16th World Congress
Peace Through Health
Iraq Contradictions
Ramesh Thakur
Senior Vice Rector, United Nations University
(Assistant Secretary-General, United Nations)*
The [Iraq] war has been a disaster
It divided more than united, there were no reasons for it, time has shown that the arguments for it lacked credibility, and the occupation was poorly managed
You can't organise a war on the basis of lies. Wars such as that which has occurred in Iraq only allow hatred, violence and terror to proliferate.
Prime Minister-elect
Jose Luis Zapatero of Spain.
The above words from the newly elected leader of Spain are about as succinct and eloquent a summation of the dominant international sentiment the view of the much-maligned 'international community' as one is likely to get. The Iraq war roiled the world of international diplomacy as few other issues have since 1945. Its legality, legitimacy and impact on UN-U.S. relations will be debated for years to come. Those waging the war insisted that their actions were both legal and legitimate. Others conceded that it may have been illegal, but they were still prepared to support it because it was nevertheless legitimate, as with the Kosovo war in 1999. This therefore amounts to an unflattering judgment on the adequacy of existing international law. Yet a third group insisted that the war was both illegal and illegitimate, and hence their strong opposition to it.
In a matching vein, there were three views on the significance of the war for the relationship between the United Nations and the United States. President George W. Bush famously declared that by refusing to support the war, the UN had in effect rendered itself irrelevant. A second group countered that the vigour of the worldwide debate showed how central the United Nations still is to the great issues of war and peace, and the failure to obtain a UN resolution authorizing the war robbed it of legitimacy and legality. And the third group went even further, insisting that if the UN Security Council had been bribed and bullied into authorizing an unjustified war, then the UN would have been complicit in a war of aggression.
The reverberations and ramifications of the war, especially with respect to its lasting impact, continue. Washington had five great claims for the war on Iraq: the threat posed by proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD); the threat of international terrorism; the need to establish a beachhead of democratic freedoms and the rule of law in the Middle East; the need to bring Saddam Hussein to justice for the atrocities committed by his regime; and the duty to be the international community's enforcer. It is not clear that even now, the war protagonists appreciate how each goal has been badly undermined by the means chosen; nor the fact that their collective damage to the Empire Lite enterprise is greater than the sum of their separate parts.
WMD Proliferation
The question of the still elusive WMD whether the mistaken belief about the size, sophistication and imminence of Saddam's WMD arsenal was a genuine conviction based on faulty intelligence, or the result of a deliberately politicized process of intelligence analysis is not relevant to my argument. Independently of that consideration, there is profound skepticism about the country with the world's most powerful nuclear weapons using military force to prevent their acquisition by others. It is impossible to convince all others of the futility of nuclear weapons when the facts of continued possession, continual technological improvements and ongoing doctrinal refinements demonstrate their utility to the U.S.. Washington has also seriously downgraded a number of key arms control regimes seeking to check the role of WMD, thereby weakening the system of institutional international checks on the WMD ambitions of others and undermining the anti-WMD norm. By attacking Iraq in defiance of world opinion without UN authorization, Washington exempted itself from the existing normative restraints on the use of military force. Many prudent national security planners around the world will be more attracted than before the Iraq war to nuclear weapons for deterring possible attack on their countries in the suddenly harsher jungle of international relations, especially as the more clear-cut threat from North Korea was dealt with differently.
International Terrorism
Second, how is it possible to achieve victory in the war on international terrorism against American targets by inciting a still deeper hatred of U.S. foreign policy? Most informed observes predicted that the sight of American forces occupying Baghdad would spur more terrorism, not less, especially while the open Palestinian wound still festers on the collective Arab-Islamic body politic. Iraq was a distraction from the war on terror as Osama bin Laden effectively became Osama bin Forgotten. Iraq has become a hotbed of terrorism as a result of the war. "Our" tanks, bombs and missiles are full of the milk of human kindness and dispatched by angels of virtue. It is thus very puzzling why "they" detest and hate us so.
