Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions (2003) (39 page)

This is only one example, but it is indicative of a broader feeling that is already having consequences for the United States. The giant Prince Sultan airbase has been a key element in the U.S. structure for constant surveillance of the Persian Gulf. In recent months, however, Saudi leaders have let it be known that once a war with Iraq is over, they will ask President Bush to withdraw all American armed forces from the kingdom. Indeed, many Saudis seem to think the best part of a new American was with Iraq will not be so much the elimination of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, but the elimination of the American presence in Saudi Arabia. Thus, Osama bin Laden may yet see the dissolution of the Saudi-U.S. alliance he has long sought.

Like Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt are also troubled. In meetings with Jordanian leaders, I was impressed with the frustration expressed at what they took to be Washington’s misinterpretation of events in the region. Their views were shared and best expressed by Abdel Monem Said, the director of the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo. Over a breakfast, he explained that Americans tend to see the problems of Iraq, Iran, fundamentalism, terror, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as discrete and to be solved individually. To Arabs, he said, these are all related. In particular, he went on, the problem is not Iraq nearly so much as it is the Palestinian question. Indeed, hitting Iraq will only exacerbate the situation in the Middle East, he said. In particular, it is likely not to dampen but to stimulate fundamentalism and violence between Arabs and Israelis. What you in America don’t understand, he emphasized, is the deep sense of injustice virtually all Arabs feel. They ask: Why can Israel have atomic weapons and Arab countries cannot? Why can Israel ignore UN resolutions with impunity, but Saddam must be attacked immediately? Why can Israel get away even with sinking the American naval ship
Liberty
in the 1967 war and using Americans like Jonathan Pollard, who is now in prison, to spy on the United States itself, while Arab nationals residing in the United States are routinely rounded up for questioning about terrorist activities just because they are Arabs? Moreover, he said, Arabs don’t see Saddam as nearly as great a threat as terror is. By going after Iraq, he noted, America is taking the easy way out by attacking a capital it can bomb. For half a century, he continued, the U.S. tie with moderate Arabs worked to contain communist expansion to hold back the waves of the Iranian revolution, and to end the threat of Saddam in the Gulf War of 1991. Now, he said, Arabs see the major force for instability in the region to be the United States itself.

That view was echoed on a broader basis by Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir, who told the 116-member Non-Aligned Movement in February 2003 that the United States is no longer just fighting a war against terror. Rather, it is a war to dominate the world, he said. He emphasized American unconcern with the frustration in the Islamic world over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and condemned the blatant double standards that infuriate Muslims, while arguing that current U.S.-led efforts are creating injustice and oppression of people of other ethnic origins and colors. This was the same Mahathir who had been feted at the White House less than a year previously for his staunch support of the United States on fighting terror.

SOUTH ASIA

T
he legacy of Pakistan’s split from India in 1947 and the Cold War, combined with the advent of the War on Terror, have created a witches’ brew in South Asia that makes it perhaps the most dangerous place in the world today. The bitter parting of India and Pakistan left millions dead, along with the running sore of the partition of Kashmir. Over the past fifty years, India and Pakistan have fought three wars and been constantly engaged in competitive and immensely expensive weapons development despite their mutual poverty. The United States became entwined in all this as a result of the Cold War.

Although India has always been a democracy, and Pakistan more often than not a military dictatorship, India, with its socialist economic system and suspicion of America’s ties to its excolonial ruler, Britain, leaned toward the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The United States thus tended to lean toward Pakistan, which jumped with alacrity into U.S.-sponsored alliances of the 1950
s
like CENTO (the Central Treaty Organization) and SEATO (the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization). But the U.S. relationship with Pakistan was a hot and cold one. In the early days of the Cold War, it was hot as the U.S. looked for allies in Asia. Then, when China attacked India in 1962, there was a short period of India-U.S. warming as Washington provided some aid to India. But Pakistan soon became an ally of China, to which Nixon wished to make an opening in the late 1960
s
and early 1970
s
. The Pakistani leaders offered themselves as a channel to Beijing and so cemented a close tie to Washington. Indeed, it was so close that in the 1971 Indo-Pakistani War, the United States tilted toward authoritarian Pakistan and against democratic India. Thereafter, Washington seemed more or less to forget about the area until 1974, when India exploded its first nuclear device. Although it had trained Indian scientists and supplied critical nuclear material, the United States cut off supply of nuclear fuel to India after the explosion despite the fact that India promised not to weaponize its device. This only pushed India more tightly into the embrace of the Soviets, who gladly became India’s supplier of heavy water.

