In Defense of America (12 page)
Trade: The United States Has Largely
Worked Within the Rules
If climate change is one of America’s more vulnerable flanks, its promotion of trade liberalization is one of its strongest. The World Trade Organization is perhaps the single international institution and set of rules for which the United States finds the most use. At least it finds the WTO useful as a court —in many years the United States takes more disputes there for resolution than other countries. Like every other country on the planet, it finds the treaty-making side of the organization harder to work with —as the process of trying to write deals demands repeated concessions on all sides.
America’s behavior has hardly been perfect. Nor are candidates for Congress or the presidency in an election year the best test of America’s free-trade impulses; if you took their torrent of promises to protect American jobs at face value, then the United States would be an island, with nothing bought or sold over its borders.
But to say that America’s instincts are overwhelmingly in the direction of liberalizing trade is fair. President George W. Bush’s repeated defense of that principle is one of his few unambiguously useful legacies, for the United States and other countries.
Conclusion
The United States has undeniably been high-handed in its approach to international law, an inclination present from its creation. This was flamboyantly the case under the administration of George W. Bush, at least until the worsening situation in Iraq left it chastened.
But Bush’s skepticism was a continuation of the approach taken by President Clinton’s administration —in Kosovo, in some trade talks —if wildly more abrasive in tone. It was perhaps an inevitable result of the United States’ position as the sole superpower and its growing frustration with increasingly strained postwar institutions. Its attitude of “picking and choosing” among those institutions is often justified. They have not all worn well, and while many clearly need reform —the United Nations, some of the arms treaties, and the International Monetary Fund, to name just a few —it is a task so formidable it may be impossible.
That frustration does not make America a lawless nation. Indeed, it is hard to portray a country so imbued with laws —and lawyers —as contemptuous of the discipline, let alone one which has played such a central part in creating the rules and institutions that have helped run the world for half a century. Iraq does not destroy that claim, because there are so many other instances when the United States can argue that it does respect those principles, but it is in its interests to show that it is still committed to that cause.
THE IRAQ INVASION: STUPID BUT NOT MALIGN
The mess in which America finds itself in Iraq, more than five years after the invasion, has been one of the provocations for this book. The United States’ reputation for military supremacy has disintegrated. Its foreign policy is in confusion, beset with a horrendous list of problems, many connected to Iraq. Most of all, America threw away its reputation for competence and judgment, and, for many, its claim to be acting to improve the world. Its enemies are delighted, its allies bewildered.
The questions now are whether anything can be said to redeem the invasion and how much America should be judged by this debacle. Should its future efforts abroad —and its ideology of exporting democracy —be condemned because of its breathtaking mistakes in Iraq?
There are a few points in America’s favor, although I am not going to defend either the conception or execution of the war overall. I have never been one of its dogmatic opponents. In the run-up to the war, I was in the camp of those willing to be persuaded, but by the time of the invasion, had not been, skeptical of the urgency and objecting to the lack of international support. But whatever one’s view then, the years since have revealed an ugly drama of ideology, wishful thinking, and outright duplicity on the part of the administration. In the United States’ record in Iraq, there is little defense against the charges of arrogance, naïveté, deliberate suppression of inconvenient facts, and indifference to the need to justify the action. There is no way to commend America for an invasion that led to the deaths of probably hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and the displacement of millions, as well as the deaths of more than four thousand American soldiers.
It is possible that Iraq may yet “come right” in the brutal sense of being relatively stable and not a cause of turmoil to its neighbors, although there are plenty of signs that it will remain a hideous and dangerous place for those not on the winning side of its countless sectarian divisions. Even if it does improve, America will hardly be able to take credit for a transformation so out of control and at such cost.
Yet there are still some arguments in America’s defense (even if each one is ringed around with deep qualifications). It did get rid of a dictator who had killed many of his own people, and promotion of democracy is in itself an honorable aim, although the United States entirely failed to understand how the hatred among Iraq’s different groups might make such a transition tremendously difficult, if not impossible.
America can also argue that recent experience has already changed it and strengthened its own democracy. Bush’s successors will take care to sound very different on such themes. Congress (and the media) are now reminded of their role in challenging the president. The intelligence agencies are strengthened in their ability to defend their own findings against the administration. The army has been converted to the need to be good at peace building as well as fighting, a shift that will make American policy far more versatile. Americans themselves will take less on faith from their leaders.
However, America will be judged most on how it behaves in Iraq and the region. It will find it hard to defend its claim to being a force for improving the world if it pulls out and leaves Iraq and its neighbors in turmoil. It is surely inconceivable —whatever the wild assertions of the 2008 presidential candidates about how many combat troops will stay in Iraq or go home —that the United States would exit in a manner that surrenders any influence it might still retain.
Indeed, the bitter benefit of Iraq —and America’s best defense, years from now —may be that managing the fallout from the conflict has demanded the sustained engagement of the superpower in a region that, even if Saddam Hussein had stayed in power, was likely not going to stay peaceful and would have needed its attention.
Toppling the Dictator
The image of the statue of Saddam Hussein toppling into the square below, pulled down by jubilant Iraqis, is the one that America went to war to find. The memory is now hollow, given what followed.
All the same, it is worth keeping in mind that Saddam was exceptionally unpleasant, even in a harsh part of the world. He directed that brutality particularly against the Shias, some 60 percent of the population, and the Kurds in the north, 20 percent, killing men, women, and children —indeed, whole villages —who opposed him, sometimes with chemical weapons. That would have been stronger as a partial justification for war had the worst outrages been recent, rather than a decade earlier, but there was no shortage of evidence of Saddam’s brutality up to the end.
