The Progressive Response
Volume 6, Number 34
November 4, 2002
The Progressive Response (PR) is produced weekly by the Interhemispheric Resource Center (IRC, online at www.irc-online.org) as part of its Foreign Policy in Focus (FPIF) project. FPIF, a "Think Tank Without Walls," is an international network of analysts and activists dedicated to "making the U.S. a more responsible global leader and partner by advancing citizen movements and agendas." FPIF is joint project of the Interhemispheric Resource Center and the Institute for Policy Studies. We encourage responses to the opinions expressed in the PR and may print them in the "Letters and Comments" section. For more information on FPIF and joining our network, please consider visiting the FPIF website at www.fpif.org, or email <feedback@fpif.org> to share your thoughts with us.
Tom Barry, editor of Progressive Response, is a senior analyst with the Interhemispheric Resource Center (IRC) www.irc-online.org and codirector of Foreign Policy In Focus. He can be contacted at <tom@irc-online.org>.
Editor: Tom Barry (IRC)
Table of Contents
I. Updates and Out-Takes
FRONTIER JUSTICE: No. 11 | PNAC'S PRESENT DANGERS AS BLUEPRINT FOR BUSH DOCTRINE
By Tom Barry
SHOWDOWN AND COMPROMISE AT THE UN
By Ian Williams
U.S.-IRAQ: ON THE WAR PATH
By Stephen Zunes
OTHER IRAQ AND PRESENT DANGER ANALYSIS
II. Letters and Comments
UN RESOLUTIONS: APPLES AND ORANGES
I. Updates and Out-Takes
FRONTIER JUSTICE: No. 11 | PNAC'S PRESENT DANGERS AS BLUEPRINT FOR BUSH DOCTRINE
(Editor's Note: Frontier Justice is a weekly column written alternately by Tom Barry and John Gershman, foreign policy analysts at the Interhemispheric Resource Center, chronicling instances of U.S. unilateralism and its assault on the multilateralism framework for managing global affairs. It is part of the new Project Against the Present Danger. These columns are now indexed on the www.presentdanger.org site at: http://www.presentdanger.org/frontier/2002/index.html.)
By Tom Barry
This type of bellicose formulation of U.S. foreign policy could have easily come from any member of Bush's foreign policy team. One thinks first of the hawks like Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Cheney, or Richard Perle. But it could just as easily have been a statement by the president himself or by the moderate conservatives like Colin Powell or Richard Armitage when referring to U.S. plans to wage war on Iraq.
This "war for peace" doctrine, however, came from the U.S. president whom neoconservatives honor as America's model of an "internationalist" president: Teddy Roosevelt--the hero who led the famous charge up "San Juan Hill" in Cuba and championed the Spanish-American War of 1898, which made the U.S. an imperial power with territorial possessions around the world. Here was a man who was unapologetic about power and its uses. "All the great masterful races have been fighting races," boasted Roosevelt, "And no triumph of peace is quite so great as the triumphs of war."
Any attempt to understand the ideology and the type of frontier justice that distinguishes U.S. foreign policy today will fall short if it does not keep in mind the heroes of the ideologues and enforcers of the Bush foreign policy. Beginning in the 1970s, neoconservative groups, like the Committee on the Present Danger, started criticizing mainstream scholars of international relations for their purported misrepresentation of the history of U.S. internationalism. America's true internationalism is not the liberal variety advanced by Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, they have argued, but the conservative, interventionist internationalism of Teddy Roosevelt. Today, the neoconservatives include Ronald Reagan in their models of conservative internationalists. At the same time, the neoconservatives who have set the foreign policy agenda of this administration also rail against the proponents of "realism" in international relations. They contend that U.S. foreign policy needs to have a "moral clarity" (a pet phrase of the conservative camp), and shouldn't be based just on strictly defined national or economists interests, as the realists would have it.
The Bush foreign policy team has been champing at the bit to get on with the foreign policy agenda laid out in the 1990s by groups like the American Enterprise Institute, Hudson Institute, Center for Security Policy, and the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). These and other right-wing think-tanks and policy institutes believe that George W.'s father and Clinton squandered the opportunity to fashion a truly global U.S. hegemony or imperium in the 1990s. High on the list of priorities for the interventionist agenda of the conservative internationalists is overthrowing Saddam Hussein--a case of a U.S. foreign policy objective where moral clarity partners with U.S. national interest, namely controlling a major source of oil.
