Stumbling Into War

A DIPLOMATIC POSTMORTEM

After the attacks of September 11, 2001, the United States put together a historic, worldwide coalition to overthrow the Taliban in Afghanistan and destroy al Qaeda. China, India, Japan, Pakistan, and Russia all supported the enterprise, as did Europe. The subsequent war may have scattered al Qaeda rather than destroyed it -- key operatives remain at large today -- but the mission was widely seen as a success.

Eighteen months later, the Bush administration went to war again, this time to overthrow Saddam Hussein. On this occasion, however, most of the same countries that had backed the United States in Afghanistan bluntly opposed the campaign -- as, indeed, did most of the world. Washington's failure to muster international support to depose a despised dictator was a stunning diplomatic defeat -- a failure that has not only made it harder to attract foreign troop contributions to help stabilize post-Saddam Iraq, but will more generally damage U.S. foreign policy for years to come.

Support for the Bush administration's Iraq policy should not have been so hard to gain. After all, Baghdad was in clear violation of a series of UN Security Council resolutions. And Bill Clinton had also deemed Iraq a substantial threat, both because of its apparent capability to field weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and because of its demonstrated willingness to use them. For those reasons, coupled with Saddam's history of gross human rights violations and his refusal to comply with the demands of the international community, the Clinton team had also supported regime change in Iraq.

Of course, an invasion of that country was never going to be an easy sell, even after the attacks of September 11. Legitimizing the use of force and preventing the United States from being seen as an aggressor would have required a comprehensive game plan. And the Bush administration did seem to recognize this fact at first, when, last fall, it managed to unite the world around its demand that Iraq finally disarm. But despite months of subsequent international debate and diplomacy, Washington did not then muster much support for its policy before actually going to war. The United Kingdom and Spain remained stalwart allies, as did most states in central and eastern Europe. But these countries, like Australia, had been on the United States' side from the beginning.