Not true. NATO staff discussed Article 5, decided that it was appropriate, spoke to Colin Powell, who supported it, and by the time the NATO council met to approve the draft statement concerning Article 5 George Bush had also signalled his support for it.
I wasn't denying that NATO passed Article 5 for the first and only time in its history after the 9/11 attacks, and I wasn't denying that the US supported it. I was referring to the arm's length at which the Bush Administration held our NATO allies during the early stages of the Afghan war. The resulting hard feelings made it more difficult for Bush to get cooperation from those same allies during the run up to the Iraq War. This is a fact and was a common talking point at the time among liberals and others critical of Bush's foreign policy.
Fred Kaplan:
"Aside from letting a handful of NATO's AWACS radar planes come help patrol American skies, Bush's response was a shockingly terse: Thanks, but no thanks; we'll handle it by ourselves. Marc Grossman, the undersecretary of state for political affairs, later admitted to the Washington Times that the United States initially 'blew off' the allies. Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy, said that the United States, in the Times' words, 'was so busy developing its [Afghanistan] war plans that it did not have time to focus on coordinating Europe's military role.'
"The effect, of course, was to alienate the allies just as they were rediscovering their affections. As London's conservative Financial Times later put it, 'A disdainful refusal even to respond to a genuine offer of support from close allies, at the time of America's most serious crisis in decades, spoke volumes about its attitude to the alliance.'"
(The similarity between the "thanks but no thanks" phrase used by Kaplan and the one used by me is a complete coincidence. I found this article this afternoon when googling for something to support a rebuttal.)
