CHAPTER SIX

George Bush and the Attack on Saddam

I will never forget the first time I met George W. Bush. We liked each other right away. There was a kind of feeling between us. There was good chemistry. I guess I felt myself attracted to him, to his vision.”

Berlusconi recalls the moment his friendship began with President George W. Bush. The two men first met at a hectic NATO summit in Brussels on June 13, 2001. Both leaders were fairly inexperienced on the international stage. Bush was making his debut visit to Europe after just five months in office. Berlusconi had been sworn in as prime minister less than twenty-four hours before. This was Berlusconi’s first great moment of international prestige following his political comeback in Italy’s elections of May 2001. It was quickly apparent to the former Texas governor that in a Europe where most of his relations were poor or tepid at best, he would find in Silvio Berlusconi a man who would lend a sympathetic ear.

The Bush administration had already gotten off to a rocky start with its European allies. The decision to pull out of the Clinton administration’s much-vaunted Kyoto agreement on global warming angered many in France and Germany. Bush’s determination to speed ahead with a new and costly missile defense plan that some had dubbed “Son of Star Wars” had stirred further resentment in Paris and Berlin. His approach was not subtle. Tony Blair was already on board, but then that would prove the case with just about any request Bush might make of him. Blair was well known to be in awe of the U.S. president. But the French and Germans were opposed to Washington. Neither Jacques Chirac nor Gerhard Schroeder liked Bush.

Italy’s foreign policy, meanwhile, was about to undergo a big change. Berlusconi was Italy’s most openly pro-American prime minister. His support for Bush and the United States was a given. Even before taking office, Berlusconi had already signaled that he was ready to endorse the missile defense shield. And he would.

In Brussels, the body language of the two men said it all. They were spotted joking and making friendly small talk during the traditional “family photo” of the NATO leaders. Bush and Berlusconi seemed to have found each other, like two soul mates. Both men were ardently pro-business. Both had made tax cuts the centerpiece of their electoral campaigns. And both had been attacked repeatedly in the European media, for different reasons.

Bush was perceived as a caricature of an arrogant cowboy from Texas while The Economist magazine had recently put Berlusconi on its cover with a headline that seemed to sum up the sentiment of many in the European media: “Why Silvio Berlusconi Is Unfit to Lead Italy.”

Both Bush and Berlusconi were strong and polarizing political figures. Both were loved and adored by millions of supporters. Both had attracted not just harsh criticism but genuine hatred from their opponents.

That evening, after meeting Bush at the NATO summit in Belgium, Berlusconi got back on board the prime minister’s Airbus 300 and flew on to Sweden, where the following day he would meet Bush again, this time at the European Union summit in the town of Gothenburg. The U.S. president’s rhetoric was meanwhile becoming increasingly muscular. Aside from the missile shield, Bush was calling for NATO expansion and for pushing the borders of Europe to the east. Neither sat well with many, stirring widespread protest and dissent across European capitals, and in this case also in the streets of downtown Gothenburg.

The anti-globalization movement was out in force. They lined the streets of Gothenburg, outnumbering the Swedish police.

Bush and Berlusconi were ensconced inside the summit talks with more than a dozen European leaders, including Germany’s Gerhard Schroeder, France’s Jacques Chirac, and Britain’s Tony Blair, while the police were fighting pitched battles with angry protesters out in the streets, using horses, dogs, and water cannons. The anti-Bush sentiment was so strong, just a few months into his presidency, that it brought together the massed forces of Italian and Swedish anarchists in addition to the anti-globalization protesters from across half of Europe. The Swedish police, overwhelmed by the protesters, eventually opened fire, shooting and injuring three protesters.

All of this happened just as the summit was getting under way in downtown Gothenburg in the town’s glass and steel convention center.

“Bush walks into a room, with that Texas cowboy walk of his, where most of the European leaders present really don’t like him,” recalls Valentino Valentini, Berlusconi’s closest aide at the summit. “So President Bush walks in and he sees Berlusconi smiling at him, one of the few people there who is really happy to see him. Bush shouts out: ‘Hey, Silvio! Hey, Silvio Berlusconi!’ He sort of sidles up to him. You could see that the two of them liked each other right away, talking and joking over drinks. At dinner Bush discovers that Berlusconi is the only leader at the summit who is willing to support the U.S. position, the only European prime minister willing to loudly proclaim his support for Washington. Bush seemed very pleased to have met Berlusconi. After all, Berlusconi is a tycoon. He is pro-American. He is pro-business. He is a natural ally. Of course they liked each other right away.”