The White House's National Security Strategy of the United States, released September 2002, briefly outlines the new Bush foreign policy doctrine of global military domination and interventionism. But the full scope and ambition of the Bush foreign and military policy is more comprehensively laid out in a book called Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy produced by the Project for the New American Century in 2000. In this edited volume by PNAC founders Robert Kagan and William Kristol, one can find what amounts to a blueprint for the current objectives of U.S. global engagement. Nonstate terrorism is given short shrift in the book, which includes chapters written by such current top foreign policy team players as Richard Perle, Elliott Abrams, Paul Wolfowitz, and Peter Rodman.
It's a call for a doctrine of frontier justice in which the top gun--the U.S.--saddles up and hustles together a posse to pursue bandits and rogues. According to the conservative internationalists, like Paul Wolfowitz, we "must descend from the realm of general principles to the making of specific decisions." While laws, judges, and trials are what we "want for our domestic political process … foreign policy decisions cannot be subject to that kind of rule of law."
PNAC's Present Dangers apparently functions as a playbook for the Bush administration. In his chapter on the Middle East, Elliott Abrams lays out the "peace through strength" credo that has become the operating principle of this administration. "Our military strength and willingness to use it will remain a key factor in our ability to promote peace," wrote Abrams, who is the administration's National Security Council Senior Director for Democracy, Human Rights, and International Operations. Like the other PNAC principals, Abrams calls for a preemptive "toppling of Saddam Hussein." Strengthening our major ally in the region, Israel, should be the base of U.S. Middle East policy, and we should not permit the establishment of a Palestinian state that does not explicitly uphold U.S. policy in the region, according to Abrams.
Under a heading labeled "Regime Change" in the introductory chapter, Kristol and Kagan target Iraq, Iran, North Korea, and China as challengers that need to be confronted. With respect to Iraq and North Korea, the two PNAC founders conclude that U.S. "preeminence" in the 21st century cannot rest on "simply wish[ing] hostile regimes out of existence." They warn that the U.S. will have "to intervene abroad even when we cannot prove that a narrowly construed 'vital interest' of the United States is at stake."
This is precisely why the Bush administration is having such a difficult time explaining why it is on the war path against Iraq. The arguments made by the Pentagon, State Department, and White House about the Iraqi regime's support for international terrorism, its obstruction of UN inspections, or its repressive character don't go to the heart of their agenda--namely to effect "regime change" in all countries that constitute a challenge--real or potential--to the American "imperium," with their control of essential global resources and its global military domination.
The Bush administration contends, like Teddy Roosevelt, that U.S. war-making is a strike for peace. Writing during the last presidential campaign, Kagan and Kristol called for a new foreign policy based on the principles of superior military power and conservative internationalism. "Conservative internationalists," they said, "…are the true heirs to a tradition in American foreign policy that runs from Theodore Roosevelt through Ronald Reagan." Fortunately, most of the international community and growing numbers of Americans reject the revival of 19th century gunboat diplomacy as an appropriate manifestation of 21st century internationalism.
(Tom Barry <tom@irc-online.org> is a senior analyst at the Interhemispheric Resource Center (online at www.irc-online.org) and codirector of Foreign Policy In Focus.)
Also see:
Men Who Stole the Show
FPIF Special Report (October 2002)
By Tom Barry and Jim Lobe
http://www.fpif.org/papers/02men/index.html
Glossary of the Right-Wing Sectors in U.S. Foreign Policy
By Tom Barry
http://www.fpif.org/papers/02men/box2.html
Focus on the Right
http://www.irc-online.org/globaffairs.html
Project for New American Century
http://www.newamericancentury.org/
SHOWDOWN AND COMPROMISE AT THE UN
By Ian Williams
(Editor's Note: Excerpted from a new FPIF Global Affairs Commentary, posted in its entirety at: http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2002/0211casusbelli.html .)
Bismarck's dictum that people who want to appreciate treaties and sausages should not watch them being made applies to Security Council resolutions as well. The U.S. is set to win Security Council support for a resolution on Iraq and is already calling it victory.
In one sense, it is indeed an American triumph. The threat from Bush has secured Baghdad's climb down from its refusal to admit the inspectors or accept the validity of UN resolution 1284.The U.S. pressure has also brought over other Security Council members to an implicit acceptance that Iraq will face military force if it fails to comply with disarmament and inspection.
However, the American positions actually changed considerably in the face of French obduracy. But they did not want to advertise it; nor did anyone else in case it upset the hawks in Washington. The new resolution inching its way to examination early in November will take inspections seriously rather than using them as a flimsy excuse for war, and the ball will be very much in Saddam Hussein's court. The question is whether he will cooperate and disarm, or dissimulate and bring about his own downfall at the hands of the U.S. military.
