A Portrait of a Man Defined by His Wars

For Bush's closest advisers, how the president governed can best be judged by the results he has achieved, or will eventually achieve.

"I have believed from day one that Iraq was going to change the face of the Middle East. I've never stopped believing that," Secretary of State Rice said during a meeting at the State Department in May 2008. She acknowledged, however, that "there were times in '06 when I wondered if it was going to change the face of the Middle East for the better or not."

Rice rejected the notion that the Middle East had been stable and that the Bush administration had come along and disturbed it by invading Iraq. Those who felt that way simply didn't know what they were talking about.

"What stability? Saddam Hussein shooting at our aircraft and attacking his neighbors and seeking WMD and starting a war every few years? Syrian forces, 30 years in Lebanon? Yasser Arafat stealing the Palestinian people blind and refusing to have peace?"

Rice considered the war nothing less than "the realignment of the Middle East. On one side, you've got Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, the Gulf states" supporting non-extremists. "At the other side, you've got the Iranians, Hezbollah, Hamas," with Syria shifting sides, she said. She felt there had never been a greater cohesion of American allies in the Middle East than in 2008, even if those countries didn't want to be on the front lines supporting the United States publicly.

"There's nothing that I'm prouder of than the liberation of Iraq," she said without hesitation. "Did we screw up parts of it? Sure. It was a big, historical episode, and a lot of it wasn't handled very well. I'd be the first to say that."

She agreed that on Inauguration Day 2009, no new president, Democrat or Republican, was going to say that the Bush administration had fixed the Middle East. But she asserted that over time, a democratic Iraq would emerge, Iran would be transformed or defeated, Lebanon would be free of Syrian forces, and a Palestinian state would exist.

"We didn't come here to maintain the status quo. And the status quo was cracking in the Middle East. It was coming undone. And it was going to be ugly one way or another. . . . With the emergence of Iraq as it is, it's going to be bumpy, and it's going to be difficult but big. Historical change always is. There are a lot of things, if I could go back and do them differently, I would. But the one I would not do differently is, we should have liberated Iraq. I'd do it a thousand times again. I'd do it a thousand times again."

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By the summer of 2008, Vice President Dick Cheney was getting ready to move on. After four decades in government, he believed he'd had quite a run. The administration had planted a democratically elected government in the heart of the Middle East and, he maintained, administered a major defeat to al-Qaeda. The Bush anti-terrorist policies, in his view, were sound. Despite the controversy and allegations of torture, he believed that the administration had established an effective and necessary interrogation program for high-value detainees, even though harsh techniques such as sleep deprivation and waterboarding, or simulated drowning, had been used against multiple detainees.

Early on, Cheney set out to make his vice presidency a consequential one. He had been at the center of the action, shaping policy and working to strengthen presidential powers. But everything had its price: If his chosen path meant leaving office as a symbol of belligerency and excess, he was willing to pay.