Analysis: How we tried to slow the rush to war in Iraq
Looking out my window on the sixth floor of the State Department, I could see the plumes of smoke across the Potomac. The full magnitude of the attacks on that Tuesday, September 11, 2001, was just beginning to sink in. That afternoon, sitting in a virtually deserted building, alone in my office as assistant secretary of state for Near East affairs , I tried to collect my thoughts and think ahead.
Regime change in Iraq became the acid test of the administration’s post–9/11 approach. Impatient and proud of his decisiveness, President Bush found containment of Saddam to be too passive, inadequate to the challenges of this moment in history. The humble realist lens of his presidential campaign no longer seemed to illuminate. For “paleoconservatives” like Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld, the message sent in Afghanistan was necessary but insufficient.
Before a White House meeting that November, I sent a note to Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage emphasizing that it was the “wrong time to shift our focus from Afghanistan.” I explained that we needed “to show that we will finish the job [and] restore order, not just move on to the next Moslem state.” I added that the case for war was extremely weak. There was “no evidence of an Iraqi role” in 9/11, “no [regional or international] support for military action” and “no triggering event.
Many of the arguments in the memo, which we entitled “The Perfect Storm,” look obvious in hindsight. We highlighted the deep sectarian fault lines in Iraq, on which Saddam had kept such a brutal lid. We emphasized the dangers of civil unrest and looting if the Iraqi military and security institutions collapsed or were eliminated in the wake of Saddam’s overthrow, and the risk that already badly degraded civilian infrastructure would crumble.
At a White House meeting on Iraq in September, I dutifully made the case for working through the United Nations to build international legitimacy and to enhance the leverage of coercive diplomacy. After listening politely but impatiently, the vice president replied, “The only legitimacy we really need comes on the back of an M1A1 tank.” Despite grumbling by Cheney and other hardliners, who saw the whole U.N.
Our policy sins of commission had quickly become glaringly apparent, the sins of omission harder to measure but no less significant.
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