Berlusconi says he remembers being struck most by the straight-talking manner of the new American president.

“There are not many politicians like him,” says Berlusconi with a nostalgic smile. “What I liked best about Bush was that his ‘yes’ meant yes and his ‘no’ really meant no, just like me. So we had a lot in common.”

That Berlusconi’s foreign policy would be heavily influenced by his personal relationships—true of Bush as it would be later on with Russia’s Vladimir Putin—was not surprising. “He is, after all, a businessman, an entrepreneur, a tycoon. His whole world is built on his personal network of relations, and his style is to schmooze everyone,” recalls Valentini. “In meeting Bush, he raised the profile of Italy in the world, he became a preferred ally for Bush, alongside Blair. That meant a lot to Berlusconi on a personal level but it also meant a lot to Italy.”

At the Gothenburg summit, the chemistry with Bush must have felt good. For Berlusconi, who had just returned to power after six long years in the political wilderness, being on the world stage alongside the leader of the free world was more than just good chemistry. It was redemption.

The summit came at the start of a full five-year term in office for Berlusconi, an unusual feat in the world of Italian politics, where the average life span of a government tended to be around ten or eleven months.

More than six years had passed since the humiliation of November 1994, when the newspapers had reported that he was under investigation for bribery and corruption, and right in the middle of the United Nations summit on organized crime in Naples.

Now Berlusconi had just won a smashing electoral victory, literally rising from the political grave.

After the Naples summit his fate was sealed. A few days later Berlusconi was called in for questioning by the investigating magistrates in Milan, a first for a sitting prime minister. It implied that he was likely to be indicted on bribery and corruption charges.

In the local Italian manner, court officials traded quotes and secrets with the Milanese press corps, so that almost every suspicion, every whisper, whether investigated or not, was fair game. Everything leaked out and often the newspapers would publish details of investigations long before they were presented in court.

This drip-drip approach made for a new kind of torture for Berlusconi. He was now a sitting prime minister, thoroughly humiliated and very angry. His government coalition was falling apart and he was being interrogated by the crime squad in Milan.

He made one last televised speech to the nation, which was as usual videotaped in advance at his villa and then distributed to the media. He swore on the lives of his children that he was innocent of any wrongdoing and he pledged not to resign. He then managed to hold out for a little more than a week before the roof caved in.

His resignation came just three days before Christmas 1994. His allies had turned against him. The leader of his northern Italian coalition partner, Umberto Bossi, heaped abuse upon him in parliamentary statements and rallies, comparing him to Mussolini, attacking his control of half the television market in Italy, and claiming that his Fininvest group and sister companies were linked to the Mafia. Bossi also attacked Berlusconi’s far-right coalition partner, a former Fascist named Gianfranco Fini.

When his government fell Berlusconi asked for a snap election, but President Oscar Scalfaro had already made his mind up. Using his constitutional prerogatives, he appointed Berlusconi’s treasury secretary as the new premier, and Berlusconi was out the door. Italy is a country where the president is supposed to be bipartisan and above the fray. Since the president always comes from either the left or right, however, impartiality is rare among Italian presidents. After his resignation, Berlusconi and Scalfaro traded plenty of insults, neither man distinguishing himself in the process.

If 1994 was the year of his rise and fall as Italy’s first billionaire prime minister, then 1995 was the year the magistrates really began piling on the charges.

In the space of little more than a year Berlusconi and his entourage faced a total of twenty-seven arrests and indictments. His younger brother, Paolo, was convicted of bribery. He himself was soon indicted and put on trial for bribery.

Berlusconi was now in disgrace. He was furious with the judges, because from now on, and for the rest of his life, his legal travails would always compete for his attention alongside his leadership of Forza Italia.

Politically he was unable to put the pieces back together again and struggled to rally the troops. Barely a week went by without the newspapers reporting investigations, indictments, witness questioning, gossip, or court proceedings related to Berlusconi. His war with the judiciary had been fully engaged. By the spring of 1995, with multiple judicial probes now underway, Berlusconi began to fear arrest. His brother, Paolo, was facing more indictments, as were his cousin, his lawyer, and some of his closest friends.

