“Since the end of the Cold War, American foreign
policy makers have declared their belief in the importance of multilateralism
but, at the same time, they have often demonstrated a desire to act
unilaterally.”
Critically discuss this statement with specific
reference to Bush II administration policy towards Iraq between January 2001
and the decision to intervene in March 2003.
Barry
Gilheany ©
It is often stated that the Presidency of George W.
Bush marked a significant departure in US foreign policy ideology and practice. Throughout the Cold War and in the decade
after it, it is held that America acted in concert with allies in the North
Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and with the backing of international
organisations such as the United Nations (UN).
In other words, US foreign policy was characterized by multilateralist
approaches. By contrast, the Bush II administration is commonly believed to
have acted, in accordance with almost divine belief in the exceptionalism of
the USA, in a unilateralist fashion.
This willingness to go-it-alone was nowhere more obvious than in its policy
towards Iraq where the administration was determined to oust the regime of
Saddam Hussein; launching an invasion of this country along with a “coalition
of the willing” in March 2003 to effect just such an outcome. I argue that although there is a considerable
element of truth in this account, there is rather more continuity between Cold
War and post-Cold War American foreign policy and complexity in the Bush II approach
that such an account allows for.
Specifically, American involvement in Iraq has to be seen in the context
of the attempts to establish a “stabiliser” for US interests in the Middle East
after the Iranian Revolution of 1979.
That said, I will examine the extent to which the Bush II administration
departed from rules based international
conduct in its Iraq policy and in the Global War on Terror it declared in the
aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.
The road to Iraq, Lloyd G. Garner asserts began in the
aftermath of the Vietnam War. He finds
echoes of contemporary neo-conservative ideology in the views of two personages
from that era, the then National Security Adviser, Walt Rostow and then
Secretary of State to Lyndon B. Johnson, Dean Rusk. Rostow, beholden to the
belief that liberal political thought needed military backbone to resist competing
ideologies, defended the American mission in Indochina as one to save the world
from false prophets, particularly Marxist tempters who had flooded into places like
South East Asia in the wake of failed colonial regimes (Gardner, 2008:2) Rostow
maintained to the end that the failure to deny sanctuary to the Viet Cong and
North Vietnamese forces was the reason for the eventual and traumatic American
defeat. Rusk differentiated between a “fraudulent” revolution in Vietnam
formented by totalitarian Chinese Communists and “the kind of revolution which
is congenial to our own experience and fits into the aspirations of ordinary
men and women right round the world” (Gardner, 2008: 13). It is not hard to read off from George W.
Bush’s equation of American foreign policy with God’s will in his State of the
Union address on 28th January 2003 on the eve of the Second Iraq War
this type of almost messianic idealism about America’s place in the world
(Gardner, 2008).
A different set of conclusions regarding Vietnam was
drawn by another National Security Adviser, Zgibnew Brzezinski who worked for
President Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s.
Like his predecessor Henry Kissinger, Brzezinski feared that a legacy of
Vietnam was an impression of American weakness and indecision and, like former
Vice-President Dick Cheney, looked to “reclaim” the supposedly “lost” power of
the President, a casualty of the Vietnam disaster. He developed the idea of the “arc of crises”
centred on the Persian Gulf with its rich oil resources and where the Cold War
with the Soviet Union could be decided.
President Nixon had pledged “no more Vietnams”; henceforth the US would
rely on regional stabilisers to see off threats to its assets in any part of
the globe. In the Persian Gulf, Iran had
acted as a surrogate power to protect US interests in the oil regions. This role ended with the second flight of the
Shah after the Shia Islamic Revolution of 1979.
In the 1980s the US developed a dual containment towards both Iran and
Iraq (admittedly tilting towards Iraq as its war with Iran raged) while casting
wary glances at events in Saudi Arabia which has historically acted as a US
stabiliser. The tacit policy of using
Saddam Hussein’s Iraq as a de facto stabiliser collapsed after his invasion of
Kuwait in August 1990 (Gardner, 2008: 2-3).
Brzezinski believed that the real threat to America was
the Kremlin’s ability to spread chaos in Africa, the Middle East and Central
Asia. He sought to paint a picture of
the USA and USSR as engaged in the end game of the “great game” of Asia played
out in the 19th century and which would finally be decided in
Afghanistan. He used the shifting
balance of power in Washington towards the Pentagon and the National Security
Adviser’s office to bolster the belief that America was in danger of falling
behind the Soviets militarily and on reliance on the militarization of foreign
policy to complete the American mission.
