Stumbling Into War
James P. Rubin. Foreign Affairs. New York: September/October 2003.Vol.82, Iss. 5; pg. 46
<...The public struggle in the Security Council over the second resolution was about more than just Iraq. The opponents of the American and British resolution say they were fighting a White House that they believed threatened to undermine international order.
Above all, it was the so-called preemptive strike doctrine, published in last September's National Security Strategy, that harmed America's diplomatic cause. Viewed through this lens, the war in Iraq looked less like a way to uphold UN Security Council resolutions than like the manifestation of a new American approach. Whichever U.S. officials decided to include the now-infamous language about preemptive strikes and the primacy of American power in the annual document, and then singled them out as marking a new U.S. doctrine, either did not consider or did not care how it would affect the debate.
Whatever the explanation, the result was that every time U.S. officials insisted their goal was to enforce UN resolutions on Iraq, they ran up against a wall of skepticism. Is Iraq the first in a series of preemptive attacks? they were asked. Who decides when an existing threat justifies preemptive action? How can the UN endorse an unprovoked attack on another country? What will happen if other countries, such as India, Pakistan, Russia, or China, insist on their right to attack preemptively whenever they see a threat? Much of the world became determined to prevent the Security Council from rubber-stamping American decisions to conduct preemptive strikes. If gaining support for action against Iraq was truly Washington's highest priority in the fall of 2002, it is hard to imagine a more counterproductive step than to initiate a debate over whether the United States has the right to attack whomever it wants, whenever it deems it necessary.
Having said that, the controversy over preemptive strikes might, by itself, have been manageable. But international relations are a lot like interpersonal relations. Every country has a certain amount of goodwill on deposit with others. Unfortunately, by last fall, the United States' goodwill account had been exhausted. The president seemed to have forgotten the tenet he had articulated so well as a candidate: "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."
One reason Washington's goodwill reserve had all but vanished is that European countries pay a lot of attention to treaties. Their foreign ministers meet, week after week, in a rolling discussion of how to modify and improve the treaties that form the European Union, and these ministers regard international law and formal accords as the primary currency of foreign policy. Nonetheless, early in its term, the Bush administration declared war on all outstanding international treaties. First he repudiated the Kyoto Protocol on the environment. Then came Washington's withdrawal from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, its rejection of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and its repudiation of the protocol to the Biological Weapons Convention.
Just as unpopular was the U.S. policy on the International Criminal Court. The ICC accord may have its flaws, but the Bush team broke new legal ground when it declared Clinton's signature of the treaty null and void (a gratuitous step, since the agreement had never been ratified by Congress). In order to weaken the ICC further, Bush also provoked a bitter battle over the court with the entire EU, demanding that every country sign a special waiver to exempt American citizens and soldiers from the court's jurisdiction. This step was overkill; the idea that the ICC would ever have forced a European country to imprison an American citizen over the objections of the U.S. government is not only hypothetical in the extreme, but also politically unthinkable.
Next, the matter of the prisoners held on Guantnamo may have actually marked the beginning of the end of European sympathy for and solidarity with the United States after September 11. Europeans across the political spectrum reacted with shock and condemnation when Rumsfeld brusquely dismissed the applicability of the Geneva Conventions to these prisoners on January 16, 2002, saying he didn't have "the slightest concern" about how they would be treated in light of their organizations' attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Even the normally pro-American weekly The Economist called this view "unworthy of a nation which has cherished the rule of law from its birth."
Unfortunately, Guantnamo became a rallying point for anti-Americanism. The fact that the United States would not even accept the Geneva Conventions in this case, critics argued, showed that the Bush administration really did see itself as above the law of nations. A more careful diplomat than Rumsfeld would, in answer to a question about the convention's applicability to the prisoners, have simply said, "of course we will apply the principles of the Geneva Conventions to any prisoners we are holding" -- and then gone on to explain that government lawyers were considering how to apply those principles in this unprecedented situation. Indeed, this is precisely what the U.S. government ended up doing, but by then the damage had been done.
Washington had also alienated Europe through its approach to NATO. Top NATO officials have been stewing ever since the alliance's offer of help after September 11 was spurned. Although the now-famous invocation of Article V (the mutual self-defense clause) of NATO's founding treaty was more of a political act than a prescription for joint military operations, the Pentagon's subsequent, disparaging attitude toward a NATO role in Afghanistan stung Brussels deeply. Nato had long been the United States' favorite multilateral forum; but Washington's recent "don't call us, we'll call you" message led many Europeans to conclude that even NATO was no longer valued by the Americans.
