October 16, 2001: Bush Policy Adviser: US Must Build a Coalition to Succeed in Middle East

Brent Scowcroft, the head of the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and a close adviser and friend of former President George H. W. Bush, is becoming increasingly marginalized in the current administration. Realizing he has little real influence in the White House, he goes public with his measured objections to a US invasion of Iraq by publishing an editorial in the Washington Post entitled “Build a Coalition.” Scowcroft reflects on the decision not to invade Baghdad in the 1991 Gulf War (see September 1998), and writes that if the US had then overthrown Saddam Hussein, “Our Arab allies… would have deserted us, creating an atmosphere of hostility to the United States [that] might have well spawned scores of Osama bin Ladens. [We] already hear voices declaring that the United States is too focused on a multilateral approach. The United States knows what needs to be done, these voices say, and we should just go ahead and do it. Coalition partners just tie our hands, and they all will exact a price for their support. Those are the same siren songs of delusion and defeat that we heard in 1990. We can no more succeed in our present campaign by acting unilaterally than we could have in 1990.” If the “war on terror” is to succeed, he writes, it will have to be “even more dependent on coalition-building than was the Gulf War.” Scowcroft finally understands, author Craig Unger will observe, that the neoconservatives are using 9/11 as an excuse to invade Iraq. “He knew they were going to try to manipulate the president into thinking there was unfinished business” in Iraq, an administration official will recall in 2007. “For [Scowcroft] to say something publicly was a watershed. This was where the roads diverged.” [Washington Post, 10/16/2001; Unger, 2007, pp. 228]