42. Ibid., p. 82.
43. Ibid., p. 69.
44. Knapp, “United States and the Middle East,” p. 23f.
45. Maddison, World Economy, p. 151, table 3–21.
46. Lundestad, “Empire,” p. 97.
47. Power, “Problem from Hell,” p. 234.
48. Gause, “U.S.-Saudi Relationship,” p. 347.
49. Ibid. See also Haass, Intervention, p. 28.
50. “Declaration of the World Islamic Front for Jihad Against the Jews and the Crusaders February 23, 1998,” http://www.fas.org/irp/world/para/docs/980223-fatwa.htm
51. “Conversation with Terror,” Time, January 11, 2001.
52. See also the purported letter published on November 24, 2002, http://observer.guardian.co.uk/worldview/story/0,11581,845725,00.html, and the message broadcast on al Jazeera on February 11, 2003.
53. Huntington, Clash of Civilizations. Cf. Lewis, Crisis of Islam.
54. Lewis, What Went Wrong?, p. 159.
55. Burleigh, Third Reich.
56. See Christopher Hitchens, “Against Rationalization,” Nation, October 8, 2001. Hitchens used the phrase “fascism with an Islamic face.”
57. Marshall, Demanding the Impossible, p.284.
58. Pettiford and Harding, Terrorism, p. 36.
59. Conrad, Secret Agent, pp. 65–68.
60. Knapp, “United States and the Middle East,” p. 21f.
61. John Keegan, “Diary,” Spectator, October 13, 2001. During the later stages of the Second World War, five thousand Japanese pilots killed themselves flying kamikaze (“divine wind”) missions. At Okinawa nearly five thousand American sailors were killed, and such attacks sank no fewer than thirty-six vessels. Nor was this the only suicide tactic the Japanese adopted as the Pacific war turned against them. They also trained suicide divers—fukuryu or “crouching dragons”—whose mission was to swim out and attach mines to approaching landing craft.
62. Pettiford and Harding, Terrorism, p. 116.
63. United States Commission on National Security/21st Century, New World Coming: American Security in the 21st Century—Major Themes and Implications, September 15, 1999; http://www.nssg.gov./Reports/NWC.pdf.
64. Martin Wolf, “Frightening Flexibility of Terrorism,” Financial Times, June 3, 2003.
65. On the basis of the 1993 Federal Budget Request: International Institute of Strategic Studies, The Military Balance, 1992–1993, p. 17.
66. Ibid., p. 218.
67. “September 11 Death Toll Revised,” Associated Press, June 11, 2003. It is now estimated that 2,940 people died in the World Trade Center attacks, 189 in the Pentagon attack and 44 when a fourth plane crashed in Pennsylvania.
68. Looney, “Economic Costs.” This proved much too pessimistic.
69. See the debate in University of Chicago, Graduate School of Business, “What’s Next? The Economic Effects of September 11,” http://gsbwww.uchicago.edu/news/gsbchicago/win02/features/effectsl.htm.
70. By way of comparison, the insurance losses caused by the severe flooding in Central Europe in 2002 amounted to $2.5 billion. The death toll of the earthquake in Afghanistan and Pakistan that same year was around 2,000. See the Economist, May 24, 2003.
71. There were nearly 1,000 terrorist incidents in Europe between 1991 and 1996, compared with just 241 in the years 1997 to 2002, a fall of 75 percent.
72. “There can be no military solution to the problem [of Palestine],” retired CENTCOM commander Anthony Zinni told a journalist in 2002. “You know, there is no military solution to terrorism either”: Priest, Mission, p. 11f.
73. The statistics are of course controversial. I have consulted the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, http://www.btselem.org.
74. While there is no conclusive evidence that Saddam Hussein’s regime gave assistance to al Qa’eda, it did support Abu Nidal and Hamas. Saddam also aided the Iranian group Mujahedeen-e-Khlaq and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party.
75. Smith, Talons of the Eagle, p. 5ff.
76. Haass, Intervention, p. 26f.
77. Pettiford and Harding, Terrorism, p.135.
78. Woodward, Bush at War, p. 38.
79. Schirmer, “U.S. Bases in Central America.”
80. Mead, Special Providence, p. 31.
81. Haass, Intervention, p. 25f.
82. Schirmer, “U.S. Bases in Central America.”
83. Priest, Mission, p. 95.
84. Ibid., p. 71.
85. By the mid-1990s these forces would have undertaken over two thousand operations in 167 different countries: Coker, Conflicts, p. 20.
