Allies at War: America, Europe, and the Crisis over Iraq

Abstract

ALLIES AT WAR America, Europe, and the Crisis over Iraq Philip H. Gordon and Jeremy Shapiro New York: McGraw-Hill, 2004. vi, 266pp, $28.95 doth (ISBN 0-07-144120-4)The first published accounts of a world event, though written while the record is necessarily incomplete, are the first constructions of a coherent narrative and are important because they can influence the way an event is viewed by later authors. Where John Kampfner's Blair's Wars or Bob Woodward's Bush at War offer in-depth descriptions of the decision-making process of a single country on the road to the Iraq war, Allies at War tells a story that is public and international. This seems appropriate for a crisis that engulfed many countries and played out in the media at least as much as in the hallways of the United Nations. Gordon and Shapiro combine a description of the events leading up to the beginning of the war in March 2003 with an analysis of the causes of the transatlantic rift, and conclude with a series of prescriptions for repairing the relationship.The narrative emphasizes that the crisis over the Iraq War was neither inevitable nor surprising. First, the debate must be seen in the context of the end of the Cold War, a changed threat environment, and institutions and norms that had not quite caught up to the transition. A changing world order, along with transatlantic differences in capabilities, perspectives, and strategies, predates President George W. Bush's administration and shapes a debate that runs deeper than the disagreement over Iraq. second, the crisis owed as much to bad politics as it did to structural differences. Structural differences made disagreement inevitable but crisis avoidable.Allies a t War shows that there were more than enough political errors to go around, and the book is at its strongest when describing the vicious circle of transatlantic vitriol. In the lead-up to the war, the US behaved more as if it was selling a decision than consulting its allies; Gerhard Schroeder pandered to domestic anti-Americanism to win the German election; and French president Jacques Chirac could not resist the opportunity to lead . European public opinion. More fundamentally, both sides raised the stakes by making it a debate about principles rather than about a specific threat to American national security. By focusing on preemptive and preventive war doctrine, Bush turned a debate over Iraq into a debate about the norms of intervention; by opposing the war instead of letting the US respond to a perceived threat while refusing to acknowledge it as a precedent, the French and German governments made this a debate about the future of the Atlantic alliance. …