Did Chirac Say ‘Non’? Revisiting UN Diplomacy on Iraq, 2002-03

Abstract

THE STANDOFF BETWEEN THE UNITED STATES and France leading up to the 2003 Iraq War probably “led to the most serious deterioration of transatlantic relations in recent memory.”1 According to a prominent view first advanced by American and British officials and subsequently taken up by academic analysts, President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair made an all-out effort to secure United Nations (UN) approval before invading Iraq, but French president Jacques Chirac's public veto threat on 10 March 2003 doomed that effort to failure.2 Put differently, France's determination to use the UN Security Council (henceforth SC or UNSC) as an instrument for “soft balancing” American power made UN approval unattainable.3 This article challenges that conclusion. Chirac only threatened to veto the particular draft resolution then on the table, leaving open the possibility of a future French abstention on the use of force in case the UN weapons inspectors determined that Iraq had clearly failed to cooperate. Building on this insight, I develop a counterfactual thought experiment using new evidence from declassified documents and more than a dozen interviews that I conducted with senior American, British, and French officials. What emerges from this evidence is that the Bush administration would have stood a good chance of securing a French abstention and ultimate UN approval for the use of force—had it been willing to postpone the start of military operations by up to six weeks and endorse a set of demanding (and, we know now, virtually impossible to achieve) benchmarks for Iraqi compliance, as proposed by Britain and several nonpermanent members of the SC. In short, there are strong indications that President Bush failed to secure UN approval primarily because he was unwilling to make even tactical concessions to his SC partners and deviate from a timetable for war set months in advance.