t he p erils of o ptimism 279It took little time for the administration to identify another target.
Eyes turned again to Iraq. In late November 2001, the president directed
Rumsfeld to order General Franks to begin planning for a possible
invasion.
Th e (Non) Decision to Invade
George W. Bush never made a clear decision to invade Iraq. Th at is, it
is not possible to point to a particular meeting or a specifi c moment
when he chose to go to war. Instead, the planning for a major military
operation against Saddam Hussein took on a life of its own, generating
an irresistible momentum within the administration. It became
evident to key advisors in summer 2002 that, barring a profound
change in Iraqi behavior, the president had settled upon war. B y n o t
insisting upon an open discussion of the risks of military action, Bush
neglected the fi rst important task of wartime leadership. Th e adminis-
tration focused instead on justifying its preferred course of action to the
American people and the international community. With Americans
already fearful of a terrorist follow-up to 9/11, making the case to the
domestic audience proved simple enough. Not so foreign leaders and
their publics, and the eff ort to induce their support by renewing UN
inspections slowed the march to war.
From the standpoint of actual threats to American security, Iraq
ranked low, even after 9/11. Saddam’s military, badly damaged in the
1991 war, no longer represented a signifi cant danger to its neighbors, let
alone to the United States. American attention focused instead on the
possibility that the Iraqi dictator might join forces with al-Qaeda or
other terrorist organizations and make available to them his presumed
stock of WMD. He had kicked out UN weapons inspectors in 1998,
and the common assumption in the United States and elsewhere was
that he had restarted his eff orts to acquire nuclear weapons and revived
his capability to produce chemical and biological weapons. (Indeed, his
own military commanders shared the same belief and expected their
leader to use WMD when American forces approached Baghdad.) On
the other hand, his relationship with Islamic terrorist groups seemed
tenuous. Saddam’s Baath Party embraced a secular pan-Arab ideology
that bin Laden condemned. Among “rogue” states, Iran in particular