When did Bush decide he had to fight Saddam?
Washington
had a vertiginous feeling last week as the endlessly debated war against Iraq
finally began. For the previous six months, the capital had surely been the most
pro-Iraq-war city in the world: George W. Bush had given a textbook
demonstration of Presidential power in bringing Washington into a position of
support—or, in the case of many of the Democrats, cowed silence—for a course
of action that almost nobody had advocated when Saddam Hussein forced the United
Nations weapons inspectors to leave, in 1998. There had been, from the
Washington point of view, a satisfying rhythm to the run-up to war, beginning
with Bush’s speech to the United Nations in September, continuing through
Saddam’s forced readmission of the weapons inspectors in the fall, and
culminating in Secretary of State Colin Powell’s presentation of evidence
against Saddam at the U.N. in early February, which, in Washington, at least,
caused a wave of liberal capitulations to the cause of war.
Then, to the
queasy surprise of the small community of people in Washington who follow
American diplomacy with a sense of proprietary interest, things fell apart.
There was much more opposition to the war than anybody had expected; seemingly
reliable allies jumped ship; the coöperation of the Security Council became
unattainable; even the impeccably loyal Tony Blair, the British Prime Minister,
needed last-minute resuscitation, in the form of a Presidential reiteration of
support for Palestinian statehood. Recrimination between hawks and doves, over
who was to blame for the failure of diplomacy, and gloom about the death of the
international order were in the air—along with martial expectancy. Late Monday
morning, after it was announced that President Bush would make a television
address that evening, helicopters suddenly began patrolling the skies and
streets were shut off. It turned out that a North Carolina tobacco farmer had
driven his tractor into a pond on the Mall, but, before people knew that, the
city had been alive with alarmed rumors: a peace protester was threatening to
blow up the Washington Monument; a terrorist had driven a truck packed with
explosives into the reflecting pool in front of the Capitol Building.
With the
war only hours away from beginning, I had a long talk with a senior
Administration official about how it had come about and what it seemed to
portend.
“Before
September 11th,” the official said, “there wasn’t a consensus
Administration view about Iraq. This issue hadn’t come to the fore, and you
had Administration views. There were those who
preferred regime change, and they were largely residing in the Pentagon, and
probably in the Vice-President’s office. At the State Department, the focus
was on tightening up the containment regime—so-called ‘smart sanctions.’
The National Security Council didn’t seem to have much of an opinion at that
point. But the issue hadn’t really been joined.
“Then, in the
immediate aftermath of the eleventh, not that much changed. The focus was on
Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda. Some initial attempts by Wolfowitz”—Paul
Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense —“and others to draw Iraq in
never went anywhere, because the link between Iraq and September 11th was, as
far as we know, nebulous at most—nonexistent, for all intents and purposes.
It’s somewhere in the first half of 2002 that all this changed. The President
internalized the idea of making regime change in Iraq a priority. What I can’t
explain to you is exactly the process that took us from the initial
post-September 11th position, which was, Let’s keep the focus on Al Qaeda and
Afghanistan, to, say, nine months later, when Iraq had moved to the top of the
priority list for us. That’s a mystery that nobody has yet uncovered. It
clearly has something to do with September 11th, and it’s clearly consistent
with the President’s speech about weapons of mass destruction in the hands of
rogues, people with a history of some terror—but, again, how it exactly
happened, and what was the particular role of Cheney, among others, I wish you
well in uncovering.”
I wondered how
the war looked to the American diplomatic community. “I think it’s hard to
generalize,” the official said. “It’s my sense that the arguments for
going to war are strong enough that people feel comfortable. There’s a good
case for going to war. There’s also a respectable case for not. But the case
for going to war is strong enough that I don’t think a lot of people at senior
levels are going home unable to face themselves in the mirror. A lot of this
comes down to how imminent a threat you feel Iraq poses. Everyone agrees that
Saddam Hussein is truly evil. Everyone agrees he has these weapons of mass
destruction. Everyone is concerned about what he might do with them. And so the
real question is, Did we have to do something right away, with military force?
Reasonable men and women can disagree, but I think the bottom line is, the
arguments that have led the President to this point are strong enough that even
those who tilt the other way can still acknowledge the validity of the arguments,
and, indeed, even conclude that those who favor going to war now may well be
right.”
In terms of the
future of American diplomacy, much depends on how the war effort goes. If things
don’t go well, the official said, “the price we pay is, first of all, the
aftermath inside Iraq is likely to be more costly, in terms of how long, how
many forces have to stay. It could be harder to put Iraq right, if what we
inherit is a much more destroyed place. Second of all, we could find the world
economy in much rougher straits. If things are messy and prolonged, we could
find some friendly governments possibly overthrown, or at least in much worse
shape. The U.S.’s reputation would be taking a battering. It’s one thing if
you challenge the conventional wisdom and are proved right. It’s quite another”—he
chuckled mordantly—“if you challenge the conventional wisdom and the
conventional wisdom proves to have been right. I just think America’s
reputation would have taken a real battering. We’d probably also find
increased terrorist attacks, because we’d be seen not as invincible, and
bogged down, and all that. This is all—this is a big throw of the dice.”