In the political arena a new center-left alternative to Berlusconi was being created. Romano Prodi, a jovial economist from Bologna, had just announced plans to form a social democratic political movement called the Olive Tree coalition. It was a new party that brought together former Communists, hard-left Marxists, and Christian Democrats. It was an unwieldy alliance of liberals and conservatives on the left and would only find unity in its opposition to Berlusconi. Nonetheless, the emergence of this alliance would threaten Berlusconi and his now fractured center-right coalition. In fact, it was an ominous sign for the media mogul turned politician.

Berlusconi claims, of course, that the prosecutors were out to get him and that they leaked damaging details of their investigations in a carefully orchestrated political strategy aimed at discrediting him. There is no doubt that at least some of the accusations were indeed leaked to the press just ahead of the elections, where Berlusconi fared poorly. Ahead of the 1995 local and state elections, when Forza Italia took a beating, Berlusconi was placed under investigation for allegedly cooking the books and falsifying company accounts in connection with a deal to buy a soccer star for AC Milan.

In October 1995, the Milanese prosecutors struck a body blow. They formally indicted Silvio Berlusconi and charged him, his brother, Paolo, four Fininvest managers, and five tax inspectors with bribery and corruption. Berlusconi recalls declaring for the first time (but not the last): “We are now living in a police state.”

Things got worse a few days later when the news broke that the investigators from Operation Clean Hands had discovered a series of Swiss bank accounts that Fininvest had allegedly used to transfer slush funds to Berlusconi’s old friend, former prime minister Bettino Craxi. Although the formal indictment would not come until the following summer, all the details appeared on the front pages of the Italian press. Berlusconi was now under formal investigation for bribing Craxi.

In January 1996, Berlusconi went on trial in a Milan courtroom for bribing tax inspectors. An even bigger blow came from Palermo, where word had leaked out that both Berlusconi and his closest collaborator at Mediaset, Marcello Dell’Utri, were being investigated for alleged ties to the Mafia. Although the investigation of Berlusconi was shelved by the end of the year, his friend Dell’Utri would now face multiple Mafia probes, and was ultimately convicted of being a go-between for Berlusconi and the Mafia. As for the prosecutor who originally placed Berlusconi and Dell’Utri under investigation in Palermo, he later became a hard-left politician.

In the Italian national election of April 1996, Berlusconi was beaten by the center-left candidate, Romano Prodi. His defeat followed a campaign during which the Milan magistrates had launched a fresh blitz, this time with truly suspicious timing. But the main reason he lost was that Berlusconi at this point could not get the other center-right parties to form an electoral pact.

“In that election I still managed to win nearly eight million votes, out of a total of more than 15.8 million votes that were cast for the center right,” recalls Berlusconi. “But the fact that my coalition partners would not join forces with Forza Italia meant that we could not win.”

By now Berlusconi was battered and besieged. The court cases were mounting, some of his closest advisers were pressing him to bow out of politics. His own former spokesman wrote a front-page article in a newspaper owned by the Berlusconi family that urged him to make “a dignified exit.”

Electoral defeat was one thing. But money was another.

In the summer of 1996, Berlusconi turned his attention back to his media empire. He had found the time to hold talks with his friend Rupert Murdoch about selling Mediaset to the Australian media tycoon. But the two could not agree on a deal. Instead the billionaire former prime minister now managed to cut his debts and value up his own fortune by floating Mediaset on the Milan stock exchange. He also placed key equity stakes with Saudi prince al-Waleed, with German television mogul Leo Kirch, and with South African billionaire Johann Rupert.

Mediaset was now worth more than $5 billion, and by the end of the decade its value would rise to more than $30 billion. He was, in the eyes of the center-left government, a walking conflict of interest, a political leader who was also Italy’s richest billionaire and a man with vast media holdings.

Fortunately for Berlusconi, the center-left government, instead of consolidating its position, was beset by internecine warfare and factional infighting. The former Communist leader Massimo D’Alema seemed to covet the job of Prime Minister Prodi. The crafty D’Alema would indeed replace Prodi as premier, and under circumstances that remain murky to this day. But first he would do something that no one could understand: In 1997 the leader of the largest left-wing party in Italy would invite Berlusconi, as leader of the opposition center-right, to join him in rewriting portions of the Italian Constitution. He invited the devil to dinner, and in doing so he would rehabilitate Berlusconi and pave the way to his political comeback.

