for someone age 55, he has often seemed to have absorbed few of the annealing lessons of maturity.

Yet Bush's plainspoken style may be well suited to a time of fear, grief and a primal rage for revenge. Those close to him recognize the costs associated with such an attribute. It was a mistake, at a time when the U.S. needs to be sensitive to its Muslim citizens and friends in Islamic countries, to cast the nation's task as a "crusade"; it was crass for Bush to adopt the attitude of a frontier sheriff and say he wanted bin Laden captured "dead or alive." "Sometimes he can be too plainspoken," says an adviser. "But when you net it all out, people like someone when he tells it like it is."

That's why the President's inner circle was not overly worried about the speech to Congress. Even some of his advisers concede that his performance on Sept. 11 left something to be desired. But his aides say Bush turned a corner on the Friday after the attacks, with a speech at the Washington National Cathedral, an impromptu rallying cry amid the rubble at Ground Zero and--in private--two hours comforting, and weeping with, the families of those who have lost loved ones. Andrew Card, his chief of staff, says the President has "made sure that there is a balance to his effort--and that includes taking care of his mind and body and spirit." Bush is sticking to his exercise regimen, watching his diet and making sure that he gets a decent night's sleep, though now he typically gets to the office just before 7 a.m. rather than just after it.

The President's team knows that he delivers a speech better to a live audience than to a TelePrompTer as he sits at a desk; that is why the White House suggested that his call to the nation should be given to the entire Congress, packed into the chamber of the House of Representatives. Bush knew it would--must--be the most important address he had ever given. When the speech was suggested on Monday morning, he turned to Karen Hughes, his Counsellor, and said, "I want a copy tonight." Hughes protested; that was impossible. "By 7," he added. Bush, says a senior aide, "wanted it early because he wanted to see if this was something he wanted to do in the first place."

Three speechwriters set to work, and Bush had a draft by the appointed time. It needed work, but Bush was becoming convinced that it was the right time to speak out. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and others weighed in; Rice helped tune the ultimatum to the Taliban, and with the speechwriting team, made sure that sad little Valentines were sent to Pakistan and Iran. Both countries were included in a short, careful list of eight that were acknowledged for losing their nationals in the World Trade Center. By Wednesday lunchtime, Hughes was convinced that her team had written a great speech. Bush agreed, and that day and the next, he practiced his delivery three times, marking changes with a black Sharpie pen. By the time he arrived at the Capitol Thursday evening after dining with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Rice and Secretary of State Colin Powell, the President was as ready as he could possibly be.

Bush's speech was designed for the population at large, to explain to a people thirsty for the quick fix of vengeance the virtues of patience. But of necessity, the translation of goals into practice depends not so much on the mobilization of millions as on the detailed staff work of a few score. Bush's world begins with his closest advisers, extends to Cabinet officers and military commanders and then reaches his friends and allies in other countries. All must be engaged, all must do their part, if Bush's war is to be won.

In the White House--where grief counselors have been made available and the morning prayer meetings are better attended than they recently were--there has been some reordering of responsibilities. Josh Bolten, the deputy chief of staff, now chairs a group called the Domestic Consequences Principals Council, charged with reviewing the need for everything from an economic stimulus package to the parlous state of the airlines. Bush himself, in addition to his regular national security briefings (there's now an afternoon meeting as well as one in the morning), meets each day with FBI Director Robert Mueller and Attorney General John Ashcroft to hear how the manhunt is going and assess new threats.

Some of the quotidian expressions of political activity, like party fund raising, have been curtailed. Karl Rove, the President's chief political strategist, continues to make sure that key constituencies are not forgotten; but for the first time in Bush's political life, Rove and Hughes no longer attend the President's most important meetings. Vice President Dick Cheney, whose star had dimmed since the spring, is back, front and center. If Bush is taking the role of the outside player, the public spokesman, the emotional leader of the Administration and the nation, Cheney is the inside man, the operations guy. Think of a train: "The President," says an adviser, "is the engineer. Cheney is the guy shoveling the coal."

Bush is lucky to have a team with experience in wartime. To be sure, he and everyone else who has had the chance--including Powell and Rice--have been at pains to point out that this crisis is not like the one in August 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait, and that this war will not be like the one fought in the Arabian desert five months later. But it doesn't hurt to have around you men and women who have gone through the fire. Apart from Cheney (Defense Secretary 10 years ago) and Powell (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff back then), Bush can call on Rice, an NSC staff member in his father's Administration, and Paul Wolfowitz, now Deputy Secretary of Defense and then Cheney's policy aide. Army General Hugh Shelton, who holds the job that Powell had 10 years ago, retires next week, but Shelton will be succeeded as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs by his deputy, Air Force General Richard Myers. Pentagon officials are relieved. "If the new Chairman was a field commander," says one, "it would be tough bringing him into this."

