Regards, Ivan
Posted on 3/22/2003, 11:23:08 PM by MadIvan
George Bush is accused of bringing about the showdown in Iraq, but when the twists and turns of history since the last Gulf war are examined, the finger points in an entirely different direction
Whose war is this? If it succeeds, it will have many authors, as victories always do. If it fails, its architects will be restricted to the handful of leaders who are required to take responsibility regardless of merit or cause.
So perhaps now is the best moment to propose the true orchestrators of this, the first full-scale invasion of the 21st century — while wet fingers are still thrust nervously upwards in the air. For all the easy judgments about this being “Bush’s war”, the real picture is more complicated.
History is rarely so free of irony that the actual initiator of hostilities is the real force behind them. Others lie behind him and others still behind them. And this war, perhaps more than many others, is laden with irony.
It is, first and foremost, the United Nations’ war. Without the UN it would never have happened. Indeed, without the UN it wouldn’t have even been necessary. Saddam Hussein was reeling after a coalition invasion in 1991 to repel his aggression against Kuwait.
Both the Kurds in the north of Iraq and the Shi’ite in the south, emboldened by the war in Kuwait and encouraged by Washington, had launched an uprising against the same tyrant we are still battling today. With American air cover they could have succeeded. But the Americans, in the greatest military miscalculation of the past few decades, hung back.
The then president, George H W Bush, insisted that his war aims did not include the removal of Saddam but were limited to the liberation of a small oil company known as Kuwait.
Why, after sending half a million troops halfway around the globe, did Bush suddenly turn modest? Because the UN was the rubric under which he fought the war; the terms of his enormous coalition were dictated by the UN; and those terms were strictly limited to the reversal of Iraq’s invasion and nothing more.
In one of the loveliest paradoxes of this battle, the UN therefore laid the groundwork for its subsequent self-destruction 12 years later. Without the UN’s restrictions on American force 12 years ago, Saddam would not be around today.
Any non-UN, American-led coalition with any sense of military opportunity would have finished off the old tyrant more than a decade ago. The year 1991 was therefore, in one sense, the UN’s post-cold war high point. Too bad that it guaranteed its future nadir.
In the second place, this is Bill Clinton’s war. Next to Saddam, Clinton was the biggest and most surprising beneficiary of the 1991 defeat-from-victory.
George H W Bush never acquired the full-bore victory that Saddam’s fall would have guaranteed; as the American economy worsened, he was blamed for excessive concern with foreign affairs. Clinton popped up as a natural foil, dedicated to the economy before foreign policy, a passionate but nervous multilateralist, a believer in soft rather than hard power, a man the Europhiles could suddenly warm to, if only because he could be relied upon to do as little in foreign policy as Europe’s elites were comfortable with. But Saddam, menacingly, endured. And Clinton, like many domestically oriented Democrats, couldn’t afford the appearance of military weakness.
So we had the sanctions regime and the inspections regime. We had abrupt clashes and long, somewhat successful police work under UN inspections, but no real breakthrough with regard to Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction.
Worse, precisely because Saddam stayed in power, American troops had to stay in the region in large numbers to maintain some sort of deterrence. Where did they stay? Saudi Arabia. Who noticed this? One religious fanatic, Osama Bin Laden. What was the result? The forces of Islamist fundamentalism shifted their focus from the corrupt regimes in their own region to the superpower thousands of miles away.
If you want a direct, irrefutable link between Saddam and 9/11, look no further than the consequences of the first Gulf war. If there had been no UN-mandated half-victory, Bin Laden would never have had his direct provocation. And, in one of those perfect circles of historical irony, Bin Laden’s revenge has led just as directly to Saddam’s final comeuppance.
That twist, however, didn’t come as a consequence of September 11, 2001. It came as a result of the final Iraqi-UN impasse in 1998, when the inspections regime collapsed in the face of Saddam’s deception and intransigence.
In response, Clinton formally shifted US policy from containment to regime change — which is why, at some level, this is also Clinton’s war.
The subsequent US and UK bombing helped to reduce the immediate threat from Saddam, but deferred the day of reckoning as the Americans and British cast about for ways to be rid of Saddam short of full-scale invasion.
The Clinton administration also created the clear precedent for the war we are witnessing today: Kosovo. The Kosovo campaign was the first and last test of a bizarre new world coalition, the coalition that would collapse in the first two months of 2003.
A military hyper-power agreed to fight a war under terms in part dictated by European allies whose military capacity was negligible. Unequals had to pretend to be partners. The goal was not just to prevent genocide in Europe but also to save an alliance strained by sheer military imbalance to the point of absurdity.
