At that time, there was a lot of tension around the NATO table—certainly at the Prague meeting.
The Americans were very anxious to get support for the Iraq mission, and there was a lot of resistance from various countries, Canada and others, about what the NATO statement would say. There were a lot of fights. I was constantly fighting with Colin Powell about a word here, or a word there, that was going to take you in one direction or another. The Germans, as you'll recall, fought an election on this issue, and Joschka Fischer was adamant. So there was a lot of tension.
I don't think it interfered with military operations, but it certainly interfered with the idea of the Americans bringing us in.
For a long time, in Canada, we were very resistant to the idea of NATO doing training in Iraq. We saw that as a way of being involved in Iraq that we didn't want NATO to be doing, and we didn't even want our Canadian officers in NATO itself at Brussels to be deployed to Iraq. It was rather ironic, considering that we did have people in Iraq anyway, as you know, so there was a lot of confusion around these issues.
On the broader question of coalitions of the willing and when you use them and when you don't, obviously in Iraq we took the strong position that a United Nations Security Council resolution was necessary to justify it. You could take that from a legal point of view. I used to argue that it was also political, because if you couldn't get around that issue, then you wouldn't be able to demonstrate the threat of weapons of mass destruction, which Hans Blix said really weren't there.
There was a whole host of issues around that, but I don't think you can foreclose the idea that in other circumstances, what I call a Kosovo-type circumstance or other, we might be engaged in things. Because people think Afghanistan was a NATO mission, I remind everybody that it was a United Nations authorized activity. We have to remember that. We had the Security Council authority to be in Afghanistan and have always had that.
My first argument would be in favour of the Security Council, but I think we couldn't possibly rule out the circumstances, particularly given Russian and Chinese attitudes today, of a mission where that wouldn't be used.