Friendly Fire: The Near-Death of the Transatlantic Alliance

Chapter 3. The Franco-German-American War: Fall 2002 to Spring 2003

In the late summer of 2002, Iraq moved to center stage. Europeans generally read Saddam Hussein’s behavior as that of a quite rational tyrant whose drive to preserve power restrained him from launching WMD arbitrarily or getting close to jihadists who despised his secular regime. They thought that the containment effected by embargoes , no-fly-zones, and periodic bombardments by American and British planes had for a decade effectively deterred him from acquiring usable nuclear weapons or repeating the terrible chemical poison attacks he had unleashed in the 1980s on Iranian soldiers and Iraqi Kurd civilians. The one time when deterrence had failed, they noted, had been in 1990–91, when the United States had still been courting Iraq as a counterweight to Iran and when ambiguous American signals had let the Iraqi strongman think he could get away with seizing Kuwait. After the U.S.-led coalition pushed him back over the border, he remained contained for a decade, and they saw no reason why such deterrence could not continue to be effective. Nor were European intelligence agencies given any convincing evidence by their U.S. counterparts of a new threat of imminent Iraqi acquisition of nuclear weapons, attack on neighbors, or any direct link between Iraq and al Qaeda that might require near-term military blocking action. They therefore saw no urgency in incurring the enormous risks of an invasion of Iraq in 2002 or 2003. Electronic intercepts and the considerable information gathered by UN weapons inspectors before Hussein’s obstructionism forced them to quit the country in 1998 indicated that 45 chapter three The Franco-German-American War Fall 2002 to Spring 2003 03-7153-3 ch03 11/4/03 10:31 AM Page 45 while Baghdad was in all likelihood trying to obtain nuclear weapons, it was still several years away from acquiring crucial materials—and that this gap could be maintained in the future. The general European assessment was that an invasion of Iraq might be the one thing that could provoke a cornered Hussein to a desperate third-time use of chemical weapons. Moreover, many European governments held, an attack on Iraq could well lead to the breakup of this keystone Arab country, with Iran taking control of parts of the south and Turkey taking control of Kurdish territory to the north. Particularly if an invasion were conducted with the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation still at a boil, they reasoned, the result could be destabilization of the entire Mideast. They found eerie the increasingly voiced American expectation that democracy, welling up from Iraq’s educated younger generation, would naturally succeed Hussein ’s tyranny in Iraq, bring the equivalent of the Enlightenment and the Protestant Reformation to medieval Arab Islamic societies, start a wave of modernization in the region, and promote Israeli-Palestinian peace. On the contrary, they suspected, any move toward greater popular participation risked empowering clerics of the majority Iraqi Shia, with echoes of the theocratic Shia rule in next-door Iran.1 Moreover, with militants gaining in Pakistani elections, Europeans worried that an attack on Iraq could increase anti-American and antiwestern anger in the wider Islamic world, spread militancy among previously moderate Muslims in Southeast Asia, and perhaps even give fundamentalists access to Pakistani warheads that were not hypothetical future nuclear weapons, as in Iraq, but existing hardware. They feared as well polarization that could fulfill Huntington’s prophecy of a clash of Islamic and Christian civilizations,2 especially if Bush continued his uncritical support of Sharon’s violent reprisals that were exacting three Palestinian eyes and teeth for every single Israeli eye and tooth. The uniformed American military, the Central Intelligence Agency mainstream, and several foreign-policy stalwarts of the realist school from the administration of the senior President Bush seemed to share these concerns. In midsummer a series of opinion columns and leaks of military plans to the media raised circumspect but sharp questions about administration intentions in Iraq. Bush senior’s secretary of state James Baker, National Security Council adviser Brent Scowcroft, and Gulf War The Franco-German-American War 46 03-7153-3 ch03 11/4/03 10:31 AM Page 46 commander General Norman Schwarzkopf were among the doubters; so was Bush’s own Middle East envoy, General Anthony Zinni (who subsequently lost that post). Most bluntly, Zinni said, Attacking Iraq now will cause a lot of problems. . . . It might be interesting to wonder...