Powell, sources say, is in his element. His State Department aides describe a man who looks after the basics, allotting specific tasks to his team. "Colin's at the center of gravity," says a senior European diplomat who has seen him up close. But that doesn't mean that Powell has always got his way without argument. The national security team met with Bush at Camp David for seven hours on the weekend after the attacks--with maps and charts spread out over tables and easels, and a mood that Card described as "like a war council"--and then continued their discussions in Washington. At the heart of the debates were two linked questions: Who was responsible for the atrocities on Sept. 11? And what immediate actions can and should be taken against those so identified? The Administration insists the attacks were the work of bin Laden's network. "The evidence we have gathered," said Bush before Congress, "all points to a collection of loosely affiliated terrorist organizations known as al-Qaeda." But when dealing with a cellular organization, proving hard evidentiary links between different operatives is like trying to build a garden wall out of wet tissue. Bin Laden has denied any involvement, and the Taliban says the restrictions it has placed on his movements and communications make it impossible for him to have masterminded the attacks. Hamid Mir, a Pakistani journalist who claims to be bin Laden's biographer, says that on Sept. 11 he was handed a written message, purportedly from bin Laden: "I am not involved in these attacks, but I support them," he said.

The Administration pours cold water on any other theory. Relying on intelligence intercepts of bin Laden's known associates discussing the hijackings, and on links between some of the suicide squad and elements of al-Qaeda, it continues to finger bin Laden. British intelligence too is convinced that al-Qaeda is responsible: "The evidence is pretty good, better than circumstantial," says a British source. For Powell, all of this has meant that policy on retaliation should proceed in a step-by-step approach, focusing first on bin Laden and the Taliban.

Right from the start, however, some in the Administration argued for a wider response. And even if it doesn't come immediately, Bush's careful but ambitious rhetoric on terror suggests it will one day arrive. There have been intelligence reports that Iraq helped train the hijackers and that one of them met with an Iraqi agent in Europe. Israeli intelligence sources, however, tell TIME they have nothing tying Saddam's regime to the attack. But the mere possibility that Saddam might have been involved got Wolfowitz's juices flowing. The leading advocate within the Administration for a policy of "regime change" in Baghdad, Wolfowitz has been convinced of Iraq's menace since long before the Gulf War. In 1979, as an analyst in the Pentagon, he authored a secret report warning of Saddam's dangerous ambitions. Now, supported by his boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and by Cheney's chief of staff Lewis (Scooter) Libby, Wolfowitz argued for a far-reaching military response beyond anything Powell had envisioned. Targets would include not only Saddam's regime but also other states that have supported terrorism in the past, like Syria and Iran.

If that prospect has alarmed the State Department, which hopes to accomplish much by words instead of bombs, it positively terrifies some of Washington's allies. The French have been jittery from the start about the Administration's use of the word war, and anything that might turn that war into a contest between "the West" and half the Islamic world makes their blood run cold. A top British diplomat acknowledged that London had heard the case to widen the war but said, "What we see in terms of policy is very measured. We have seen no evidence of hasty rushes to judgment or pounding the sand." Still, the argument over the nature of the Iraqi regime has been running through Washington during five presidencies. It would not take much evidence of Iraqi complicity in the atrocities of Sept. 11 to resuscitate it.

For now, however, the Administration is committed to Powell's plan, one that a senior European diplomat calls "ruthless prioritization." The short-term priority is to deal with the Taliban and its response to Bush's ultimatum. The longer-term goal is to build a strategy for concentrating on terrorism itself. "There's a sequence to follow," says the European source. "You've got to take them one at a time." In its initial phases, the military plan hence concentrates on Afghanistan. Last week the preparation for presenting the final options to Bush hit a brief snag. On Thursday, Shelton reviewed the plans with Army General Tommy Franks, commander of Central Command, and with the commanders of the U.S. special forces. There was something in the plans that Shelton didn't like--"He wasn't comfortable with the targets," says a source--but by Friday the brass was ready for a presentation to the President; it took place in the White House at 1 p.m.

