3.2 |
Development of UK strategy and options, January to April 2002 –
“axis of evil” to Crawford
9.
Dr.
Condoleezza Rice, President Bush’s National Security Advisor, wrote
in 2011 that
President
Bush’s phrase, an “axis of evil”, was “overdramatized”. She and the
President
were
“stunned” when the media focused almost exclusively on
it:
“Since many
people believed that we’d already decided to go to war against
Iraq,
sinister
interpretations suggested that we were preparing to use military
force
against all
three states. We had, for all intents and purposes, some
believed,
declared
war on North Korea, Iraq and Iran.”3
10.
Dr Rice added
that, in a speech the following day, and in media interviews, she
had
sought to
clarify what the President had meant:
“The
President wouldn’t take any options off the table, but he’d said
we’d work with
our friends
to deal with the problem; diplomacy was the first line of defense.
But,
admittedly,
the harsh language suggested that negotiation was impossible.
How
could you
negotiate with members of an ‘axis of evil’?”
11.
From early
2002, there were increasing indications that key figures in
the
US
Administration were considering military action to achieve regime
change
in Iraq and
there was an emphasis on the potential nexus for the fusion of
WMD
proliferation
and terrorism.
12.
Mr Blair
stated that regime change would be desirable. If Saddam
Hussein
wanted to
avoid war, he would need to agree to the return of
inspectors.
13.
Mr Blair
told President Bush on 6 February that he agreed on the
importance
of sending
a strong signal to the countries identified as an “axis of evil”
that their
behaviour
needed to change.
14.
At a meeting
of the Overseas Sub-Committee of the Official Committee on
Domestic
and
International Terrorism (TIDO(O)) on 1 February 2002, chaired by Mr
Stephen
Wright, FCO
Deputy Under-Secretary Defence and Intelligence, the FCO
reported
that US
thinking about Phase 2 of the “War on Terrorism”, as reflected in
President
Bush’s
State of the Union address, was already under way and crystallising
around two
concepts:
the proliferation of WMD and counter-terrorism.4
15.
Mr Wright
stated that the US appeared to be most concerned about the
proliferation
of WMD to
terrorist groups, and that lay at the heart of concerns about a
number
of states
including Iraq. The US saw Iraq increasingly as a WMD rather than
a
counter‑terrorism
problem. UK officials thought that the interagency process
would
probably
result in a balanced approach. Military action was seen as a last
resort. Action
against
Iraq was not seen as imminent.
3
Rice
C. No Higher
Honour. Simon &
Schuster, 2011.
4
Minutes, 1
February 2002, Overseas Sub-Committee of the Official Committee on
Domestic and
International
Terrorism meeting.
389