The Sierra Club, founded in 1892, is one of the world’s oldest environmental clubs, now with 1.3 million supporters. When I was a child at school in Washington, DC, in the 1970s, the curriculum was threaded with lectures about recycling and protecting wildlife, a good couple of decades before that became standard in British schools. “It was America which put environmentalism on the world’s agenda in the 1970s and 1980s,” recalled Glenn Prickett, a senior vice president for Conservation International. “But since then, somehow, the wealthiest and most powerful country on the planet has gone to the back of the line.”6
A second point in the United States’ favor is that the environmental laws it passed in those decades are some of the world’s toughest. The 1980 Superfund act (formally known as the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act), a tax on petroleum and chemical industries to pay for cleaning up toxic land, and the five separate Clean Air acts between 1963 and 1990 were very expensive for American businesses and state governments. So was the drive to tighten health regulations, such as the 1980s move to ban and phase out asbestos. It is a measure of the importance legislators attached to the issue that they were made national standards, not left to states’ discretion.
The United States also moved quickly, when a 1976 National Academy of Sciences report found damage to the ozone layer, to ban chlorofluorocarbons from aerosols. It was one of the driving forces behind the 1987 Montreal Protocol to ban substances damaging to the ozone layer and develop replacement technologies, a move resisted initially by the European Union.
What is more, the United States enforces these laws, even if their application is challenged in court. The folly of Lloyd’s of London, the three-hundred-year-old insurance market, in thinking that insurance against these costs could be secured against the private wealth and property of the British middle classes was a misjudgment that brought parts of the market to collapse in the late 1980s. But it may have stemmed from a failure to appreciate that in the United States, once a law has been passed, it is generally enforced.
In contrast, although the European Union has been prolific in passing ambitious regulations on environmental standards, the marvel is how patchily they are enforced. Drinking-water standards, cleanliness of beaches, the protection of wildlife habitats —the European Commission in Brussels has had plenty to say on all of these. But the countries on Europe’s southern fringe, Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal —the poorer ones, before the influx of those from the former Soviet bloc —have often been treated with some lenience when they have failed to comply.
Even in France, one of the founders of the European Union and one of its richest countries, compliance has been patchy. The left-wing government of Lionel Jospin between 1997 and 2002 struggled to impose an “eco-tax,” to eliminate nitrates from drinking water (a particularly troublesome consequence of farming), and to comply with the toughest measures of the Kyoto accords on climate change, even though he had Green Party members among his ministers.
But then we come to climate change, and America has a more difficult case to make, one that, so far, has won no worldwide sympathy. The Bush administration did, in February 2008, say for the first time that the United States would agree to be bound by limits on emissions —but only if China and India were, too. But that sidesteps their main objection: that the emissions of the developed world have caused the problem and that rich countries should bear the cost of mitigating climate change.
The United States’ best defense is that it would find it much more expensive than would other countries to make those changes to its economy, and if it did so abruptly, it would have an effect on growth that would also hurt other economies, particularly the poorest. Given its size, and its reliance on road transport, America is inevitably more dependent on gasoline than are smaller, more densely inhabited countries.
America might add to that another argument (one I’m sympathetic to, even though I’m conscious that it drives my greenest colleagues to a point beyond anger), that there is a moral value in encouraging people’s mobility because it encourages their understanding of one another and their ability to work together. Americans’ delight in crisscrossing their own country springs from the exhilaration of the American project itself, even though it does carry a cost in pollution.
There is some force in America’s defense of its difference from other countries. The Kyoto Protocol, which sets targets for reducing emissions or requires countries to trade permits for them if they exceed the set levels, was much easier for European countries to meet, as it coincided with a shift from coal- to gas-fired power stations, which immediately reduced emissions. Germany was helped by the closure of many old, dirty East German industries, which scythed through the emissions levels of a united Germany, as well as by the slow shrinkage of its aging population. Even given those advantages, the European Union has not found it easy to make the required cuts. The European Environment Agency, a Copenhagen-based think tank, warned in November 2007 that the fifteen European countries covered by the Kyoto commitment (not including those who joined the European Union since 2004) were on course to achieve only a 4 percent cut in emissions, not the 8 percent required.
The United States’ proposal to research new green technologies and to export or give them to other countries is also a strong point in its favor. The speed with which it did this with ozone-damaging chemicals was dramatic, although the demands of innovation were less, as substitutes were developed with comparative ease once the need was clear. In December 2007, Bush signed into law new rules on energy efficiency in cars and houses —the Energy Independence and Security Act —which had overwhelming bipartisan support in Congress. That will slowly but profoundly shift Americans toward cars and appliances that use less fuel.
It is also fair for the Bush administration —and the Clinton administration before it —to claim that there is no point in the president’s signing on to curbs that Congress will never pass. A Russian president can push through a law on a whim, but the leader of a democracy cannot, let alone one with the separation of powers dictated by the U.S. Constitution. To that extent, President Bush could be said merely to have been honest in pointing out to the world, at the start of his presidency, that Congress would not pass the Kyoto Protocol, a blunt declaration that President Clinton had avoided making.
However, the weakness of America’s case, under Clinton as well as Bush, is that administrations have not tried harder to persuade Congress to back reforms —ones better designed than the Kyoto Protocol, say —building on the significant minority that wants change. The United States could have been much more vigorous, for example, in investigating market-based ways to curb emissions.
It helps the United States’ case that, as well as new federal efforts, some of the states have begun moving on their own to encourage behavior that would reduce carbon emissions. That contradicts the caricature of America as a country unified in its lack of concern about global warming.
The same phenomenon is true in all developed countries —people are concerned about global environmental problems but do not much want to sacrifice their own standard of living to help. It is unfair for countries that, because of the structure of their economy, find these changes easy, to accuse America of entirely neglecting something that it would find more difficult.
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.
Chapter 7
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.” 1 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 viol
ence, 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.
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