Meanwhile, Pakistan had undertaken its own nuclear development program after its 1971 war with India. While Canada and Germany supplied critical equipment, the United States halted economic and military aid as an expression of opposition to what was not obviously a nuclear weapons program. By 1981, however, Pakistan had again become important to Washington as a result of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. To train, equip, and supply the Mujahedin, the United States needed a rear area, and Pakistan was perfect, being an Islamic country that harbored many of the same tribes that inhabited Afghanistan and spoke some of the same languages. The Reagan administration thus lifted the sanctions, despite arresting a smuggler attempting to ship two tons of zirconium to Pakistan, and renewed generous military and financial aid in return for help with the Mujahedin. In 1983, China reportedly supplied a bomb design to Pakistan; in response, Congress passed an amendment requiring economic sanctions unless the White House certified that Pakistan had not embarked on a nuclear weapons program. The White House so certified for the next five years, but finally imposed sanctions in 1990 when Pakistan, fearing war with India again, made cores for several nuclear weapons. The program continued, however, concluding in 1998 when both India and Pakistan conducted a series of nuclear test explosions. Again, Washington expressed its outrage.

In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and as a large number of Indian entrepreneurs came to strike it rich in Silicon Valley and returned to create new companies at home, U.S.-Indian relations began to warm. They got even warmer when the new Bush administration declared China a ‘strategic competitor’ in 2001 and initiated greater military cooperation with India as a way of signaling to China that it was surrounded. Meanwhile, under the tutelage of Pakistan, the Taliban had taken control of Afghanistan, which the United States had abandoned and forgotten after the Soviet army exit in 1989. As the Taliban put women under the veil and out of jobs, schools, and even hospitals, and provided facilities and support for Osama bin Laden while imposing a truly medieval regime, the United States remained mute – until, that is, September 11.

Suddenly, we needed Pakistan again. Economic and military aid began to flow again, as President Musharraf pledged that in the war against terror he was ‘with’ the United States. Actually, in this pledge, Musharraf proved himself a brave man. His own military and secret services were deeply penetrated by Islamic radicals and Taliban supporters, while public opinion in the country, particularly in the provinces bordering Afghanistan, tended to be pro Osama. Given that Musharrafs is another military dictatorship, the possibility of assassination or a coup d’etat was, and is, ever present. But if Musharraf was brave, he was also disingenuous. When Al Qaeda supporters in Pakistan seized
Wall Street Journal
report Danny Pearl and murdered him, Pakistan’s internal security services were aware of and very possibly involved in the killing. Musharraf almost certainly knew this when he visited Washington in February 2002, yet he told the American public he believed Danny to be still alive. Maybe he had to in order to stay alive himself. In any case, the situation today is that while Musharraf remains president with U.S. backing, he does not control the western provinces or the so-called tribal areas of his own country. Nor does he seem to control some of his internal services that continue to support terrorist activity in Kashmir. This activity could easily lead to war with India, but the United States is telling the Indians to cool it because Washington needs Musharraf to back its policy in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, however, U.S. policy in Iraq and in Israel-Palestine is radicalizing Pakistan to such an extent that, as a leading Pakistani publisher told me, it is very possible that a Taliban-like group could kill off Musharraf and take over Pakistan with its nukes and ballistic missiles. If you think that sounds dangerous, it is.

