American Ally: Tony Blair and the War on Terror by Con Coughlin

Author:Con Coughlin [Coughlin, Con]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, National, Political Science, Political Process, American Government, General
ISBN: 9780062322029
Google: qQNKAAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 18330095
Publisher: Ecco
Published: 2006-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Eight

PREPARE FOR BATTLE

ON TUESDAY, JANUARY 29, 2002, an estimated 52 million Americans tuned in to their television sets to watch President George W. Bush make the annual State of the Union address before the joint session of Congress. The audience was the highest recorded since President Clinton’s address to the nation at the height of the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal in 1998. Bush had invited a number of distinguished guests to sit with First Lady Laura Bush in the upstairs gallery. Among them was Hamid Karzai, the new interim leader of Afghanistan who had taken office five weeks earlier. Bush began his forty-eight-minute speech by acknowledging the successful U.S.-led operation to defeat the Taliban, and Karzai’s position as the new ruler of Afghanistan. With bin Laden still on the run, no mention was made of the al-Qaeda leader. Instead, the president turned his attention to the future conduct of the war on terror.

The key objective for the United States in the years that lay ahead, he said, was to eliminate the threat posed by terrorist regimes that seek weapons of mass destruction. Bush was determined to “prevent regimes that sponsor terror from threatening America or our friends and allies with weapons of mass destruction.” North Korea was a regime that was arming itself with missiles and weapons of mass destruction while starving its citizens. Iran aggressively pursued these weapons and exported terror while an “unelected few” repressed the people’s hope for freedom. But Bush saved his strongest condemnation for Iraq, a country that “continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror.” The Iraqi regime had been attempting to develop anthrax, nerve gas, and nuclear weapons for over a decade. “This is a regime that has already used poison gas to murder thousands of its own citizens . . . This is a regime that agreed to international inspections—then kicked out the inspectors. This is a regime that has something to hide from the civilized world.” So far as Bush was concerned, states like these, and their terrorist allies, constituted an “axis of evil.” If left unchecked, these countries could ultimately provide weapons of mass destruction to terrorists, which could be used to attack the United States and its allies. Bush concluded his speech by declaring, “Our war on terror is well begun, but it is only begun.”1

Bush’s State of the Union address in January 2002 developed the themes that he had articulated during his hastily written television broadcast on the night of September 11, when he had declared that “we will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.” The “axis of evil” reference, however, together with the fact that Bush made scant reference to the worldwide support America had received after 9/11, increased the resentment in Europe that Washington was determined to go it alone in fighting the war on terror. Until this moment, most European leaders had been broadly supportive of the American campaign, even if they felt slighted that Washington had not been more receptive to their offers of help.

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