How it came to war
New Yorker
by NICHOLAS LEMANN
Issue of 2003-03-31
Posted 2003-03-24
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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