86. Priest, Mission, p. 45f.
87. Boot, Savage Wars, p. 318.
88. Haass, Intervention, p. 30f.
CHAPTER 4: SPLENDID MULTILATERALISM
1. I am grateful to Mr. Arria for permission to quote what I hope will one day be the title of a memoir by him about his time at the Security Council.
2. Woodward, Bush at War, p. 333.
3. The number is controversial. The United States claimed that its “coalition of the willing” numbered forty-nine. However, one independent survey on March 28, 2003, could confirm the support of only thirty-seven countries, with a further ten countries apparenly, though not explicitly, supportive. Only Britain, Australia and Poland sent fighting forces to Iraq, though another ten countries offered small numbers of noncombat forces, mostly either medical teams and specialists in decontamination: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S.-led_coalition_against_Iraq#Invasion_coalition.
4. The phrase is usually ascribed to the Marquess of Salisbury, but his minister George Goschen seems to have used it more often. Salisbury regarded isolation as highly dangerous and preferred to embed Britain in a network of alliances and understandings.
5. By June 1998, according to the UN, the United States owed about $1.5 billion in dues and assessments. This was made up of $298 million owing for the 1998 regular budget and $271 for the regular budgets of prior years, as well as $95 million for peacekeeping operations in 1998 and $871 million for peacekeeping in previous years: Christopher S. Wren, “Unpaid Dues at the U.N. Could Cost U.S. Its Vote,” New York Times, June 28, 1998. Under the Helms-Biden compromise of 1999 the United States agreed to pay slightly under half its arrears in return for a series of reforms of the UN and the other affiliated institutions.
6. http://www.un.int/usa/FactSheets_GA58.htm.
7. Madeleine Albright, “Think Again: United Nations,” Foreign Policy, September–October 2003, p. 22.
8. The United States walked out of the International Court in 1984 after being sued by Nicaragua for mining its harbors.
9. Forman et al., United States in a Global Age, p. 10f. The principal opt-outs are from the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the Antiballistic Missile Treaty, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, the Biological Weapons Convention (verification protocol), a proposed UN convention on small arms and light weapons, the Ottawa Convention banning the production, trade and use of antipersonnel land mines, the conventions on the Rights of the Child and on the Elimnation of Discrimination against Women, and (perhaps most famously) the Kyoto Protocol on global warming.
10. Karnow, Vietnam, p. 16.
11. Department of Veterans Affairs, http://www.va.gov/pressrel/amwars01.html.
12. Priest, Mission, p. 69.
13. Boot, Savage Wars, p. 320.
14. A recurrent error of recent American policy since 1991 has been to give military enterprises names more suitable to brands of medication. “Provide Comfort,” “Southern Watch” “Deliberate Force” and “Enduring Freedom” all are unwittingly reminiscent of remedies for diarrhea.
15. Haass, Intervention, p. 37.
16. Ibid., p. 168.
17. Gause, “U.S.-Saudi Relationship,” p. 351.
18. Ibid., p. 343. In 1990 the Saudi armed forces totaled just 111,500. Iraq, with a population less than double the size, had an army five times larger.
19. Bergen, Holy Wa
r Inc., p. 85f.
20. Reich, “United States and Israel”, p. 235f.
21. Ibid., p. 237.
22. Ibid., p. 236.
23. Bowden, Black Hawk Down, p. 166.
24. Note that the aversion of American politicians and voters to military casualties has nothing to do with the attitudes of American service personnel, whose often reckless bravery Aidid’s men sought to exploit.
25. Haass, Intervention, p. 46.
26. See Power, Problem from Hell.
27. The United Nations Convention of the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of 1948 is a widely misunderstood document. Its second article sets out a clear definition of the word that Raphael Lemkin coined four years before. It covers “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such”:
a.killing members of the group;
b.causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
c.deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
d.imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
e.forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
It is not only genocide that is declared a punishable offense by the convention, but also conspiracy to commit genocide, direct and public incitement to commit genocide, attempt to commit genocide and complicity in genocide. There can be no question that according to this definition, crimes of genocide were committed in Burundi in 1972, Iraq in 1987–88, Bosnia in 1992 and 1995, Rwanda in 1994 and Kosovo in 1998 and 1999.
