Bush, Iraq, and the World

Bush, Iraq, and the World
▪ 2004
by Strobe Talbott
      From the moment that the first explosions lit up the night sky over Baghdad, this war was personal. Four huge bombs and about 40 cruise missiles slammed into a heavily fortified VIP compound near the Tigris River. The opening salvo was intended not just to inspire “shock and awe” among the Iraqi people but to kill their leader, Saddam Hussein. “Selected targets of military importance,” said Pres. George W. Bush when he went on national television half an hour later. “A target of opportunity,” added White House and Pentagon sources in the hours that followed. They left no doubt who was in the crosshairs.

      Bush had come by his animus honestly. The greatest triumph of the presidency of his father, George H.W. Bush, had been to end Saddam's occupation of Kuwait in the Gulf War of 1991. But that victory had been incomplete. Saddam survived, and two years later he plotted to assassinate the senior Bush, who was then out of office, during a visit to Kuwait.

      No wonder the second President Bush felt he had a score to settle. He also had objective reasons to wish for Saddam's demise, as did the whole world. The Iraqi dictator was an affront to the very idea of an international community. He had spent the 1990s intimidating his neighbours, brutalizing his own people, engaging in genocidal repression of Iraq's Marsh Arabs and Kurds, and systematically flouting the terms of probation that the UN had imposed on him after his eviction from Kuwait. Saddam played cat and mouse with the UN as it tried to make sure he was not illicitly developing chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons. In 1998 the UN withdrew its arms inspectors in the face of Iraqi deceit, defiance, and obstruction.

      So, in addition to its being personal for President Bush, this was a war waiting to happen. Whenever it had occurred and however it was explained from the bully pulpit in Washington, it would have set off a wave of criticism and second-guessing around the world. For at least half a century, the emergence of the U.S. as the strongest nation in history had aroused a combination of ambivalence and resentment in other countries, including friends and allies of the U.S. They counted on the strength of the American economy to boost their own, admired the U.S. for its political values and the dynamism of its culture and society, and looked to Washington for protection. However, when American presidents—in disregard of John Quincy Adams's famous advice—went abroad in search of monsters to destroy, the foreign reaction to success was two cheers, not three, and the reaction to failure was varying degrees of schadenfreude.

      Pres. John F. Kennedy took his lumps abroad as well as at home for botching an attempt to eliminate Fidel Castro in Cuba. Lyndon Johnson's debacle in Vietnam was widely seen as Goliath meeting his match. Ronald Reagan made quick work of tiny Grenada in 1983, but the pretext for the invasion—the rescue of American students at a beachfront medical school—struck many as implausible and unjustified. In addition to his own showdown with Saddam Hussein, George H.W. Bush went into Panama with guns blazing, kicked down the door, and dragged the country's strongman, Manuel Noriega, off to an American jail. By what right? asked many, especially in Latin America, which has had long experience with “Tio Sam” armed with a pistol and a “Wanted Dead or Alive” poster.

      Under Pres. Bill Clinton, the U.S. resorted to force on a significant scale three times: in 1994, when it replaced a military junta in Haiti with the democratically elected president, and in 1995 and 1999, when it conducted bombing campaigns to stop Slobodan Milosevic's rampages of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans. Once again the reaction abroad to the U.S.'s actions was a mixture of astonishment (sometimes tinged with anxiety) at U.S. military prowess, gratitude (sometimes grudging) for American leadership, and unease at the unprecedented, unrivaled, and unregulated extent of American power. When in 1999 French Foreign Minister Hubert Védrine labeled the U.S. l'hyperpuissance, or “the hyperpower,” he did not mean it as a compliment, and he had in mind the foreign policy of the archmultilateralist Clinton.