NEW WORLD ORDER

T
he shape of the new world order is still somewhat amorphous, but increasingly uncomfortable. It is not exactly the United States against the world, as my Malaysian friend forecast. But tension between America and its old friends in South Korea, Europe, Japan, Southeast Asia, and Latin America are rising to dangerous levels. Relations with old opponents like Russia, India, and China have actually improved, but remain unpredictable. Indeed, the whole world order has become unpredictable and unstable. Is that, we need to ask ourselves, what we really want?

10

City on a Hill

‘
No need of moon or stars by night or sun to shine by day. It was the new Jerusalem that would not pass away
.’

—The Holy City (Weatherly and Adams)

A
s I begin this last chapter, it seems very likely that U.S. troops, along jtl-with some British forces and perhaps a token representation of armed units from other members of the ‘coalition of the willing,’ will be occupying Iraq when this book appears. While that is probably better, at this point, than the alternative of allowing Sadam to defy and mock the UN Security Council while continuing to brutalize ordinary Iraqis, it seems to me that by trying to do the right thing, but in the worst possible way, we gave ourselves only bad options and created a lose-lose situation. For whether we go in soon, or, by reason of some last-minute change of Saddam’s heart, delay, or don’t go in at all, enormous damage has already been done. And even if the occupation goes by the book, and Iraq emerges as a model democracy in five years – a very long-odds scenario – the damage will have lasting consequences. This is particularly true if you look at Iraq and North Korea as part of a whole, rather than as discrete issues.

For one thing, by playing down the significance of North Korea’s threats and withdrawal from the Non-Proliferation Treaty while moving heaven and earth to go to war with a so far non-nuclear Iraq, Washington sent a loud message that if you think you might be on America’s bad side, you’d better go nuclear, quick. More fundamentally, by misunderstanding our own national interests and the basis of our power, we have already undermined it. The European Union, for example, is more than just a big market. It is the instrument that has laid to rest the ancient enmities and tribal warfare of Europe; that has created a generator and spreader of wealth able to be an equal partner with the United States; and that acts as a guarantor for the spread of democracy, peace, and stability in all of Europe, and now even in parts of Asia. This huge asset that the United States has historically promoted as being greatly in America’s interest has been severely damaged internally by the divisions arising from the battle over how to handle Iraq, divisions that were exacerbated by U.S. policies. Beyond this, the relationship of the EU and most of the key European countries to the United States has been harmed. This is true even in those countries like Britain, where the leadership has backed America because the public-at-large had been overwhelmingly against U.S. policies. And don’t be fooled by the ‘Old Europe-New Europe’ rhetoric. New Europe is not going to send any troops or help foot any bills; and by dint of going along with Washington and estranging itself from Old Europe, it has probably damaged its own development prospects.

Take NATO as another example. Americans are wont to see NATO and the maintenance of U.S. troops in Europe as a kind of favor we do for the Europeans. In fact, however, with the demise of the Soviet Union, there is no military threat to Europe. On the other hand, the United States cannot project power into the Middle East or Africa without use of NATO bases and cooperation. The truth is that we need NATO perhaps more than the Europeans. Yet, already there is talk in Europe of possible termination or restriction of U.S. use of bases and air space. It is already clear that Saudi Arabia will be asking us to evacuate bases there in the near future, and it seems possible South Korea will request the same, perhaps followed by Japan. The great irony here is that American unilateralism appears to be eroding the very basis of the hegemony its apostles are trying to enlarge.