The result was the American and European realisation that this imbalance was bound to strain the alliance almost to breaking point. General Wesley Clark, the commander of Nato forces in Kosovo, ruefully recalled later that the need to maintain a consensus between Europeans and Americans had hampered the ability to send a direct message to Slobodan Milosevic, prolonged the war and protected the enemy.
In that case, America’s own security interests were irrelevant. But it was a dark omen for future conflicts when real interests might collide.
In Kosovo, the UN’s failure to get consensus — Russia threatened to veto the military operation in the security council — showed that universal agreement could not be achieved even in the face of European genocide.
Even within Nato, Europe’s obsession with means collided brusquely with America’s attempt to achieve clear military ends. The Americans pushed for the escalation to more sensitive targets, while the allies expressed reservations. At a meeting of military officials a few months after the war, one Nato minister said simply: “We never want to do this again.”
“Nobody laughed,” Clark recalls. It was a prophetic moment, the essential precedent for the breach that France and Germany turned into a chasm in the winter of 2002 and 2003.
And yes, this is also the neo- conservatives’ war. By this I don’t mean the alleged cabal of Likudniks infiltrating American foreign policy. I mean simply that this war represents the winning of a long argument among Washington’s policy elites about the future of American interests in the Middle East. I witnessed much of this debate first-hand, editing the neo-conservative and neo-liberal Washington weekly, The New Republic, for five years in the early 1990s.
When George H W Bush and James Baker pulled back from the brink of victory in 1991, a wail went up among Washington’s neo-con intellectuals. When Bush followed the European script that the Arab-Israeli conflict was the real source of instability in the Middle East, that wail got even louder.
It morphed into disbelief as the Rabin and Barak governments vested so much effort in the Oslo peace process. When Rabin and Arafat shook hands on the White House lawn, a hundred neo-con eyebrows arched.
None of this will work, the neo-conservatives harrumphed. Their argument: our hesitation in Iraq emboldened Israel’s and the West’s enemies and made a real peace less, not more, available. Our abrupt retreat from Somalia under Clinton, our poor response to the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 and our recourse to weak sanctions against Saddam — all these moves simply galvanised those elements in the Arab world that didn’t want peace with Israel but desired Israel’s destruction and the West’s humiliation.
At the time I was sympathetic to the neo-conservative analysis but still sceptical. Like anyone else, I wanted the Oslo process to work. I too wanted to believe that Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah and Hamas were reasonable political entities, people you could negotiate with, not murderous, implacable fanatics. Even though Al-Qaeda’s attacks increased slowly in ambition and scale, I saw no reason to believe its followers were the menace that many neo-cons insisted.
Two things shifted the balance to the neo-conservatives. The first was Yasser Arafat’s refusal at Camp David and Taba to accept the sweeping deal that Barak offered for West Bank autonomy. Or, to be more accurate, his refusal to offer any alternative whatsoever except a return to the intifada, and this time with suicide bombing as his main negotiating tool.
The second event, of course, was September 11. Suddenly, everything those crazy old neo-cons had been saying had credibility. Maybe they were right after all and only force could deter the fanatics and bring about a Middle East peace.
When George W Bush looked around him in the ashes of the World Trade Center for an analysis of what had gone wrong and a strategy to put it right, the neo- conservatives seemed the only ones with a plan.
They weren’t a cabal. And they weren’t natural Bush allies. Men such as the Pentagon’s Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz, The Washington Post’s Charles Krauthammer and Bob Kagan, The New Republic’s Lawrence Kaplan or the Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol: all had been bitter foes of Bush’s father, brutal critics of his foreign policy.
The Washington Post and New Republic had endorsed Al Gore for president. The Weekly Standard had backed John McCain in the primaries. The reason why they rallied behind Bush in the wake of 9/11 was because he was the president. The reason why Bush reached out to these theorists was because history had proved them right.
So it’s not surprising that the first White House meetings after 9/11 brought up Iraq as a target for counterattack almost immediately. This was not because Saddam was directly implicated. It was because war had broken out.
In a war against Islamist terrorism, the neo-cons persuasively argued, you had to look at the bigger picture if you wanted victory rather than semi-success. Going after the mere perpetrators of one calamity was not enough. That was the hallmark of mere police work, not warfare. It was Clintonism and Clintonism had catastrophically failed.
What you had to do was survey the whole network of terror, its state sponsors and, in particular, the relationship between all this and weapons of mass destruction. You had to think deep and you had to think big. Saddam was by no means the only link in this chain, but he was a brittle link. And there was already an international legal case that legitimised direct action. If you wanted to remake the entire region, Iraq was an obvious place to start.