      It was against this backdrop that George W. Bush became the custodian of all that power in January 2001. Yes, he had a glint of vengeance in his eye on the subject of Saddam, and yes, he slipped naturally into the Gary Cooper role as the marshal in High Noon—facing down the bad guys while the frightened townspeople disappear from the streets, duck behind closed doors, and peek out through drawn blinds. But he also had a strong case, and plenty of precedent, for making the downfall of an international outlaw a priority of his foreign policy.

      However, the second Gulf War as waged by the second President Bush proved to be more controversial abroad than any other American military adventure since Vietnam—which is all the more extraordinary in that it took only six weeks and relatively little death and destruction for the U.S. to accomplish its immediate objectives. The war was seen as dramatic evidence of what many had feared for over two years. From virtually the day he took office, Bush had put the world on notice that the executive branch of the U.S. government was operating under a new concept of the American mission and how to accomplish it. Previously, the assumption had been: “Together if we can, alone if we must.” “Together” meant a preference for working with allies, with regional security organizations, and with the authorization of UN Security Council resolutions. The Bush administration stood the formula on its head: “Alone if we can, together if we must.”

      In one respect this shift was unabashedly political. Spokesmen for the new administration claimed that Democrats—particularly the one who occupied the presidency between the two Bushes—had diluted the U.S.'s power, squandered the nation's resources, and emboldened its enemies. They had done so through misplaced idealism about the nature of the world, a naive belief in the illusory if not oxymoronic concept of international law, excessive deference to the sensibilities of other countries (notably including allies), a foolish reliance on feckless international organizations, and a timidity about the decisive use of U.S. force.

      While this critique was directed primarily against Clinton, it was, ironically though inescapably, also a tacit put-down of the elder Bush's concept, enunciated in 1991, that the end of the Cold War made possible a “new world order,” led by the U.S. but based on collaboration with old friends and new partners and the strengthening of international institutions.

      During the first nine months of 2001, the administration made statements and took actions intended to demonstrate a new self-reliance and assertiveness and, accordingly, a new resistance to agreements and arrangements that limited the U.S.'s freedom of action. The U.S. renounced, “unsigned,” weakened, disdained, or ignored more than a dozen treaties and diplomatic works in progress that it had inherited from its predecessors, Republican as well as Democratic. These included the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, the International Criminal Court, the Treaty on Anti-Ballistic Missile Systems, the land- mine-ban treaty, and an array of conventions designed to protect the rights of children, stop torture, curb discrimination by race and gender, end the production of biological weapons, prevent money laundering, and limit trafficking in small arms. Earlier administrations had had objections to some features of many of these accords but had sought to improve them; the Bush administration seemed to want nothing to do with agreements of this kind.

      The new U.S. leadership also downgraded the importance it attached to diplomacy, since that is an exercise in compromise and the Bush team was not in a compromising mood. The U.S. suspended the Middle East peace process and the dialogue with North Korea.

      By the late summer of 2001, there was more grumbling than ever before from those around the world who were prepared to follow the U.S. president as a leader but were less inclined to take orders from him as a boss. Vice Pres. Richard Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld quickly established themselves as the advocates, in public and in the councils of the administration, of unilateralism without apologies. Secretary of State Colin Powell seemed to be alone in voicing a more traditional, cooperative, and institutional approach. He lost one battle after another, and his imminent resignation was frequently rumoured.

      Then came September 11. The immediate effect of the attacks was to galvanize international sympathy for the U.S. There was a sudden burst of approval for President Bush as a righteous lawman, and the world became one big posse. The normally hyperpuissance-bashing Paris daily Le Monde ran a banner headline proclaiming, “We are all Americans now.”

      Secretary Powell went from being the odd man out to being the man of the hour. He assembled an international coalition of unprecedented breadth to back the U.S. as it prepared for retribution against Afghanistan, which had become a breeding ground for radical Islamists and a sanctuary for Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda terrorist network.