Whether D’Alema acted out of personal ego and desire to be center-stage or because he truly believed this new initiative was needed for his country, the effect was the same. Berlusconi was suddenly catapulted from being a political has-been and target of judicial probes to being a newly recruited co–founding father of the revised Constitution of his nation. He was brought back from the political wilderness, thanks to the political miscalculation of his fiercest political rival, and perhaps thanks to his ability to schmooze and charm and seduce just about anybody, including his rivals.

Although D’Alema, a man of the left, may not have planned it, the result of Berlusconi’s presence in such important constitutional talks (even if the effort would collapse after a few months) helped his image and helped him to reassert himself as the undisputed leader of the center-right. By 1999 Forza Italia scored a big victory in elections for the European parliament. A year later Berlusconi got his prickly coalition partners back together again and trounced D’Alema and the government parties in nationwide municipal and state elections. As part of the campaign, Berlusconi invented the idea of a lavish whistle-stop campaign tour, this time in a cruise ship around Italy’s Mediterranean coast. He called it the Ship of Freedom and it worked very well. It was this victory in administrative elections that helped foster D’Alema’s demise.

Then, in May 2001, Berlusconi staged an extraordinary political comeback, following a slick campaign that was heavy on the TV spots, celebrity endorsements from Mediaset TV stars, and the usual razzmatazz, including the mailing to ten million Italian families of a 125-page color pamphlet, starring Silvio Berlusconi. He promised the Italians that he would cut their taxes and create a million new jobs. Ever the showman, he clinched the election just five days before polling day when he went on state television, and, with a munificent flourish and the fawning cooperation of a popular pro-Berlusconi talk show host, he signed his promise to the nation of lower taxes and job creation in a document he called his “Contract with the Italians” an Italian-style version of Newt Gingrich’s historic Contract with America.

His first act after being sworn in as prime minister was to fly off to the NATO summit in Brussels, where he would meet his new ally, George W. Bush.

If Berlusconi traces the start of his friendship with Bush to the experience the two men shared in Gothenburg just after that Brussels meeting, getting to know each other at a summit marred by riots in the streets, then their bonding would grow deeper a month later, during another summit of violence and protests: the G-8 summit in Genoa in July of 2001.

In Genoa, Berlusconi was once again happy to be back on the world stage. He was hosting the most powerful leaders on the planet, the G-7 heads, and, for the first time in history, the addition of Russia’s Vladimir Putin for a formal G-8. It would be overshadowed, though, by protests, by violence, and by a tragic death.

On the morning of Friday, July 20, world leaders began to converge on Genoa. Canada’s Jean Chrétien was the first to arrive; he landed early so he could have a bilateral meeting with Japan’s Junichiro Koizumi, who had flown in from Tokyo the night before. German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder was also already in the country, having his annual summer holiday in the countryside. Berlusconi had him picked up by Italian military aircraft from nearby Pesaro. Around eleven a.m., President Jacques Chirac landed at Genoa’s tiny seaside airport. Britain’s Tony Blair flew in from his country estate at Chequers, where he and President Bush had spent the previous night. As noon approached, Air Force One touched down, and President Bush, like the other leaders, was sped by motorcade to the thirteenth-century Palazzo Ducale, where Berlusconi was waiting to welcome his guests for an aperitif and opening luncheon. Vladimir Putin was not expected until later in the afternoon.

Drinks in hand, Blair and Chirac were admiring the frescoed splendor of the old Palace of the Doges of Genoa. Berlusconi was pointing out the magnificent ceilings as the world leaders sat down to dine. At almost exactly the same moment, troublemakers who had infiltrated the tens of thousands of protesters out in the streets were beginning a rampage that would turn downtown Genoa into a war zone. Before the second course of lunch had been served at the palace, the police were firing their first tear gas canisters.

Black-masked anarchists were throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails at the Italian police. By the time Berlusconi and his guests had gotten to the end of their lunch, a number of protesters were provoking the authorities by jumping over barricades and penetrating a top-security area ringed by steel-and-concrete barriers that was known as the “Red Zone.”

