THINKING THINGS OVER Engaging the Irritating Europeans America must tell the world that the rules have changed. BY ROBERT L. BARTLEY Monday, April 22, 2002 12:01 a.m. EDT
From afar, European attitudes toward American policy in the Middle East seem a pastiche of rationalizations for inaction, resentment at being supplanted in world leadership, fear of their own Muslim populations, and cowardice political and personal.
From up close they look pretty much the same. Or at least, there was plenty of that at a long weekend breaking bread and chewing fat at Ditchley Park, the very British 18th century squiredom now become a stately conference center. Yet there was also more than that. At their best, Europeans do make one important point. To wit, a preemptive attack on Iraq would represent a historic change in the rules of international behavior.
Since World War II, the world order has been organized around the twin principles of nonaggression and state sovereignty. Exhausted by two global conflagrations, the nations codified these principles in the United Nations Charter. While the U.N. did not live up to the heady expectations of its founders, these well-understood rules of behavior kept the peace, more or less, for a half-century.
Thus with Iraq's across-the-border attack on Kuwait in 1990, the U.N. managed greater alacrity than the U.S. Congress. And with the World Trade Center atrocity, European and even Arab countries were quick to support a U.S. response, including an invasion of Afghanistan in pursuit of the terrorists harbored there.
Iraq is another matter. While it's the putative number-one target of President Bush's war on terrorism, Europeans at their best are quick to note that no case has been made that it was involved in the September 11 terrorism. It has crossed no borders to attack the U.S.; indeed, a decade of containment has greatly diminished the threat it poses to its neighbors. So an attack on a sovereign state cannot be justified as a response to aggression.
In an interdependent world, thoughtful Europeans readily specify, the notion of state sovereignty is already under stress. No one argues that Yugoslav sovereignty should have prevented military intervention to stop ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. And Slobodan Milosevic is on trial at an international tribunal in the Hague for actions within the supposedly sovereign state he ran at the time.
President Bush has proclaimed that states must suppress terrorists within their borders or risk preemptive attack. At their best, Europeans would not dismiss this out of hand. But they argue that so important a change should not be imposed unilaterally, even by a U.S. militarily capable of doing so. It should come only by wide agreement after meaningful consultations, making it part of a continuing structure of international rules, not a matter of might makes right.
Now, few Europeans, if any, can in fact make their case this cogently. And however finely the logic is drawn, few Americans are likely to accept its ultimate implications. It does after all suggest that the U.S. response to a horrific attack on its civilians is limited by the veto of amorphous "world opinion."
Still, the Europeans at their best are worth engaging. One of their biggest resentments is simply that the Americans have not bothered to try seriously to persuade them. And the engagement could also clarify in American minds the principles they are propounding with the "war on terrorism."
More serious engagement might start, first of all, with the old rules about aggression. There is quite a bit of circumstantial evidence that Saddam Hussein was indeed involved in attacking the U.S. homeland, but the Bush administration has worked to suppress rather than advance it. One of his agents is known to have met with hijacker Mohamed Atta, of course, and his laboratories have the capability to produce military-grade anthrax. Despite earlier dismissals, the latest reports on the anthrax sent to the U.S. Capitol suggest a sophistication exceeding anything seen in now-defunct U.S. and Soviet biological weapons programs. And the FBI has been sitting on evidence that one of the hijackers was treated for what the physician now believes was cutaneous anthrax.
Yet rather than debating evidence of direct aggression under old international rules, the administration has chosen to rest its case on Saddam's well-established pursuit of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and his well-established history of aggression and the support of terrorism.
He has after all invaded two of his neighbors and plotted the assassination of a U.S. president. He operates a terrorist training facility at Salman Pak, and pays bounties to the families of suicide bombers. He has used poison gas on his own citizens. U.N. inspectors found ample evidence of nuclear and biological programs as well, but he has expelled them in defiance of U.N. resolutions, which is to say the principles the world community has itself promulgated.
The administration's case is that September 11 showed that the world has become too small to leave so dangerous a character on the loose and coming closer every day to nuclear weapons. If the world order means the U.S. cannot legitimately act until after it suffers a nuclear terrorist attack, it's time to change the rules.
For that matter, other Bush administration initiatives that roil Europeans share the theme of introducing hard reality into a heady world conversation. They were upset by its rejection of the Kyoto treaty, the international criminal court and the ABM treaty. In each case, Bush diplomacy refused to sacrifice real American interests to what had become international totems.
Perhaps the greatest lesson that Americans have learned from September 11 is that with power comes responsibility. A sole superpower can't escape involvement in the world; when Islam cannot resolve its own quarrels, the U.S. gets attacked. If this is the potential of the new century, Americans are now resolving to shape rules of behavior that fit it.
Yes, the Americans should engage the Europeans and the rest of their critics. Yes, they should say, we are replacing the old rules with new ones, and the world will be better for it.
Mr. Bartley is editor of The Wall Street Journal. His column appears Mondays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.
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