An odd
aspect of the Washington foreign-policy community during the last few months has
been that there was less general enthusiasm for the war inside the government
than you’d think, and more enthusiasm outside the government, which is where
the Democratic foreign-policy specialists are now. Foreign-policy Democrats are
a bit to the right of their party, because they feel that it tends to be too
hesitant about the use of American power, and foreign-policy Republicans (excepting
the hawks) are a bit to the left of theirs, because they feel that it
undervalues diplomacy. The result is that the foreign-policy arms of the two
parties form a continuum of opinion (excepting, again, the hawks), despite the
custom that forbids those who have served in Administrations of one party from
serving in Administrations of the other. The consensus after the expulsion of
the weapons inspectors in 1998 was that Saddam Hussein was a bad actor, but that
his misbehavior had not achieved the status of a grave international crisis. On
the other hand, quite a few people in the Clinton Administration wanted to
respond to him more forcefully than the United States actually did, with a
four-day bombing campaign called Operation Desert Fox.
James
Steinberg, who during the last years of the Clinton Administration was the No. 2
man at the National Security Council and is now the head of the foreign-policy
division of the Brookings Institution, told me that he would have preferred to
try to muster an international disarmament effort against Saddam. Then as now,
the chief problem would have been persuading the French and the Russians. “We
would have tried to go to the United Nations, but back it up with a more
aggressive posture, including moving troops to the region,” Steinberg said.
“But a variety of factors made it impossible.” He listed the war in Kosovo
and Al Qaeda’s bombing of the American embassies in East Africa as matters
that took the focus away from Iraq—and, of course, Clinton had an especially
weak hand during this period, because he was being impeached.
By the time of
the 2000 Presidential campaign, the flurry of activity that followed the end of
inspections had subsided, and on Iraq there was not much apparent difference
between Clinton’s position, Al Gore’s position, and Bush’s position. All
three men were nominally for “regime change,” without suggesting an
immediate way to achieve it. “In any Administration, the question is, How do
you raise an issue from one that people with a narrow portfolio worry about to
one that people with a broad portfolio worry about,” Stephen Sestanovich,
another high diplomatic official in the Clinton Administration, whom I saw in
Washington last week, told me. (Sestanovich now works at the Washington office
of the Council on Foreign Relations.) “Iraq was a problem the regional
specialists saw as very serious, but they could never get their argument
accepted above the level of regional specialists.” That was as true in the
early Bush days as in the late Clinton ones.
Then, when Iraq
did become an issue of Presidential importance, Washington followed George
Bush’s lead. The foreign-policy consensus shifted, from the view that Saddam
represented a second-order-of-magnitude problem to the view that it was worth a
war to get rid of him, but only if it was an international effort like the first
Gulf War. And most people believed that’s what would happen, once Bush had
acceded to Colin Powell’s request to go to the United Nations to line up
support. Surely, people felt, the rest of the world would come around to the new
American position—even the balky Russians and French. As Sestanovich put it,
“The anti-American stance is a familiar French thing, not entirely cynical,
not entirely principled. They’d know when to call it off. After they’d been
French for a while, they’d stop being French. People thought they understood
the limits of the game and it would be over at a certain point. And then it
wasn’t. And it turned out that the Russians were prepared to be French, as
long as the French were being French.”
So this was the
dizzying progression in the Washington diplomatic world: from believing that
Saddam should be taken somewhat more seriously as a threat, to believing that an
international coalition was going to oust him from power, to watching the
coalition fall apart and the United States go to war anyway—and wondering
whether it made a difference anymore what professional diplomats think.
Last
week, I went to see Richard Haass, the director of the policy-planning staff at
the State Department. Haass is probably the Administration’s most prominent
moderate theoretician and is a leading member of the foreign-policy
establishment. Before joining the Bush Administration, he had held the job at
the Brookings Institution which James Steinberg now holds. (And Steinberg
formerly held Haass’s job in the State Department.) Haass will soon be leaving
government to take one of the foreign-policy world’s plummiest jobs, as
president of the Council on Foreign Relations, in New York. With his departure,
it’s hard to think of whom one could call a prominent moderate theoretician in
the Bush Administration.
I arrived at
the State Department on the day that President Bush made his televised address
giving Saddam Hussein forty-eight hours to surrender power. The enormous,
usually crowded lobby of the building was deserted, as if to manifest the
succession of diplomacy by war. Haass seemed tired but not harried, as you would
when a long period of intense preparation had ended and there was nothing left
to do.