At the end of the afternoon session, with Vladimir Putin’s plane landing, Berlusconi came out to announce a new pledge of help for poor African countries and the promise of $1.2 billion to fund the battle against AIDS and other epidemics. By now, however, out in the streets the air was thick with tear gas, and nearly 20,000 policemen were fighting pitched battles with protesters.

Berlusconi had opened the summit meeting by telling President Bush and the leaders of Germany, France, Britain, Japan, and Canada that in the face of repeated protests now under way and looking back to the violence that had started at the Seattle world trade summit in 1999, it might be time to rethink the use of large cities as locations for future summit meetings.

He tried to defend himself against criticisms of police brutality, saying that his month-old government had sought to defuse the anti-globalization protests by establishing a dialogue with their representatives months before. But a small group of determined anarchists and anti-globalization protesters who were bent on violence had triumphed. Berlusconi was livid.

“Those who are against the G-8 are not fighting against leaders democratically elected in their countries,” he declared. “They are fighting against the Western world, the philosophy of the free world.”

Bush jumped in to shore up his new colleague. He told the White House press corps, crowded into a makeshift pavilion on Genoa’s waterfront, that he regretted the violence but in Bush’s opinion these protests would do a disservice to the impoverished masses of the world.

Then tragedy struck.

Just before six p.m., while Berlusconi was in the library of the Palazzo Ducale with his closest staffers, an aide came forward with the news that a twenty-year-old protester had been shot in the head by an Italian paramilitary trooper. The victim, who had thrown a fire extinguisher at a police van, had been hit by one of the two bullets fired by the trooper. The image of Genoa that was being now broadcast to the world showed the youth lying in a pool of blood and covered by a white sheet. Inside, Berlusconi slammed his fist against the wall and let out a guttural sound of rage.

The death of this protester, along with the injury of nearly two hundred others, was ruining Berlusconi’s dreams for this summit.

“The world had seemed so peaceful,” he recalls. “How wonderful it was to sit as the host of a dinner with the most powerful leaders on the planet, with George W. Bush having a nice conversation with Vladimir Putin to my right. But of course the death of a young man was a human tragedy, even though it was later shown that the paratrooper was acting in self-defense. And of course everyone spoke with me and gave me their condolences, and especially President Bush.”

At the end of the weekend summit in Genoa, Bush and his wife, Laura, remained in Italy, flying to Rome for a whirlwind state visit and a meeting with the pope. Berlusconi entertained the Bushes at a baroque seventeenth-century Roman villa, serving up an extravagant Italian lunch complete with an array of Italian wines and a red, white, and green pasta dish whose colors matched the Italian flag. The two men seemed to agree on just about every issue. They went for a long walk in the elaborate gardens of the Villa Doria Pamphili and they nearly got lost in the labyrinth. It was an unusual and unscheduled frolic for the American president and the Italian premier. They seemed to truly enjoy each other’s company. Bush might be getting the cold shoulder from France and Germany, but he had found himself a staunch ally in Berlusconi.

The billionaire prime minister, already a virulent anti-Communist, was now leading an Italian government that was so pro-American that it was attracting major hostility from nearly all of the left-wing parties in Italy. Berlusconi was already hated by half of the Italians, just as he was loved by the other half. But the way he trumpeted his friendship with the much reviled Bush made him even more of a target of hate for the left. He didn’t care a whit.

“I told George the reasons why I loved America and why I considered it the greatest democracy on the planet,” recalls Berlusconi. “In fact, I told George how grateful all Italians should be to America, since we were liberated by American soldiers during the Second World War. I explained that for my generation of Italians the United States was still a kind of beacon of liberty. It was thanks to the generosity of the U.S. Marshall Plan that my country could emerge from poverty and achieve growth and prosperity after the war years. When we first met, I told him the same story about my father that I would later repeat in a speech to a joint meeting of Congress. It was about a moment in my life that had a profound effect on my thinking.”

Berlusconi pauses for effect.

“When I finished high school my father took me to visit the American cemetery at Anzio. He pointed at the dates on the graves of some of the U.S. soldiers who were buried there.”

Berlusconi now points a finger into space, virtually reenacting the scene.