Much of the negotiation was not actually among the "P5"--the permanent veto-holding members of the Security Council--but within what an Irish diplomat engagingly calls "the P1." The horse-trading between the realists and the axis of aggressiveness in Washington is what took up much of the past seven weeks. Colin Powell leveraged the resistance from France and even the pleas of close allies like Blair to shift the administration's position toward a more pragmatic one that deferred to the needs of coalition-building.
The initial American position was dictated by the hawks, whose nightmare was that Iraq would deprive them of a casus belli by accepting inspectors. However, Bush has at least for the time being opted to go with the inspectors--both the UNMOVIC and International Atomic Energy Administration (IAEA) teams--backed by a strong resolution. His and Cheney's meetings with team leaders Hans Blix and Muhamed El Baradei (from which Rumsfeld was notably absent, even if Wolfowitz was present) were in part a reassuring signal to the waverers on the Security Council. After the president's initial diplomatically disastrous fit of pique when Iraq first accepted inspections, the White House had apparently decide to back them.
At the expense of the hawks, there has also been some flexibility in the new drafting. Now, inspections are not set up to provoke Iraqi non-cooperation--unless of course Iraq does indeed have undeclared weapons programs that it will try to conceal. The U.S. can claim the right to unilateral decisions of military action, but as now arranged will not have to. The other members of the Security Council have almost all conceded that when the inspection teams go into Iraq they will be backed by the threat of force. The implication is that if they face any serious problems from Baghdad, then the Security Council will back military action. In discussions inside the Security Council this week, the Russians, Chinese, and French all admitted that this was Iraq's last chance.
The French may have a cynical motive--to ensure their companies access to the Iraqi oil fields--but their appeals to principle were so successful that they became a hostage to their own oratory, with council members like Ireland and Mexico vigorously backing the French stand. Although China and Russia are always unhappy at any suggestion of unilateral interference by other countries, they have also been happy to see Paris as the frontrunner on the issue.
Although the end result is indeed likely to be a successful American resolution, whose consequences may eventually include the regime change that has been the administration's public policy, we can draw some considerable comfort from the strong opposition to American unilateralism in the Security Council. The effect of the drawn-out resistance led by France has also worked on public opinion in the U.S. itself. According to polls, the U.S. public is much less eager for unilateral action than intervention by a coalition--even though a frighteningly high proportion of them (66% according to Pew Research poll in October) have bought the presidential line that Iraq was involved in the September 11 attacks. Presumably they will also be much less eager if Iraq readily cooperates with the UN inspectors. But all this remains to be seen.
(Ian Williams <uswarreport@igc.org> writes for Foreign Policy In Focus (online at www.fpif.org) and is the author of The UN for Beginners.)
U.S.-IRAQ: ON THE WAR PATH
By Stephen Zunes
(Editor's Note: Excerpted from new FPIF policy brief, posted in its entirety at: http://www.fpif.org/briefs/vol7/v7n12iraq.html .)
The Bush administration must drop its illegal doctrines of "preemptive strike" and "regime change," support the return of UN weapons inspectors, and work to build genuine multilateral coalitions and decisionmaking. The most effective means of preventing any potential deployment or use of WMDs is to support unfettered access for UNMOVIC inspectors in Iraq, which would be impossible during a military attack.
Washington must pledge to enforce other outstanding UN Security Council resolutions and not simply single out Iraq. As long as the United States allows allied regimes to flout UN Security Council resolutions, any sanctimonious insistence for strict compliance by the Iraqi government will simply be dismissed as hypocritical and mean-spirited, whatever the merit of the actual charges.
In a similar vein, the United States must support a comprehensive arms control plan for the region, including the establishment of a zone in the Middle East where all weapons of mass destruction are banned. Such an agreement would halt the U.S. practice of transporting nuclear weapons into the region on its planes and ships and would force Israel to dismantle its sizable nuclear arsenal. This more holistic approach to nonproliferation might include, for example, a five-year program affecting not just Iraqi missiles but phasing out Syrian, Israeli, and other countries' missiles as well.
