Michael Ignatieff, Why Are We In Iraq , Part 2/2
The Iraq intervention was the work of conservative radicals, who believed that the status quo in the Middle East was untenable -- for strategic reasons, security reasons and economic reasons. They wanted intervention to bring about a revolution in American power in the entire region. What made a president take the gamble was Sept. 11 and the realization, with 15 of the hijackers originating in Saudi Arabia, that American interests based since 1945 on a presumed Saudi pillar were actually built on sand. The new pillar was to be a democratic Iraq, at peace with Israel, Turkey and Iran, harboring no terrorists, pumping oil for the world economy at the right price and abjuring any nasty designs on its neighbors.
As Paul Wolfowitz has all but admitted, the ''bureaucratic'' reason for war -- weapons of mass destruction -- was not the main one. The real reason was to rebuild the pillars of American influence in the Middle East. Americans may have figured this out for themselves, but it was certainly not what they were told. Nor were they told that building this new pillar might take years and years. What they were told -- misleadingly and simplistically -- was that force was justified to fight ''terrorism'' and to destroy arsenals of mass destruction targeted at America and at Israel. In fact, while Hussein did want to acquire such weapons, the fact that none have been found probably indicates that he had achieved nothing more than an active research program.
The manipulation of popular consent over Iraq -- together with and tangled up with the lack of an intervention policy -- is why the antiwar party is unresigned to its defeat and the pro-war party feels so little of the warm rush of vindication. Even those who supported intervention have to concede that in justifying his actions to the American people, the president was, at the least, economical with the truth. Because the casus belli over Iraq was never accurately set out for Americans, the chances of Americans hanging on for the long haul -- and it will be a long haul -- have been undercut. Also damaged has been the trust that a president will need from his people when he seeks their support for intervention in the future.
V.
Critics view Iraq as a perilous new step in the history of American intervention: unilateral, opposed by most of the world, an act of territorial conquest. The truth is we have been here before. The Iraq operation most resembles the conquest of the Philippines between 1898 and 1902. Both were wars of conquest, both were urged by an ideological elite on a divided country and both cost much more than anyone had bargained for. Just as in Iraq, winning the war was the easy part. The Spanish fell to Commodore Dewey even more quickly than Hussein's forces fell to Tommy Franks. But it was afterward that the going got rough. More than 120,000 American troops were sent to the Philippines to put down the guerrilla resistance, and 4,000 never came home. It remains to be seen whether Iraq will cost thousands of American lives -- and whether the American public will accept such a heavy toll as the price of success in Iraq. The Philippines also provides a humbling perspective on nation-building in Iraq. A hundred years on, American troops are back in the Philippines, hunting down guerrillas, this time tied to Al Qaeda, and the democracy that Teddy Roosevelt sought to bring to that nation remains chronically insecure.
Roosevelt's ''splendid little war'' may not have done much for the Philippines, but it did a lot to make America a leading power in the Pacific. If Bush succeeds in Iraq, he will reap geostrategic benefit on the same scale. America's enemies understand this only too well. The current struggle in Iraq is much more than the death throes of the old Hussein regime. The foreign fighters who have crossed into Iraq from Syria, Iran and Palestine to join Hussein loyalists in attacks on American soldiers know how much is at stake. Bloodying American troops, forcing a precipitous withdrawal, destroying the chances for a democratic Iraq would inflict the biggest defeat on America since Vietnam and send a message to every Islamic extremist in the region: Goliath is vulnerable.
