Making War to Keep Peace

by Jeane J. Kirkpatrick

  POSTSCRIPT: THE ARMISTICE

  As Iraqi spokesmen reiterated tirelessly, the Gulf War victory did not defeat Saddam Hussein. It only drove him out of Kuwait and forced inspections on plants where his regime was believed to be developing nuclear and other weapons. Under extreme duress, Saddam had agreed to the sanctions imposed as a condition of the cease-fire.99 But soon it was clear to all that he was violating a number of the terms. It was also clear that nothing much happened when he did. On February 19, 1992, the Security Council noted that Iraq’s “failure to provide full, final and complete disclosure of its weapons capabilities” was a breach of Resolution 687. Nothing happened. A similar Security Council notice on March 11 produced a similar result.100

  Iraq violated the cease-fire agreement repeatedly. It refused to participate in the work of the Boundary Commission demarcating the boundary between Iraq and Kuwait, refused to permit delivery of food and medicine to Kurds in northern Iraq, and defiantly used fixed-wing aircraft (specifically forbidden by the cease-fire and the Safwan Accords of 1992) to attack Shiite villages in southern Iraq. And, of course, Saddam repeatedly refused to provide access to multiple sites for inspection. In the summer of 1992, a confrontation over access to documents took place outside Baghdad’s Department of Agriculture between Iraqi government officials and UN inspectors. Some inspectors—but no American, French, or British personnel—were permitted to enter the building.

  These acts of noncompliance were accompanied by Iraqi demands that the sanctions be lifted. They were met by American, British, and French threats, but these were rendered hollow when the chief of the UN team decided to accept Saddam’s conditions for inspection. Saddam’s offer of limited access to the Department of Agriculture building, and his demand for a veto over membership on the inspection team, were treated as acceptable, even though the Iraqis had already had ample opportunities to remove any materials they desired to protect from UN eyes.101

  Saddam’s conditions may have seemed less offensive to the UN team and its leader, Ambassador Rolf Ekeus, than they did to most observers because they were similar to the conditions under which the parent body of the inspection team—the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)—regularly operates. Many people think the IAEA is authorized to police violations of safeguards and of the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). But the IAEA inspection system is not designed to be efficient in catching cheaters; the agency negotiates with member states the conditions of access to their facilities, much as Ekeus negotiated with Saddam.

  In regular inspections, conducted under regular rules, the IAEA inspects only facilities declared by member states, and these only when nuclear material is present. The agency is not authorized to search for undeclared weapons or facilities. The composition of an inspection team must be approved by the nation being investigated. Members may veto classes of people—for example, Americans—if it judges them unacceptable as inspectors. The number of inspectors and their access to the country can also be controlled. The requirement (imposed by some, but not all, countries) that a UN inspection team procure visas provides early warning of any intention to inspect.102 Saddam sought an escape from the special requirements of the cease-fire—penalties for his aggression in invading Kuwait—and the restoration of Iraq’s previous rights as a UN member, and he largely achieved his goal.

  The IAEA does not provide much protection against governments that lie and cheat. The agency is governed by its member states, some of which are themselves actively engaged in cheating on the principle of nonproliferation and lying about it. Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Libya, and Syria are all members of the IAEA and sit on its governing board. So are other states that have developed or are working hard to develop a nuclear capacity outside the NPT regime.103 Iraq is a signatory to the NPT and had long served on the governing board of the IAEA—during the same period when it was working surreptitiously to develop a capacity to produce nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons of mass destruction.

  The IAEA suffers problems typical of UN and quasi-UN agencies. It is politicized and tends to be dominated by a third world agenda. Its priorities frequently reflect those of developing countries. Technical competence is only one of the criteria for employment in the IAEA.

  Try as it will (and it frequently tries very hard), the IAEA can only monitor countries that are willing to be monitored. It does valuable but limited work in monitoring safeguards for the peaceful use of nuclear energy, but its capacity to deal with problems like those posed by Iraq, or the broader problems of nuclear weapons proliferation, is limited. Today the agency is unable to monitor, much less to police, the activities of Syria, Iran, Pakistan, and India, among other states. What the IAEA can do in the field of nuclear energy is much like what UN peacekeeping forces can do with regard to peace: it can be helpful when the parties are willing.

  By provoking a series of confrontations throughout the 1990s, Saddam sought to undermine and discredit the terms of the Gulf War cease-fire, divide the Security Council, and undermine its resolve. Just as the United States and the United Kingdom had assumed responsibility for forcing Saddam out of Kuwait, they tried to force him to abide by the terms of the cease-fire and abandon his pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. The United States repeatedly used force to uphold the Security Council resolutions, which were violated or ignored by Iraq, often with the tacit acceptance of coalition allies and UN officials.

