It has
been almost four years.
Back in January
2003, I voiced
this warning in my column in the Christian Science Monitor.
Any use of massive violence such as that Washington is now threatening
against Iraq is a terrible thing.
Everything we know about violence gives two clear lessons. First, the
use of force always has unintended – often quite unpredictable –
consequences. And second, war in the modern era always
disproportionately harms civilians.
For these two reasons, there is a strong presumption in international
law and international custom against any easy or voluntary recourse to
war. War is still allowed in international law, yes – but only for
self-defense, and only as a very last resort, after all avenues for
peaceful resolution of differences
have been exhausted.
Mr. President, you have no such justification for the war you now
threaten against Iraq. There is still time to stand down the huge US
expeditionary force and return to some version of the mix of
containment and deterrence that has proved successful against Iraq
until now – as it did against the much more threatening Soviet Union in
an earlier era. Turn back from this war before its consequences come
back to haunt you and the rest of the world.
And then, I
noted the consequences that followed the decision that Ariel Sharon had
made, when he was Israel’s Defense Minister in 1982, to invade Lebanon:
That
campaign had two key similarities to the one you now threaten against
Iraq. It was a war of “choice,” not one imposed on Israel by other
powers
like some of its other wars. Secondly, Mr. Sharon’s campaign aimed
explicitly
at bringing about “regime change” in Lebanon, as yours promises to do
in
Iraq.
At the military level, Sharon’s warriors succeeded. Within two months,
they controlled half of Lebanon including the capital Beirut. They
forced
Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian guerrillas to leave the country, and
“persuaded”
Lebanon’s parliament to vote in Israeli ally Bashir Gemayel as their
new
president.
Politically, however, Sharon’s campaign did not go well. The continued
presence of Israeli forces in the country catalyzed the birth of a new,
much
more militant Lebanese Muslim group called Hizbullah. Mr. Gemayel was
assassinated.
Before 1982 ended, Israel was seeking to reduce its footprint in
Lebanon. But it was unable to deal with the resistance that its
presence provoked, and ended up staying in Lebanon an additional 18
years.
Israel (and Lebanon) bled profusely for all those years. (And the
Palestinians? Their national movement simply changed its form. In 1987,
it launched its first serious uprising – “intifada” – inside Gaza and
the West Bank.)
No one in Israel today gives a favorable verdict to Sharon’s 1982
campaign. One can only wonder how Americans 20 years from now will
judge the results of a US war on Iraq.
In February
2003, I wrote this:
Right now, the vast majority of the world’s Muslims strongly oppose the
US launching what they see as a quite avoidable war against Iraq. (Most
non-Muslims worldwide seem to share this view, too.) With his latest
message, bin Laden seeks to insinuate himself into the leadership of
the sprawling collection of societies known loosely as the “world
Muslim community.”
If the US blindly goes ahead with the threatened attack on Iraq, will
that bring bin Laden closer to his goal, or further from it?
My judgment, based on more than 25 years of studying Muslim issues, is
that it will bring bin Laden much, much closer.
The tragic irony in this is that, just days before the airing of the
bin Laden tape, Secretary of State Colin Powell, in his presentation at
the UN, significantly inflated the strength of the link between Saddam
Hussein’s regime
and bin Laden’s Al Qaeda. Now, as in the Yiddish folktale “The Golem,”
bad
dreams seem to be taking on real substance.
In his Feb. 5 speech, Mr. Powell laid out the best evidence he had for
the existence of what he called, “the potentially … sinister nexus
between Iraq
and the Al Qaeda terrorist network.”
But the case he made at that time for the existence of this nexus was
thin and deeply unconvincing. To note this is not to stick up for
Saddam Hussein. He’s a very abusive ruler with a long record of
deception on significant weapons-related
issues. But prudence still dictates that the Bush administration needs
to
get its facts straight about the Baghdad-Al Qaeda nexus.