Nor was the spur to terrorism confined to Iraq or the Middle East. U.S. officials in Southeast Asia conceded that recruitment and fund-raizing for the terrorist organization Jemaah Islamiyah had become easier because of the widespread opposition in the region to the war on Iraq. On top of that, it has been difficult to shake off the conviction that "without the incubation of the mujahedeen resistance to the Soviet occupation in Afghanistan, aided and abetted in critical ways by the CIA and the Saudi and Pakistani intelligence services, these freelance terrorists would never have built up the confidence, the knowledge, the discipline and the expertise to embark on a worldwide jihad." The balance sheet does not look all that bad for Osama bi Laden.
Democracy
Third, the most problematic contradiction is in relation to the professed goal of establishing democracy in Iraq and using it as a beacon to promote political freedoms across the Arab world. How does one instil democracy in an inhospitable terrain by punishing friends and allies in the home continent of the founding values of Western civilization who dared to exercise their democratic right to dissent from a war whose justification still remains contentious, while rewarding dictators who lent ready support? Democracy might also be the one outcome that Americans cannot afford in Iraq. Given Iraq's demographic composition, genuinely free elections could bring a Shiite-dominated Islamist regime aligned to Iran.
Then there is the little matter of normative inconsistency, when the goal of democracy is Iraq is imposed by bombers, helicopter gunships and tanks but other regimes with equally questionable democratic credentials are not just tolerated, but in many cases remain solid U.S. allies. The global expansion of democracy is not a pillar of American foreign policy; the rhetoric of democracy is an expedient justification in support of other more traditional goals.
Liberal democracy rests on the rule of law. What answer to those who claim that aggression abroad was matched by repression at home, with serious cutbacks to many liberties that U.S. citizens, residents and visitors alike had come to take for granted for decades? The most perverse has been the charade of justice in Guantánamo Bay, which even a British law justice, in the F. A. Mann Lecture in London on 25 November 2003, called "a monstrous failure of justice." Lord Steyn noted that the purpose of holding prisoners at Guantánamo Bay was "to put them beyond the rule of law, beyond the protection of any courts, and at the mercy of victors... The military will act as interrogators, prosecutors, defence counsel, judges and when death sentences are imposed, as executioners." Trials would be held in secret, with none of the basic guarantees of a fair trial. The "legal black hole" at Guantánamo Bay, he concluded, was "a stain on United States justice." The task force of the American Bar Association, the country's largest lawyer association, criticized the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens without charges, without judicial review and without right to attorney: "It cannot be sufficient for a president to claim that the [government] can detain whomever it wants, whenever it wants, for as long as it wants, as long as the detention bears some relationship to a terrorist act once committed by somebody against the United States."
The implications of Guantánamo Bay are so revolutionary, so far-reaching and so frightening that they are worth underlining. In effect the United States is asserting the right to be able to "pick up foreign citizens anywhere in the world, spirit them off to Guantánamo and lock them up forever, with no court questioning its actions, and therefore without any legal limits." The U.S. military can "hold people indefinitely without trial in an undeclared and permanent war against unidentified foes." Presumably when Washington talks of exporting democracy, it does not have in mind exporting democracy out of America.
But Guantánamo is not the end of it. There is also the celebrated case of the Syrian-Canadian Maher Arar. which seems to offer proof of the practice of "rendition" for torture, sending prisoners to countries known for practicing torture as a means of extracting information even though such a practice is illegal under the Convention against Torture, which the U.S. has ratified. Not surprisingly, emboldened by the curtailment of civil liberties in the bastion of democracy, many other governments have appropriated the language of the war on terror to wage their own wars on domestic dissidents.
Nor is it possible to promote the rule of law and the role of international law in world affairs, to act as the world's policeman, by hollowing out some of the most important parts of international law that restrict the right to go to war except in self-defence or when authorized by the UN. In order to oust a regime based solely on might with few redeeming features to make it right, established institutions and conventions for ensuring that force is legitimately exercised were set aside by a power supremely confident of its might. And, having done so, Washington proceeded to apply tactics and strategies of demolition of homes of suspected terrorists, collective punishment of communities from which alleged terrorists are suspected to come, taking family members (including women) hostage in order to induce suspected terrorists to surrender, and stifling controls on movement of the civilian population.