What is more, his regime was working out how to evade the sanctions imposed after his 1990 invasion of Kuwait and his defeat by international forces. Russia, in particular, was keen to begin trading again with Iraq, and there are good reasons to think the sanctions regime would have crumbled within years. The lesson of that experience is not that such sanctions don’t work —evidently, as we now know, they prevented him from getting the nuclear and chemical weapons he sought —but that they are very hard to keep in place over the years, as opportunistic countries wriggle to open links again with the pariah.
Saddam’s outrages, and the threat of the weapons he might acquire, were not, on their own, anything like adequate justification for going to war, not in international law, nor in the politics of the United Nations Security Council, nor in the wider historic sense of “a just war.”
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But they were an important step on the road to making that case, had the rest of it been better.
It wasn’t. The administration’s intelligence on those threats was slim, as it turned out, and its presentation of that evidence duplicitous, as were its claims of links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. Its claim to have just cause for war crumbled when its forces failed to find weapons of mass destruction. Of course, intelligence can always be wrong, but after the spectacle of its abuse by the Bush administration (and, for that matter, by the Blair government), voters, armed forces, and other nations are not going to accept again that they should take it on faith. And it is impossible to say without extraordinary blitheness that what replaced Saddam is better, given the death toll. Ordinary Iraqis have to live with more violence, and with local “mini-Saddams,” even if the dictator is gone.
But it is still worth acknowledging that in the tangle of motives which took the Bush administration to war (not least, many have speculated, George W. Bush’s desire to outdo his father), one of the guiding inspirations was a very American faith in democratic values and traditions —liberal values in the classic sense of the word. Reams have already been written about how the neoconservatives who so influenced the White House and Pentagon drew on that philosophy and turned it into a battle plan. It would be wrong to call Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney anything other than old-fashioned conservatives, but Paul Wolfowitz, as Rumsfeld’s deputy at the Pentagon, was one of the neocons best placed to influence them. Those advisers were grotesquely crude in applying their beliefs to Iraq without care for the circumstances of that country or for the costs of getting it wrong. Their dream of an American-friendly, democratic Middle East now looks farcical. In Iraq, the ideal was made hideous by its use to justify every decision, graced with flippant slogans, of which perhaps the worst was Donald Rumsfeld’s “Freedom’s untidy,” on April 11, 2003, when he was irritated by questions about the looting of Baghdad. But it was a dream rooted in a profound faith in a philosophy which has at other times produced some of the best impulses of American policy.
That is one of several reasons why it is perverse to claim that the war was “all about oil,” as many try to do (a brigade that was given unexpected support in September 2007 by Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, in his memoir). Saddam Hussein hardly deprived the world’s oil markets of his country’s production, nor could he, in any obvious way, have deprived America of it, given that Iraq’s contribution simply adds to the total supply of a commodity.
It is striking that the idealism of the war’s planners was shared by so many bright American officials in Iraq immediately after the invasion, even if tempered with a better appreciation of the obstacles. Many of them were very young, as accounts of the aftermath have noted, but some were not, and they brought their professional experience to bear on the predicament, together with a conviction in what they were doing. I remember one conversation in Baghdad in June 2003, three months after the invasion, when the worst problems appeared to be the sabotage of electricity pylons. An official from the General Accounting Office in Washington, sent in to try to bring order to the government departments, acknowledged freely how seductive Americans still found the images of the cheering crowds liberated by America in Paris more than sixty years ago, and how disconcerted Americans in Iraq had been not to encounter the same reaction. But that was not a confession of naïveté, exactly —more a wry acknowledgment of his country’s mentality, combined still with a deep personal belief that Iraq could be improved. One of the most moving points of
No End in Sight,
the movie and later the book by Charles Ferguson, of the Council on Foreign Relations, is the chronicle of enormously bright Americans who threw their energies into trying to make the transition in Iraq work, and believed for some time that they could.
Democracy in Iraq
The failure so far of democracy to take proper root in Iraq is a blunt lesson to the United States in why such an enterprise demands much more than elections. For a democracy to work, minorities, or the losing side in elections, have to be able to go about their daily lives regardless of who is in power, and to have faith that in future elections they might win. Otherwise, they have every incentive to keep fighting.
To protect minorities or those not in power, there must be a constitution that sets out their rights. There must be courts which will uphold that fairly. There must be police to enforce it (and Kosovo and Northern Ireland show how long it can take to establish fair policing, trusted by all sides, in a deeply split community).
Iraq is not at that point, and it may not get there. The greatest obstacle to its embrace of democracy, and to peace, is the disinclination of the Shia majority, now in charge after years of brutal suppression by Saddam, to share any power with the Sunnis who were his elites. The 2007 “surge” of U.S. troops brought down the violence, but it did not cure the paralysis at the heart of government: the refusal, every time it came to the wire, of Shia leaders to share power and oil revenue with Sunnis or the Kurds in the north.
America was not wrong in believing that its own federalism held the key to the future structure of Iraq —in theory. That model still represents the ideal of how to weld together a country of very different groups. But America was unconsciously blithe about the difficulty of getting there in a country where the factions loathe one another. It forgot how long it took to put its own Constitution and Bill of Rights in place, and how rare the success of its own federation has been in assuming that Iraq would fall into the same model. It was also guilty of wanting it both ways —wanting to install democracy, but also wanting to pick the people who would emerge on top.
That does not mean that the pursuit of democracy should be avoided. But Iraq shows that it cannot be enforced. And if one side does not want to share power with the others, as is the case in Iraq now, it will take a long effort of intervention by outsiders, which may still fail, to persuade it that it should.