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in every network control
     room in America loved it—and stayed with it, splitting the screen to show images of
     the old and new presidents.
    The new White House communications chief, Chis Lehane, did not love it. He was on
     the hotline phone to ABC’s Roger Goodman, who was directing the pool coverage.
    “Roger! The President of the Fucking United States is making a major fucking policy
     announcement! That’s where your fucking coverage should be!”
    “Not my call, Chris,” Goodman said. “We just send out the feeds; the networks take
     what they want. And they want … Bubba.”
    “Let it go,” President Gore said later when Lehane slipped into the glass-enclosed
     reviewing stand during the Inaugural Parade and briefed him on Clinton’s upstaging.
     “I’m sure it won’t be the last time we’re going to be frustrated.”
    It wasn’t long before that turned out to be an unhappily prescient observation.
    * * *
    While President Gore and ex-president Clinton were competing for the attention of
     millions, a small group of men, casually dressed in slacks and sweaters, were gathered
     at a townhouse nine miles northwest of the capital, in Chevy Chase, Maryland. The
     host and his guests were exiles of a sort; but for a few thousand votes in Florida,
     they would have been preparing to guide the foreign policy of the United States under
     President George W. Bush. Now, with President Gore assuming power, they snacked on
     cold cuts as they engaged in a blunt assessment of how best to use the considerable
     political resources at their disposal to pursue their shared highest priority. And
     with them, elegantly dressed in a beige sport coat with blue pinstripes, was the one
     man who had done more than any other to shape that priority.
    For the top foreign- and defense-policy stars of the Republican Party, the Cold War
     and the power balances among nation-states had been the defining reality of their
     professional lives. They had been a part of the Reagan administration when that fifty-year
     struggle with the Soviet Union had come to an end. They were part of the first Bush
     administration when the president had rallied an international coalition to drive
     Iraq’s Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait; many of those at midlevel posts had bitterly
     regretted the decision not to send the Third Army straight into Baghdad, ridding the
     world of a psychopathic butcher once and for all. And for the eight years of the Clinton
     administration, they had worked in political exile to argue for “regime change” and
     had rallied the Congress to pass the Iraq Liberation Act, forcing President Clinton
     to sign the bill, making it the official policy of the United States government to
     depose Saddam.
    And now that they were facing four more years away from the center of military and
     diplomatic power, they were determined to make the removal of Iraqi dictator Saddam
     Hussein a reality.
    Their host that evening was Richard Perle, a twenty-five-year veteran of Washington
     and a relentless advocate for what had come to be known as neoconservatism, the core
     belief of which was the forceful use of American power and influence to challenge
     the legitimacy of America’s foreign adversaries. With Perle were such luminaries as
     Doug Feith, John P. Hannah, Zalmay Khalilzad, and Paul Wolfowitz—the last two having
     been key figures in the Defense Department of George H.W. Bush.
    After the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, Wolfowitz had dismissed the idea that a
     self-financed terror group could have pulled off such an audacious attack on its own;
     a nation-state had to have been behind such a strike, he reasoned, and that nation-state
     almost certainly was Iraq.
    One of the neocons’ allies, an academic named Laurie Mylroie, not only argued that
     Saddam had been behind the World Trade Center strike; she also saw Iraq’s hand in
     the 1995 bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, for which Timothy McVeigh