Finally,
as the drumbeats of the approaching war grew louder, on March 13, 2003,
I wrote this:
The
fight-to-the death that the
president is poised to launch against Saddam Hussein’s regime will send
a tsunami of destabilization throughout the Middle East. But beyond
that,
if this war is not authorized by the UN Security Council, it threatens
to unravel not just the 58-year-old UN system, but the whole web of
interstate
relations that has grown up through the past four centuries. We would
be
catapulted back to a Hobbesian world of “might makes right” in
international
affairs. In such a world, as Hobbes warned us, human life can only be
“nasty,
brutish, and short.”
The threat to the UN system is already dire. Yes, the UN has made
mistakes and still has many shortcomings. And yes, the US has sometimes
had rocky relations with the UN over the years. But for the vast
majority of the world’s people, the UN represents an ideal of national
equality, and embodies their desire that international conflicts be
resolved without war. In thousands of places around the world, the UN
delivers basic human services – nutrition, healthcare, water
management, shelter – that governments are too weak or
impoverished to provide. In explosive hot spots – including the
Kuwait-Iraq
border – UN peacekeepers help monitor and defuse otherwise deadly
tensions.
President Bush has repeatedly said, “When it comes to our security,
we don’t need anybody’s permission.” That can only mean he’s prepared
to
go to war against Iraq even without Security Council authorization.
Make
no mistake: If the president does that, he will start a cascade of
actions
and counteractions that could unravel the UN, all its good works and
the
ideals it represents, within months – not years.
… Many Americans remember a previous effort by a well-meaning
president to use the US military’s dominant position to forcibly impose
democracy
on another country. That was President Johnson, in 1968, in Vietnam.
In 2003, a similar effort to impose democracy on Iraq through force
can similarly be expected to fail. This time though, the cost to global
stability and human well-being would be much higher. Mr. President,
turn
back!
All of us
urging Bush to turn back failed, and on March 19-20, 2003 the first
waves of the US invasion force started pounding Iraq.
The carnage and social collapse that Iraq has seen since then have
exceeded even my worst expectations,which had previously been
‘seasoned’ by having experienced six years of Lebanon’s civil
war up close and very personal in the 1970s.
There a number of reasons for that, I think. One is that the
Lebanese have always, as a people relying on trade and on cultivation
in the valleys of inhospitable mountains, been deeply distrustful of
government, so many elements of their society never relied on the
existence of a central government for very much of anything.
Iraq, by contrast, is an ancient riverine culture in which central
government regulation of many aspects of economic life is deeply
engrained into the national culture. Add to that 30 years of
Baathist authoritarianism (and 12 years of tough international
sanctions), which between them deepended Iraqis’ dependence on
government for many basic necessities of life… And you can see how
the collapse of central government had so much more drastic an effect
on the lives of ordinary people in Iraq than an anlogous collapse had
earlier had in Lebanon…
Secondly, the amounts and kinds of weaponry at the disposal of the
local militias and fighting forces have been a quantum leap more lethal
than anything the fighting parties in Lebanon ever had access to.
In both cases, external occupying powers have worked hard to stir the
pot of internal divisiveness in pursuit of their own policies iof
‘divide-and-rule’…
Anyway, just going back to what I was writing there in the early months
of 2003, I’d like to note the following:
1. Very sadly, all
my dire warnings proved correct. The exuberant enthusiasm of
those deeply ignorant souls who promised us ‘cake-walks’ and rapturous
greetings with rice and flowers proved to have no substance at all.
2. Where has been ‘accountability’ in all this?? The thing that
rankles for me, most of all, is that the ‘international community’
(whatever that is) rewarded
Paul Wolfowitz, who had been one of the pleading architects and
implementers of the war, with an appointment as President of the World Bank.
This is madness, madness– if the ‘world community’ wants to say
anything serious at all about (a) the strength of the norm it places on
the avoidance of war, and (b) the value it places on the work of the
World Bank.