But the American Goliath recovers quickly from failure, and this keeps presidents throwing the interventionist dice. Nor is the risk of imperial overstretch -- which kept the Romans and the British from battering every available barbarian rogue -- a very real constraint on America's propensity to intervene. The occupation of Iraq is forcing the military to run at a high operational tempo, but still there appear to be enough troops to land in Liberia and garrison Bosnia and South Korea and all the other outposts of the imperium. Indeed, intervention is getting cheaper. The second gulf war cost half as much as the first gulf war and required about half the number of troops, and actual combat lasted a little more than half the time. If neither the risk of failure nor the cost of deployment is likely to restrain American use of force, what about the risk of casualties? While Clinton believed that Americans didn't want their sons and daughters dying in wars of choice, studies show that Americans are prepared for casualties in wars -- if they understand them as wars of necessity. Besides, Americans count on precision missiles and stealth aircraft to deliver crushing lethality at low risk to American troops. Impunity lowers the threshold of risk for intervention. But that threshold does remain, and an army of occupation is particularly vulnerable. Nobody knows whether one of the president's Democratic opponents will manage to turn the deadly drip of bloodshed in Iraq into an electoral liability. Only one president -- Lyndon Johnson -- was brought down by a botched intervention, but no president since has been able to afford to ignore that warning.
VI.
If we take stock and ask what will curb the American appetite for intervention, the answer is, not much. Interventions are popular, and they remain popular even if American soldiers die. Even failure and defeat aren't much of a restraint: 30 years after Vietnam, America is intervening as robustly as ever. What Thomas Jefferson called ''decent respect to the opinions of mankind'' doesn't seem to exert much influence, either. About Iraq, the opinions of mankind told the Bush White House that the use of force was a dangerous and destabilizing adventure, but the intervention went ahead because the president believes that the ultimate authority over American decisions to intervene is not the United Nations or the world's opinion, but his constitutional mandate as commander in chief to ''preserve, protect and defend'' the United States. This unilateral doctrine alarms America's allies, but there is not a lot they can do about it. When Bush went to war, he set the timetable, and not even Tony Blair, who desperately needed more time to bring his domestic opinion with him, was able to stretch it out.
To date, the only factor that keeps the United States from intervening is if the country in question has nuclear weapons. One of the factors driving pre-emptive action in Iraq was the belief that were Hussein to acquire a nuclear or mass-casualty chemical or biological weapon, it would then be too late to use force. No wonder a Pakistani general is supposed to have remarked in 1999 that the chief lesson he drew from the display of American precision air power in Kosovo was for his country to acquire nuclear weapons as quickly as possible.
After Iraq, the key question is when the nuclear taboo will be broken. Already in 1994, over the last crisis with North Korea, the Clinton administration gamed out the possibilities of a conventional strike against a North Korean reactor where it believed nuclear weapons were being produced. Fortunately, it decided not to, realizing that any strike, either with conventional or the small precision nuclear weapons the United States is known to possess, might trigger horrendous military retaliation against South Korean or even Japanese cities.
There is actually a more daunting intervention possibility on the horizon. The United States recognizes one China but guarantees the security of Taiwan. Clinton sent the Navy into the China Sea in 1996 to make sure the Chinese respected that commitment. The freedom of Taiwan, one of the great success stories of American power in Asia, remains precarious. Were the Taiwanese to provoke the mainland, were the Americans to fail to hold them back or were the Chinese leadership to seek to divert attention from troubles at home with bellicose nationalism abroad, America might find itself having to decide how to confront a nuclear power of more than a billion people in defense of an imperative commitment to the freedom of 23 million. Doing so would require the president to break, or at least to threaten to break, the nuclear taboo that has restrained American intervention strategy since Hiroshima. Given American history, which seems to say that resolute use of force always pays dividends, it is difficult for the United States not to believe that it can get its way by relying on military force alone. Yet such a doctrine might end up endangering everyone, including itself.
VII.
For all its risks, Americans, by and large, still think of intervening as a noble act in which the new world comes to the rescue of the old. They remember the newsreels of G.I.'s riding into Rome in 1943 or driving through the lanes of northern Europe in 1944, kissing the girls and grabbing the bouquets and wine bottles held out to them by people weeping with gratitude at their liberation. All this has changed. There were few tearful embraces when the marines rode into Nasiriya, no bouquets and prayers of thanks when the Army rode into Baghdad. True, Iraq is not the first time an American intervention has been unpopular. Iranians were not happy that the C.I.A. engineered the overthrow of Mossadegh in 1953, Chilean democrats didn't like what was done to Allende and students the world over protested against Vietnam. But these occasions apart, and right through the Kosovo intervention in 1999, our allies kept faith with American good intentions. Now all that moral capital has been spent. Some Europeans actually think, to judge from a few polls, that George Bush is more of a threat to world peace than Osama bin Laden. This may be grotesque, but it makes it much harder for American interventions to find favor in world opinion.
