The 12 Year Itch

At a meeting with the president in August at his ranch at Crawford, Texas, Powell insisted that the United States could not go it alone in Iraq, that allies were essential to any campaign to disarm Saddam. Administration officials now say that the significance of this meeting, first reported in Bob Woodward's book "Bush at War," has been overblown. The White House says it had always intended to go to the United Nations before taking on Iraq.

But there was considerable disagreement within the administration over what might be accomplished at the United Nations. Powell apparently believed that Saddam could be forced to disarm without war--that a firm stand by the United Nations, backed by the threat of U.S. military power, could compel Saddam to back down and give up his WMD. It was a long shot, perhaps, but worth trying. Bush's other top advisers, however, were dubious that Saddam would ever surrender, and saw the reintroduction of U.N. arms inspectors as a snare.

Partly because of this fundamental internal contradiction, the White House gave off confusing and mixed signals last fall and this winter. Was the real goal disarmament or regime change? Was the threat from Saddam building a nuclear weapon or sharing his bio-chem arsenal with Al Qaeda? The evidence and the arguments coming from the administration were never wholly convincing. Moderates from the Bush 41 administration strongly fault national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice for failing to pull together a coherent message and a clear game plan. Rice is a "yes man," says one former top government official. "She thinks her job is just to figure out what the president is trying to say and then to say it more articulately." The splits between Defense and State, between Powell on the one hand and Cheney and Rumsfeld on the other, have been allowed to spin out of control. At interagency meetings set up by the national-security staff to iron out policy differences, the Defense Department sometimes doesn't even bother to show up.

Powell was caught in a bind, painfully exposed by the administration's failed diplomatic dance with the French. Powell had hoped to bring along the French to sign on to a war resolution if inspections failed. But in January the French, claiming that the Americans never had any intention of making the inspections work, began publicly denouncing the Bush administration as, in effect, warmongers. Powell was reported by aides to be truly angry at the French. But he could just as easily have been furious at his own untenable position.

Both the president and the secretary of State have come under fire for bungling the diplomacy, for lacking the finesse of the Bush 41 team that put together the gulf-war coalition. Scowcroft publicly warned that an invasion of Iraq without wide international support would isolate and endanger the United States. President Bush did work the phones like his father in '91. But father and son have very different world views and experiences. Bush Senior, a former ambassador to the United Nations and China, and CIA director as well as a well-traveled vice president and president, is at heart a moderate internationalist, perfectly comfortable with foreign heads of state. Bush Junior, far less worldly, is much more a creature of Midland. President Bush and his father talk all the time on the phone, says a source close to 41. But "his father is not going to say, 'Now, son, you've got to do this'," says the source. "And the son has tried to draw lessons from where the father went wrong." According to this source, President Bush believes that one of his father's biggest mistakes was failing to get rid of Saddam Hussein when he had the chance.

Bush will be remembered as the war leader who finally stepped up to the hard problem and confronted Saddam. The question is whether a nimbler, less heavy-handed approach could have brought America into war with a strong coalition of allies, and not as a lonely and seemingly arrogant superpower. The Bushites are hoping that success will bring round the doubters and naysayers. But a crude, bloody victory could leave the world divided and America in the unenviable role of imperial policeman. That would be a political as well as a strategic disaster for the president. Most Americans, when threatened, are willing to go to war. But then they like to come home.

WITH JOHN BARRY, MICHAEL ISIKOFF, RICHARD WOLFFE AND MICHAEL HIRSH IN WASHINGTON AND CHRISTOPHER DICKEY IN AMMAN

© 2003