A final reason for the loss of goodwill toward the United States was the White House's approach to peace in the Middle East. Although most of the world recognizes how difficult stopping Arab-Israeli violence will be, they expect the U.S. government to try. Bush's across-the-board support for Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, therefore, and his administration's lack of high-level engagement in the peace process prior to this summer made it hard for Washington to attract support for its war in Iraq. Blair, at least, understood this problem and pushed Bush hard to commit political capital to getting both the Palestinians and the Israelis to compromise. Although the White House did begin to move in this direction right before the invasion of Iraq began, its effort was too little and too late to repair the damage done by its two years of studied avoidance of this critical issue.
IN THE COURT OF WORLD OPINION
After the diplomatic failure in New York, it became fashionable to ask why the United States should have had to try to win support in the first place from African countries such as Angola, Cameroon, or Guinea, or Latin American nations such as Chile and Mexico. Many wondered why these smaller countries should play such an important role in deciding whether international action is legitimate or not.
The truth, however, is that the UN system worked. The nonpermanent council members took positions that did, in fact, reflect the views of their regional groups. The three African countries, for example, accurately represented Africa's overwhelming opposition to the war. So did Mexico and Chile for Latin America. The Europeans on the council also acted in accordance with the views of most of their neighbors. Bulgaria represented the sense of solidarity with the United States felt by central and eastern European countries and their opposition to Saddam. And the split between France and Germany on one side and Spain and the United Kingdom on the other fairly represented the split among governments in Western Europe. The lack of support in the council for the American and British position, therefore, was not a systemic failure but a reflection of international reality.
That China and the countries of the Middle East and Africa would oppose the war in Iraq could have been predicted. The real surprise was that the world's democracies did not see the importance of upholding UN disarmament demands or ending the misery of the Iraqi people. One explanation is that Bush's emphasis on personal diplomacy between leaders was not enough to win him support in democratic countries, where governments cannot simply act in complete defiance of public opinion. The United States should have deployed public diplomacy to help fill this gap, but the Bush administration's efforts on this front were lackluster. True, Powell made an impressive presentation on the evils of Saddam's regime to the Security Council in New York, but that performance was a one-off, not part of a campaign. Moreover, Powell did not provide an irrefutable case. He cited communications intercepts that suggested Iraq was hiding something and was afraid of what the UN inspectors might find. But what exactly that "something" was could only be speculated about, not identified with certainty. This is not to diminish Powell's efforts or Blair's, since both men were genuinely convinced that WMD existed in Iraq. Uncertainty is inevitable in intelligence work when investigating closed societies. But in the absence of diplomatic backing and trust from other countries, the United States needed proof beyond a shadow of a doubt. Powell's case was strong, but not strong enough.
As mentioned above, another problem was the shifting rationales for war. The evolution of the administration's arguments -- from the threat of WMD, to the link to al Qaeda, to the Wilsonian claims about human rights abuses and democracy in the Middle East -- convinced many that the American president was determined to invade no matter what. Of all of these claims, the Wilsonian argument especially might have been effective had it been argued consistently from the beginning.
The lack of coordination between the State and Defense Departments was a further problem. American diplomats emphasized the wmd argument because that allowed war to be justified in terms of Iraqi violations of mandatory UN resolutions. Meanwhile, Defense Department officials too often played up the al Qaeda link, which did not resonate anywhere outside the United States.
In fact, Rumsfeld's frequent public appearances harmed rather than helped his country's case in the court of world opinion. His blunt language may have won him a few laughs in domestic settings, but his every gaffe and insult was greeted with disgust throughout Europe. Public diplomacy is supposed to persuade, not infuriate. German officials still cannot forgive Rumsfeld's rhetorical lumping together of Germany with countries such as Cuba on the grounds that all refused to support the war. Overcoming Germany's postwar pacifism would not have been easy in the best of circumstances, but challenging Germany's core democratic values by comparing it to dictatorships only caused its diplomats to dig in their heels.
Rumsfeld's reputed disdain for NATO, the UN, and any force other than the American military rendered him particularly unsuitable to pushing Washington's case in Europe. Yet, to the dismay of many American and British officials alike, he persisted throughout the crisis in accepting interview requests and maintaining the highest possible profile. The most candid quote of the whole failed diplomatic effort came from Spain's normally reticent prime minister, Jose Maria Aznar, a crucial Bush ally, who broke precedent by complaining that in order to build a coalition, "we need a lot of Powell and not much of Rumsfeld."
