Abstract
One year after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush addressed the General Assembly of the United Nations (UN), and declared that the relevance of the international organization in the twentyfirst century would depend on how it responded to the repeated failure of Iraq to comply with arms inspections. A few weeks later, the Bush administration secured a congressional resolution authorizing the use of force to institute “regime change” in Iraq. The UN Security Council followed in November with a fully unanimous resolution authorizing “serious consequences”1 in Iraq if it did not permit inspections for weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Yet when the United States invaded Iraq in March 2003, UN support had disappeared, with several Security Council members criticizing the United States for taking military action without a second resolution explicitly authorizing force. Both the war and the ongoing reconstruction in Iraq thus represent largely unilateral policy making by the Bush administration.
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Notes
See “Text of UN Security Council Resolution on Iraq,” November 8, 2002, available at <http://www.state.gov/p/nea/rls/15016.htm.> Accessed January 28 , 2004.
George W. Bush, “President’s Remarks at the United Nations General Assembly,” September 12, 2002. Available at <http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/09/20020912–1.html.> Accessed January 28, 2004.
Richard E. Neustadt, Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents: The Politics of Leadership from Roosevelt to Reagan (New York: Free Press, 1990), 29. Neustadt’s book originally was published as Presidential Power: The Politics of Leadership (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1960).
Fred I. Greenstein, “Toward a Modern Presidency,” in Leadership in the Modern Presidency, ed., Greenstein (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 3.
Wildavsky’s article “The Two Presidencies” originally appeared in Trans-Action 4 (December 1966): 7–14. It is reprinted in Stephen A. Shull, ed., The Two Presidencies: A Quarter Century Reassessment (Chicago: Nelson-Hall Publishers, 1991).
James A. Baker III and Thomas M. DeFrank, The Politics of Diplomacy: Revolution, War, and Peace, 1989–1992 (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1995), 283.
Charter of the United Nations, Chapter VII, Article 51. Available at <http://www.un.org/aboutun/charter/> Accessed February 16, 2004.
Baker, The Politics of Diplomacy, 279.
Bobbie Greene Kilberg, quoted in Meena Bose and Rosanna Perotti, eds., From Cold War to New World Order: The Foreign Policy of George H.W. Bush (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002), 157.
Bush and Scowcroft, A World Transformed, 61.
George H.W. Bush, “Address before a Joint Session of Congress on the Persian Gulf and the Federal Budget Deficit,” September 11, 1990, in Public Papers of the Presidents: George H.W. Bush, 1990. Available at <http://bushlibrary.tamu.edu/papers/> Accessed February 16, 2004.
Bush and Scowcroft, A World Transformed, 370.
Bush, “Address before a Joint Session of Congress on the Persian Gulf and the Federal Budget Deficit,” September 11, 1990. Available at <http://bushlibrary.tamu.edu/papers/> Accessed February 16, 2004.
Ibid.
Woodward, The Commanders, 8.
Bush and Scowcroft, A World Transformed, 382.
Ibid.
Woodward, The Commanders, 310.
Ibid., 312.
Both quotations are in Bush and Scowcroft, A World Transformed, 385.
Baker, The Politics of Diplomacy, 304.
Ibid., 304–5.
Ibid., 305–20.
Ibid., 327.
Bush and Scowcroft, A World Transformed, 415.
Ibid., 416.
Victor Gold, “George Bush Speaks Out,” The Washingtonian, February 1994, 40.
Bush and Scowcroft, A World Transformed, 446.
Ibid. Details of the House and Senate votes are available on the websites of the respective chambers, http://www.house.gov./gt;, and http://www.senate.gov. January 28, 2004.
See Appendix in Fred I. Greenstein, The Presidential Difference: Leadership Style from FDR to George W. Bush, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 264. Also see John Mueller, Policy and Opinion in the Gulf War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994) and Lawrence Freedman and Efraim Karsh, The Gulf Conflict 1990–1991 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
Bush and Scowcroft, A World Transformed, 486.
The quotation is in Stanley Karnow, “Vietnam’s Shadow Lies across Iraq,” Los Angeles Times, September 26, 2003, B15.