The U.S. has the ability to wage terrifying war on Afghanistan. There are already several hundred American warplanes in the region, based in Turkey and Saudi Arabia, and aboard two aircraft carriers, the U.S.S. Carl Vinson and the U.S.S. Enterprise. Washington wants to conduct the air war from a new command center just outside Riyadh, but the Saudis are balking. (If the past is any guide, the U.S. will eventually get its way.) Another pair of carriers, the U.S.S. Kitty Hawk and the U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt, could be ready to attack within a week. The Pentagon and the State Department have arranged for basing bombers and refueling planes in Bahrain and Oman. B-52 and B-2 bombers, flying from the U.S. and the tiny speck of Diego Garcia, an island in the Indian Ocean, will also be serviced by tankers flying out of Thailand. Air Force Special Operations MH-53J Pave Low helicopters may be based in both Uzbekistan and Pakistan, close to Afghanistan's borders. (After initially seeming enthusiastic about basing rights, the Uzbeks appear to have had second thoughts.) The 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit is sailing to the theater, with 2,000 Marines and support helicopters; it will join another similar unit already in the region. Three guided-missile destroyers are on their way, and the Pentagon has readied active-duty ground forces for possible deployment. The core of such forces are likely to come from the Army's 18th Airborne Corps., which includes the 82nd Airborne Division, based at Fort Bragg.

And what will they do, all these fighting men and women, with their guns and their rockets, their bayonets and bombs? For a start, they'll be very, very careful. Four years ago, during a war game at the Army War College, the U.S. and its allies were unable to eradicate a terrorist group that resembled al-Qaeda. "These new terror groups are built the way the Internet is built," says an officer who took part in the exercise. "Every time you destroyed one chunk, the rest stepped in to fill the gap." Initially, air strikes against Afghan targets are likely; but Pentagon sources stress that a massive carpet-bombing exercise isn't in the cards. "There isn't that much to hit in Afghanistan," says an Air Force planner, "and we want every bomb to count." A huge bombing campaign, says another officer, "would be more for show than effect." Instead, planners hope that a sustained campaign will cripple the al-Qaeda camps and--if the forces are lucky--smoke out bin Laden so that someone can nab him.

That's why, last Monday morning, Bush entered a secure room at the Pentagon for a briefing by Major General Del Dailey, commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, which runs the military's most secretive units. The special forces--including the 800-strong Delta Force, Navy SEALS, and Army and Air Force commandos--are likely to be central to the first phase of the war. Special forces always have a hard time getting the attention of the brass leading conventional forces--they operated under very restrictive rules during the Gulf War--and they have had their setbacks. A Delta Force team was chewed up in the streets of Mogadishu in 1993, when it tried to capture Somali warlord Mohammed Aidid. And in Afghanistan, where the terrain is about as unforgiving as any on earth, and the population as warlike, they won't be able to hold territory for long.

Nonetheless, some hit-and-run operations are likely, to hold an airport, raid a terrorist camp, or snatch a top target. But military analysts are bluntly realistic about the challenges facing them. In a sense, the U.S. military is a victim of its own success. The Gulf War, says Charles Dunlap Jr., an Air Force colonel, "was an object lesson to military planners around the globe of the futility of attempting to confront the U.S. symmetrically, that is, with like forces and orthodox tactics." The attacks on the World Trade Center were classic examples of "asymmetric" warfare, using small fanatical teams to inflict maximum psychological damage on a chained Gulliver. And there isn't an army in the rich world that knows, with confidence, how to defeat such a foe. "When you're fighting someone who wants to die," says a Marine colonel, "those old-fashioned rules of war seem rather quaint."

In Bush's newfangled war, in which some successes may be secret, the U.S. needs all the friends it can get. Beyond his own instincts, his closest advisers, his officers of state and his superb armed forces, Bush has had to reach out to others, who can help him win the financial and economic battle against terrorism, and win hearts and minds to his cause.

That's one reason why, last Monday, he appeared at the Islamic Center in Washington, and spoke of Islam as a "faith that brings comfort to a billion people around the world." Islamic terrorists, he said before Congress, "are traitors to their own faith." The U.S. will not win Bush's war without intelligence on the names, places of refuge and financial support for terrorists--assistance that, in many cases, is available only in the Islamic world itself. Cooperation with Pakistan, at one and the same time a supporter and a victim of the Taliban, is essential if the mission is to be accomplished.

