Powell’s emphasis on the need for clarity of purpose was sincere and salutary. Under his leadership, he explicitly stated, there would never be another fiasco like the Lebanon expedition of 1983. Yet it is important to remember that the new kind of intervention Powell had in mind was made possible only by a fundamental change in the global strategic context. The fact that the invasion of Panama happened little more than a month after the fall of the Berlin Wall was very far from coincidental.88 Previously, the Soviet threat had inclined the United States to intervene covertly, often to preserve reliably anti-Communist Latin American dictators. Now, with the Soviet empire crumbling, intervention could be quite overt and, at least ostensibly, on behalf of democratic forces not just in Latin America but potentially anywhere. In that sense, the real historic turning point was not 9/11 but 11/9. After the East German revolution of November 9, 1989, it was suddenly apparent that the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev would not or could not maintain the Russian empire by sending tanks into East European cities. Given the importance of Germany, a Western-led reunification of which had been the stuff of previous Soviet leaders’ darkest nightmares, it followed by implication that the United States now had a free hand more or less everywhere. On December 2 Bush and Gorbachev had formally declared the cold war over. On December 19 the invasion of Panama began.
When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990, he thus unwittingly created the opportunity for the United States to inflict on him the treatment it had just inflicted on Noriega. Or did he? For even with the Soviet Union in crisis, the Middle East was not quite Central America. A unilateral regime change in Panama had been implemented with barely a murmur of international protest. Yet for two crucial reasons Iraq proved to be different. The first was the belief (which was almost universal in 1990) that intervention in the Middle East required the sanction of the United Nations. The second was that such a sanction, even were it to be unanimous, would not be legitimate in the eyes of the stateless Islamo-Bolshevists. For America’s victory in the cold war had—in the ruins of distant, half-forgotten Kabul—been their victory too.
The geographical focus of the American empire shifted repeatedly during the twentieth century. At the beginning of the century it had been a hemispheric empire, reaching eastward into the Caribbean, southward into Central America and westward into the Pacific. In the middle of the century it had reluctantly been forced to extend its reach to Europe, and for much of the cold war, the security of Western Europe seemed to matter more than Asia or, indeed, the Caribbean. Gradually, however, the Middle East came to be the hub around which American strategy turned: because of Israel, because of oil, because of terrorism. With the end of the cold war opportunities presented themselves to use America’s reviving military power against one or more of those dangerous states that simultaneously threatened Israel, possessed oil and sponsored terrorism. The question was not whether the United States would act against these sworn enemies; it could not afford not to. The question was whether it would do so alone or in partnership with its traditional allies.
Chapter 4
Splendid Multilateralism
A room without a view.
VENEZUELAN DIPLOMAT DIEGO ARRIA, former president of the United Nations Security Council, describing the council’s private meeting chamber, where the curtains are permanently drawn shut1
It’s nice to say we can do it unilaterally, except you can‘t.
SECRETARY OF STATE COLIN POWELL TO PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH, August 5, 20022
THE UNITED STATES AND THE UNITED NATIONS
Does a true empire need allies, or can it achieve what it wants in the world single-handedly? In the eyes of many commentators, the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq exposed a simple dichotomy between “unilateralism” and “multilateralism” Throughout the 1990s the United States sought to deal with Saddam through the institutional structures of the “international community,” a vague phrase usually intended to refer to the United Nations, but sometimes in reality flattering a few nations opposed to American policy. Critics of President George Bush Senior argued that he was too sensitive to the wishes of this international community when he failed to follow the UN-authorized expulsion of Iraq from Kuwait with an invasion of Iraq and a change of regime in Baghdad. Twelve years later critics of President George Bush Junior argued just the opposite: that he was too heedless of the wishes of the international community when he ordered—without explicit UN authorization—the invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. In their view, the French government was consistently right in arguing for a multilateral approach to Iraq.
Yet this is in many ways a false dichotomy. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was not without a legitimate basis in international law and was supported in various ways by around forty other states.3 No country was so opposed to the regime change that it was willing to fight against it, other than with that least expensive and effective of weapons, rhetoric. On the other side, the French government can hardly be portrayed as an exemplar of “multilateral” virtue, any more than the United Nations Security Council can be regarded as the sole fount of legitimacy in international relations. The crisis in Iraq arose from deep ambiguities in the way the UN—and especially the Security Council—had behaved in the thirteen years prior to 2003. These were the years when, with the cold war over, a “new world order” was supposed to emerge, in which the UN, supported by the United States, would play a crucial role. Those who today exalt the United Nations and excoriate the United States have selective memories. For the cardinal sins of omission on the part of the former far outweigh the venal sins of commission on the part of the latter.
Victorian statesmen used to speak ironically about “splendid isolation,” which in their view was no desirable situation for an empire.4 Yet the 1990s revealed that an excessive obeisance to international institutions could also have disadvantages. Multilateralism too can be less than splendid.