28. Simms, Unfinest Hour, p. 54.
29. Ibid., p. 56. Cf. Shawcross, Deliver Us from Evil, p. 83.
30. Simms, Unfinest Hour, p. 339f.
31. Ibid., p. 57ff.
32. Ibid., pp. 88, 95f, 120f, 130f.
33. Ibid., p. 133.
34. Shawcross, Deliver Us from Evil, pp. 92, 94.
35. Holbrooke, To End a War, pp. 231–312.
36. Ibid., pp. 318, 322.
37. The full text of the agreement can be found at http://www.mondediplomatique.fr/dossiers/kosovo/rambouillet.html.
38. See my article on the subject in the Financial Times, April 3, 1999. See also Bobbitt, Shield of Achilles, pp. 468–77. Article 2(4) of the UN Charter states that “all Members shall refrain … from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state,” while Article 2(7) prohibits intervention “in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state.” In addition, the General Assembly’s 1970 Declaration on Principles of International Law denies members “the right to intervene, directly or indirectly, for any reason whatever, in the internal affairs of any other state.” Under the UN Charter, force may be used only in self-defense or with the explicit authorization of the Security Council in response to an act of aggression (Chapter VII, Articles 39 to 51). Only by ignoring the UN Charter (or, in the words of Tony Blair, “qualifying … the principle of non-interference … in important respects”) could the military intervention by NATO on behalf of the Albanians of Kosovo be justified. See Caplan, “Humanitarian Intervention: Which Way Forward?” p. 25f.
39. On the “ ‘no casualties’ mindset” that characterized the war, see Boot, Savage Wars, pp. 325–27.
40. New York Times, August 15, 2003.
41. Ignatieff, Empire Lite, p. 70f.
42. Boot, Savage Wars, p. 327. The war’s diplomatic low point came when the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade was unintentionally hit by a guided missile. Still more damage was done to the legitimacy of the NATO intervention by the use of cluster bombs on civilian targets in Serbia.
43. Ignatieff, Virtual War.
44. This was the conclusion of Ferguson, Cash Nexus.
45. Power, “Problem from Hell.”
46. Shawcross, Deliver Us from Evil, p. 118f.
47. Ibid., pp. 106, 119, 207ff.
48. Ibid., p. 211.
49. Bacevich, American Empire, p. 202f.
50. New York Times, September 24, 2003.
51. Woodward, Bush at War, esp. pp. 30, 150.
52. Bush’s words to a group of senators on September 13, 2001, quoted by Howard Fineman in Newsweek, September 24, 2001.
53. Clausewitz, On War, ch. 1, p. 87.
54. Around ten thousand Mahdists were killed to just forty-eight British soldiers. For an account of the battle, see Ferguson, Empire, pp. 267–70.
55. American forces had been operating in post-Soviet Central Asia since the mid-1990s, in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan as well as in Pakistan. But it was still far from easy to mount even an air war from territories so recently added to the U.S. sphere of influence: Priest, Mission, pp. 38, 101f.
56. See the exceptionally well-informed account in Woodward, Bush at War.
57. Text from http://usinfo.state.gov/topical/pol/terror/secstrat.htm.
58. See, e.g., Galston, “Perils of Preemptive War.”
59. Leffler, “9/11.”
60. Shawcross, Deliver Us from Evil, p. 224f.
61. The list of transgressions was eloquently presented to the House of Commons by the prime minister, Tony Blair, on March 18, 2003.
62. Six in 1999, three in 2000, three in 2001 and five in 2002 alone.
63. Shawcross, Deliver Us from Evil, pp. 250, 320.
64. Stanley Hoffman, “America Goes Backward,” New York Review of Books, June 12, 2003; James P. Rubin, “Stumbling into War,” Foreign Affairs, September–October 2003; Madeleine K. Albright, “Bridges, Bombs or Bluster,” ibid.
65. Pollack, Threatening Storm.
66. “The Divided West,” Financial Times supplement, June 2003, p. 5.
67. Text at http://ods-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N02/682/26/PDF/N0268226.pdf? OpenElement.
68. It would be interesting to see how credible this document looks today.
69. See the inferences drawn by Mark Danner, “Iraq: The New War,” New York Review of Books, September 25, 2003, p. 90.
70. “The Divided West,” Financial Times supplement, June 2003, p. 5.