As with its highly selective insistence on the enforcement of UN Security Council resolutions, the double standards in U.S. policy render even the most legitimate concerns about Iraqi weapons development virtually impossible to successfully pursue. If Iraq is truly a threat to regional security, there must be a comprehensive regional security regime worked out between the eight littoral states of the Persian Gulf. The U.S. should support such efforts and not allow its quest for arms sales and oil resources to unnecessarily exacerbate regional tensions. In addition, the United States should withdraw its ground forces from the Persian Gulf, since the U.S. military presence--aimed largely at Iraq--has not contributed to the security of the region and has led to an anti-American backlash, most dramatically in the form of the Al Qaeda terrorist network.
Washington should continue to support a strict UN arms embargo on Iraq and closely monitor potential dual-use technologies. However, the U.S. should join the growing number of countries in the Middle East and around the world calling for a lifting of the economic sanctions that have brought so much suffering to Iraqi civilians. The Bush administration should promise to no longer block the lifting of economic sanctions once the UN secretary-general recognizes that Baghdad is in effective compliance with Security Council resolutions. The United States, in consultation with other members of the Security Council, needs to clarify the positive responses that Iraq can expect in return for specific improvements in its behavior.
International guarantees protecting the oppressed Kurds of northern Iraq are necessary. However, this should not be taken as an excuse for ongoing punitive air strikes, which perpetuate the sad history of using Kurds as pawns in international rivalries. Comprehensive initiatives for a just settlement of the Kurdish question--including the oppressed Kurdish minorities in Turkey and other countries--should be pursued by the international community.
Finally, there needs to be a greater understanding by U.S. policymakers of Iraqi politics and society, which Washington not only lacks but appears to have done little to improve upon. Most successful changes of regime in recent years have come from internal, nonviolent, popular movements.
Although there is nothing inherently wrong with the United States or other countries supporting democratic opposition movements against autocratic regimes, the U.S. has so thoroughly destroyed its credibility that little good can result from actively supporting an Iraqi opposition movement, particularly given its weakness and internal divisions. In particular, support for any kind of internal military resistance is not only futile but would give the Iraqi regime an excuse to crack down even harder against the country's already-oppressed people. The lifting of economic sanctions, a cessation of the bombing, and an end to the threat of an invasion, offers the best hope of some kind of organized opposition emerging. However, to be successful, it must be seen as a genuinely indigenous force, not the creation of yet another ill-fated intervention by Western powers.
(Stephen Zunes <zunes@usfca.edu> serves as Middle East editor for the Foreign Policy in Focus. He is an associate professor of politics and chair of the Peace & Justice Studies Program at the University of San Francisco as well as the author of Tinderbox: U.S. Middle East Policy and the Roots of Terrorism (Common Courage Press, 2002).)
OTHER IRAQ AND PRESENT DANGER ANALYSIS
The Men Who Stole the Show
online at http://www.fpif.org/papers/02men/index.html
By Tom Barry and Jim Lobe (FPIF adviser) (October 2002)
Organizations such as the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), the Center for Security Policy (CSP), and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) have supplied the administration with a steady stream of policy advice and also with the men--and they are virtually all men--to steer the ship of state on its radical new course.
The Cuban Missile Crisis versus the Crisis with Iraq
online at http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2002/0210cmc.html
By Susan B. Martin (October 22, 2002)
Mr. Bush would have us believe that the lessons of the Cuban Missile Crisis support a preemptive war against Iraq. Mr. Bush is wrong, and his misreading of the Cuban Missile Crisis illustrates what is wrong with the current administration's policy toward Iraq.
Give Deterrence A Chance
online at http://www.presentdanger.org/commentary/2002/0210iraqdeter.html
By Susan B. Martin (October 24, 2002)
The White House would have us believe that an Iraq armed with chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons is a direct threat to the security of the United States, and that the only way to deal with that threat is to go to war.
II. Letters and Comments
Re: Looking & Acting American in Texas
This letter does the service of expressing in plain language an opinion that is probably prevalent in the U.S., but has little resonance elsewhere.
History tells that wars are not always won by the biggest battalions. The extreme example is Gandhi (the "naked fakir" in Churchill's contemptuous language) who won independence for his country against the might of the British Raj without taking arms. How did he do it? Mainly by his grasp of how British democracy worked, and the mindset of British public opinion.
The only source of strength and funding for Al Qaeda is a mindset of hatred. The further this mindset spreads, the greater the reach of the organization. How to exploit this known fact in the war on terrorism?
Were the U.S. to broker a genuine peace deal between Israel and Palestine, securing a lasting, independent Palestinian state within the pre-1967 borders, this would take wind from the sails of Al Qaeda by sabotaging the mindset of hatred.