The United Nations is in large measure a creation of the United States. The very name was suggested by Franklin Roosevelt when the twenty-six Allied states fighting the Axis powers were drawing up a joint declaration at the end of 1941. Three and a half years later the UN Charter was formally adopted by delegates from the original fifty member states in the San Francisco Opera House. Although it initially met in London, the Security Council and General Assembly have been housed since the 1950s on a site in New York donated by the Rockefeller family. And although the United States suspended the payment of its dues to the United Nations in 1996 at the instigation of the Republican-dominated Congress, those contributions were resumed and arrears partially paid in 1999.5 At present, the United States thus remains, as it has been since the inception of the UN, its biggest single contributor. More than a fifth (22 percent) of the regular two-year UN budget of $2.54 billion is paid for by the United States, only slightly less than the 25 percent quota prior to 1999. Moreover, American contributions also account for half the budget of World Food Program; a quarter of the budgets of UN peacekeeping operations, the International Atomic Energy Agency, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and the International Civil Aviation Organization; and around a fifth of the budgets of the World Health Organization, the Children’s Fund and the UN Development Program. Altogether, the United States claims that its assessed and voluntary contributions to the entire UN system of international organizations in 2002 were worth $3 billion.6
The point about the United Nations is not that it is an alternative to the United States. It is a creature of the United States. And its resources are so much smaller than those of the U.S. government that its functions can never be more than complementary to American power. To be precise, the annual budget of the United Nations is equivalent to around 0.07 percent of the U.S. federal budget, 0.4 percent of the U.S. defense budget and 17.6 percent of the U.S. international development and humanitarian assistance budget. In the words of the former secretary of state Madeleine K. Albright, who from 1993 to 1996 was the American
permanent representative to the UN, the annual budget of the United Nations is “roughly what the Pentagon spends every thirty-two hours.”7 The UN could thus never hope to run counter to the United States and win; whenever there have been differences, as over the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice, the United States has simply gone its own way.8 Though America has done more of this kind of thing under President Bush, it is not a novelty.9 The United States needs the United Nations, but it does not need to sign every international agreement the latter produces. The United Nations needs the United States even more, so it must be tolerant of its principal patron. Were an outright breach to occur between the United States and the United Nations, the latter would for all practical purposes be defunct.
Such checks on the power of the United States as exist today must therefore be sought behind the veil of “multilateralism.” They will be found in the permanent overrepresentation on the UN Security Council of three former empires and one still existent empire: Britain, France, Russia and China. It is they, not the UN per se, that have the power to deny the foreign policy of the United States the sanction of the “international community” in the form of UNSC resolutions, and they can exercise this power singly as well as collectively. Thus, ironically, the seal of multilateral approval can be withheld by the unilateral action of just one other permanent member of the Security Council. That the United States tolerates this when it happens, as it did over Iraq last year, is a mark of its own self-restraint, but also of its own self-interest. The UNSC—rather like the regular conferences of the foreign ministers of the great powers during the nineteenth century—is a convenience, a clearinghouse for the interests of some (though not all) of the great powers of today. When it does legitimize American policy, it is positively useful. When it does not, on the other hand, it is no more than an irritant. And perhaps by providing a stage on which the former empires can indulge their own sense of self-importance, it renders them even less powerful than they might otherwise be—precisely because their presence is a subtle irritant to the ascendant economic powers of the present that are, for purely historical reasons, not permanent council members. Today the other four permanent members of the UNSC have economies with a combined gross domestic product of $4.5 trillion. This is slightly less than half the GDP of the United States. It is also less than three-quarters of the combined GDP of the three largest nonmembers of the Security Council: Japan, Germany and India.
GULF WAR I
When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990, he did so at one of the rare moments in history when the United Nations Security Council was in a position to give more or less unqualified support to an action the United States would certainly have carried out anyway. Within six days President George H. W. Bush announced that American troops would be deployed to Saudi Arabia to protect it from any further Iraqi aggression. In January the following year, with a huge armed force in place, the president ordered the expulsion of Iraqi forces from Kuwait. After a six-week air campaign Saddam’s forces were routed in an overwhelming ground assault that lasted barely one hundred hours.