Even Rumsfeld, however, cannot be blamed for the diplomatic disaster in Turkey, where parliament voted on March 1 to block the deployment of U.S. troops and thereby prevented them from opening a northern front against Saddam. Fault for that debacle lies with the whole Bush administration. Despite their professed admiration for Turkish democracy, American diplomats were just not prepared to deal with the inexperienced and rowdy Turkish legislature. Moreover, almost nothing was done to try and turn around the Turkish public, which staunchly opposed the war. Instead, the Turkish press ran frequent reports of bullying by and insults from U.S. officials, as well as their attempts to bluff Turkey with phony deadlines. At the beginning of the crisis, Wolfowitz boasted that Turkish support for the deployment of American troops was "assured." But when things began to get dicey, rather than insisting that Powell travel to Ankara to persuade key Turkish legislators one by one, both the Pentagon and the State Department relied on the Turkish military to assure a victory. Given that the measure ultimately lost by a mere handful of votes, it seems obvious that providing some personal care and attention would have made the difference. But the Bush administration failed to do this. The subsequent Turkish vote not only undercut U.S. military operations, but also emboldened smaller countries to stand up to U.S. pressure on the Security Council.
American diplomats have since lamented the fact that no serious public diplomacy strategy existed to persuade key foreign publics or at least reduce opposition. It is hard to overstate how important this failure was. Crucial votes were lost in democratic countries such as Chile and Mexico. No matter how close their personal ties to Bush were, Presidents Ricardo Lagos and Vicente Fox simply could not sell a matter of war and peace to their constituents by saying that they did not want to upset the White House or risk trade retaliation. Similarly, had public opinion not been so overwhelmingly antiwar in France and throughout Europe, it seems fair to assume that even Chirac's opposition would not have been so rigid.
The problem, in sum, was that the United States did not approach its prewar diplomacy with a coherent and comprehensive strategy. Although the use of decisive and overwhelming military force may have been his signature at the Pentagon, Powell did not convince the Bush administration to adopt a similar approach to diplomacy. Perhaps that was because Cheney and Rumsfeld would not support such a strategy. Or perhaps the administration as a whole just did not think securing international legitimacy for the war was particularly important. Whether the reason was incompetence or ideology, however, Washington's failure to maintain diplomatic consistency on its justification for war, to synchronize force and diplomacy, to plan for partial compliance by Iraq, to lay the groundwork for a second resolution, and to win over international opinion constituted a diplomatic defeat of the highest order for American foreign policy.
TRUE LIES
Many in the Bush administration apparently view the diplomatic failure as a minor setback and assume that the military victory is all that will be remembered. And to a certain extent, such officials are right. The United States did send a powerful message to dictators and supporters of terrorism, and the Iraqi people were liberated from tyranny. Stability in the region has improved now that its most pernicious government has been eliminated. If some form of representative government eventually takes charge in Baghdad, democratic values may finally start to spread through the Middle East, the one region of the world from which they have remained conspicuously absent until now.
Nonetheless, all of these worthy goals could and should have been achieved with international support. Americans should be worried that so many around the world hoped that they would fail in Iraq, that Saddam would put up greater resistance, killing more U.S. soldiers and dragging out the conflict. Some of the United States' moral authority has also been lost, along with its cherished reputation as a superpower reluctant to use military might.
The most concrete consequences of Washington's failure will be felt the next time a dangerous regime starts developing WMD. Stopping the proliferation of such weapons has become the United States' top national security priority. Winning that battle will require more than just American resolve and military power, however; it will require cooperation from countries around the world. Unfortunately, the diplomatic debacle over Iraq has harmed the international system that monitors, controls, and responds to wmd threats; the whole concept of coercive disarmament has been discredited. Even the Bush administration has now recognized that dealing with North Korea and Iran requires the UN system. But what will happen the next time coercive disarmament is attempted by the UN? Washington's recent attacks on the UN inspectors' efficacy will make it harder to rely on their judgments in the future.
Even more worrisome is how the failure to actually find WMD in Iraq is playing out. By basing the decision for war on American intelligence and threat assessments, rather than the collective will of the UN, the United States placed its credibility on the line. Unfortunately, to justify early action, Washington appears to have exaggerated the near-term threat. Ironically, most of the underlying information that led most intelligence agencies to conclude Iraq had and was hiding chemical and biological weapons originally came from UN inspectors. That information alone would have been sufficient to justify military action, although perhaps not as quickly as the Bush administration wanted. Thus U.S. officials decided to play up the alleged imminent threat. The most egregious example of this was Cheney's argument that Iraq had "reconstituted nuclear weapons." The United States is still paying the price for those false claims.
The administration should have focused attention on Iraqi noncompliance, not U.S. intelligence. No country doubted that Iraq was failing to cooperate with the UN inspectors. Had war been launched later -- after Blix had concluded and a majority of the Security Council had accepted that Iraq was never going to disarm fully -- the search for WMD would never have become the kind of international spectacle it has. A war with greater legitimacy would have kept the spotlight on Iraq, not the United States.
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