The Foreign Service Journal, February 2005

even larger problem. Powell won his August 2002 bat- tle with Cheney over whether the United States should seek U.N. Security Council support for a tough stand against Iraq. But Powell lost other struggles, on North Korea, for example. Powell wanted a more generous economic incentives package for North Korea to encourage disarmament, but was overruled by Cheney. As the administration’s house moderate, Powell found himself outgunned much of the time. He never said flatly he was against the war but it was clear he had more reservations about it than his colleagues. Perhaps two tours of duty in Vietnam in the 1960s instilled in him a caution about going to war that non-veteran col- leagues such as Cheney may lack. Iraq was a different kind of war from any the coun- try has ever fought. The “postwar” phase has produced more casualties than the three weeks it took to force Saddam out. Before the war, there was very little pub- lic discussion about postwar resistance in Iraq. Ironically, two of the most prescient prewar observers were the first President Bush and his Secretary of State, James A. Baker. In 1990, they led the charge for building an international coalition with U.N. backing to oust Saddam’s Army from Kuwait. But they argued passionately against any effort to topple Saddam by force. “We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq,” the senior Bush wrote in his memoir, A World Transformed , published well before his son became president. “The coalition would have instantly collapsed. ... Going in and thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations mandate would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different — and per- haps barren — outcome.” Baker, in a September 1996 opinion piece, wrote, “Iraqi soldiers and civilians could be expected to resist F O C U S 34 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / F E B R U A R Y 2 0 0 5 T HE R EMINGTON