      The Bush administration was glad to have good wishes and political support from abroad. But when NATO, for the first time in its history, invoked Article V of its charter, proclaiming that the assaults against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon constituted an attack on all member states, the U.S. said, in effect, “Thanks very much; now please stay out of the way while we take care of this.” As a result, the alliance was largely sidelined during the military action in Afghanistan.

      Only when the Afghan Taliban had been driven from power and the U.S. turned to the hard work of reconstruction did it welcome international participation. One reason was that the Bush administration saw itself as doing regime change but not nation building. Another was that it wanted, as quickly as possible, to get on with changing another regime—in Iraq. The day after September 11, Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld's intellectually formidable and politically powerful deputy, made the case in a meeting with the president that once the U.S. had taken care of Target Kabul, it should turn to Target Baghdad.

      The willingness of the American people to support military action in Iraq increased because of September 11. Before the terror attacks, the term national security had been an abstraction for many Americans. Afterward it had new, concrete meaning virtually synonymous with personal safety. The world was a place where bad people—“evildoers,” as the president put it—were looking for ways to kill Americans on their own territory. It was easier than it would have been otherwise for the administration to convince Americans that Saddam too was an evildoer who would kill Americans if he could and that the U.S. therefore had to kill him first. That was the subtext of the doctrine that the administration promulgated a year after September 11 in a presidential document identifying preemptive and preventive war as vital tools for the defense of the homeland.

      In a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in August 2002, Vice President Cheney set the stage for applying the new doctrine to Iraq. “We must take the battle to the enemy,” he said. “We” meant the U.S.; the United Nations, Cheney made clear, had disqualified itself and should step aside.

      In a phrase that had gained currency since September 11, the administration set about “connecting the dots” between Saddam on the one hand and weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and the forces of international terrorism on the other. Since Saddam was trying to acquire WMD and might give them to terrorists, the U.S. should bring him down. Embedded in this syllogism was a major weakness in the administration's case for war. In his effort to build domestic and international support for military action, Bush was driven to assert—and, as it turned out, exaggerate—the extent of Saddam's WMD programs and his ties to terrorists.

      The most vocal skeptics about the logic of the administration's argument were Republicans associated with the first President Bush, particularly former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft and former secretary of state James Baker. Whatever the misgivings of prominent Democrats, they were reluctant to tackle a president who was riding high largely because of his robust response to September 11. Within the administration, Powell continued to be a force for moderation. He persuaded Bush to address the UN and give multilateralism one more chance. The president dared the UN to prove itself relevant but, unlike Cheney, did not dismiss its ability to do so. The challenge led directly to the unanimous passage of Security Council Resolution 1441, which warned of “serious consequences” if Iraq did not comply with tough new inspections. Saddam immediately adopted his familiar practice of dodging and weaving, but it looked as though the U.S. might finally have laid the basis for a UN-authorized, U.S.-led military action.

      Had it worked out that way, Gulf War II would have been part of the continuum going back to Gulf War I and the Clinton administration's use of force in Haiti and the Balkans. Not only would Bush have prevailed over Saddam, but he would have had the much-vaunted international community largely behind him—and, indeed, with him on the ground in large and diverse numbers.

      Instead, the juggernaut that Bush and Powell had put in motion turned into a train wreck, primarily between the U.S. and France. Pres. Jacques Chirac shares the blame. In an interview on March 10, 2003, he warned that France would veto a new resolution authorizing force under any circumstances. Russia and China, which were prepared to go along with France in either direction, took a similar position. Chirac's obstinacy and grandstanding cut the legs out from under Powell and strengthened those in the administration who had warned that by going to the UN in the first place, the president had fallen into a trap. Now the U.S. was, in the eyes of the unilateralists, free to do the job right, with a “coalition” that included, in its military dimension, Great Britain, Australia, and Poland, as well as some crucial logistic support from the smaller Gulf states.

      Operation Iraqi Freedom produced two positive results. First, it rid Iraq, the region, and the world of a scourge; and second, in part because of an understanding he had with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, his staunchest ally, Bush relaunched the Middle East peace process.