71. “It is not well brought-up behavior,” snapped Chirac. “They missed a good opportunity to keep quiet.” For good measure, he added: “If they wanted to diminish their chances of joining Europe, they could not have found a better way.”
72. Hoffman, “America Goes Backward,” p. 74. Hoffman argues that the United States is pursuing “a policy of hubris in which international domination is presented under the mask of universal benign ideals.” If anyone was wearing that mask in March 2003, it was surely Jacques Chirac.
73. Mark Husband and Stephen Fidler, “No Smoking Gun,” Financial Times, June 4, 2003.
74. Financial Times, June 4, 2003.
75. Testimony of John Scarlett before the Hutton Inquiry into the death of Michael Kelly, August 28, 2003: http://www.the-hutton-inquiry.org.uk/.
76. Hansard, March 18, 2003: http://www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/cm200203/cmhansrd/cm030318/debtext/30318–06.htm and-08.htm.
77. Woodward, Bush at War, p. 106.
78. Rodric Braithwaite, “End of the Affair,” Prospect, May 2003, pp. 20–23.
79. Gilbert, Never Despair, p. 1271.
80. Ibid.
81. Dimbleby and Reynolds, Ocean Apart, p. 255.
82. Ibid., p. 252.
83. Ibid., p. 288.
84. Ibid., p. 264.
85. Pew Global Attitudes Project, “Views of a Changing World,” June 2003.
86. Richard Burkholder, “Ousting Saddam Hussein ‘Was Worth Hardships,’ ” Gallup Web site: http://www.gallup.com/poll/tb/goverpubli/20030923c.asp.
87. Ibid.
88. Woodward, Bush at War, p. 220.
89. Ibid., pp. 231, 237.
90. Ignatieff, Empire Lite, p. 2.
91. Etzioni, “Implications of American Anti-Terrorism Coalition,” p. 26.
<
br /> 92. Stewart Stogel, “Food Fight,” Time, May 3, 2003.
CHAPTER 5: THE CASE FOR LIBERAL EMPIRE
1. Louis, Imperialism at Bay, p. 227.
2. Ibid., p. 14.
3. On the limits of sovereignty and the various models of partial sovereignty, including empire, see Krasner, “Troubled Societies.”
4. Diamond, “Universal Democracy.”
5. Townsend, European Colonial Expansion, p. 19.
6. Despite his repeated demands for a “timetable” for decolonization, the time frame Roosevelt had in mind was always kept vague. He spoke of some South Asian colonies as being “ready for self-government in 20 years,” but Borneo he expected would need a century of trusteeship: ibid., pp. 157, 437.
7. Louis, Imperialism at Bay, p. 175. See Jeffery, “Second World War,” p. 314.
8. Louis and Robinson, “Imperialism of Decolonization.”
9. The British never tired of pointing out these inconsistencies. They lost no opportunity to remind the Americans of their de facto imperial position in Hawaii, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. It turned out, conveniently enough, that these lay “outside the scope of the trusteeship program”: Louis, Imperialism at Bay, p. 236. Later they referred to the preferential treatment accorded by Roosevelt to the Russian empire as the “salt water fallacy”: ibid., p. 570.
10. Alesina et al., “Economic Integration and Political Disintegration,” pp. 1, 23.
11. Diamond, “Promoting Real Reform in Africa.”
12. Ibid., p. 11.
13. They were Lesotho, Pakistan, Egypt, Botswana, Malaysia, Malta, Barbados, Cyprus, Israel, Ireland, Singapore, Hong Kong, Canada and, of course, the United States.
14. Calculated from World Bank, World Development Indicators database. Per capita GDP is adjusted for purchasing power parity in current international dollars.
15. Ibid. Income refers to gross national income per capita, Atlas method (current U.S. dollars), 2002.
16. The exceptions are Bangladesh, Nepal, Laos, Cambodia, Kyrgyzia and Tajikistan: two former British colonies, two former French colonies and two former Russian colonies.
17. Diamond, “Promoting Real Reform in Africa.”
18. James Wolfensohn, “A Good ‘Pro-Poor’ Cancún Could Help Rich as Well,” Financial Times, September 8, 2003.
19. Tobias Buck, Guy de Jonquiéres and Frances Williams, “Fischler’s New Era for Europe’s Farmers,” Financial Times, June 27, 2003. Cf. Runge, “Agrivation.”
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