I
asked him whether there had been a particular moment when he realized that war
was definitely coming. “There was a moment,” he said. “The moment was the
first week of July, when I had a meeting with Condi”—Condoleezza Rice,
Bush’s national-security adviser. “Condi and I have regular meetings, once
every month or so—she and I get together for thirty or forty-five minutes,
just to review the bidding. And I raised this issue about were we really sure
that we wanted to put Iraq front and center at this point, given the war on
terrorism and other issues. And she said,
essentially, that that decision’s been made, don’t waste your breath. And
that was early July. But before that, in the months leading up to that,
there had been various hints, just in what people were saying, how they were
acting at various meetings. We were meeting about these issues in the spring of
2002, and my staff would come back to me and report that there’s something in
the air here. So there was a sense that it was gathering momentum, but it was
hard to pin down. For me, it was that meeting with Condi that made me realize it
was farther along than I had realized. So
then when Powell had his famous dinner with the President, in early August,
2002”—in which Powell persuaded Bush to take the question to the
U.N.—“the agenda was not whether Iraq, but how.”
The long,
gruelling effort at the U.N. now looked like a waste of time—or did Haass
disagree? “That’s too negative,” he said. “Resolution 1441”—which
the Security Council passed unanimously, and which reopened the weapons
inspections in Iraq—“was an extraordinary achievement. It got inspectors
back in under far more demanding terms. And it didn’t tie our hands. We never
committed ourselves to another resolution. So it was an extraordinary
accomplishment. It gave tremendous legal and political and moral authority to
anything that we would subsequently do. I don’t see how anyone could fault
that. Indeed, any problems that we have today pale in comparison to the problems
we would have had if we had not done 1441. Where we had problems was obviously
in the aftermath, and the question is why. Well, to some extent, as we got
closer to the reality of war, all the visceral antiwar feeling came out. The
French and others who voted for 1441 are being disingenuous. When they voted for
it, they knew damn well what serious consequences it would have. What they’re
doing is listening to their public opinion, rather than leading it.”
There
were other reasons besides French opposition that the American effort in the
United Nations had failed, Haass said. “A lot of the resentment of American
foreign policy over the last couple of years has coalesced. This has become a
kind of magnet for resentment. I think we may have been hurt by having a policy
toward the Israel-Palestine dispute that was perceived in much of Europe and the
Middle East to be biased toward Israel. In any event, we ended up going for the
second resolution, quite honestly, not because we needed it. It was seen as nice
to have, from our point of view. It was seen as desirable. But it was something
that Tony Blair and others felt very strongly that they needed in order to
manage their domestic polities.”
After months of
official talk about removing Saddam from power, would the United States really
have been willing to accept his remaining as the Iraqi head of state if he
complied with the weapons inspectors? “That’s a hypothetical,” Haass said.
“We said that we would have lived with it. My hunch is that, if you had had
complete Iraqi coöperation and compliance, so we had eliminated to our
satisfaction the W.M.D.”—weapons of mass destruction—“threat, the
question would be, Could Saddam Hussein have survived that? My hunch is, Saddam
concluded he couldn’t survive it, which is one of the reasons why we are where
we are. It would have been such a loss of face. But, assuming it did not lead to
regime change from within, I do not think we could or would have launched a war
in those circumstances. Instead, if Saddam survived W.M.D. disarmament, we could
have pursued regime change through other tools. That’s why you have diplomacy,
that’s why you have propaganda, that’s why you have covert operations,
that’s why you have sanctions. You have the rest of the tools. So my
recommendations would have been, we pursue regime change and war-crimes
prosecution—he still should have been responsible for war crimes—using other
tools. But I think you had to reserve the military either for the W.M.D. issue
or for incontrovertible evidence of support for terrorism.”
Now people were
saying that the United States, by deciding to abandon the Security Council
negotiations, had done irreparable harm to the institutional stature of the
United Nations. “We’ve not done irreparable harm to anything,” Haass said.
“In the case of the U.N., we’ve just once again learned the lesson that the
U.N. can only function as an institution when there’s consensus among the
major powers. The U.N. was never meant to act with the independence of a
nation-state. It was never meant to be the instrument of one great power against
another. So, when the great powers can’t agree, that’s when they have to go
outside the U.N. Otherwise they’ll destroy the institution to make it
relevant. You want to preserve it for those times when the differences between
the powers are modest, or they actually agree.”
Therefore, with
the United States determined to go to war, it was imperative to avoid a vote on
a second resolution, which might have failed and would have been vetoed even if
it had passed. “This would have been a much more confrontational situation,”
Haass said. “We would have been acting against the U.N. Now we can argue that
we are acting pursuant to the U.N., in 1441. This is a way, I believe, quite
honestly, of preserving the U.N.’s potential viability in the future. We’ve
not destroyed it. We’ve just admitted, though, that it can’t do everything,
when the great powers of the day disagree.”
Now that the war is under way, the Washington foreign-policy consensus has shifted again, to the point that Haass’s position on the future of the U.N.—indeed, the future of the United States as a member of lasting alliances—would seem overoptimistic to many people. Washington has stopped debating the merits of the real war in Iraq (that’s one for demonstrators in the streets, not policymakers in offices) and has begun to focus on a possible one in North Korea.
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