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.

TRUE LIES

Many in the Bush administration apparently view the diplomatic failure as a minor setback and assume that the military victory is all that will be remembered. And to a certain extent, such officials are right. The United States did send a powerful message to dictators and supporters of terrorism, and the Iraqi people were liberated from tyranny. Stability in the region has improved now that its most pernicious government has been eliminated. If some form of representative government eventually takes charge in Baghdad, democratic values may finally start to spread through the Middle East, the one region of the world from which they have remained conspicuously absent until now.

Nonetheless, all of these worthy goals could and should have been achieved with international support. Americans should be worried that so many around the world hoped that they would fail in Iraq, that Saddam would put up greater resistance, killing more U.S. soldiers and dragging out the conflict. Some of the United States' moral authority has also been lost, along with its cherished reputation as a superpower reluctant to use military might.

The most concrete consequences of Washington's failure will be felt the next time a dangerous regime starts developing WMD. Stopping the proliferation of such weapons has become the United States' top national security priority. Winning that battle will require more than just American resolve and military power, however; it will require cooperation from countries around the world. Unfortunately, the diplomatic debacle over Iraq has harmed the international system that monitors, controls, and responds to wmd threats; the whole concept of coercive disarmament has been discredited. Even the Bush administration has now recognized that dealing with North Korea and Iran requires the UN system. But what will happen the next time coercive disarmament is attempted by the UN? Washington's recent attacks on the UN inspectors' efficacy will make it harder to rely on their judgments in the future.

Even more worrisome is how the failure to actually find WMD in Iraq is playing out. By basing the decision for war on American intelligence and threat assessments, rather than the collective will of the UN, the United States placed its credibility on the line. Unfortunately, to justify early action, Washington appears to have exaggerated the near-term threat. Ironically, most of the underlying information that led most intelligence agencies to conclude Iraq had and was hiding chemical and biological weapons originally came from UN inspectors. That information alone would have been sufficient to justify military action, although perhaps not as quickly as the Bush administration wanted. Thus U.S. officials decided to play up the alleged imminent threat. The most egregious example of this was Cheney's argument that Iraq had "reconstituted nuclear weapons." The United States is still paying the price for those false claims.

The administration should have focused attention on Iraqi noncompliance, not U.S. intelligence. No country doubted that Iraq was failing to cooperate with the UN inspectors. Had war been launched later -- after Blix had concluded and a majority of the Security Council had accepted that Iraq was never going to disarm fully -- the search for WMD would never have become the kind of international spectacle it has. A war with greater legitimacy would have kept the spotlight on Iraq, not the United States.

Tragically, the truth about Saddam's WMD may never be known. Apparently, little effort was made to secure and protect potential Iraqi WMD sites. It remains a mystery why the Pentagon reportedly did not make securing such sites one of its highest wartime priorities, especially given that materials looted and stolen may now be sold to criminal groups or terrorist organizations.

In the future, stopping wmd proliferation will require the United States to consider interdicting supplies on the high seas or possibly attacking nuclear facilities. To gain international support for such measures, Washington will need the international community to trust its information and motives -- a proposition now unlikely at best. It is worth recalling the events of 1962, when John F. Kennedy sent former Secretary of State Dean Acheson to brief Charles de Gaulle about the Soviet deployment of nuclear missiles in Cuba. Acheson offered de Gaulle a full intelligence briefing, but the French president told him it wasn't necessary, saying he trusted Kennedy never to risk war unless he was sure of his facts. After the diplomatic debacle over Iraq, it is hard to imagine a similar level of trust today.

Already the failure to find WMD is being noted closely in Paris. One key French official acknowledged that if significant quantities of chemical or biological weapons were found, "we would be dead." But there have not yet been such findings. Still, although Chirac seems to have been right in his assessment of the limited nature of Saddam's WMD capabilities, France's interests have suffered too. French officials wince at the memory of de Villepin's "delusions of grandeur," which marked France's dramatic but fruitless opposition to war. As a result of Paris' position, many Iraqis continue to associate France with the hated Saddam regime, and throughout the Arab world, France is now perceived as impotent for having failed to stop or slow America's invasion. Furthermore, France's most cherished international institution -- the United Nations -- has been weakened and sidelined. And Chirac's intemperate attack on the United States' eastern European backers ("They should learn to shut up") will be remembered in Europe long after Iraq is forgotten. Finally, Chirac also appears to have seriously misjudged how long American anger toward him would last. The political and business elite in Paris now feel that he went too far, and the majority of officials in the French foreign ministry who argued for abstention rather than opposition at the Security Council no doubt feel vindicated.