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.

Despite this turnaround, however, Washington and London decided to seek another resolution. British diplomats insist that domestic politics was not the only reason for this decision; they also wanted to avert a UN resolution condemning military action, which British government lawyers feared might make their participation in the campaign illegal. Blair himself, however, was never advised that the second resolution was likely not to pass. On the contrary, he assumed, as did most observers, that once the White House got behind the effort, it would be determined enough to win.

But then Berlin, Moscow, and Paris joined forces, insisting that the Iraqi threat did not justify an American-led invasion and claiming that the inspections were serving their purpose: Iraq was no longer in a position to develop a militarily significant arsenal of biological or chemical weapons. With the emergence of this new alignment, London's hopes for passage of a second resolution were crushed.

All along, most observers had assumed that Washington was quietly wooing Moscow. The strategy seemed obvious: once a nine-vote majority for the resolution was secured, Putin would be convinced to abstain in order to preserve good relations with the United States. France, isolated, might not risk using its veto alone.

But Washington never succeeded in winning over Putin, a continuing source of bitterness for British officials. Having gone along with NATO expansion, the deployment of U.S. military forces across Central Asia, and the termination of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, Putin felt he had little to show for his cooperation with Bush. With the Russian economy improving, Moscow was no longer playing such a weak hand. One Russian described Washington's attempts to appease them, such as by offering to repeal the famous Cold War-era Jackson-Vanik Amendment, as "peanuts." Moscow wanted respect, or at least a serious discussion of protecting Russia's interests in Iraq. Neither was offered.

Despite the formation of a Moscow-Paris-Berlin axis, however, it would still have been possible to secure a majority on the Security Council. But the White House failed even to line up the support of the Africans or the Latin Americans on the council. Officials across Europe are still puzzled that the vaunted power of the U.S. president -- not to mention the threats made and the incentives offered -- was not enough to accomplish this feat.

In attempting to understand Washington's failure, much has been made of the fact that Powell did not visit the key undecided nations. Powell's refusal to travel did indeed harm U.S. diplomacy, but another, bigger problem was that multilateral diplomacy requires compromise and subtlety, which the Bush administration, with all its bullying and inflexibility, notably lacked.

Effective U.S. diplomacy at the United Nations requires an impartial validator, since other countries prefer to be seen as responding to neutral voices rather than bowing to Washington's will. Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons inspector, could have played such a role and should therefore have been handled more skillfully. Regardless of whether he was too easy on Iraq ten years ago, as some in the administration complained, this was not a time for settling scores. Blix had an important job, and his judgments had influence on undecided countries. But instead of embracing him, working with him, and showing him that Washington and the UN inspectors were both tough-minded, top U.S. officials tried to bully him and even resorted to ridicule.

The worst example of the administration's pressure tactics occurred when Blix and Muhammad ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, met with Vice President Cheney. Cheney warned that if his administration found fault with Blix's judgments, "we will not hesitate to discredit you." In a separate meeting, Paul Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of defense, ridiculed the inspectors' caution, telling them, "You do know they have weapons of mass destruction, don't you?" Such tactics were amateurish and unseemly. Blix, a stubborn Swedish bureaucrat, made a point of telling others that he intended to stand up to Washington, and was infuriated by the treatment he received. The British government was forced to do extensive repair work. And the cutting personal remarks look particularly unfortunate in light of the administration's own subsequent difficulty in discovering Iraqi WMD -- despite the fact that the U.S. military now controls all the real estate in Iraq and has key scientists in custody.

To secure a second resolution would have also required some compromise on substance, especially the question of timing. London was willing to endorse such an approach, but Washington was not. Had the Bush administration shown some flexibility in early March, however, it would have been France that ended up on the losing side of the tally, not the United States. In fact, a compromise text did emerge that would have had the tacit backing of Blix and the support of ten countries. This resolution would have entailed the following elements: the establishment of benchmarks for compliance (which would have included accounting for vx gas and anthrax, the destruction of al Samoud and other illegal missiles, allowing scientists to be interviewed abroad, and resolving the issue of long-range drones); the setting of a mid-April deadline for Iraq to meet the established tests; and, finally, a presumption that failure to comply would constitute a material breach and thus trigger the use of force.

Blair and his diplomats worked hard to craft this compromise plan, but Washington's inflexibility doomed the effort. Instead, either because of the military timetable or because he was frustrated with the diplomatic process, Bush offered a one-week extension to mid-March -- no compromise at all, since that was when military operations ultimately commenced anyway. Merely offering several more weeks would likely have yielded ten votes for the British resolution, but Bush refused. Obtaining a majority simply was not a high priority for the White House, which believed that it would be vindicated by military success. So long as Blair believed a good faith effort to compromise had been made, the Americans considered that good enough.