When was the war decided upon?

There’s another little mini-brouhaha blowing through about whether there was a decision to go to war with Iraq all the way back a year ago.

I really don’t get it.

1. A military solution to the ongoing Iraq problem has been bubbling in the US foreign policy pot since we held off in 1991. Clinton toyed with the idea on a number of occasions, but was hamstrung enough in his own domestic problems that he had to settle for bombing and cruise missiles.
2. It’s clear that 9/11/2001 was a wake-up for the Bush administration. And if attention was focused back on problems in the Middle East by that attack, Iraq regime and its WMD programs (distinctly linked with 9/11 or not) was an obvious front-runner for dealing with.

3. Tommy Franks has indicated that they’ve had a year of “what-if” planning to prepare for the Iraq campaign. Well, jeez, I’ll bet we were running simulations and planning for a war with the USSR for decades after WWII, without actually attacking. That’s what we pay the military to do when they’re not actually fighting. We aren’t paying the Pentagon staff so that when the President suddenly wakes up and says, “We need to go to war with Iraq,” they scratch their heads and say, “Let us get back to you on that after we find it on a map.”

4. Bush has been making noise about regime change with Iraq for, yeah, at least a year. That’s not just semi-privately with senators and his staff, but in public. We’ve been actually moving troops into the area since, when, the fall?

   I mean … would we feel better if the President only last week had sat down to ponder, Hey, I guess, all things considered, which way should I choose?

But wait, you say. What about all that “The president has not decided on war” stuff we were hearing from his advisors until the final 48-hour ultimatum was issued?

What about it?

Bush made it clear some time ago what he considered to be the conditions necessary to avoid war: verifiable and complete strategic disarmament of Iraq in accordance with previous UN resolutions. Planning for a regime change is disingenuous only to the extent that it wasn’t obvious to some people from Day One that the Iraqi regime — i.e., Saddam Hussein — wasn’t going to comply.

The decision hadn’t been made yet, insofar as (a) we weren’t ready to go in yet, but (b) when the military and diplomatic moment was right, if Iraq had not complied, we were going in. If, in the meantime, the conditions were met, then all’s fine, and we don’t need a war. That was obvious to me, at least.

But what about the UN resolution stuff?

What about it?

Well, it sounds like that was all a fake.

Bush went to the UN both because the US wasn’t ready to attack yet (so no harm no foul), and because he felt it was diplomatically necessary. And, in fact, he got unanimous agreement to Resolution 1441 out of it.

But if he was going to attack regardless of the UN, isn’t that deceptive?

No. He made it pretty clear from the get-go that what he wanted was UN approval, not permission. He wanted the the UNSC members to be convinced of the case, and provide military and financial backing for the course of action he’d decided. (He may also have done it to give Tony Blair some domestic cover.) He didn’t go to the UN, though, to consult, or to get sage counsel as to whether this was the right thing to do — he went to try to get multilateral support of US actions.

Did anyone really think that the US would not go ahead with this course of action, if the UN didn’t offer its approval?

I really don’t see the foofoorah here.