THE DREAM THAT MIGHT HAVE COME TRUE

I
t didn’t, and doesn’t, have to be that way. Another scenario was, and is, possible. It is not widely recognized that at the end of the Gulf War in 1991, neither the United States nor the UN put serious conditions on a cease fire. Indeed, when the Iraq army was fully routed, the coalition simply stopped fighting, and called for the Iraqi commanders to arrange a cease-fire. Operating with few instructions, commanding General Norman Schwarzkopf met on March 3, 1991 with Iraqi generals to arrange the terms of the cease-fire. No demands were made by the coalition for Saddam or any of his representatives to sign any document of surrender or of conditions calling for Iraqi disarmament, destruction of weapons of mass destruction, or protection of the Shia and Kurdish groups in Iraq that had been encouraged by the coalition to rise up against the Saddam regime. In effect, Saddam got a pass, and although Schwarzkopf did require that Iraq not fly fixed-wing aircraft near U.S. troops, no provisions were made to restrict helicopters. Thus, when the Shias and Kurds revolted, as urged by the coalition, they were butchered by Saddam’s helicopters. Washington later blamed this on the need to respond to Saudi fears of the Shias, but top U.S. and Saudi officials, who were on the spot at the time, have told me that, in fact, the Saudis wanted to help the Shias. In any case, the United States eventually established the southern no-fly zone, but too late to rescue the Shias. Later, in April, the UN issued resolution 687 directing Saddam to destroy all weapons of mass destruction. Although Iraq’s foreign minister responded with a letter accepting the directive, the moment for a decisive change had passed. It was now a cat-and-mouse game.

Suppose the United States and its allies (and they really were allies then) had imposed disarmament conditions on Iraq at the time of the cease-fire, requiring Saddam to sign a formal document with real conditions and enforcement mechanisms. We could have done what we are talking about doing now, with the full weight of world opinion backing us. Top U.S. experts who were in the area at the time have told me that such a requirement would definitely have meant the fall of Saddam. Instead, we allowed him to turn military disaster into political victory. We had most of the same leaders then that we have now: Cheney, Powell, Wolfowitz, Feith, and Haass were all there. Today, they argue that Congress and the UN only mandated them to eject Iraq from Kuwait, and that any advance to Baghdad would have torn the coalition asunder. While that may be true as far as it goes, it evades the point that there was no necessity to go to Baghdad, only a necessity to impose the conditions of the victor. You may remember that we feted these leaders, gave them ticker tape parades in Manhattan, and gave them accolades before Congress for their apparent victory over a third-world army. We should have been giving them a Bronx cheer, because they blew it, badly.

They blew it by not getting the weapons of mass destruction when they could have done so. They blew it again when they allowed Saddam to use his helicopters to gun down the rebel uprisings they had called for in the Kurdish and Shia areas of Iraq. They blew it out of a lack of postwar planning and out of ignorance of the true state of Iraq and, in fairness out of deference to our coalition allies who feared a vacuum in the region. They knew then that Saddam had used gas on his own people and that he was a brutal dictator. Certainly they hoped – and maybe even believed – that his officers would carry out a coup d’etat, but they were ready to accept his survival because they thought he was defeated and would not be a threat again.

But put that all aside. It seemed right to many at the time. Instead, suppose the United States had ratified the final Kyoto agreement, which is very close to the original American proposals. Suppose the United States had signed onto the International Criminal Court or at least refrained from campaigning against it. Suppose we had signed onto the landmine treaty and the small arms treaty, not gutted the chemical weapons treaty, and supported the antigenocide agreements and the agreement on the status of women. Suppose the United States had been leading efforts to redefine and restructure NATO and its relationship to the EU along with the other outdated Cold War institutions, including the UN. Suppose that instead of saying, ‘Freedom itself has been attacked by a faceless coward’ or, ‘They hate our values and our freedoms,’ we had had said something like ‘We have been attacked by religious fanatics who misunderstand our values and policies and who have hijacked Islam, just as Christianity was hijacked by the Crusaders, in an attempt to right imagined wrongs that have much to do with the difficulties of their own societies in modernizing, difficulties we are committed to helping them overcome.’ Suppose that instead of calling Ariel Sharon ‘a man of peace’ – something no one in Israel, let alone the Arab nations, would call him – we had committed ourselves to action on the Abdullah peace plan. Suppose that, instead of saying ‘you’re with us or against us,’ in the wake of September 11, the president had taken advantage of the great outpouring of sympathy for America and flown to Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Beijing, Cairo, Teheran, Seoul, Tokyo, and Islamabad and said, ‘Thank you.’

Suppose he had called together the leaders of the world for a special conference to seek input and advice on how to deal with the terrorists and the sources of terrorism. Suppose the United States had not announced a new strategy of pre-emptive war with the objective of preventing the rise of any challenger to American hegemonic predominance.