“When we looked at the tombstones you could see that these were mostly kids who had died when they were just twenty-two, twenty-three, or twenty-four years old. My father pointed at the graves and he told me: ‘These kids came across the ocean, from a democracy far, far away, and they sacrificed their lives for your freedom. I want you to now swear your eternal gratitude to them, to their democracy, and to their country.’ He made me swear on the graves of these American soldiers that I would never forget their sacrifice. And I never will.”

Berlusconi’s eyes well with tears. A cynic would say that he is the world’s greatest Method actor who has memorized and repeated the same story numerous times before. On this occasion, he appears to be speaking straight from the heart, with deadly sincerity.

Berlusconi pauses in his recollection. He glances around at the manicured lawn, recovers his composure, and then gestures to the old villa.

“I was here, you know, when we got the news of 9/11. I was right here at Arcore that very day in September 2001,” he says, glancing at the house. “I was having a meeting with my staff and suddenly they started shouting for me to turn on the television.

The events of 9/11 would deepen the bonds between Berlusconi and Bush even further. After their baptism by fire that summer, amid the violence at the European summits, it was the destruction of New York’s World Trade Center that would bring Berlusconi and Bush still closer.

“When I turned on the television I could not believe what I was seeing,” recalls Berlusconi. “I thought I was watching one of those disaster movies. It was so unreal. It was unbelievable, unimaginable. I waited for several hours before telephoning President Bush, but I remember thinking that it felt like a spell had been broken. Until then, there really seemed to be peace in the world. Now it felt like the world’s collective innocence had been shattered. Everything had seemed to be moving in the right direction. There was progress in the world, there was economic growth. But we were completely unprepared for the rise of this new force of global terrorism; it was a new threat to Western democracies. Of course after that terrible moment all the rest came quickly: the war in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq, the terrorism of al-Qaeda, the rise of Isis. It all came after 9/11. That was the date that changed world history forever.”

Berlusconi pauses again. He looks down at his hands for a moment and then resumes his recollection. He is talking about the flurry of conversations he had with Bush and with Tony Blair in the months that followed.

“We had a kind of a continuous collaboration. It was nonstop. The bad news kept on coming, and we were constantly in touch with each other, either me and President Bush or me and Tony Blair, or one of them would brief me on what the other was doing. There was a lot of coordinating and communicating. After all, this was the biggest problem we were facing, the challenge of all challenges, and in all of our countries domestic issues went on the back burner for a while. This was a challenge for all humanity and not just for the West. So we had lengthy discussions about how to fight the war on terrorism. Above all, we had one really big discussion, where we had a big difference of opinion. That was when the United States decided to go to war in Iraq.”

It was in January 2003, sixteen months after the World Trade Center attacks, that the drumbeat of war would get steadily louder. By early February, when the hapless Colin Powell would go before the UN Security Council and wave around a glass vial that he claimed could contain a teaspoon of anthrax, it was clear that Bush intended to make war on Saddam Hussein.

“Frankly I was very worried,” recalls Berlusconi. “I was worried and I wanted to see if I could change Bush’s mind. I was looking for an alternative to the invasion of Iraq. I was thinking about how to find an exile for Saddam, a way out that would avoid war. So I began contacting Gaddafi and we began discussing the idea of his hosting Saddam in exile in Libya. We must have spoken half a dozen times between the end of 2002 and early 2003. And I was getting him to a point where he was almost willing to accept Saddam.”

Berlusconi was scheduled to see Bush at the White House on January 30. In the weeks that preceded his visit to Washington, he engaged in a frenetic round of telephone diplomacy.

“It was a pretty crazy time and Berlusconi spoke to Gaddafi numerous times,” recalls a close aide. “Bush was willing to accept the exile solution as long as it guaranteed regime change, but he didn’t think we could pull it off. And Gaddafi was a wild man, unpredictable. He would call up Berlusconi in the middle of the night and we had to scramble to find an interpreter and we would tell him that we would call him back. It was pretty crazy.”