      On the other hand, the war did profound damage to American relations with a wide array of countries and several international institutions, principally the UN and NATO, which were further marginalized. More generally, it heightened anxieties that American power, benevolent though its motivations might be, was a problem for virtually every other country on Earth, especially if the victory in Iraq vindicated the unilateralists and ensured their continued ascendancy in the U.S. As American and British troops were tearing down Saddam's statues and scouring the country for the man himself, many around the world (and in the U.S. as well) feared that the “Iraq model” would serve as a template for changing two other regimes that Bush had named as part of the “axis of evil,” Iran and North Korea, since both had nuclear-weapons programs far more advanced than Iraq's.

      It was not that simple, however. In the second half of 2003, the U.S. military had its hands full in Iraq and Afghanistan, both of which were far from stabilized. Partly for that reason, and also because the U.S. needed as much international help as possible for the jobs ahead in those two countries, the administration put its six-shooter back in its holster and resorted to multilateral diplomacy in trying to deal with Iran and North Korea. Just as it quickly became apparent that the Iraq war would have a long, messy, and uncertain aftermath, so the struggle to define the future of American foreign policy was far from over. What was already being called the “Bush revolution” in U.S. foreign policy might yet give way to at least a partial restoration of traditional American internationalism.

Strobe Talbott is a former journalist for Time and deputy secretary of state (1994–2001) and now president of the Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C. His latest book is The Russia Hand: A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy (Random House, 2002).

* * *


Universalium. 2010.

Игры ⚽ Поможем написать курсовую

Look at other dictionaries:

  • Iraq and weapons of mass destruction — This article concerns the Iraqi government s use, possession, and alleged intention of acquiring more types of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) during the presidency of Saddam Hussein. During his reign of several decades, he was internationally… …   Wikipedia

  • The World Can't Wait — The World Can t Wait! Drive Out the Bush Regime! (WCW) is a left wing group in the United States. According to its mission statement, by organizing people living in the United States, WCW seeks to create a political situation where the Bush… …   Wikipedia

  • The Way of the World (book) — Infobox book | name = The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism author = Ron Suskind country = United States language = English subject = Politics publisher = Harper release date = August 5, 2008 pages = 432 isbn =… …   Wikipedia

  • United States support for Iraq during the Iran–Iraq war — The United States supported Iraq during the Iran–Iraq War as a counterbalance to post revolutionary Iran. The support took the form of technological aid, intelligence, the sale of dual use and military equipment, and direct involvement in warfare …   Wikipedia

  • Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War —   …   Wikipedia

  • POWs and the Global War on Terrorism — ▪ 2005 Introduction by Peter Saracino       The conduct of the parties in the global war on terrorism declared by the United States and the war in Iraq stirred up great controversy in 2004. The applicability of the accepted rules of war to these… …   Universalium

  • George W. Bush and the Iraq War — The 2003 Iraq War was begun mostly by the efforts of United States President George W. Bush.Beginning with his January 29, 2002 State of the Union address, President Bush began publicly focusing attention on Iraq, which he labeled as part of an… …   Wikipedia

  • United States and the United Nations — The United States is a charter member of the United Nations and one of five permanent members of the UN Security Council. U.S. role in establishing the UN The term United Nations was suggested by Franklin D. Roosevelt [… …   Wikipedia

  • Relations between the Catholic Church and the state — The relations between the Catholic Church and the state have been constantly evolving with various forms of government, some of them controversial in retrospect. In its history it has had to deal with various concepts and systems of governance,… …   Wikipedia

  • Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping — The Church of Stop Shopping is an activist performance group based in New York City, led by Reverend Billy, the stage name of Bill Talen. Using the form of a revival meeting, on sidewalks and in chain stores, Reverend Billy and his gospel choir… …   Wikipedia

Share the article and excerpts

Direct link
Do a right-click on the link above
and select “Copy Link”