Ex-Friends
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by Peter Beinart
The New Republic
Issue date 09.23.02
When Iraq hawks hear Iraq doves say the United States needs international support for a war against Saddam Hussein, they get suspicious. And understandably so. Saying the United States shouldn't invade without global support is a convenient way for American politicians to oppose an invasion while fobbing responsibility for that opposition onto non-Americans. It allows the Bush administration's critics to outsource foreign policy judgments they should be making themselves.
But even though Americans should make up their own minds, international opposition to an Iraq war is still a big problem. The problem isn't moral--given the penchant of many of our European allies for cutting lucrative deals with dangerous dictatorships like Iraq and Iran, they don't exactly hold the ethical high ground. And it isn't military either--if the United States has the support of a couple of countries on Iraq's border, it can overthrow Saddam without a single French or German sortie.
Rather, European opposition is a problem financially and politically. It's a financial problem because when it comes to overseas expenditures, the United States (especially with Republicans running the government) is cheap. If Europe doesn't back the war, it won't be obligated to help pay for the post-Saddam peace. And that could leave Iraq's reconstruction (including, perhaps, peacekeeping) almost entirely in the hands of a Bush administration that loathes nation-building and faces a mountain of budgetary red ink. In which case Iraq might never be adequately reconstructed at all.
European opposition also represents a political problem because much of the world--rightly or wrongly--considers the United States a colossus bent on dominating the planet. If war with Iraq is seen as a purely American exercise, it will provoke even greater hostility toward the United States down the road. The Bush administration seems to think multilateralism gives weak European states an influence they don't deserve. But it also eases their resentment of the United States, which makes them less likely to band together to try to cut Washington down to size.
Since returning from his August vacation, President George W. Bush has lobbied numerous foreign leaders, which would seem to suggest an all-out White House effort to convince other governments to back war with Iraq. But in a deeper sense, that effort is an illusion. The Bush administration has actually put remarkably little effort into winning our allies' support for overthrowing Saddam. In fact, it has helped produce much of the international opposition it now seeks to overcome.
It has done so by picking a series of petty fights with America's closest allies that have bred public hostility throughout Europe and have made it politically harder for European leaders to support the United States now that it really counts. The fights started soon after Bush took office: In March 2001 he rejected the Kyoto Protocol, a global-warming pact beloved by Europeans. Relations worsened that summer when the United States opposed a treaty restricting the spread of biological weapons and signaled its intention to withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. By August 2001 an International Herald Tribune poll found that less than 20 percent of respondents in Britain, Germany, France, and Italy thought Bush took European concerns into account when making U.S. policy. In a quote that now sounds prophetic, Dana Allin, an expert on trans-Atlantic relations at London's International Institute for Strategic Studies, warned, "[I]f a crisis erupts--in the Persian Gulf or Taiwan Strait--where European views and interests are ambiguous ... [Bush's] unpopularity certainly could impair his ability to line up allied support for U.S. action."
Before September 11 the Bush administration could perhaps be forgiven for stiffing America's friends in Europe. After all, in a world where the United States faced no grave threats, and needed no grand coalitions, what was the harm? But astonishingly, the White House has continued playing hardball with European governments even after it knew it might need those governments' backing for a war with Iraq. All this year the Bush administration has waged a remarkably heavy-handed campaign against the International Criminal Court, an institution enthusiastically backed by virtually all of America's European allies. Rather than seeking to modify the court to protect U.S. troops from politically motivated prosecution, the White House has instead tried to bludgeon its allies into signing treaties guaranteeing Americans immunity--threatening to oppose both future peacekeeping missions and the further expansion of NATO if it doesn't get its way.
On trade, the Bush administration has been equally myopic. In March it slapped tariffs on steel imports from Japan, Russia, and a host of European countries, including Britain. The tariffs humiliated Tony Blair, who was mocked at home for having sent troops to fight alongside the United States in Afghanistan and having received nothing in return. In Moscow--which had swallowed hard and allowed U.S. bases in Central Asia--Alexei Arbatov, a key member of the State Duma, spoke of Russians' "deep sense of resentment. They do not believe that for all the strategic and military concessions Russia will get great economic cooperation." The White House followed up its steel decision in May with a farm bill packed with protectionist subsidies and 27 percent duties on Canadian softwood lumber.
The point is not that the Bush administration was wrong, and the Europeans right, on each conflict. Rather, it is that compared with European support on Iraq, each conflict was trivial. The Bush administration prides itself on its ability to set aside distractions that interfere with its post-September 11 mission--which is why it has essentially put American policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on hold until we go after Saddam. But with regard to Europe, the administration has done exactly the opposite--miring itself in one peripheral spat after another. And those spats are coming back to haunt the United States today. Take Germany. All year the Bush administration has been sticking its finger in Berlin's eye over global warming, trade, and the International Criminal Court. The result is that, according to a recent poll by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations and the German Marshall Fund of the United States, 62 percent of Germans rate American foreign policy as either fair or poor. And that has led German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, facing a tough reelection challenge, to curry public favor by slamming the Bush administration's Iraq policy--which must put a smile on Saddam's face.
In the second presidential debate with Al Gore, Bush said, "It's important to be friends with people when you don't need each other so that when you do there's a strong bond of friendship." A good insight--too bad he's forgotten it when it matters most.
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Peter Beinart is the editor of The New Republic.
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