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COMMENTARY
Like lambs to the slaughter of
Iraq
By Ehsan Ahrari
As
significant as the issue of taking preemptive and
unilateral action to bring about "regime change" in Iraq
is, major Asian countries are noted for their perplexing
silence on the issue. While Russia and China have
expressed their tepid opposition, even they are not yet
vociferously opposing it. That only leaves the
"Atlanticists" - the multilateralists of Europe - as
vocal opponents and critics.
But even their
insistence on prior United Nations approval for any
military action against Saddam Hussein may not prevent
President George W Bush from unilaterally toppling the
Iraqi dictator. To make matters worse, there is no
credible Iraqi opposition that could be implanted as a
legitimate ruling authority in Iraq, and there have been
no public discussions of the specifics of nationbuilding
after the present governmental institutions are
dismantled.
Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder of
Germany epitomized the European opposition to attacking
Iraq in the elections rhetoric he used. France is
pressing for inspection in Iraq for weapons of mass
destruction, and is staying on the side of disarming
Iraq, but not for military action.
But British
Prime Minister Tony Blair opted for a different role,
which is more nuanced than is recognized by the British
media that frequently labels him as George Bush's
"poodle". While supporting the necessity of ousting
Saddam Hussein, Blair has not abandoned the need for
seeking UN approval for it, or just stopping at the
option of disarming Iraq. However, Blair's position
becomes shaky when one considers that the Bush
administration, as the New York Times has recently
noted, "continues to insist it will act unilaterally if
necessary". The problem with Blair's position, however,
is that it contains elements of both Atlanticist and
unilateralist perspectives. The Europeans insist that he
can't be both, and the Bush administration does not seem
to care either way. All it wants is to ensure that when
the decision to attack Iraq is made, Britain also
commits its forces.
As the European Atlanticists
and American unilateralists continue to feud, a
conservative American analyst, Robert Kagan, presents a
thoughtful analysis of the reasons for the "diverging"
European and American positions regarding the efficacy,
morality and desirability of power. Europe seems to
have, he writes, realized philosopher Immanuel Kant's
dream of "perpetual peace", while the United States is
"mired" in dealing with the "Hobbesian world" in which
"international laws and rules are unreliable and where
true security and the defense and promotion of a liberal
order still depend on the possession and use of military
might".
Viewing the United States from the
European perspective, Kagan continues, the former
"resorts to force more quickly and, compared with
Europe, is less patient with diplomacy. Americans
generally see the world divided between good and evil,
between friends and enemies, while Europeans see a more
complex picture". To Europeans, according to Kagan, even
Secretary of State Colin Powell appears more European
than Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
Kagan
is most prescient in stating that the difference in
perspectives of unilateralist United States versus
multilateralist Europe may best be explained on the
basis of power. He writes, "When the United States was
weak, it practiced the strategies of indirection, the
strategies of weakness; now that the United States is
powerful, it behaves as powerful nations do. When the
European great powers were strong, they believed in
strength and martial glory. Now, they see the world
through the eyes of weaker powers. These very different
points of view, weak versus strong, have naturally
produced differing strategic judgments, differing
assessments of threats and of the proper means of
addressing threats, and even differing calculations of
interest."
These differences notwithstanding,
the Atlanticist opposition to attacking Iraq is also
based on what they perceive as America's lack of
attention to detail about "the day after". William
Anthony Hay, writing in an essay published under the
auspices of the Philadelphia-based Foreign Policy
Research Institute, captures the essence of the
Atlanticist-multilateralist opposition. He observes,
"[the] unilateralists sharply dismiss skeptics at home
and in Europe as fearful of exercising American power,
but the problem with their position involves more than
its stridency. The unilateralist argument neglects the
role of financial coordination, intelligence, and
policing that can only be accomplished through
multilateral efforts. It also greatly overstates the
prospects of replacing dictatorships with something
approximating Western democracy or the speed with which
this might be done."
The Bush administration's
lack of any sense of direction about who or what would
replace Saddam is legendary. Here is a president who,
even as a presidential candidate, treated
"nation-building" and "peacekeeping", to quote Kagan,
"as dirty words". The current American obsession is only
to rid Iraq of its dictatorial regime. But then wishful
thinking takes over. The tedious but awfully significant
issues related to building the administrative state in
Afghanistan are viewed as problems for the
"international community". In all likelihood, the same
will happen in Iraq after Saddam. Thus, the Europeans
are fully justified in asking, does the United States
"have a workable plan for a post-Saddam Iraq? Or will
the Americans bug out after a few months or a year,
leaving the job of putting Iraq back together to the
United Nations or to Europe or, perhaps, to Iran?"
Watching George Bush use the "bully pulpit" of
the presidency to frighten the American public about the
threat potential of Saddam is a scary scene in itself.
One is constantly driven by the horrible feeling that
America's power no longer has a sense of purpose.
Dismantling Iraq today, or perhaps going after Iran in
the near future, and then, maybe, North Korea? What
would the Middle East or Asia look like after
dismantling the so-called axis of evil?
The acts
of dismantlement are the cherished dreams of the
American unilateralists and superhawks. But those same
acts are likely to become the nightmares of the millions
of good and decent people of those regions. Yes, those
people are being ruled by the tyrannies of Saddam and
Kim Jong-il, but they are likely to suffer even longer
if those tyrannical regimes are replaced by the chaos
created by the sole superpower, whose commitment to
nationbuilding remains, at best, dubious.
Ehsan Ahrari, PhD, is a Norfolk,
Virginia, US-based strategic analyst.
(©2002
Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
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