Richard N. Haass, Intervention: The Use of American Military Force in the Post—Cold War World, rev. ed. (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1994), 37.
See Louis Fisher, “Deciding on War against Iraq: Institutional Failures,” Political Science Quarterly 118 (Fall 2003): 395.
Bob Woodward, Bush at War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), 328; Philip Gourevitch, “The Optimist: Kofi Annan,” The New Yorker, March 3, 2003, 56.
George W. Bush, “Inaugural Address,” January 20, 2001. Available at <http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/inaugural-address.html.> Accessed March 8, 2004.
Frank Bruni, “For President, a Mission and a Role in History,” New York Times, September 22, 2001, A1; Ivo H. Daalder and James M. Lindsay, “Bush’s Foreign Policy Revolution,” in The George W. Bush Presidency: An Early Assessment, ed., Fred I. Greenstein (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 118–21. Also see Daalder and Lindsay, America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2003).
Paul Wolfowitz, “Rebuilding the Anti-Saddam Coalition,” Wall Street Journal, November 18, 1997, A1.
John Lancaster, “In Saddam’s Future, A Harder U.S. Line; Bush, Gore Depart from Clinton Policy,” Washington Post, June 3, 2000, A1. Also see Steven Mufson, “A World View of His Own; On Foreign Policy, Bush Parts Ways With Father,” Washington Post, August 11, 2000, A1. The letter was written by the Washington think tank The Project for a New American Century (PNAC), and is available at <http://www.bushpresident2004.com/pnac.htm.> Accessed January 4, 2005.
All quotations in this paragraph are from George W. Bush, “State of the Union Address,” January 29, 2002. Available at <http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/01/20020129–11.html.> Accessed March 8, 2004. For the drafting of this speech, see David Frum, The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush (New York: Random House, 2003).
George W. Bush, “Remarks by the President at 2002 Graduation Exercise of the United States Military Academy,” June 1, 2002. Available at <http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/06/20020601–3.html.> A ccessed March 8, 2004.
George W. Bush, “The National Security Strategy of the United States of America,” September 17, 2002. Available at <http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.html.> Accessed March 8, 2004. For a comparison of the preemption doctrine with the UN Charter, see Madeleine Albright, “Misunderstood: Why the United Nations is Indispensable,” Foreign Policy (September/October 2003), 16.
Graham Wilson, “Bush II and the World,” in The George W. Bush Presidency: Appraisals and Prospects, ed., Colin Campbell and Bert A. Rockman (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2004), 303–4.
George W. Bush, “President’s Remarks at the United Nations General Assembly,” September 12, 2002. Available at <http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/09/20020912–1.html.> Accessed March 9, 2004.
Bush’s decision to seek a UN resolution authorizing the use of force, if necessary, to remove Saddam Hussein from power may have been influenced partly by the views of his father’s top foreign policy officials, who published opinion pieces supporting U.S. diplomacy at the UN. See Brent Scowcroft, “Don’t Attack Saddam,” Wall Street Journal, August 15, 2002, A12; and James A. Baker III, “The Right Way to Change a Regime,” New York Times, August 25, 2002, Sec. 4 9.
James P. Rubin, “Stumbling Into War,” Foreign Affairs (September/October 2003), 51.
George W. Bush, “State of the Union Address,” January 28, 2003. Available at <http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/01/20030128–19.html.> Accessed March 10, 2004.
Michael J. Glennon, “Why the Security Council Failed,” Foreign Affairs (May/June 2003), 18.
See summary of H.J. Res. 114, which becomes Public Law 107-243, at >http://thomas.loc.gov/cgibin/bdquery/zd107: HJ00114:@@@L&summ2=m&.> Breakdown of party votes also available through this website. Accessed January 11, 2005.
Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack: The Definitive Account of the Decision to Invade Iraq (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 357.
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© 2006 Michael A. Genovese and Lori Cox Han
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Bose, M. (2006). Who Makes U.S. Foreign Policy? Presidential Leadership in Gulf Wars I and II. In: Genovese, M.A., Han, L.C. (eds) The Presidency and the Challenge of Democracy. The Evolving American Presidency Series. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230600744_7
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