At the same time it looks for allies, the U.S. can't press too hard; this isn't a matter of building a war-fighting coalition of the kind arrayed against Saddam. With the Aqsa intifadeh still smoldering, it is intensely difficult for Arab regimes to be seen offering assistance to Washington. The Administration, says a senior White House official, recognizes that "everybody doesn't have to be involved in anything." But Washington has been worried by the response from Egypt, whose President, Hosni Mubarak, has been pleading for a U.N. conference on terrorism rather than for military strikes. American intelligence has picked up reports of a disturbing lack of support for Bush's policy.

Cooperation with Saudi Arabia, some of whose plutocrats salve a portion of their conscience by funding terror groups, is vital. Administration sources say that notwithstanding the hassle over the Riyadh air base, the overall tenor of discussions with the Saudis has been good. Iran, with whom Washington has had no official relations for 21 years, is suddenly useful; Tehran has more reason to loathe the Taliban than most. As TIME reported last week, Washington has used the British as a conduit to some moderate Iranians. Blair wrote to President Mohammad Khatami (they have since spoken) thanking him for his expression of sympathy after the attacks, and asking for his help in preventing any confrontation between religion and cultures. The British Foreign Secretary will visit Tehran this week. Iranian intelligence on Afghanistan would be useful; the right of American planes to overfly Iranian territory, though unlikely anytime soon, would mark the start of a new order in the region. Will it work? Hard-line Iranian religious leader Ayatullah Ali Khamenei followed Khatami's expression of condolence with a chillier tone: "If we are supposed to condemn such deeds, which we must, we must condemn them everywhere."

There are geopolitical problems as well. Moscow has been supportive; last week Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov, after meeting with Powell, said that "Russia and the U.S. have agreed to closely coordinate their actions." But the Russians remain determined that the U.S. should not use the crisis as an excuse to build permanent military bases in the region, and are making their views known in central Asia. China, with a potential Islamic insurgency of its own in Xinjiang, has no reason to stand in the way of the fight against terrorism; but Beijing is always anxious about the projection of American power close to its border. In a display of support so unprecedented it was shocking, Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, whose nation did nothing but write a large check in support of the coalition during the Gulf War, deployed a destroyer to the Indian Ocean and promised a seven-point plan of assistance to Washington.

Depend on it; these expressions of support and any that follow come with a price tag. A top-level Saudi delegation to Washington last week stressed the need to address the grievances of the Palestinians. Russia will not expect to hear a lot of moaning from Americans about its behavior in Chechnya. Pakistan will expect some economic relief for its battered economy. (And Pakistan will get it; sources tell TIME that Japan has already offered cash and loan guarantees to Islamabad.) George Bush's war will be one of strange bedfellows.

But then, many wars are. In World War II, Roosevelt and Winston Churchill made common cause with Stalin--"Uncle Joe" for a brief while, but in the full measure of his life, a bloodstained monster--in the fight against fascism. Even heroes compromise, and Churchill has long been a hero of Bush. When he welcomed five religious leaders to the Oval Office last week, the President pointed out a bust of the British leader. Churchill, Bush once told TIME, was the political leader he most admired, and Card says that since Sept. 11, Bush has spoken of Churchill often.

At first glance, it's hard to imagine two men less alike. Bush has had his share of verbal stumbles; Churchill never uttered a sentence that didn't stiffen spines. Bush is fit; Churchill was whatever is fitness's opposite. Bush has forsworn the demon drink; when Churchill stayed with Roosevelt in the White House over Christmas 1941, he instructed Roosevelt's butler that he needed a tumbler of sherry in his room before breakfast, a couple of glasses of Scotch and soda before lunch, and French champagne and 90-year-old brandy before he went to sleep. About the only thing they have in common goes between the lips; very occasionally, Bush sneaks out on the Truman balcony of the White House and enjoys a cigar.

But one big thing Bush and Churchill may share. At the times when he was most challenged, and whether he was justified in his sense of self or not (and often he was not), Churchill never knew self-doubt. It seems to rarely stalk Bush. For a man leading the kit-bag-packing troops and a great wide world into a war the like of which it has never known before, that confidence is a useful attribute to have.

--With reporting by Massimo Calabresi, James Carney, Matthew Cooper, John F. Dickerson, Christopher Ogden, Mark Thompson and Douglas Waller/Washington, Scott MacLeod/Cairo and J.F.O. McAllister/London

With reporting by Massimo Calabresi, James Carney, Matthew Cooper, John F. Dickerson, Christopher Ogden, Mark Thompson and Douglas Waller/Washington, Scott MacLeod/Cairo and J.F.O. McAllister/London