The consequences would be giving the Soviets “their Vietnam” through
initially backing Islamic revivalist forces opposed to the communist regime
that had come to power in Afghanistan in 1978 and then coordinating military
aid (via the CIA, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan) to the Mujahedeen who fought the
Soviets in that country after their intervention on Christmas Day 1979. The imprimatur of Brzezinski was clear in the
new Carter doctrine laid out in the State of the Union address in 1980. Sounding the death knell of détente, Carter
warned that any attempt by an outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf
would be repelled by the US by any means necessary, including military
force. More pertinently, he linked two
distinct challenges; the “subjugation” of the Afghan people by Soviet troops
and the holding captive of fifty American hostages in Iran as “threats to
peace” (Gardner, 2008: 55-60). Such
subsuming of disparate challenges into one overarching challenge to be faced
down prefigures George W. Bush’s grouping of Iraq, Iran and North Korea into
the “Axis of Evil” two decades later.
Notwithstanding the muscular idealism of Rusk and
Rostow; United States policy towards the Soviet Union in the Cold War era was
largely characterised by containment of the Soviets through regional alliances
such as NATO. The first Gulf War to
liberate Kuwait from Saddam Hussein’s invaders in 1991 was arguably the last
stand for Cold War realism (Gardner, 2008).
President George H. W. Bush assembled a multi-national alliance of
military forces under the command of the United Nations with the limited
objectives of ejecting Iraqi forces from Kuwait and safeguarding oil supplies
from America’s traditional stabiliser Saudi Arabia. This mission completed, President Bush I did
not proceed to Baghdad as he feared, presciently many would argue, the presence
of Western troops in an Arab country would antagonise the local population and
that the premature overthrow of the Ba’athist regime could lead to the
fracturing of Iraq along ethnic and tribal lines and would enable Iran to
become a regional power. He instead
hoped for a palace coup to remove Saddam and sought to enforce Iraqi compliance
with UN resolutions on disarmament with a regime of sanctions and
inspections. Critics would later argue
that the decision not to press on and remove Saddam created future problems
especially when it was discovered how close Iraq had come to developing a
nuclear weapons capability. They
contended that the elder Bush and later President Clinton failed to find a
policy for the aftermath of Gulf War I as they pursued outdated Cold War
policies dominated by a containment worldview (Gardner, 2008: 3).
Gulf War I had thus ended without a resolution of the
question of a safe landing place for American interests. A Pentagon Strategic Assessment document
written in 1999 spoke of the parallel to pre-World War II problems facing the
British, “where control over territory was seen as essential to ensuring
resource supplies.” Although Bush Senior
had not pursued Saddam for fear of the ensuing chaos, to an extent he laid a
route map for the “regime change” policy of his son’s administration by raising
the issue of the Iraqi dictator’s quest for nuclear weapons, his condemnation
of the regime (Gardner, 2008: 90-91) and the CIA’s creation of the Iraqi
National Congress (Gardner, 2008: 112)
The Clinton administration inched further towards “regime change”
through its 1998 Iraq Liberation Act (Gardner, 2008: 112)
Despite these continuities, it is true to state that
the Bush II administration’s foreign policy vision was that important U.S.
foreign policy goals could only be
realised through decisive U.S. leadership and, if necessary, unilateral
action. This theory was articulated by
Robert Kagan who wrote in 1998 that “to be effective, multilateralism must be
preceded by unilateralism. In the
toughest situations, the most effective multilateralist response comes when the
strongest power decides to act, with or without the others, and then asks its
partners whether they will join.”(Gordon & Shapiro, 2004).
This “if you build it, they will come” doctrine
expresses the belief that the United States is a unique country not just in
terms of the power it possesses, but also its moral authority for using that
power. And if allies are not comfortable
with American power and leadership, the thinking goes – that’s their problem,
not America’s. This view naturally leads
to negative views of the usefulness of multilateral forums and international
organisations such as the UN and NATO which are based on the opposite premise:
that no nation has a special dispensation to decide important international
issues without the consent of other states (Gordon & Shapiro, 2004: 50-52).
An almost inevitable conflict between
the US and its transatlantic allies would ensue in the run up to the Second
Iraq War in March 2003.
Even before the cataclysm of 9/11, the Bush II
administration had demonstrated its disdain for a variety of international
forums; it abandoned Bill Clinton’s efforts to secure Senate ratification for
the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) and withdrew his signature from the
treaty establishing the International Criminal Court; it refused to sign up to
a UN agreement to limit traffic in small arms, or to verification protocols to
the Biological Weapons Convention. Most
significantly, from Europe’s point of view, the US withdrew from the Kyoto
protocol on global warming. Bush did
seek the support of like-minded allies over North Korean nuclear proliferation
and sought to develop special relationships with countries in Europe like
Britain, Poland, Italy and Spain which he felt would be sympathetic to U.S.
policies. However these were measures of
multilateralist convenience and did not represent any deeper level of
commitment to international cooperation (Gordon & Shapiro, 2004: 52-55).