While Silvio Berlusconi was getting ready for his visit to Washington and twisting Muammar Gaddafi’s arm to accept Saddam in exile, Tony Blair was busy shuttling back and forth across the Atlantic so frequently that in the eyes of many the British prime minister began to look like a glorified messenger between the White House and continental Europe. Most of Europe was not interested in hearing Blair’s message. The leaders of France and Germany were vigorously opposed to the idea of a war against Saddam Hussein. Aside from Blair, the few Europeans who would side with Bush were Spain’s center-right prime minister, José María Aznar, and a handful of newly enfranchised Eastern European leaders who were just thrilled to be part of NATO and wanted to join the European Union. And then there was Berlusconi. At home he was walking a political tightrope with his vocal support for Bush. Some 75 percent of the Italian electorate was against the idea of joining Bush’s “Coalition of the Willing.” The Italian Constitution even prohibited offensive military engagements.

What the Italian public did not know at the time was that Berlusconi was still trying to dissuade his friend George W. Bush from the folly of war.

“The truth is that I wanted to stop the war,” says Berlusconi, now staring intently at his interlocutor, as if to measure the impact of his words.

“I went to see Bush,” recalls Berlusconi, “because I wanted to explain my opinion on Iraq, which is pretty simple. This is a country whose borders were drawn on a tablecloth. It is populated by three different ethnic groups which have ancient rivalries. Some sixty-five percent of the country is illiterate. This kind of country cannot be governed as a democracy, with a democratically elected government. This has to be a regime, preferably with a leader who is not a dictator, or at least not a bloodthirsty dictator. Iraq could not function as a democracy. So I wanted to avoid a war. That is why I kept trying to get Gaddafi to accept Saddam. Actually, Bush was receptive to this idea. He would have gone for it, if there had been enough time.”

Berlusconi stopped off in London on his way to Washington from Rome.

“Berlusconi met with Tony Blair for a couple of hours at Downing Street. But Blair was distracted. He was having problems in the House of Commons over Iraq and it was not going so well,” recalls Valentino Valentini, Berlusconi’s aide. “Both Blair and Berlusconi shared the concern that any U.S. military action needed to have the correct kind of legal cover, at the national and international levels.”

It was on that day, January 29, 2003, as Berlusconi returned to his plane to fly on to Washington, that Blair made one of his more controversial assertions about Saddam Hussein. He told parliament that based on intelligence reports “we know of links between al-Qaeda and Iraq.”

On the morning of January 30, Berlusconi went to see Bush in the Oval Office. The two men seemed genuinely happy to be together, and Berlusconi spoke a few words of English for the cameras. Inside the Oval Office the conversation was all about Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction, and the weapons inspections by Hans Blix of the United Nations. Berlusconi tried to press his case for the exile of Saddam to Libya.

“I remember telling President Bush about the talks I was having with Gaddafi,” says Berlusconi. “He was very engaged and interested.”

“Berlusconi was trying to be helpful,” recalls former U.S. ambassador to Rome Mel Sembler, who was present for the Oval Office meeting. “He was being a good ally. He was looking for an alternative to war. The president listened to Berlusconi. He was open to the idea of Saddam going into exile, as long as he left Iraq.”

After the forty-five-minute meeting in the Oval Office, Bush led Berlusconi upstairs for a private luncheon for the two leaders and their closest aides. Gathered around the table were Bush’s National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Ambassador Sembler, and Andy Card, the president’s chief of staff. Berlusconi was accompanied by his spokesman, his diplomatic adviser, and the Italian ambassador in Washington. Over a light meal of grouper with mushrooms and wild rice, accompanied by a California Chardonnay, Berlusconi and Bush continued their conversation about Iraq and Saddam.

Toward the end of the luncheon, just before an all-American apple pie was served for dessert, Berlusconi turned to Bush and spoke of the need for any military action to be well justified under international law. The discussion turned to the desirability of a fresh UN resolution to justify any intervention in Iraq. It was at this point that Berlusconi launched into the lengthy telling of a fanciful story, an allegory of his own making, to explain to Bush why he was worried about a war being launched without appropriate legal backing and justification that weapons of mass destruction had really been found. After all, the UN inspectors had returned empty-handed. France and half of Europe were bitterly opposed to an invasion. Now Berlusconi screwed up his courage, and puffed out his chest as he stared into the hard faces across the table.

“I wanted to find a friendly way of delivering my message,” he says. “After all, I was telling the president of the United States that I was not in favor of military action. So on the plane while we were flying from London to Washington I had spent hours with Valentino Valentini trying to come up with a nice story, a fable, an allegory of sorts.”