What, on the other hand, would be the biggest prize the U.S. could present to Al Qaeda, winning it millions of candidates for suicide attacks? Why, pre-emptive attack on Iraq, with thousands of civilian casualties!
- Barbara Strauss <bstraus@club-internet.fr>
UN RESOLUTIONS: APPLES AND ORANGES
Re: United Nations Security Council Resolutions Currently Being Violated by Countries Other than Iraq
The editor's lead-in states: "In its effort to justify its planned invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration has emphasized the importance of enforcing UN Security Council resolutions. However, in addition to the dozen or so resolutions currently being violated by Iraq, a conservative estimate reveals that there are an additional 91 Security Council resolutions about countries other than Iraq that are also currently being violated."
This aim at comparison fails, simply because the resolutions against Iraq are of a different grade and character. There are fundamental differences between the different kinds of resolutions in the UN. UN Security Council resolutions are given different weight by the UN Charter (Compare Chapter VI and Chapter VII resolutions at http://www.un.org/aboutun/charter/index.html). Chapter VI deals with "Pacific Resolution of Disputes" and are negotiated or mediated through the UN. Chapter VII resolutions are the most severe of the UN Security Council. This grade of resolution enables the UN to "...take such action by air, sea, or land forces as may be necessary to maintain or restore international peace and security" (Article 42, Chapter VII). Article 41 details the use of sanctions that may be used by members of the UN.
Zunes' article makes no mention that the UN authorized the use of force against Iraq under Chapter VII, nor does it mention the use of UN approved sanctions against Iraq. In fact, of all the Resolutions listed by Zunes, only those concerning Sudan (1054, 1070) made it to the sanctions level. Iraq has 22. Surprisingly, the sanctions against Sudan in 1070 were not imposed; further, Resolution 1372 lifted the sanctions of 1054 (http://www.un.org/News/ossg/sudan.htm). I say, "surprisingly" because the title of Zunes article is "…Resolutions Currently Being Violated."
Only Iraq has had Article 42 measures placed against it. The UN authorized the use of all necessary means to force Iraq to comply with Security Council Resolutions. No other country on Zunes' list has that distinction. To compare the resolutions against Iraq with the resolutions mentioned in the FPIF commentary "United Nations Security Council Resolutions Currently Being Violated by Countries Other than Iraq" is non sequitur. No other country on the list has Chapter VII resolutions against it.
- Robert Weiss
While the enforcement mechanisms allowable or implemented can indeed vary considerably depending on whether they are under Article VI or Article VII, the offending government is still required to abide by these resolutions. It is true that resolutions under Article VI cannot be enforced militarily and most of the resolutions cited in my article are indeed under Article VI. This is not a reflection of the seriousness of the violations, however. For example, invading, occupying, and colonizing a neighboring country (as has been done by Morocco, Indonesia, Israel, and Turkey in recent decades) is a clear violation of the UN Charter, which forbids any nation from expanding its territory by military force.
By contrast, singling out a country (Iraq) for unilateral disarmament is an unprecedented infringement on national sovereignty, albeit arguably justifiable given the nature of the regime and its conduct in recent history. When Iraq invaded and occupied a neighboring country, the UN authorized force under Article VII, but not in the aforementioned cases. Similarly, calls for Iraq to allow UN inspectors to oversee the disarmament of its weapons of mass destruction under UNSC resolution 687 are under Article VII, but calls for Israel to place its nuclear facilities under the safeguard of the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency under UNSC resolution 487 are under Article VI.
Why? Because the vast majority of the governments that are in violation of the 91 UNSC resolutions cited in my article are U.S. allies, and the United States would have vetoed most of these resolutions had they been placed under Article VII.
The distinction between Chapter VI and Chapter VII is irrelevant to my argument, however, since--even if these 91 other resolutions were under Chapter VII--I don't believe that any of those countries in violation of these resolutions should be invaded since, in these cases as well as with Iraq, all nonmilitary means of enforcement have not yet been exhausted.
Interestingly, some of the resolutions currently being violated by Iraq that President George W. Bush and Congress has cited as grounds for going to war--such as those dealing with post-war Iraqi relations with Kuwait--are actually under Article VI.
That there are double-standards involving UN resolutions is certainly not news and is certainly not unique to the U.S. government. However, the self-righteous assertion by the Bush administration and Congress that only governments the United States does not like are required to abide by such resolutions under threat of invasion does little to advance the cause of international peace and security upon which the United Nations was founded.
- Stephen Zunes <zunes@usfca.edu>
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