When the administration of Geroge W. Bush needed an ally to help sell its proposed invasion of Iraq to a skeptical European audience, Silvio Berlusconi stepped forward.
It wasn’t that the Italian prime minister was particularly concerned over the threat of Saddam Hussein’s imagined weapons of mass destruction to his country, or the region – he wasn’t. But it was a chance for the former businessman to burnish his credentials as an international statesman and to draw the U.S. closer into Italy’s orbit.