Five points are worth emphasizing. The first and most obvious is that with the Soviet Union in its death throes, the traditional obstacle to American policy on the Security Council vanished as surely as the Soviet boycott had removed it during the Korean crisis. Saddam’s act of aggression had clearly violated the charter of the UN, but the pre-Gorbachev Kremlin would instinctively have opposed such a large-scale deployment of American forces as Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm entailed. This time there was little difficulty in passing a series of resolutions that demanded that Iraq withdraw from Kuwait, embargoed Iraq’s oil exports, authorized a blockade of the country’s imports and finally authorized the United States and any other member states to use “all necessary means to liberate Iraq.” Secondly, Saddam underestimated the American determination to “kick the Vietnam syndrome once and for all” (as President Bush put it) with a decisive military victory.10 The combination of devastating bombardment and a four-day blitzkrieg annihilated the Iraqi Army with minimal American casualties, just 148 battle deaths out of a total deployment to the gulf region of over 1.1 million.11 In the words of former CENTCOM Commander in Chief General Anthony Zinni: “Desert Storm worked … because we managed to go up against the only jerk on the planet who actually was stupid enough to confront us symmetrically, with less of everything, including the moral right to do what he did to Kuwait.”12
The third point, however, was that precisely for fear of the Vietnam syndrome, the United States did not press home its advantage by invading Iraq itself. As chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell urged Bush to stop the ground war, allowing at least half of Saddam’s loyal Republican Guard to escape. Having incited rebellions against Saddam’s regime by Kurds in the north and Shia Muslims in the south of the country, the United States stood aside as these were crushed.13 The most that was done in the aftermath of victory was to impose, first, a security zone for the Kurds in northern Iraq and, later, two no-fly zones north of the thirty-sixth parallel and south of the thirty-second. These two operations (Operation Provide Comfort and Operation Southern Watch) 14 were once again multinational undertakings—French, British and Turkish aircrews were also involved—which had a UNSC resolution as their mandate. The United States continued to hope for Saddam’s demise; in June 1993 President Clinton ordered a desultory cruise missile attack on Bagh- dad following an Iraqi-sponsored attempt to assassinate his predecessor with a car bomb when he visited Kuwait.15 Nor did it cease to enforce the UN resolutions limiting Iraq’s postwar military activities. There were further cruise missile strikes in 1996 to punish the Iraqis for violating the northern security zone, and again in December 1998 (Operation Desert Fox), prompted by Iraq’s refusal to cooperate with UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) weapons inspectors.16 But by the end of the 1990s it was abundantly clear that nothing short of a full-scale invasion would get rid of Saddam. There were also legitimate grounds for doubt that the system of weapons inspections would ever be wholly effective in eliminating the regime’s efforts to acquire or accumulate “weapons of mass destruction,” a shorthand term for nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.
In many ways, the first Gulf War had greater consequences outside Iraq than inside it. Even after the war had been won, U.S. forces were not wholly withdrawn from the Middle East. On the contrary, during the 1990s the number stationed there tended to increase, as table 5 shows, from just over six thousand in 1993 to sixteen thousand by 2000. As a proportion of American forces stationed abroad, this represented a tripling of the U.S. military commitment to the region. Especially remarkable was the rising number of American personnel stationed in Saudi Arabia, temporary “tenants” of the royal dynasty that happened to be accompanied by between one hundred and two hundred warplanes.17 These figures understate the extent of the American presence because they do not take account of the number of U.S. naval vessels deployed in and around the gulf. Nor do they capture another aspect of the growing Saudi military dependency: between August 1990 and December 1992 the Saudi regime placed orders worth more than twenty-five billion dollars with U.S. armaments manufacturers. In effect, the Arabian political system, with its exceptionally low military participation rate, made Riyadh dependent for its security on American manpower and firepower.18 As we have seen, however, this only served to fuel the resentment of the radical Islamist movement inside and outside Saudi Arabia. As early as 1991 Saudi clerics, including Safar al-Hawali, an authority often cited by Osama bin Laden, were denouncing “a larger Western design to dominate the whole Arab and Muslim world.” Disgusted by the Saudi authorities’ reliance on American protection (they had declined his offer to lead an Afghan-style guer rilla force against Saddam), bin Laden left Saudi Arabia in April 1991, traveling via Pakistan and Afghanistan to al Qa’eda’s new base in Sudan.19
The fifth and final feature of the first Gulf War also had little to do with Iraq. This was what mig
ht be described as the marginalization of Israel. The Bush administration took the view that Israel should not serve as a center of military operations against Iraq—not even for supply, storage or medical purposes.20 When Saddam fired Scud missiles at Tel Aviv, in an effort to cast himself as the archenemy of Zionism, the Americans worked energetically to prevent any Israeli retaliation. Moreover, in the wake of Desert Storm, Bush sought to apply pressure on Israel, in the hope of breaking the deadlock in the negotiations over the Palestinian question. In doing so, he reasserted the American conviction that any peace “must be grounded in the United Nations Security Council resolutions 242 and 338 and the principle of territory for peace.”21 Two months later Secretary of State James Baker remarked pointedly that he knew of no “bigger obstacle to peace than the settlement activity that continues not only unabated but at an enhanced pace.” American loan guarantees worth ten billion dollars were allowed to lapse when the Israelis refused to accept conditions the United States attached to them.22 After 1991 American aid to Israel was effectively frozen and in real terms declined. By 1999, as a proportion of Israeli gross national income, it was down to a third of its 1992 level.
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