The differences between Americans and Europeans on what to do about Iraq were real—the products of history, political culture, and the two sides’ respective strategic situations. Those different perspectives had led to tensions on the issue for over a decade, and it was thus not surprising that they exploded into crisis when the United States decid- ed to dramatically change the status quo by invading Iraq.
The transatlantic crisis over Iraq, however, was not inevitable. It resulted in part from the structural gaps that divided Americans and Europeans, but just as much from the often regrettable decisions made in capitals on either side of the Atlantic and by Saddam Hussein in Iraq. As we show in the following two chapters, the transatlantic split over Iraq was as much the result of diplomatic mistakes, personality clash- es, unfortunate timing, faulty analysis, and bad luck as it was a product of an unavoidable march toward transatlantic divorce.
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Chapter
4
TOWARD
CRISIS
T
he story of how the United States and Europe came to clash over Iraq goes back many years; deep transatlantic differences on the issue were apparent since at least the mid-1990s. But the turning point toward crisis came, as on so much else, with September 11, 2001.Before the attacks on America, hard-liners within the Bush admin- istration had not yet convinced the administration as a whole that Iraq constituted an imminent threat to U.S. national security or that it required urgent action in the face of strong international opposition. In January 2000, for example, Bush’s chief foreign policy adviser on the campaign, Condoleezza Rice, had effectively rejected the notion of using the American military to overthrow rogue regimes, asserting in a
Foreign Affairsarticle that regimes like those in Iraq and North Korea were “living on borrowed time, so there need be no sense of panic
about them. Rather, the first line of defense should be a clear and classical statement of deterrence—if they do acquire WMDs, their weapons will be unusable because any attempt to use them will bring national obliteration.”
Similarly, in his January 2001 confirmation hearings, Secretary of State–designate Colin Powell expressed skepticism that Iraq constitut- ed a serious threat: “[As] long as we are able to control the major source of money going into Iraq, we can keep them in the rather broken con- dition they are in now . . . it is fundamentally a broken, weak country.” Reflecting the administration’s internal divisions, the Iraq “policy review” launched soon after inauguration was bogged down in bureau- cratic wrangling, with advocates of regime change failing to win the case for early action. As late as the summer of 2001, the policy priority was still on improving the sanctions regime on Iraq, and the review was not expected to conclude until at least September.
That schedule changed with 9/11 and the anthrax attacks along the East Coast of the United States that followed it—seen as a vivid demon- stration of what weapons of mass destruction in the wrong hands could do. After that, the balance between proponents of overthrowing Saddam and skeptics within the administration tipped, and the argu- ment in favor of doing something about Iraq—as well as the viability of selling the idea politically—tipped with it. The risk of a WMD attack on the United States, however remote, was simply no longer acceptable, and the administration, backed by a population more fearful for its security than it had been for decades, resolved to do whatever it took to eliminate the threat.
The Bush administration did not decide immediately and irrevoca- bly after September 11 to go to war against Iraq, as many opponents of war in Europe later seemed to believe. But there can be little doubt that 9/11 pushed the debate strongly in that direction. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, proponents of regime change felt they had a more compelling case and saw a window of opportunity to make it.
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On September 13, 2001, for example, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz publicly argued that the campaign against terrorism would be not only about capturing terrorists, but about “removing the sanctuaries, removing the support systems, ending states who sponsor terrorism,” which was widely interpreted to be a reference to Iraq. A few days later, at a National Security Council meeting at Camp David, Wolfowitz made the case for attacking Iraq as part of the war on terrorism, provoking a discussion about Iraq that included Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, National Security Adviser Rice, and President Bush himself. Bush, however, while suspicious of Iraqi involvement and sympathetic to arguments that Saddam would eventually have to be removed, decided against a near-term attack.
By the end of the weekend’s deliberations on how to respond to the terrorist attacks, Bush had made it clear that Iraq would not be part of the initial response and that the focus should be on Afghanistan and al Qaeda. “I believe Iraq was involved,” Bush told the NSC meeting on September 17, “but I’m not going to strike them now. I don’t have the evidence at this point.” Three days later Bush told visiting British Prime Minister Tony Blair that he agreed with Blair that “the job in hand is al Qaeda and the Taliban. Iraq, we keep for another day.”
Over the following months, Bush stuck to his decision not to “strike them now.” But he also began to make it increasingly clear that he did not intend to live with the status quo in Iraq forever. There does not seem to have been any single day on which the President or his senior advisers formally decided on war, but the momentum toward a policy of confronting Iraq grew steadily over the course of the winter and spring of 2002.
In January 2002, with the war in Afghanistan won, the President hinted at a new phase in the war on terror. His State of the Union address denouncing an “axis of evil” was a clear shot across the bow of the Iraqi regime and a signal to all that he saw a direct link between the problem of rogue regimes and the problem of terrorism. The warning
that “the United States of America will not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons” could only be read—and was read—as a warning to and about Iraq. Similarly, the President’s June 2002 West Point speech out- lining the doctrine of military preemption only made military action against Iraq seem more likely and more imminent.
Bush’s arguments that containment was “not possible” with dicta- tors who have weapons of mass destruction and that “the only path to safety was the path of action” were unmistakable signals that the United States was determined to act. And it did not take much of a logical leap to figure out just whom the Americans were going to act against. The new agenda, as one senior official later put it, was “not whether Iraq, but how.”