The story that Berlusconi then told took more than ten minutes to tell. It was long. It was complicated. It was a bit corny. To those who were in the room, Berlusconi appeared highly animated, playing the part of different animal characters, miming the scenes in an imaginary forest. The scene upstairs at the White House must have seemed slightly surreal.

“I told them a story about a lion and a wolf,” recounts Berlusconi. “The lion in this story was Bush, who is the king of the forest. The lion doesn’t like the wolf, meaning Saddam Hussein. But the wolf has to pass in front of the lion’s house every day to get to his own home and every time he passes, the lion growls at him or punches him. So the wolf and the lion complain to the fox, who is the head of the General Assembly of all the animals in the forest. That would be Kofi Annan. The fox then tells the lion to stop picking on the wolf, but the lion says the wolf is a bad guy. ‘What has the wolf done?’ the fox asks the lion. ‘He ate the three little piglets,’ says the lion. But the fox wants proof of the crime, so the fox [Kofi Annan] sends the Swedish eagle [UN weapons inspector Hans Blix] to investigate the wolf. But the eagle returns without any proof of the crime. The fox then tells the lion that if he really wants to keep punching the wolf, he will need to come up with a good reason, some excuse. So the lion tells the wolf to run and get him a pack of Marlboro cigarettes. And when the wolf returns with the Marlboros, the lion tells him that he got the wrong kind of pack and he punches him anyway.

“In other words,” says Berlusconi, now chortling about his own anecdote, “I was trying to find a way to tell him that he needed a really good reason and a plausible one if he wanted to take down Saddam Hussein.”

When Berlusconi finished telling this lengthy and bewildering anecdote, a virtual cornucopia of mixed metaphors in the animal forest, the attendees at the White House luncheon laughed politely. Then everyone looked at the president and the air became still.

“Everybody was laughing at the end of my story,” recalls Berlusconi. “Everybody except George…”

Bush was a man of few words.

“Yeah,” said the president of the United States of America to Silvio Berlusconi. “I’m gonna kick his ass!”

What Berlusconi remembers following this statement of intent is another lengthy story, this one told by Bush, and this one not an allegory from the jungle but the story of how Saddam Hussein had tried to assassinate his father.

“President Bush had a particular, let us say a very vehement conviction, a genuine belief, that Saddam Hussein was a threat to all humanity and had to be destroyed,” recalls Berlusconi.

As they left the White House, Berlusconi turned to his aides and said it appeared that Bush would not change his mind. He seemed crestfallen.

In his public remarks upon leaving the White House that day, Berlusconi summoned up his strength and continued to give his staunch backing to Bush, as would Tony Blair when he turned up at the White House a day later.

That same evening Berlusconi and his team boarded their Airbus and returned to Rome. In his private diary that night, amid the general exhaustion and jet lag, Berlusconi scribbled a few notes about his failed mission. It had not gone as he had hoped.

A few days later, Colin Powell made his controversial appearance at the UN Security Council. After that it was clear that Bush really did intend to bring down Saddam. In March, when Operation Enduring Freedom was launched, Italy would provide logistical support and other non-military assistance to the war effort, even though Berlusconi remained convinced that the invasion of Iraq was a big mistake. He continued his enthusiastic support for Bush throughout the long war in Iraq, for years to come, and right up until the election of Barack Obama in 2008. His friendship would also blossom with Tony Blair, who famously vacationed with his wife, Cherie, at Berlusconi’s fabulous villa on Sardinia’s Costa Smeralda, enjoying the yachts and local watering holes in this billionaire’s playground. But the friendship with Blair, whom Berlusconi perceived as the rightful heir of Margaret Thatcher, would never match the heat and intensity of the Bush-Berlusconi bond. Nor would the relationship with Blair ever come near to matching the warmth that Berlusconi would feel in the company of his other new ally, another world leader with a slightly macho disposition. He may have developed an instant rapport with Bush, but long after W. had left the White House and gone back to Texas, Berlusconi remained on the closest of terms with a man for whom he still professes the profoundest feelings of friendship. Who could this be?

“I am talking about my friend Vladimir,” says a smiling Silvio Berlusconi.

That would be Vladimir Putin.