Of course, the Taliban came first. But there was never any question that Saddam would have to be dealt with next. And the precedents laid down by Clinton and the UN always made the universal, security council-backed route a deeply perilous and dubious one.
Dick Cheney never bought the case, but Colin Powell and Tony Blair insisted on trying and the president, much more pragmatic than his critics are prepared to concede, went for the UN route. Was he wrong to have had war in mind from the outset? After the experience of the 1990s, surely not.
In his view, war had already been brought to the United States. And this humble, instinctually modest president in foreign affairs demanded a comprehensive strategy to grapple with the gravest attack on American soil in history.
The neo-cons had a comprehensive strategy. Their rivals — the multilateral purists — had piecemeal initiatives and recent history against them. Critically, Bush also remembered his father’s experience. Again, Bush’s critics get it half-right and therefore completely wrong. Bush isn’t out to avenge his father. He’s out not to repeat his father’s mistakes.
This war will therefore not end with Saddam’s survival. Not this time. This is also Blair’s war. To watch his presence from the American side of the Atlantic is to be amazed by the way in which he has framed the terms of this conflict, its timing and its public meaning in America as well as Britain.
I know of no other recent precedent in which a British prime minister has had such an influence on American discourse and therefore on the course of world events. Blair commands respect on the American left and now something approaching shock and awe, to purloin a phrase, on the American right.
Because of Blair, the world’s sole hyper-power delayed its war for two months in a fruitless effort to paper over widening transatlantic cracks. Because of Blair, the realists in the Bush administration — Cheney and Rumsfeld — have seen their arguments complemented and sometimes superseded by the rhetoric of liberal internationalism.
Partly because of Blair, the Democrats, still controlled by the Blair-friendly Clinton mafia, have failed to resist this war as fiercely as its left wing would like. And because of Blair, George W Bush laid out the “road map” for peace between Israel and the Palestinians before, and not after, the war to depose Saddam.
Poodle? You have to be kidding. Blair’s leverage was all the more serious because it wasn’t wielded for transparent reasons of British world influence. It seemed to Americans to come from an obvious conviction about the threat of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, and from a genuine and perhaps unique understanding of what Americans went through on September 11.
Blair convinced Americans that his sympathy wasn’t just restricted to human sentiment in the wake of tragedy, but also included analysis and policy that could turn such a tragedy toward good. And his ability to articulate those reasons, in ways that Bush could not, made 70% American public support for this war a possibility.
And yes, this is also, in the last resort, George W Bush’s war. To read the accounts of his diplomacy in the European press, the caricature of his character that has become universal, the disparagement of his intellect and the contempt for his strategy, is to experience a certain amount of cognitive dissonance these past few months.
This simply isn’t the president I’ve observed for two years or so. In fact, it’s hard not to feel that the personal demonisation of this man is less an accurate portrayal of his role at this moment of history than a way for others to vent their feelings of impotence.
One thing I can relay from Washington: the closer you get to people who actually know him, the greater the respect you hear. In a cabinet of heavyweights, you’d expect in these tense circumstances a certain amount of grandstanding, of rivalry and of leaks to the press about who is really running the country.
Instead, you hear that Bush really is in charge, that he has earned the deepest respect of those with far more experience than he has.
It’s far too early to make judgments about this president’s place in history, but I suspect the future will hold him in far higher regard than the present. He enters this new phase of the war with majorities in both houses of Congress, with more public support than his father had in the first Gulf war and with a military more expert and relatively powerful than any in the annals of world conflict. From being barely elected a little more than two years ago, that’s some transformation — as impressive as Blair’s.
Nobody should doubt, either, this president’s resolve or his ambition. For him this war is not a few days old but already a year-and-a-half in duration. This campaign is just one part of an unfolding strategy to remake the world’s security.
This war may not be one that Bush created, devised or laid the groundwork for. But it is a war whose course he has shaped and whose successful resolution he is determined to achieve. I wouldn’t bet against him succeeding.
Regards, Ivan
God Bless our Troops!
We are as proud of Blair as we are of Bush, two fine Anglo-saxons!
Bump
This is a monument to his character, that he chose such men.
This is war. One chooses ones campaigns not solely on the basis of who was most guilty in the final sparking event that started the open warfare, not necessarily on the basis of which part of the enemy is the strongest or in the long term most dangerous. One also chooses the order of ones campaigns on the basis of what presents the finest opportunities for major progress toward total victory.
BTTT
Ivan..thank you. I've been beating pro-UN peaceniks with the fact that this war is ALL the UN's fault for not finishing him off in 91 for weeks now. Thanks for this. It's a print out and distribute article for me.!
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