Its allies wept with America after Sept. 11 and then swiftly concluded that only America was under attack. The idea that Western civilization had been the target was not convincing. While America and its allies stood shoulder to shoulder when they faced a common Soviet foe, Islamic terrorism seemed to have America alone in its sights. Why cozy up to a primary target, America's allies asked themselves, when it will only make you a secondary one? Indeed, after Sept.11 an astonishing number of the United States' friends went further. They whispered, America had it coming. Aggrieved Americans were entitled to ask, For what? For guaranteeing the security of their oil supplies for 60 years? For rebuilding the European economy from the ruins of 1945? For protecting innumerable countries from Communist takeover? No matter, after Sept. 11, memories of American generosity were short, and the list of grievances against it was long.
As the Iraq debate at the United Nations showed so starkly, the international consensus that once provided America with coalitions of the willing when it used force has disappeared. There is no Soviet ogre to scare doubters into line. European allies are now serious economic rivals, and they are happy to conceal their absolute military dependence with obstreperously independent foreign policies. Throughout the third world, states fear Islamic political opposition even more than American disapproval and are disposed to appease their Islamic constituencies with anti-American poses whenever they can get away with it.
There are those who think that the damage done by the Iraq debate at the United Nations can be repaired and that a coalition of the willing, at least one with more active players, might have been possible if the United States hadn't been so backhanded with its diplomacy. Yet the days when the United States intervenes as the servant of the international community may be well and truly over. When it intervenes in the future, it will very likely go it alone and will do so essentially for itself.
If this is the new world order, it will have costs that the rest of the world will have to accept: fewer humanitarian interventions on behalf of starving or massacred people in the rest of the world, fewer guarantees of other people's security against threat and invasion. Why bother with rescue and protection if you have to do everything alone? Why bother maintaining a multilateral order -- of free trade, open markets and common defense -- if your allies only use it to tie Gulliver down with leading strings?
American unilateralism will have costs for the United States too. The first gulf war was paid for by a coalition of the willing. The cost of the second one will be borne by the American taxpayer alone. The Bush administration affects not to care about the price tag of unpopularity abroad; foreigners don't vote. But Iraq has shown the costs, monetary and otherwise, that are added to the exercise of power when friends don't trust your intentions.
But can a war on terror be fought alone? The allies have intelligence networks and some good counterterrorist squads, and in a battle with Al Qaeda, the biggest breaks have come from the police work of specialists in Spain, Britain, Germany and Pakistan. In a war on terror, an isolated America whose military power awakens even the resistance of its friends may prove a vulnerable giant.
VIII.
There is a way out of this mess of interventionist policy, but it is also a route out of American unilateralism. It entails allowing other countries to have a say on when and how the United States can intervene. It would mean returning to the United Nations and proposing new rules to guide the use of force. This is the path that Franklin Roosevelt took in 1944, when he put his backing behind the creation of a new world organization with a mandate to use force to defend ''international peace and security.'' What America needs, then, is not simply its own doctrine for intervention but also an international doctrine that promotes and protects its interests and those of the rest of the international community.
The problem is that the United Nations that F.D.R. helped create never worked as he intended. What passes for an ''international community'' is run by a Security Council that is a museum piece of 1945 vintage. Everybody knows that the Security Council needs reform, and everybody also knows that this is nearly impossible. But if so, then the United Nations has no future. The time for reform is now or never. If there ever was a reason to give Great Britain and France a permanent veto while denying permanent membership to Germany, India, Brazil or Japan, that day is over. The United States should propose enlarging the number of permanent members of the council so that it truly represents the world's population. In order to convince the world that it is serious about reform, it ought to propose giving up its own veto so that all other permanent members follow suit and the Security Council makes decisions to use force with a simple majority vote. As a further guarantee of its seriousness, the United States would commit to use force only with approval of the council, except where its national security was directly threatened.
