How would that have worked naturally into the work against Iraq?

Because you would have built a case why you needed to take action against Iraq.

So you think the case has been made well then?

I don't think the case has been made well. It's been made very poorly.

But it could have been made?

I believe it could have been made. Although the element of urgency was always missing.

You've referred to the campaign against Iraq as "elective surgery"; I imagine that means that you support disarming Saddam in principle, just not with the same urgency the Bush administration feels.

My view on it was and has been that at some point you're going to need to take actions to deal with the problem of Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction. But those actions didn't have to necessarily be military and they didn't have to be now. It's the administration that chose to do this set of actions at this time. And the reason they've had problems persuading people of the necessity for doing it has been because they couldn't address the urgency.

If you had been in charge in 1991, during the Gulf War, would you have taken him out of power?

There was no way in 1991, given the mandate, the mood of the American people, the strength of the Iraqi military, the capabilities of the United States, and so forth -- it wasn't realistic that you would have gone to Baghdad and taken him out of power at that point.

But since then there obviously has been some diplomatic efforts. So what would you have done differently in the last 12 years?

Well, the diplomatic effort started to flag in the mid- to late-90s. We began to lose French support for the actions to restrain him in a no-fly zone. Then we bombed, and after we bombed there was no hope of getting the inspectors back in -- this is December '98. And at that point we began the enforcement of the no-fly zones by continuing air presence and the episodic bombing campaigns in the northern and southern no-fly zones. Which, in turn, undercut our legitimacy to impose tighter sanctions -- and we had to give way on sanctions.

When the [Bush] administration came in, [Secretary of State] Colin Powell wanted to do "smart sanctions," but to be honest he didn't have the backing -- at least it wasn't clear that he had the backing -- from within the administration to make this a priority effort for the administration. And that's what it would have taken. Subsequent to 9/11, there was a decision then made, "Let's go attack Iraq" -- apparently that decision was made -- and the framework of the decision wasn't "Gee, we've got a terrible problem with Iraq, what are we going to do, let's talk about the problem." Instead, they apparently moved in their own private counsel and said simply, "We've got to have regime change in Baghdad."

And the problem with moving that quickly was that even though there had been a U.S. government policy to support an eventual regime change in Baghdad, it had never been aggressively pursued. So when they jumped to espouse this program, they left behind an American public, which was simply basically disinterested in Iraq but highly interested in pursuing the war on terror. And at the same time they left behind European and world public opinion, which couldn't quite grasp the connection between 9/11 and Iraq.

In the end, though, do you think that if what you call the "public diplomacy piece" had all happened, that it's still possible we would have ended up with a situation where it came to military action against Iraq?

Well, I'm not going to rule anything out. You can't hypothesize and say it would never come up that way. It might very well have ended up with a requirement for military action. But we've always said the stronger the coalition, the more cohesion, the more legitimacy you had behind it, the easier the war and the easier dealing with the aftermath.

In a story you wrote for the Washington Monthly, you talked about the importance of working with allies, even when a leader's electoral future hinges on the success of the military campaign, as Tony Blair is experiencing right now.

Yeah. [Laughs]

But Americans are reluctant to work too closely with the U.N. or have U.S. soldiers under the command of non-Americans. Say someday you are in charge of the military as commander in chief, how would you convince others of the importance of working with allies.

I think the importance of working with allies is going to become self-evident in the aftermath of this operation. We're not going to be able to maintain stability in the Middle East, support the reconstruction of post-Saddam Iraq, deal with the challenges of North Korea, continue this struggle against terrorism, and face the problem of Iran alone and still return to prosperity in this country. It's bigger than what we can do.

Recent Stories