Stumbling Into War

James P. Rubin

From Foreign Affairs, September/October 2003

Summary:  Why did most of the world abandon Washington when it went after Saddam Hussein? The war in Iraq could never have been an easy sell, but nor should it have been such a difficult one. The Bush administration badly botched the prewar maneuvering, presenting a textbook study in how not to wage a diplomatic campaign.

James P. Rubin is a Visiting Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and was Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs from 1997 to 2000.

American power did indeed promote effective multilateral action on Iraq. But to maintain international support, the Bush administration should have then shown a willingness to adjust its military timetable to diplomatic realities. A synchronized policy would have had the diplomatic and military tracks converge sometime this fall. All of the key players in Europe now say that they would have been prepared to support or at least sanction force against Iraq if it had not fully disarmed by then. And waiting that long would have demonstrated to all that Washington was prepared to go the extra mile to secure international backing. But the Bush administration showed no such willingness.

No doubt, such a timetable would have entailed serious logistical questions and complications. For example, could military forces have been maintained in the region throughout the summer? Such problems could have been solved, however. The pace of deployment could have been slowed, making it less onerous for the allied armies to wait out the summer. Or, as the British military started to contemplate, materiel could have been left in the region while troops were rotated in and out. London strongly believed that the diplomatic advantages of waiting until the fall far outweighed the technical difficulties. In other words, Washington's most important supporter assigned a high priority to getting a positive vote in the Security Council and garnering international support and was prepared to make the arrangements necessary to ensure those results. The Bush administration, however, was not.

Indeed, the administration would not make even modest adjustments to its military plans, although doing so could have dramatically increased diplomatic support for the war. For example, in the endgame of the negotiations over the second resolution, London could not get Washington to acquiesce to several weeks' delay, despite the fact that waiting could have helped secure majority support and that top military officials said such a delay would have no appreciable impact on the conduct of the war. The administration simply did not care very much whether it had international backing or not, and the Europeans knew it.

PLANNING FOR PARTIAL COMPLIANCE

The American government's biggest mistake in the lead-up to the war was its lack of foresight and planning. Critically, no effort was made to lay the groundwork for the possibility that Saddam would partially comply with Resolution 1441. Thus Washington had no strategy to deal with Baghdad's actual response to the UN's demands and the threat of invasion.

The unanimous passage of Resolution 1441 in November of last year had masked a number of major differences among key members of the UN Security Council. Although the vote was a clear diplomatic success, insofar as it represented international support for a tougher stance on Iraqi disarmament, the council had also kicked a number of hard questions down the road. Would, for example, a second resolution be required before military action took place? How would Iraqi compliance be judged? And, most important, how much time would Iraq get to clear up discrepancies in its reported stockpiles of WMD? Unfortunately, no effort was made to resolve these ambiguities once 1441 was passed. Nor did the major powers develop a diplomatic game plan for each of Iraq's four possible responses to the resolution. Instead, as one of the architects of the UN diplomacy put it, all the key players took a "diplomatic holiday."

The first imaginable Iraqi response was capitulation. Facing the prospect of losing power, Saddam might well have complied fully. If he did come clean and give inspectors immediate access to his scientists, documents, and proof of either the existence of his WMD or their destruction, war would have been averted. Although much of the world did not trust the Bush administration to accept such a result, Blair and Bush had agreed that if Iraq really did disarm, war would be avoided.

The second possible outcome was the "smoking gun" scenario. If Saddam refused to acknowledge having any WMD programs but did provide unconditional access to all relevant sites in Iraq, UN inspectors were expected to find the famous "smoking gun" -- that is, unequivocal proof of Saddam's illegal weapons, such as a Scud missile or a cache of biological agents. Top officials in Washington and London genuinely believed that such evidence would be uncovered. Had the evidence emerged, support for war would have materialized. Russian President Vladimir Putin, for example, told Bush in a private message that he would accept a war if such evidence were found.