Powell supported easing Iraq sanction before 9?11: Part IV
Teams A and B clashed once again in the immediate wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. On Sept. 13, Wolfowitz gave a press conference in which he said that "it's not just simply a matter of capturing people and holding them accountable, but removing the sanctuaries, removing the support systems, ending states who sponsor terrorism." The idea of "ending states" did not sit well with Team A types. Powell soon said that the administration would be "ending terrorism. And if there are states and regimes, nations that support terrorism, we hope to persuade them that it is in their interest to stop doing that. But I think ending terrorism is where I would like to leave it, and let Mr. Wolfowitz speak for himself." For the first few months of the new post-9/11 world, the Bush administration worked closely with several other nations in the war on terrorism and in Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan. But however much the administration was working in concert with other governments, Team B was in charge.
As Afghanistan was liberated from the Taliban, the administration set its sights on Iraq. Many wondered where the issue Iraq had come from -- why now, why Iraq? The answer was simple: Iraq had long been a foreign policy priority for Team B. In 1998, Wolfowitz, Perle and several others wrote to President Clinton urging him to take Saddam out, urging him "to turn your Administration's attention to implementing a strategy for removing Saddam's regime from power." This, too, had been a tug-of-war between Teams A and B. In a March 2001 press briefing with French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine, Powell had actually spoken in favor of easing some of the sanctions against Iraq, making sure "that the U.N. sanctions are targeted at the Iraqi regime's attempts to develop weapons of mass destruction, while sparing the people of Iraq from any suffering."
Sept. 11, of course, had pushed President Bush more and more into the Team B camp. But former President Bush tugged his son back toward the Team A side again in August 2002. After all, once he learned that Iraq had invaded Kuwait on Aug. 1, 1990, the elder Bush decided immediately to work through the U.N. on a response; Scowcroft and U.N. Ambassador Thomas Pickering worked through night with the U.N. Security Council on a resolution. "Decisive U.N. action would be important in rallying international opposition to the invasion and reversing it," George H.W. Bush writes in "A World Transformed," the book he coauthored with Scowcroft. Conversely, the current administration seemed dead-set on attacking Iraq without first going to the United Nations, with Cheney, Wolfowitz, and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld being the most vocal proponents of that path. Yet leaders from around the globe began issuing warnings that the Bush administration must first seek U.N. approval. German Chancellor Gerard Schroeder and French President Jacques Chirac made a joint statement asserting that Bush needed to seek the approval of the U.N. Security Council first. "Kuwait does not support threats to hit Iraq or to launch an attack against it," Sheikh Jaber al-Hamad al-Sabah, Kuwait's defense minister, told Kuwait's al-Rai al-Aam daily. "Our acceptance for this matter is conditional on an international blanket decision within the global organization."
The former president Bush kept his counsel. But in early August, father and son spent four days together in Kennebunkport, Maine, where they had intense discussions about what to do next.
That month, three former aides to the elder Bush unleashed a public relations barrage in favor of seeking U.N. approval. On Aug. 15, Eagleburger told ABC News that unless Saddam "has his hand on a trigger that is for a weapon of mass destruction, and our intelligence is clear, I don't know why we have to do it now, when all our allies are opposed to it." In an Aug. 25 Op-Ed in the New York Times, former Secretary of State James Baker III wrote that the U.S. needed to seek U.N. approval before any military action. "Seeking new [U.N.] authorization now is necessary, politically and practically, and will help build international support."
The biggest splash came on Aug. 16, when Scowcroft penned an Wall Street Journal Op-Ed. He didn't just argue that the U.S. should be "pressing the United Nations Security Council to insist on an effective no-notice inspection regime for Iraq" -- Scowcroft slammed the whole idea.
"There is little evidence to indicate that the United States itself is an object of [Saddam's] aggression," he wrote. "An attack on Iraq at this time would seriously jeopardize, if not destroy, the global counterterrorist campaign we have undertaken." Moreover, he wrote, "it undoubtedly would be very expensive -- with serious consequences for the U.S. and global economy -- and could as well be bloody … Finally, if we are to achieve our strategic objectives in Iraq, a military campaign very likely would have to be followed by a large-scale, long-term military occupation."
While the elder Bush insisted that his advisors were acting on their own, biographer Parmet has his doubts. "Having met Gen. Scowcroft, I understood the closeness and loyalty he has to the father," Parmet told Salon. "And as more time has gone by I'm convinced that Scowcroft was not consciously contradicting or being disloyal to former President Bush. I believe it was a reflection of the first president Bush's thinking; whether he got a sign-off or not, we may never know."
Meanwhile, within the current Bush administration, Team B made its voice heard. On Aug. 26, speaking to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Nashville, Tenn., Cheney slammed the logic of the former presidential aides. "What we must not do in the face of a mortal threat is to give in to wishful thinking or willful blindness," Cheney said. "We will not simply look away, hope for the best, and leave the matter for some future administration to resolve."
But in September, President Bush decided to go to the U.N. after all. "It was interaction between the president and his father" that changed the policy, a family associate told the Los Angeles Times. By Sept. 5, Bush was announcing that he was going to telephone Presidents Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, Jiang Zemin of China, and Jacques Chirac of France to lobby them to support a U.N. resolution against Iraq.
Team B-ers were dismayed, seeing this path as an exercise in futility that would only buy Saddam more time. But in fact it may well have been Team A's last hurrah. Bush went to the U.N. on Sept. 12 and seemed to nod toward multilateralism. But on Sept. 17, 2002, the administration issued a 33-page National Security Strategy, which bore more than a slight resemblance to Wolfowitz's original draft of the Defense Planning Guidance document from 11 years before. Heralding "proactive counterproliferation efforts," it seems to be in favor of the ad hoc crisis-by-crisis alliance system from the 1992 draft.
"It has taken almost a decade for us to comprehend the true nature of this new threat. Given the goals of rogue states and terrorists, the United States can no longer solely rely on a reactive posture as we have in the past," the NSS tellingly states. One can argue that on the day it was issued, President Bush officially cast off his father's foreign policy views.
Next page | Does the U.N. debacle prove Team B was right?
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