  American lives were put at risk and billions of dollars were spent in these confrontations with Iraq. At a hearing of the Senate Appropriations Committee concerning supplemental appropriations for continuing operations in Bosnia and Iraq in March 1998, Senator Pete Domenici (R-NM) estimated the extra cost of the continuing Iraqi headache at $5.3 billion through 1998, over and above the ordinary costs of defense in the Persian Gulf. Each confrontation cost from tens to hundreds of millions of dollars. A single cruise missile costs more than a million dollars; in one December 1998 strike, hundreds of the missiles were fired at Iraqi targets by U.S. and U.K. forces. And although these expenses were incurred by the United States to enforce Security Council resolutions, the expenses were not credited to the United States under its UN assessments.

  During the Clinton years, Saddam’s repeated provocations took on a familiar pattern. When he believed the timing was right to extract a concession, he imposed limitations on the ability of the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) to carry out its mandate. The Clinton administration would reject Iraq’s demand and order a military buildup, and Saddam would check international opinion and tailor his actions accordingly. If he sensed lukewarm resistance, he would make demands that either weakened the sanctions regime or diminished the ability of the inspectors to do their job. Negotiations would then take place in which the U.S. administration, acting through a divided Security Council, would split the difference by granting a concession—for example, allowing an increase in Iraqi oil exports. Clinton would declare that diplomacy, yet again, had triumphed over force. From time to time there were variations—the personal intervention of the UN secretary-general or the good offices of a nation sympathetic to Iraq, such as Russia—but the outcome was usually the same: the undermining of the sanctions regime and the inspectors, and another victory for Saddam.

  Again and again, Saddam sought to build support for lifting the sanctions while simultaneously hiding weapons of mass destruction. In each confrontation, the Security Council split over the appropriate response. Often, the United States could not even convince the council to support the use of force to enforce its own resolutions, which demonstrated the council’s impotence in the role of sheriff of the new world order. And as the crises continued to occur, the allies, who had shown such unity during the Gulf War, chose to pursue their own national interests at the expense of multilateralism.

  CHANGING PURPOSES, CHANGING PROBLEMS, AND CHANGING PARADIGMS

  The policy elites positioned to take charge of American foreign policy at the end of the cold war had many ideas about the nature
of the world to come—ideas that were quite different from those that had dominated American politics during the cold war.

  In the past, the strategies that had dominated discussion in the United Nations and the liberal international law community emphasized the inviolability of state sovereignty, the prohibition against intervention in the internal affairs of states, and the illegitimacy of force in international relations. Each of these principles was questioned and revised or abandoned in the first years after the cold war ended, giving way to new arguments in favor of collective action through the United Nations. Actually, a state’s rights to sovereign control and inviolability of its territory and people, the principle of nonintervention in a state’s internal affairs, and the illegitimacy of using force in international affairs had never been accepted as binding by the Soviet Union, the United States, or most other governments. For the Soviet Union, a socialist revolution had priority over the sovereign inviolability of another state’s territory.

  These principles were further subordinated when Bush mobilized force against Saddam, and when the United States and other governments responded to Saddam’s massive violations of human rights in Iraq and to the imminent threat of starvation in Somalia. And they would be called into question again by the Clinton administration’s decision to use force to restore Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s government in Haiti. The prohibition against the use of force, which had seemed compelling to many American liberals a few years earlier, no longer seemed absolute; they were more likely to see the use of force as a variable, depending on the decisions of the Security Council and who occupied the White House.

  As the cold war wound down, the view had been expressed again and again—in publications and speeches, in public policy circles, and in and out of the Bush administration—that future problems (hunger, chaos, anarchy) would transcend national boundaries and would require resolution by multinational groups acting collectively through global institutions in multilateral arenas. For the first time, experts and analysts argued that, whenever possible, the United States should act collectively through global organizations rather than nationally or unilaterally. More and more frequently, the most inclusive and complex multilateral institution in the world, the United Nations, was cited as the preferred arena and instrument for action—on aggression, famine, starvation, and nation building; for containing civil war in the Soviet Union and “restoring democracy” in Haiti; for whatever problem was at hand.

  The Bush and Clinton administrations saw almost no limits to U.S. involvement; they conceived the United States as potentially engaged everywhere in the world, as needed. Both presidents sought to deal with international crises through multilateral action coordinated through the UN.

  George Bush was the first to take steps toward a system of multilateral military operations authorized by the Security Council. “What is at stake,” Bush said, “is more than one small country. It is a big idea, a world where brutality will go unrewarded and aggression will meet collective resistance.”104 It was Bush who set the precedent of greater reliance on and cooperation through the UN. He broke new ground again and again, expanding the Security Council’s jurisdiction by seeking to have Saddam Hussein’s violation of Kurdish human rights declared a threat to international peace and security, and sending armed forces to deliver humanitarian relief in Somalia. He stretched the UN’s jurisdiction and expanded U.S. involvement with the UN.

  Through his repeated moves to multilateral arenas, his resort to the use of force (in Panama, Kuwait, and Somalia), and his break with the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine, Bush took the first long steps toward the new world order and set new limits. The Gulf War had involved a matter of genuine national interest, had enjoyed widely popular support, had a clearly articulated goal, and could be won by mobilizing overwhelming force—yet Bush returned repeatedly to the Security Council for approval. Just as he sought the approval of the U.S. Congress because he wanted to demonstrate his respect for the American Constitution, he demonstrated respect for the rule of international law by engaging the UN.

