First Stop, Iraq

Though it was not clear at the time, the attempt to build a unified international position on Iraq died that day. Everything that followed--the gnomic reports by Hans Blix, the U.N.'s chief biochemical-weapons inspector; Powell's presentation of new intelligence on Saddam's WMD capabilities; increasingly frantic British efforts to forge a new resolution that might win a majority of the Council--was no more than flowers on the coffin of Resolution 1441. Powell was furious at the Martin Luther King Day ambush. "He had won an internal debate within the Administration to go to the U.N.," says a Republican Senator. "But the French ratted out on him. That lowered his stock." The next weekend Powell flew to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and friends found him despondent. "He was frustrated by the disinterest of the allies," says a Congressman who spoke to him at Davos. "He had laid out the facts about Iraq's transgressions. He truly believed we'd done all we could on the diplomatic front. We'd exhausted it." Resolution 1441, Powell said grimly on the eve of war, set the Security Council a test that it "did not meet."

Once Powell had shifted his allegiance to the group determined to take out Saddam, the Iraqi dictator's fate was sealed. The extraordinary power of the American armed forces would see to that. Historians will long debate whether the road to war in Iraq could have been handled a different way--and ask if the U.N. could have formed a united front against Saddam, as it did in Gulf War I, and avoided the bitter breaches between old friends that have characterized the past few months. To be sure, mistakes--as politicians say--were made; American diplomacy was curiously lacking in the weeks after adoption of Resolution 1441, when it might have been possible to maintain the unity that was demonstrated when the resolution passed the Security Council.

But perhaps unity was an impossible dream. For the intellectual roots of the war with Iraq and the personal sensibilities of the four Americans who paved the road to battle took shape in a specific time and place. Everyone sensible--French, American, Russian, German--has known for years that Saddam is a dangerous tyrant who brutalizes his people, is prepared to threaten others and bears abiding grudges. But only one nation--the U.S.--has suffered the thousands of deaths that a few people with a deep hatred could inflict. "I do think 9/11 is a historic watershed," Cheney told NBC News last week. The U.S., he said, was worried that the next attack on its territory "could involve far deadlier weapons than the world has ever seen. The rest of the world hasn't had to come to grips with that yet."

That is true. It is also true that Iraq is not the only nation that either has such deadly weapons or would like to get them. North Korea, Iran, possibly Libya and Syria would all love to have the power that Saddam coveted. The unanswered question of the Iraq story is whether the ideas behind it will one day be used in other places too. --With reporting by Timothy J. Burger, Massimo Calabresi, John F. Dickerson, Mark Thompson, Eric Roston and Douglas Waller/Washington, Mitch Frank/New York and James Graff/Paris