If a war of choice against a country that posed no conceivable security threat to any other country is legal, then international law has no place any more in governing warfare. Law serves to mediate relations between the rich and the poor, the weak and the powerful, by acting as a constraint on capricious behaviour and setting limits on the arbitrary exercise of power. If the normative restraints of the legal code of behaviour are overthrown by the eagle-eyed predators of the international jungle, will not others, guided by the age old instinct of self-preservation, seek recourse to whatever weapons of deterrence they can acquire by hook or by crook? Former U.S. Secretary of State (19972001) Madeleine Albright writes that "The administration, openly allergic to treaties and arms control, has made no effort to promote restraint in developing arms as a normative ethic to which all nations have an interest in abiding."
Criminal Justice
The troubling question of normative inconsistency crops up again with particular cogency after Saddam Hussein's capture in relation to the occupying powers in Iraq establishing an ad hoc criminal tribunal to try him and his henchmen. For, against the backdrop of U.S. rejection of the International Criminal Court and active efforts to undermine it, the denial of basic justice to prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, and the history of supporting and arming repressive regimes in the Middle East and elsewhere, justice dispensed by such an occupying power will be "of dubious legality and questionable legitimacy." It is unlikely to soften perceptions that Washington acts on the conviction that might equals right.
UN Authority
Finally, it is difficult to see how one country can enforce UN resolutions by defying the authority of the world body, denigrating it as irrelevant, and belittling its role in reconstruction efforts after the war. Poll after poll continues to affirm that in the court of world opinion, the collective voice of the United Nations still carries substantial weight. Secretary-General Kofi Annan is the first to acknowledge that the changing nature of fundamental threats to our security makes it critically urgent to adapt UN structures and procedures to confront today's challenges, not run away from them. Even so, for any international enforcement action to be efficient, effective and enduring, it must be legitimate; for it to be legitimate, it must be in conformity with international law; for it to conform to international law, it must be consistent with the Charter of the United Nations.
Unlike the reflexive hostility of the Pentagon and the Bush administration to "nation-building," the United Nations has considerable experience and expertise in this area. The U.S. Army is simply not suited to a quasi-imperial vision. Built for high-intensity war-fighting, it has resisted investing and engaging in peace operations and, once abroad, it lacks both staying power and nation-building skills.
The ouster of Saddam flowed from strategic not ethical calculations of foreign policy. The United States is a Great Power, and a Great Power has strategic imperatives, not moral ones. To accuse the United States of double standards and hypocrisy over time arming and funding Saddam Hussein as a useful idiot against revolutionary Iran in the 1980s, all the while discounting the evidence and import of his use of chemical weapons and his record of atrocities, and then turning against him in the 1990s; or in different places even at the same time some of the current allies in the war to defend freedom under attack from its evil enemies make for very curious choices indeed is therefore to miss the point. The State Department, let alone the Pentagon, is not a branch of Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International. The United States is motivated to act internationally not because it cares about foreign people, but because it cares about its own interests. The United States is consistent in its foreign policy, remarkably so: but strategically consistent, not morally so.
Conclusion
The worst act of domestic criminal behaviour by a government is large-scale killings of its own people; the worst act of international criminal behaviour, to attack and invade another country. The history of the twentieth century is in part a story of a twin-track approach to tame, through a series of normative, legislative and institutional fetters, both impulses to armed criminality by states. Cumulatively and in combination, these attempted to translate an increasingly internationalized human conscience and a growing sense of an international community into a new normative architecture of world order. Saddam Hussein's record of brutality was a taunting reminder of the distance yet to be traversed before we reach the first goal of eradicating domestic state criminality; his ouster and capture by unilateral force of arms is a daunting setback to the effort to outlaw and criminalize war as an instrument of state policy in international affairs.
Member states, even the most powerful, should be careful not to trash the UN and diminish its authority, for the organization is often useful in picking up the pieces after others have shattered the fragile edifice of world order. Its capacity to mobilize political will in reluctant governments and rally the faithful to the internationalist dream whose death has been prematurely predicted can neither be matched nor substituted by anyone else.
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