Elated by the surgical American conquest of Afghanistan – the unipower at its maximal – Bush ordered the CIA to find the evidence of such weapons in Iraq. Meagre and misleading intelligence was soon sculpted to fit his policy, now backed by Tony Blair, the talented British prime minister. An attractive, well-spoken public-school boy and Oxford barrister, he disciplined his Labour party, possessing the encompassing charisma to win three elections on his own personal centre ground. He and Bush had little in common, but they shared a Christian faith and missionary vision. Drawn to America at its plenitude, despite soaring opposition and suspicion about the dubious intelligence, Blair committed Britain to the war.
On 20 March 2003, Bush ordered 130,000 American and 45,000 British troops into Iraq, defeating Iraqi troops in an awesome display of high-tech warfare and seizing Baghdad three weeks later: the unipower had taken just twenty-six days to conquer Iraq. But the US occupation was short-sighted and heavy-handed. All Baathists – most of the army and civil service – were dismissed. A frivolity was reflected in a most-wanted list in the form of playing cards: Saddam – the Ace of Hearts – had vanished with his sons. Three months later, Uday and Qusay and the latter’s fourteen-year-old son Mustafa were betrayed by their host in Mosul for $30 million and killed in a three-hour shootout with the Americans. In May, Bush, standing on USS Abraham Lincoln in a bomber jacket, in front of a ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner, declared the ‘end of major combat operations’ that in fact marked the start of a creeping insurgency by a sinister gallimaufry of jihadist terrorists (led by al-Qaeda), Sunni and Shia militias (the latter backed by Iran) and the sacked Baathists. In December, at a remote farm, Saddam, shaggy and unkempt, was captured hiding in a manhole, but it made little difference. Using funds channelled by Saddam’s wife Sajida and his daughter Raghad, the insurgents converted the American triumph into a dystopic pandemonium of bombings, assassinations and urban cauldron battles. If there had been no link to al-Qaeda before the US invasion, now its terrorists launched a spree of sectarian killings.
At dawn on 30 December 2006, a stooping grizzled figure, wearing a dark suit, was led on to a scaffold between two executioners in ski masks in front of an audience of his Shiite enemies, including several ministers in the new Iraq government, some of whom were filming with their mobiles. As a rope was tightened around his neck and he recited the shahada, voices cried out the names of Shiites he had killed. ‘That’s how you express your manhood?’ growled the sixty-nine-year-old Saddam.
‘Go to hell!’ shouted the audience.
‘The hell that’s Iraq?’ – and the trapdoor opened.
‘The tyrant,’ they chanted, ‘is dead.’*
Bush finally embraced the new counter-insurgency tactics in Iraq, devised by a gifted general, David Petraeus, surging US troops and building Sunni alliances, to stem the mayhem – but 4,000 Americans and 500,000 Iraqis were killed. No weapons of mass destruction were found. The new Iraq, sectarian and corrupt, was far from a liberal democracy.
Moving between Afghan and Pakistani hideouts, hunted by American commandos, bin Laden could reflect that his gambit to bleed and degrade US power had worked. But he had not foreseen that the chief beneficiary was not his Sunni jihad but instead the resurgence of Shia Iran.
‘So how’s it feel?’ W. Bush asked Barack Obama.
‘It’s a lot,’ replied Obama. ‘I’m sure you remember.’
‘Yep, I do,’ said W. ‘It’s a heck of a ride you’re about to take …’
It was 20 January 2009: W and Laura Bush were welcoming the new president Obama and his wife Michelle to the White House. The polar opposite of Bush, Obama was a uniquely charismatic figure who attracted different segments of American society. Not only was he the first black commander-in-chief, the son of the maverick Kenyan economist who had come to Hawaii and Harvard on a scholarship, and the free-spirited white anthropologist. He was the most literary, cerebral president since Lincoln. This cool-blooded law professor, nicknamed No Drama Obama, was elected to soothe Americans after Iraq. Yet his background was not totally American – closer to Africa, further from the slavery experienced by most African-Americans. He described himself as ‘a platypus or some imaginary beast’, joking, ‘I’ve got relatives who look like Bernie Mac, I’ve got relatives who look like Margaret Thatcher.’
Obama was obsessed by his Kenyan family: ‘I only remember my father for one month my whole life.’ In 1988, aged twenty-seven, before he started studying law at Harvard, he travelled to Kenya to research his book of family history – ‘making peace’, wrote his wife Michelle, ‘with his phantom father’.*
Moving to Chicago after Harvard, he worked at a top law firm – ‘Oh how earnest I was then, how fierce and humourless,’ he wrote – where he met a stellar Princeton and Harvard alumna descended from slaves in South Carolina, Michelle Robinson. Daughter of a charismatic father who scarcely let MS cramp his style and died ‘having given us absolutely everything’, and from a family filled with strong women, she was ambitious: ‘I assessed my goals, analyzed my outcomes, counted my wins … the life of a girl who can’t stop wondering am I good enough?’ She always remembered, ‘There’s an age-old maxim in the black community: you’ve got to be twice as good to get half as far.’
As the only two African-Americans in their law firm, they dated, finding in his adventurousness and her stability that ‘opposites attract’. She thought him rare as a ‘unicorn … this strange mix-of-everything man’ – ‘refreshing, unconventional and weirdly elegant’. He thought her ‘an original … She was tall, beautiful, funny … and wickedly smart. I was smitten.’ But she believed that ‘the road to the good life was narrow and full of hazards. Family was all.’ He had that characteristic of politicians: ‘He was oddly free from doubt.’
Obama started community work and taught law at Chicago before at thirty-five winning election to the Illinois Senate in November 1996. Michelle laughed at his effect on white people: ‘In my experience you put a suit on any half-intelligent black man and white people tended to go bonkers.’ When Obama, who became a US senator in 2004, ran for the presidency four years later, Michelle ‘avoided talking to me about the horse-race aspect of the campaign’, until, her face ‘pensive’, she asked one night, ‘You’re going to win, aren’t you?’
Obama had studied the darkness and the light within American society. America was the ‘only great power made up of people from every corner of the planet’, but the challenge was ‘to see if we can do what no other nation has ever done. To see if we can actually live up to our creed.’ He was an optimist. ‘Maybe I can do some good,’ he told Michelle. America was the ‘place where all things are possible’. When he won the presidency, ‘I felt,’ wrote Michelle, ‘like our family launched out of a cannon and into some strange underwater universe.’
Obama had campaigned for the White House on the slogan ‘Yes we can’, but in power things at home and abroad were less possible than he expected.
Yet ‘The more pressure he was under,’ noticed Michelle, ‘the calmer he seemed to get.’ That was just as well since he arrived in the middle of a world banking crisis caused by reckless investments in American property. Great financial houses crashed. Prompted and aided by Gordon Brown, ascetic and analytical British prime minister, Obama spent $626 billion on saving the economy and those banks too big to fail. Yet his election did not halt the trigger-happy racism of American society: on 26 February 2012, Trayvon Martin, seventeen years old, was shot in Florida by a vigilante; on 17 July 2014, Eric Garner, a gentle forty-two-year-old horticulturalist, was killed in a chokehold by a Staten Island policeman. Its filming by a witness with a mobile phone launched a new movement: Black Lives Matter.