  Since Bush already had a strong legal and moral foundation on which to base U.S. military assistance to the Kuwaitis, why did he invest so much time and effort courting a broad group of marginally interested nations in multilateral fora? The answer lay in Bush’s dream of establishing the new world order as a reality. As Laurence Martin, director of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, observed:

  George Bush’s proclamation of an impending New World Order in the midst of the Persian Gulf crisis was more than a celebration of a rebirth for the United Nations system, now released from its cold war freeze by the emerging consensus on the Security Council. It was the third international organization, collective security based utopia to be announced to the world by an American president in this century.105

  After Bush’s departure from office, Bill Clinton quickly transformed the operation in Somalia from modest, conventional peacekeeping to a more expansive nation-building role. Clinton’s team had arrived in office with high hopes for peacekeeping, yet soon after the inauguration the Clinton administration joined an accelerating worldwide trend toward using force more frequently in the form of multinational operations under UN auspices and command. Clinton upgraded U.S. troop commitments to a UN peacekeeping force in Somalia and promised forces to help implement any peace agreement achieved in Bosnia. His policies quickly engaged the United States in more new conflicts than ever before.

  The long-term ramifications of decisions made during the Gulf War would not crystallize quickly. After the success of Desert Storm, American troops left Iraq and stayed out for over a decade as the policy to contain Saddam prevailed. No one predicted, then, that the carefully crafted international alliance to keep the peace with Saddam in 1991 would be torn asunder in 2003, casting the United Nations and the United States far apart on the world stage. Nor could conventional thinking have predicted the other, more ominous, unintended consequence: Bush’s decision to send U.S. troops into Saudi Arabia to keep peace and offer protection from Saddam would later provide the pretext for Osama bin Laden’s making war on the United States.

  2.

  SAVING SOMALIA

  The disastrous U.S. intervention in Somalia probably did more to undermine worldwide perceptions of the efficacy of U.S. military power than any event in recent memory…. American actions in Somalia influenced the calculations of leaders in Haiti and Bosnia as they confronted U.S. threats simultaneously.1

  BARRY M. BLECHMAN AND TAMARA COFMEN WITTES,

  Defining Moment: The Threat and Use of Force in American

  Foreign Policy Since 1989

  The end of the cold war left the United States stronger than ever—stronger than any other nation in the world—and the ensuing Gulf War demonstrated the power and skill of American military forces. In Washington, Paris, and other world capitals, and at UN headquarters, foreign service professionals and foreign policy strategists discussed how to use these resources at a moment when our military capacity outstripped the dangers, and the collapse of the Soviet Union created opportunities for new relations among nations. And what better place to start building the new world order than Somalia—one of the poorest countries of East Africa, beset by hunger and near anarchy?

  The independent state of Somalia was born in 1960 out of the remnants of colonial empires and indigenous clans. Somalia had the characteristics of many new African nations: weak borders, a weak sense of national identity, a weak central government, and strong subnational clans.2 Although economically and technologically undeveloped, with a dismally low gross national product and literacy rate, Somalia normally produced enough food for its population. A decade of attempts at democratic self-government ended in 1969 with a coup that brought General Siad Barre to power. Somalia’s location on the Horn of Africa gave it strategic interest for major powers during the cold war, but that interest faded with the demise of superpower competition. Barre ruled Somalia by force until shortly before its problems bur
st onto the world’s television screens.

  By 1990, Somalia had become a good example of what was becoming known as a “failed state”—a people without a government strong enough to govern the country or represent it in international organizations; a country whose poverty, disorganization, refugee flows, political instability, and random warfare had the potential to spread across borders and threaten the stability of other states and the peace of the region.3 At the end of the cold war there were several such failed states in Africa, any one of which could theoretically have been considered “a threat to international peace and security”4 and thus an appropriate object of concern of the UN Security Council and a potential candidate for international peacemaking or peacekeeping.

  To Somalia’s complicated problems, the American foreign policy establishment brought an optimistic perspective and very good intentions. The United States had no significant national interest, economic or strategic, in Somalia and no history of significant involvement. But in late 1991, American officials were moved by the Somalis’ urgent need for food, medicine, and order. Ultimately, the response to that need involved the United Nations, the Organization of African Unity (OAU), the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the United States, and roughly twenty-nine other nations.

  At first, this involvement took the form of a judicious, humanitarian peacekeeping mission, begun during the administration of George H.W. Bush, which avoided the temptation to overreach. During the Clinton administration, however, the Somalia mission took a more ambitious—and arguably irresponsible—direction, toward what became known as “assertive multilateralism.” It was in Somalia that the United States first ventured onto the slippery slope between peacekeeping and nation building through the use of force, and learned a lesson about relying on inefficient and insufficient UN forces to do dirty work that we are not equipped or assigned to do.