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3 DISPATCHES
FROM AMERICA Bush's faith run over by
history By Mark Danner
(Editor's note: This essay
appears in the November 8, 2007 issue of the New
York Review of Books and is published here with
the kind permission of the editors of that
magazine.)
"The only thing that
worries me about you is your optimism." -
Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar to US
President George W Bush, from the "Crawford
Transcript" of
February 22, 2003
Surely one of the agonizing attributes of
our post-September 11 age is the unending need to
reaffirm realities that have been proved, and
proved again, but just as doggedly denied by those
in power, forcing us to live trapped between two
narratives of present history, the one gaining
life and color and vigor as more facts become
known, the other growing ever paler, brittler,
more desiccated, barely sustained by the life
support of official power.
At the center
of our national life stands the master narrative
of this bifurcated politics: the Iraq war, fought
to eliminate the threat of weapons of mass
destruction that turned out not to exist, brought
to a quick and glorious conclusion on a sunlit
aircraft carrier deck whose victory celebration
almost instantly became a national embarrassment.
That was four and a half years ago; the war's
ending and indeed its beginning, so clearly
defined for that single trembling instant, have
long since vanished into contested history.
The latest entry in that history appeared on
September 26, when the Spanish daily El País
published a transcript of a discussion held on
February 22, 2003 - nearly a month before the war
began - between President Bush and Jose Maria
Aznar, then prime minister of Spain. Though the
leaders met at Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas,
some quickly dubbed the transcript Downing Street
Memo II, and indeed the document does share some
themes with that critical British memorandum,
mostly in its clear demonstration of the gap
between what Bush and members of his
administration were saying publicly during the
run-up to the war and what they were saying, and
doing, in more private settings.
Though
Hans Blix, the UN chief inspector whose teams were
then scouring Iraq for the elusive weapons, had
yet to deliver his report - two weeks later he
would tell the Security Council that it would take
not "years, nor weeks, but months" to complete
"the key remaining disarmament tasks" - the
president is impatient, even anxious, for war.
"This is like Chinese water torture," he says of
the inspections. "We have to put an end to it."
Even in discussing Aznar's main concern,
the vital need to give the war international
legitimacy by securing a second UN resolution
justifying the use of force - a resolution that,
catastrophically, was never achieved - little
pretense is made that an invasion of Iraq is not
already a certainty. "If anyone vetoes," Bush
tells Aznar,
we'll go. Saddam Hussein isn't
disarming. We have to catch him right now. Until
now we've shown an incredible amount of
patience. There are two weeks left. In two weeks
we'll be militarily ready ... We'll be in
Baghdad by the end of March.
The
calendar has already been determined - not by the
inspectors and what they might or might not find,
nor by the diplomats and what they might or might
not negotiate, but by the placement and readiness
of warplanes and soldiers and tanks.
When
did war become a certainty? The gradations of
Bush's attitudes are impossible to chart, though
as far back as the previous July, the head of
British intelligence, Sir Richard Dearlove, in his
famous consultations in Washington, had detected
"a perceptible shift in attitude". As Dearlove was
quoted reporting to the British cabinet in the
most famous passage in the Downing Street Memo:
Military action was now seen as
inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam,
through military action, justified by the
conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the
intelligence and facts were being fixed around
the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN
route ...1
It is on this point - the
need of the Europeans to have a UN resolution
justifying force, and thus a legal, or at least
internationally legitimate, war, and the deep
ambivalence among Bush administration officials
about taking "the UN route" - that much of the
drama of the Crawford transcript turns, making it
into a kind of playlet pitting the sinuous,
subtle, and sophisticated European, worried about
the great opposition in Europe, and in Spain in
particular, to an American-led war of choice with
Iraq ("We need your help with our public opinion,"
Aznar tells Bush), against the blustery,
impatient, firing-straight-from-the-hip American
cowboy.
Bush wants to put out the second
resolution on Monday. Aznar says, "We'd prefer to
wait until Tuesday." Bush counters, "Monday
afternoon, taking the time zone differences into
account." To Bush's complaint that the UN process
was like "Chinese water torture", Aznar offers
soothing understanding and a plea to take a
breath:
Aznar: I agree, but it would be good
to be able to count on as many people as
possible. Have a little patience.
Bush:
My patience has run out. I won't go beyond
mid-March.
Aznar: I'm not asking you to
have indefinite patience. Simply that you do
everything possible so that everything comes
together.
Aznar, a right-wing Catholic
idealist who believes in the human rights
arguments for removing Saddam Hussein, finds
himself on a political knife edge: more than nine
Spaniards in 10 oppose going to war and millions
have just marched through the streets of Madrid in
angry opposition; he is intensely concerned to
gain a UN resolution making the war an
internationally sanctioned effort and not just an
American-led "aggression".
Bush responds
to his plea for diplomacy with a rather remarkable
litany of threats directed at the current
temporary members of the Security Council.
"Countries like Mexico, Chile, Angola, and
Cameroon have to know," he declares, "that what's
at stake is the United States' security and acting
with a sense of friendship
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