On Iraq, deep transatlantic differences had been
apparent since at least the mid-1990s.
But the turning point towards crisis came with the Al-Qaeda attacks on
America on 9/11. Prior to that day, the
Bush administration as a whole was not convinced that Iraq represented an
imminent threat to national security and as late as summer 2001 the policy
priority was still on improving the sanctions regime. But the vulnerability that America
experienced after 9/11 allied to its sense of military power shifted the terms
of the debate towards war on Iraq.
Henceforth policy hawks such as Deputy Secretary of Defence argued that
America must deny sanctuaries to terrorists and avert the possibility of
allowing “rogue states” like Iraq to develop WMD capability which terrorists could
avail of. The momentum towards a policy
of confronting Iraq gathered pace throughout the winter and spring of
2002. Having ousted the Taliban and
Al-Qaeda from Afghanistan, Bush opened a new front in the “war on terror” by
explicitly linking rogue states and terrorism in his “Axis of Evil” State of
the Union address in January 2002. The
President speech at West Point Academy outlining the doctrine of military
preemption against dictators with weapons of mass destruction made the
likelihood of war on Iraq almost inevitable (Gordon & Shapiro, 2004: 93-
96).
Debates then followed within the administration about
the wisdom of attacking Iraq at this time and on the need to secure a fresh UN
mandate for military action. But the
arguments of hawks like Vice-President Cheney that “the old doctrines of
security do not apply” increasingly held sway.
Opposition to the stance being adopted in Washington grew among the
citizens of Europe and especially among the governments of France and Germany. On the persuasion Prime Minister Tony Blair,
Bush did go to the UN on 12th September 2012 to call upon it to
ensure enforcement of Resolution 1441 on the disarmament of Iraq. Eight weeks of tortuous negotiations in New
York ensued as the US, backed mostly by Britain, sought a resolution seeking
Iraqi compliance the failure of which would lead to military action. This foundered on French, Chinese, Russian
and German opposition at the Security Council to a second resolution and, with
NATO rent asunder, the US and UK along with other members of the “coalition of
the willing” went to war with Iraq on 19th March 2003 (Gordon &
Shapiro, 2004: 146- 154).
‘The unilateralism’ of the Bush II administration’s
foreign policy has had an even more controversial aspect, the treatment of
detainees held in the course of both the Afghan and Iraq wars. The creation of the notorious Guantanamo Bay
prison complex and US designation of Taliban and Al-Qaeda prisoners as
“unlawful combatants” has no standing in international law as the Geneva
Conventions, signed by the US in 1949, S
Philippe Sands argues that the Bush doctrine of the
right to strike pre-emptively on the basis that existing rules governing
self-defence such as Article 51 of the UN Charter are not fit for purpose in
the post 9/11 world poses a threat to the international legal order without
properly addressing the threats posed by failed states and transnational terror
networks such as Al-Qaeda (Sands, 2005).
He shows that, furthermore, the Bush administration took a conscious
decision to use the ‘war on terror’ as another means to bend global rules
citing a statement by the US Deputy Assistant Attorney General, John Yoo in May
2002 on the treatment of Guantanamo detainees: ‘What the Administration is
trying to do is to create a new legal regime.’ (Sands, 2005:153-154). A new legal regime that paved the way for the
appalling practices revealed in shocking photographs and testimonies from Abu Ghraib
prison in 2004 as well as at the various extraordinary rendition points.
This essay has shown how, spurred into action by the
events of 9/11 but also by ideological critiques of Cold War methods of
containment of US enemies by bodies such as the Project for a New American
Century, the Bush II administration sought to unilaterally rewrite the rules of
American diplomacy and foreign policy for the 21st century. It did
draw upon though foreign policy nostrums from America’s recent past. Iraq was to be the crucible of this
neo-conservative adventure; it proved to be its epitaph.
Bibliography
Gardner, L.G. (2008). The Long Road to Baghdad. A
History of U.S. Foreign Policy from the 1970s to the Present. New York: The
New Press
Gordon, P.H. & Shapiro, J (2004). Allies at War. America, Europe and the
Crisis over Iraq New York: McGraw-Hill
Mann, M. (2003). Incoherent
Empire. London: Verso
Sands, P. (2005). Lawless
World. America and the Making and Breaking of Global Rules London: Penguin
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