A history of the Iraq crisis: France, the United States, and Iraq, 1991–2003

Abstract

Frédéric Bozo's book was first published in French in 2013, under the rather sexier title: Histoire secrète de la crise irakienne. Now translated into English, it will provide a new audience with a uniquely full and authoritative account of the clash between France and the United States during what the author describes as the greatest—and also the best-documented—international crisis since the end of the Cold War. What makes this account unusual, and often revealing, is that the author gained access to the official archives of both the Élysée Palace and the Quai d'Orsay (Ministry of Foreign Affairs). Lacking similar access on the American side, he makes up for this through the rigorous use of written sources and interviews with some of the senior US officials involved. At the heart of the crisis was a dramatic rift between two very different men: George Bush and Jacques Chirac. While in Paris Chirac was very much in charge of policy-making—despite occasional differences with his flamboyant foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin—in Washington Bush was strongly influenced by a group of close colleagues (Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice) with greater experience of world affairs. Perhaps surprisingly, the personal contacts between the two presidents were generally civil. But privately it was a different story: Bush was irked by Chirac's ‘pontificating’ (p. 86), while, for his part, the French leader was appalled by Bush's contempt for multilateralism and his ignorance of the Middle East. Chirac's (unheeded) warnings were to prove prescient. ‘Once you are there [in Iraq]’, he told Bush when they met in November 2002, a few months before the start of the war, ‘you are going to have to stay there for years, and you run the risk of creating battalions of little Bin Ladens’ (p. 159).