In that context, suppose the United States had brought the matter of Iraq to the Security Council for a genuine debate instead of challenging the Council to make itself relevant. Would the international community have responded differently? Even if strong opposition remained, would there be more genuine support for the U.S. position? And in, ultimately, acting alone, would there have been less risk of doing so because it would have been seen as an exceptional act of unilateralism rather than the latest in a string of such acts? I believe our options now would be much better if we had been seen as a good international citizen rather than as a candidate for the rogue nation list.

What about the situation in Korea? Suppose instead of snubbing South Korean President Kim Dae-jung we had invited him to Washington and asked his advice on how to deal with the North. Suppose that instead of calling North Korea part of an ‘Axis of Evil,’ the president had maintained contact with North Korea’s President Kim Jong-il, and assured him delivery of the promised electricity-generating equipment he so much needs. Suppose we had offered to negotiate a peace treaty to finally end the Korean War, and had offered diplomatic recognition to North Korea as we promised, and hadn’t made such a big deal out of deploying a National Missile Defense to defend against ‘rogue nations like North Korea.’ Would we have a Korea crisis on our hands? Would the administration be in the ridiculous position of trying to explain why North Korea, which has nuclear weapons and long-range missiles and is gearing up to produce more of both, is less of a threat than Saddam. And again, would the North be so obviously frightened of us if we had not announced our preventive war strategy? I think the answer is no. We have contributed mightily to the development of the bad choices now confronting us.

∗

At issue beyond the immediate crises is the very large question of what our national strategy should be, and behind that the even larger question of what kind of people and nation we really want to be. Let’s begin with strategy. From the end of World War II until the end of the Cold War, the United States pursued two interlocking strategies – containment and economic globalization. The bargain America made with its allies was that they would get access to the huge American market and advanced American technology as well as American investment in return for embracing a system of geo-political partnership in which the United States was the senior but not always the dominant partner. As John Ikenberry has explained, ‘U.S. power didn’t destabilize the world order because the United States bound itself to an understood and accepted system of common rules.’
 1 
In other words, other countries identified their interests with U.S. interests because the United States ‘made its power safe.’ Writing in the
Atlantic
in October 2002, Benjamin Schwarz and Christopher Layne called this the ‘reassurance strategy.’
 2 
What has generated the foreign sense of alienation, fear, and betrayal described in these pages is, first, a dramatic relative growth in U.S. power. The Oxford professor Timothy Garton Ash said it nicely when he wrote in the
New York Times
, ‘I love this country [the U.S.]…contrary to what many Europeans think, the problem with American power is not that it is American. The problem is simply the power. It would be dangerous even for an archangel to wield so much power…even democracy brings its own temptations when it exists in a hyperpower.’
 3 
Gar-ton Ash may be right, although the gap between the United States and the rest has not elicited his commentary in the past. It is noteworthy now, I believe, primarily because it has been accompanied by a fundamental shift in U.S. doctrine that increasingly makes American power ‘unsafe’ in the eyes of the world.

The shift began at the end of the first Bush administration, when the study group under Cheney and headed by Wolfowitz first developed the draft paper (quickly leaked to the
New York Times
) that called for a strategy of preventing the rise of any challenging power.
 4 
Disavowed at the time as the unofficial musings of a few blue-sky thinkers, that doctrine has since become the official strategy of the United States as enunciated in the president’s West Point speech, and in the National Security Strategy (NSS) document in September 2002. The United States no longer believes that containment works. The suicidal mentality of the adversary combined with the increasingly easy availability and transportability of weapons of mass destruction makes a no-first-strike strategy untenable. Thus, the new doctrine says, ‘We will not wait while dangers gather’ or until the ‘mushroom cloud’ rises. Instead we will strike pre-emptively and preventively wherever and whenever we sense unacceptable dangers gathering. This doctrine is presented in the guise and rhetoric of dealing with the instabilities caused by failed states and ‘rogue nations,’ and the NSS paper talks of cooperation among the major powers so as to allay their fears that it might also be aimed at them.
 5