Interventions Read Free

unique opportunity to realize the severity of the threat managed only to do the opposite. As we entered my private office following the meeting, another one of my aides wondered aloud: “Why would they promise such definitive revelations only to bring at best highly circumstantial evidence? Is it because they think we can be convinced so easily, or is it because this is all they have, and that we’re asking the basic questions that they’re avoiding?”
    We would soon learn the answer.
    After September 11, following an initial outpouring of support for America, a heavy curtain soon fell between America and the rest of the world. To many Americans, and the Bush administration in particular, a global response was eminently justified by the barbarism visited upon the country and two of its greatest cities. For much of the global community in those days—shocking though this seemed to many Americans—the greatest threat to world peace came not from Saddam, but from an enraged and vengeful United States. Tragically, the chaotic, bloody aftermath of the subsequent invasion of Iraq did little to change this perception.
    If 9/11 changed the world, the consequences of the Iraq War were of a similarly dramatic magnitude—from the Arab nations, appalled by the mayhem unleashed following the fall of Saddam, to the deep distrust among Security Council members bruised by the torturous negotiations in the run-up to the war to the growing isolation of a United States no longer as feared or respected. What the United States had lost, as a consequence of the invasion, was the benefit of the doubt. This pained me deeply. Throughout my years as secretary-general, I had often found myself in the role of global interpreter, explaining the United States to the world, and the world to the United States. Despite the singular contribution of the United States to the UN’s founding and its mission in the decades that followed, after Iraq, America was too often unwilling to listen, and the world unable to speak its true mind.
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    O n the ground in Iraq, the costs of the war could be measured in the more than one hundred thousand civilian lives lost in the turmoil following the invasion. Internationally, the war resulted in broken relations and hardened animosities, but also in the damage to the personal integrity and the standing of some of the principal players involved. No one endured this passage more painfully or publicly than Colin Powell, who would ultimately resign after the Bush administration had exploited, and exhausted, his stature. And no leader would carry with him the consequences of the Iraq War more lastingly than Tony Blair.
    â€œYo, Blair, how’re you doing?” As soon as I read these first words of the exchange between U.S. president George W. Bush and UK prime minister Tony Blair captured by a rogue microphone at the July 2006 G8 summit in St. Petersburg, I thought of Blair, and knew he had to be cringing. Offering to travel to the Middle East, he told Bush that he was happy to leave immediately to try to reduce tensions. When Bush replied that his secretary of state Condoleezza Rice would be going soon, Blair remarked that he could prepare the way for her diplomacy. The aide who handed me the transcript of the exchange said I should read on. They had been speaking about me, it turned out—and not in flattering terms.
    I arrived at the G8 summit four days into the raging war between Israel and Hizbollah. Hizbollah had triggered the war when it fired rockets at Israeli border towns before crossing the Lebanese border to attack an Israeli patrol, taking two of its personnel hostage. This provoked a heavy military response by Israel against the militant group, as well as against the Lebanese state and the country’s infrastructure as a whole. I was determined to press for a cessation of hostilities and argue the case for the deployment of an international force as a condition for a