With President Bush already dismissing the likelihood that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein will comply with a new demand to allow weapons inspections inside Iraq, the administration will move aggressively in the coming weeks to win swift congressional and international support for a military operation to remove Hussein from power.
Bush’s bid to use United Nations resolutions to force the issue with Iraq quickly gained momentum after his speech before the body’s General Assembly last week, with all 15 members of the Security Council backing a U.S. plan to issue a new resolution setting a deadline for Iraq’s compliance. That approval may come as early as this week.
The administration’s initiative seems, at least for now, to have quelled the growing international opposition to using force to remove Hussein. And at the same time, Bush’s speech has ended a months-long, freewheeling debate on Iraq and set his Cabinet and top aides on the same path.
Until Bush’s speech, in which he challenged the UN to enforce its resolutions against Iraq or step aside for a U.S. military response, the administration’s Iraq policy had bobbed and drifted in the broad wake of a single, often repeated goal, “regime change.”
Each of Bush’s top Cabinet officers–chiefly Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld–has used the past six months to fashion his own interpretation of Iraq, Hussein, the weapons he might possess and the best way to get rid of him.
“There was really a spirited debate to gain Bush’s mind here,” said Rita Hauser, a member of the president’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, chairwoman of the International Peace Academy and a director of the Atlantic Council of the United States. “He was listening to all the arguments. In the end, he is a pragmatic, realistic person.”
But where Hauser saw a policy debate, others saw a policy vacuum.
The chorus of suggestions, hints and outright calls for military action coming from the White House carried all the weight that top Cabinet positions can lend. But it also presented a mosaic of messages from a single administration, confusing Bush’s own staff, Congress and the public and, perhaps most detrimental of all, confusing the United States’ possible allies.
No clear guidance
“I think the president had not made up his mind how he wanted to proceed,” said Lee Hamilton, a former Indiana congressman who is director of the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington. “And when that happens you get a lot of different voices coming up in the administration. [Cabinet] secretaries have their own views and they don’t have clear guidance from the president, and the media is after them to do something about it, and they all respond by putting the emphasis where they want it.”
Hamilton said the result was that Bush, “kind of lost control of the debate during the summer.”
Hamilton, Hauser and others close to the administration agree Bush has arrested that slide. By engaging the UN, Bush gains a measure of support for eventual U.S. military operations, but he also concedes a degree of control over just how that action might unfold.
The UN Security Council is expected to draft a new resolution that will set a deadline for Iraq to comply with previous UN resolutions. What will happen if Iraq chooses not to has been left unsaid. But Bush promised that “the purposes of the United States should not be doubted. The Security Council resolutions will be enforced.”
On Saturday, Britain echoed that sentiment at the UN, where British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw challenged its members to enforce its resolutions on Iraq.
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“We have not just an interest but a responsibility to ensure that Iraq complies fully with international law,” Straw told the General Assembly. “We have to be clear to Iraq and to ourselves about the consequences which will flow from a failure by Iraq to meet its obligations.”
At Camp David, Md., where Bush was meeting with Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, one of the United States’ most loyal allies, the president again stated that Washington would act if the UN fails to do so.
“This is a chance for the United Nations to show some backbone,” he said. “But make no mistake about it, if we have to deal with the problems, we will deal with it.”
Speaking in Baghdad, Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz revealed little movement on the part of his government Saturday, saying that Iraq would let UN weapons inspectors return only under a broad deal that would prevent a U.S. attack and lift UN sanctions.
At the White House, the debate over Iraq remains unsettled.
Some Bush advisers believe the U.S. doesn’t need UN approval to act against Hussein; these say loyal allies will board the war wagon once they see that it is rolling and successful.
“Once the president gives clear direction, people will jump on board,” said Kenneth Adelman, a former Reagan administration aide and a member of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board. “There was no international coalition the last time around until then-President [George] Bush drew a line in the sand and said, `This will not stand.'”
But others have argued that winning over allies before action is taken will make it easier to weather the difficult diplomatic moments that military operations invite.
“We made it very clear we will not abrogate our right to self-defense,” said Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. “But we prefer to work with the world. That was our going-in position. We prefer to operate in coalitions of the willing.”
A public debate
For a time, Bush’s own administration did not look much like a willing coalition. The debate over Iraq has been pitched and unusually public with the leaking of war plans, solemn, saber-rattling speeches and sideways diplomatic glances.
A campaign to turn back the attack-Iraq unilateralists was launched by a group of influential Republicans, led by Brent Scowcroft, who was a national security adviser to Bush’s father.
“Brent started on TV,” Hauser said, “and he basically stated his views. We said to him, `Since you’re out of the closet, why don’t you put it in writing?’ There was an active debate going on amongst all of us since mid-August. Everybody was talking with each other, and Brent started the ball rolling, and it picked up from there.”
Former Secretaries of State James Baker III and Lawrence Eagleburger weighed in objections to imminent military action in Iraq without broader international support.
Powell seemed to seize the moment next, noting in a late August interview with the BBC, “As a first step, let’s see what the inspectors find.”
By early September, the momentum seemed to be shifting toward a multilateral approach. The White House sent aides to Capitol Hill to win congressional support, and Bush made phone calls to key foreign leaders.
Iraq was high on the administration’s foreign policy docket from Bush’s first days in office. After a war to push Iraq out of Kuwait in 1991, seven years of faltering UN weapons inspections and four more years of no UN searches and a fraying fabric of economic sanctions, the new president wanted a tougher way to deal with Hussein.
“There was a review under way about how to deal with Saddam,” Richard Perle, chairman of the Defense Policy Board and a leading proponent of military operation to oust Hussein, said recently. “It was clear that the sanctions, rightly or wrongly, were a declining force.”
That effort was nearly complete when the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks occurred. The new war on terrorism gave voice to those within and close to the administration who were pressing for direct military action to remove Hussein and secure any weapons of mass destruction.
Calling for action
Perle and others who are considered neoconservatives, including Defense Board member Adelman, began to call publicly for U.S. action to remove Hussein.
Bush shelved the discussion, but it was renewed in January, when in his State of the Union address he announced that Iraq, Iran and North Korea formed an “axis of evil” that threatens the world’s security by seeking to develop chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.
In the same speech, Bush said, “The United States of America will not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons.”
In other words, the U.S. would take unilateral military action if threatened. With that began the campaign to define Iraq as just such a threat.
Cheney responded the most forcefully. In March, the vice president made an 11-nation tour of the Middle East, pushing for a broader war on terrorism that would include dealing with Iraq.
In a June speech, the vice president said, “Containment is not possible when unbalanced dictators with weapons of mass destruction can deliver those weapons on missiles, or secretly provide them to their terrorist allies. We have a responsibility to protect ourselves against future attack.”
As the debate increased through the summer, the administration suffered through a series of news reports in which unnamed military leaders expressed doubts about attacking Iraq.
In the month leading to Bush’s speech, matters intensified. Bush invited Iraqi opposition leaders to Washington for meetings, and he met with Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador to the U.S., at the Bush family ranch in Crawford, Texas.
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White House counsel Alberto Gonzalez issued a ruling that Bush need not win congressional approval for military action in Iraq, an opinion that drew an immediate and unfriendly response from Capitol Hill.
And Cheney gave his most forceful speech yet, telling a group of veterans in Nashville: “We realize that wars are never won on the defensive. We must take the battle to the enemy.”