by Jules Witcover

One of the things we learn from former President George W. Bush's new memoir Decision Points is that what he was pursuing in the run-up to his invasion of Iraq was "coercive diplomacy," and that in the end it didn't work.

Or, as events later proved, what ultimately was coerced was Bush's decision to use force to get rid of Saddam Hussein, in part because he ran out of patience with the search for weapons of mass destruction that weren't there.

The whole Bush theory, he writes, was predicated on the belief that "Saddam's weakness was that he loved power and would do anything to keep it. If we could convince him we were serious about removing his regime, there was a chance he would give up his WMD. ... The odds of success were long, but given the alternative it was worth the effort."

The theory required developing "a credible military option that could be used if he failed to comply," and that "ultimately it would be Saddam Hussein's decision to make." Bush notes that only two months after 9/11, he instructed Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld "to review the existing battle plans for Iraq. We needed to develop the coercive half of coercive diplomacy."

When intelligence reports came in during the summer of 2002 of a suspected chemical weapons lab in northeast Iraq, Bush writes, Vice President Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld wanted to attack it but Secretary of State Colin Powell balked, warning: "This would be viewed as a unilateral start to the war in Iraq."

Bush argues that a unanimously passed UN Security Council resolution established Iraq's obligation to disclose and disarm its WMD and that "the burden of proof rested with Saddam. The inspectors did not have to prove that he had weapons. He had to prove he did not."

So, Bush writes, while "we all should have pushed harder on the intelligence and revisited our assumptions," he relied on logic: "If Saddam doesn't actually have WMD," Bush asked himself, "why on earth would he subject himself to a war he will almost certainly lose?"

Bush, however, writes how he finally succumbed to a plea from his strongest ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, to go back to the UN for a second specific resolution on military force, and sent Powell to personally make the pitch based on overstated evidence of WMD that Powell later regretted, calling it a "blot" on his permanent record.

As Bush warned the UN that it risked being "irrelevant," the UN inspectors were sent back in. Although Bush mentions a late January 2003 report from chief inspector Hans Blix of lack of cooperation by the regime, he says nothing of two later Blix reports before the invasion, citing better cooperation and the failure to find any WMD or facilities to make them.

The bid for the second UN resolution crumbled under opposition from several unwilling countries, but Bush pressed on. He quotes Cheney as asking him at a private lunch, "Are you going to take care of this guy, or not?" Bush writes: "I appreciated Dick's blunt advice. I told him I wasn't ready to move yet."

Of the failure to find WMD, Bush insists: "Nobody was lying. We were all wrong. The absence of WMD stockpiles did not change the fact that Saddam was a threat. ... Still, I knew the failure to find WMD would transform public perception of the war.

"While the world was undoubtedly safer with Saddam gone, the reality was that I had sent American troops into combat in large part on intelligence that proved false. That was a massive blow to our credibility -- to my credibility -- that would shake the confidence of the American people. No one was more shocked or angry than I was when we didn't find the weapons. I had a sickening feeling every time I thought of it. I still do."

But in December 2003, when Diane Sawyer of ABC News asked him about his erroneous contention that they existed, he replied: "What's the difference? The possibility that he could acquire weapons, if he could acquire weapons, he would be the danger." The difference, Mr. Bush, can be counted in lives lost.

 

Available at Amazon.com:

Decision Points

The Backlash: Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters, and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama

The Feminine Mystique

The Disappearing Center: Engaged Citizens, Polarization, and American Democracy

The Virtues of Mendacity: On Lying in Politics

Bush on the Home Front: Domestic Policy Triumphs and Setbacks

The Political Fix: Changing the Game of American Democracy, from the Grassroots to the White House

Winner-Take-All Politics, How Washington Made the Rich Richer -- And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class

 

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Coercive Diplomacy That Went Wrong | Politics

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