Known and Unknown - Donald Rumsfeld [240]
Shortly after my “old Europe” comment, and to counter France and Germany’s negative position on Iraq, ten Eastern European nations jointly declared their support for military action. “Our countries understand the dangers posed by tyranny and the special responsibility of democracies to defend our shared values,” their leaders declared jointly. “[W]e are prepared to contribute to an international coalition to enforce [UN Resolution 1441] and the disarmament of Iraq.”4
In any event, the phrase “old Europe” entered the vernacular. The segment of Americans that preferred calling french fries “freedom fries” loved it. The elites in Paris and Bonn who thought themselves the guardians of a sophisticated, new world order did not. All in all I was amused by the ruckus.
Nearly fifty nations would join the American and British–led coalition willing to change the regime in Iraq—with thirty members committed to concrete, visible support and the others preferring to provide assistance more discreetly. As far as everyone on the NSC was concerned, the more nations involved in the invasion and in the postwar period, the better. It would mean less burden would fall on the United States and, in particular, on our military. I agreed with Churchill’s formulation. “There is at least one thing worse than fighting with allies,” he observed, “and that is to fight without them.”
Yet even this impressive achievement did not prevent critics from accusing Bush of “acting alone.” It was harmful, to say the least, when Senator John Kerry publicly denigrated the forty-five nations that were supporting the coalition effort in Iraq. He acidly referred to them as members of the “coalition of the coerced and the bribed.”5 This was an especially peculiar charge for two reasons. The first was that Kerry, like most of the Democrats in the Senate, had supported the decision to go to war—at least, when things seemed to be going well. Second, he presented himself as an internationalist, yet he was insulting our friends and allies and purposefully harming our coalition, simply to score a domestic political point.
The deeper irony was that his charge was perfectly misdirected. It was true that some nations in the coalition provided only a little help, but in some cases that was all they could afford to offer. Others, particularly the British, Polish, Spanish, and Australians, extended substantial help, in the form of military and civilian personnel and materiel. Given all we now know about the deep corruption in the Oil-for-Food program, if any nations might have been charged with having been bribed or coerced to take a position on the war in Iraq, it should have been some of the nations that opposed military action, not those that supported it.
In February 2003, to further rally international support and increase pressure on Saddam, President Bush decided that the United States would make a major presentation to the UN Security Council on the threat Iraq posed and its defiance of UN resolutions. The point person for that presentation was an obvious choice. Secretary of State Colin Powell was not only America’s senior foreign policy official, he also carried substantial credibility at home and abroad.
As he prepared to make his case for military action against Saddam, Powell worked closely with Tenet and other senior CIA officials, traveling to CIA headquarters, meeting with analysts over several days, and working late into the night. Powell went over his presentation extensively with Condoleezza Rice to be certain they had analyzed all of the facts and information, and had raised every conceivable question, to hone America’s case. Powell and his aides considered how to achieve an Adlai Stevenson moment—a reprise of the UN ambassador’s forceful 1962 presentation to the UN during the Cuban Missile Crisis, which turned the tables on the Soviet Union.6
On February 3, two days before Powell was to go to New York, he sketched out his briefing