All this is difficult enough, but the next step is tougher still. The United Nations that F.D.R. helped create privileged state sovereignty ahead of human rights: a world of equal states, equally entitled to immunity from intervention. One result has been that since 1945 millions more people have been killed by oppression, abuse, civil war and massacre inside their states than in wars between states. These have been the rules that made tyrants and murderers like Saddam Hussein members in good standing of the United Nations club.
This is the cruel reality of what passes for an ''international community'' and the comity of nations. United Nations member states will have to decide what the organization is actually for: to defend sovereignty at all costs, in which case it ends up defending tyranny and terror -- and invites a superpower to simply go its own way, or to defend human rights, in which case, it will have to rewrite its own rules for authorizing the use of force.
So what rules for intervention should the United States propose to the international community? I would suggest that there are five clear cases when the United Nations could authorize a state to intervene: when, as in Rwanda or Bosnia, ethnic cleansing and mass killing threaten large numbers of civilians and a state is unwilling or unable to stop it; when, as in Haiti, democracy is overthrown and people inside a state call for help to restore a freely elected government; when, as in Iraq, North Korea and possibly Iran, a state violates the nonproliferation protocols regarding the acquisition of chemical, nuclear or biological weapons; when, as in Afghanistan, states fail to stop terrorists on their soil from launching attacks on other states; and finally, when, as in Kuwait, states are victims of aggression and call for help. These would be the cases when intervention by force could be authorized by majority vote on the Security Council.
Sending in the troops would remain a last resort. If the South Africans can persuade Mugabe to go into retirement, so much the better. If American diplomats can persuade the Burmese junta to cease harassing Aung San Suu Kyi, it would obviously be preferable to using force. But force and the threat of it are usually the only language tyrants, human rights abusers and terrorists ever understand. Terrorism and nuclear proliferation can be contained only by multilateral coalitions of the willing who are prepared to fight if the need arises.
These rules wouldn't require the United States to make its national security decisions dependent on the say-so of the United Nations, for its unilateral right of self-defense would remain. New rules for intervention, proposed by the United States and abided by it, would end the canard that the United States, not its enemies, is the rogue state. A new charter on intervention would put America back where it belongs, as the leader of the international community instead of the deeply resented behemoth lurking offstage.
Dream on, I hear you say. Such a change might lead to more American intervention, and the world wants a lot less. But we can't go on the way we are, with a United Nations Charter that has become an alibi for dictators and tyrants and a United States ever less willing to play by United Nations rules when trying to stop them. Clear United Nations guidelines, making state sovereignty contingent on good citizenship at home and abroad and licensing intervention where these rules were broken might actually induce states to improve their conduct, making intervention less, rather than more, frequent.
Putting the United States at the head of a revitalized United Nations is a huge task. For the United States is as disillusioned with the United Nations as the world is disillusioned with the United States. Yet it needs to be understood that the alternative is empire: a muddled, lurching America policing an ever more resistant world alone, with former allies sabotaging it at every turn. Roosevelt understood that Americans can best secure their own defense and pursue their own interests when they unite with other states and, where necessary, sacrifice unilateral freedom of action for a common good. The signal failure of American foreign policy since the end of the cold war has not been a lack of will to lead and to intervene; it has been a failure to imagine the possibility of a United States once again cooperating with others to create rules for the international community. Pax Americana must be multilateral, as Franklin Roosevelt realized, or it will not survive. Without clear principles for intervention, without friends, without dreams to serve, the soldiers sweating in their body armor in Iraq are defending nothing more than power. And power without legitimacy, without support, without the world's respect and attachment, cannot endure.
Michael Ignatieff, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, is director of the Carr Center at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. |