The World Bank does much-needed work in many areas of the world where
war is recent, or is a current and recurring threat. How can it
have any credibility working in such zones– on all its programs for
the ‘peaceful resolution of conflicts’, etc etc– if it has at its head
a man so terribly tainted by the forceful role he played in fashioning
and carrying out a policy of unbridled militarism in Iraq?
(I could also ask how much his salary is in that very comfortable and
powerful perch… compared to the pathetic little shreds of income that
I and most other consistent critics of the war policy are currently
able to pull in.)
Of course, most other architects of the war policy have also been well
rewarded, going on to think-tanks, universities, and consultancies
(oftentimes, with arms manufacturers or arms dealers) that pay them
well. Those facts
hurt, yes, but they have less to tell us about the values of the
‘international community’ of which the World Bank is a part than does
Paul W’s continuing employment there.
3. I did write in early 2003 about the dangers that the Bushites’
unilateral and quite unjustified invasion of Iraq posed to the
functioning and integrity of the United Nations system. That is
still a strong concern for me, though the unraveling of the UN has not
been as serious or as speedy as I had feared.
However, the weakness of the UN is already quite serious enough that
the many pleas I have voiced that the UN be given a serious role in
helping to de-escalate the conflict in Iraq and provide a politically
‘legitimate’ framework within which the US can pull out its troops do
seem less convincing, and more problematic, than they otherwise
would. Of course, the fact that the Bushites have been able to
suborn the UN into acting as their junior partner in some key aspects
of Middle East diplomacy– primarily by enlisting the UN as a junior
partner in the time-wasting, doomed-to-failure ‘Road Map’ scheme– has
also considerably underrmined both the integrity of the UN process and
the political credibility it is able to project within the Middle East.
Evidently, the UN is at a slowly evolving turning-point. The
Bushites’ actions have forced the world’s other powers to make a
choice: Do they want a world that is, in fact, ruled by a single
American hegemon, or do they want to try to revive the rules-based,
international equality-based approach of the earlier UN? (Put
crudely: When will the Chnese, the Russians, and the other powers call
in their chips, sell their large stores of US Treasury bills, and push
the US back to punching at its own weight in international affairs–
which on a population basis, is around 5% of the total? This is
unlikely to happen soon– the other big powers are doing nicely with
the world economy the way it is; and they have little interest in
giving Washington too much help to stop the diminution of US military
power that is continuing at a fast rate, day by day, inside
Iraq… It is only the poor bloody Iraqis who are
suffering, for now.)
There is a lot more to write, too. I want to write more about the
historical precedents for the US’s current experience of ‘imperial
over-reach’ inside Iraq… In those early 2003 CSM columns I mentioned
Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, and the US’s earlier experience
in Vietnam. But I did not mention Britain (and France)’s
experience during the invasion of Gaza, Sinai, and Suez in 1956; and
the role that Britain’s experience there, in particular, had in
catalyzing and hastening London’s withdrawal from (nearly) all the rest
of its imperial holdings around the world, over theyears that
followed… Or apartheid South Africa’s bruising experiences
during its war against Angola in the 1980s… Or the Soviet Union’s
experience in Afghanistan from 1989 on… (or Israel’s experience in
Lebanon in 2006?)
In those other instances, that I had failed to mention in the columns,
the setbacks experienced during one discrete military-imperial
adventure had consequences for the military-imperial power that were considerably broader than in just
that single territory they had attacked.
I definitely need to do a more serious study, sometime, of this
phenomenon of imperial
over-reach leading very rapidly to imperial rollback or even the
collapse of empire.
How far will the rollback of US power extend in the wake of this
still-ongoing debacle in Iraq?
(I have other things I need to write about too… including, what the
exact motors are of the current political developments inside Wasington
DC… something that, I have found in my travels, many non-Americans
seem to have only a rather fuzzy notion about… But for now, I
have to run… Back posting here again soon, I hope.)