Photo Gallery Selective Memories
Then-President George W. Bush and then German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder during a meeting in Mainz, Germany, in 2005. "We'll be deliberate, yet time is not on our side," Bush said a few years earlier in his speech on the "Axis of Evil," which marked the beginning of the second phase of the war on terror. "I will not wait on events while dangers gather. I will not stand by as peril draws closer and closer," he said.
British Army soldiers stand in front of a portrait of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein after the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. We have to stop them before they do something to us, Bush said at a dinner with German Chancellor Schröder in January 2002.
When asked why the US didn't consult its allies before making the decision to invade Iraq, then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice would later state she said that she felt that it was too risky to notify the Europeans. They didn't trust Schröder and they certainly didn't trust then French President Jacques Chirac. They only trusted then British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
