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[Previous entry: "Bevvies all round"] [Main Index] [Next entry: "Endex for the Distasteful Duo?"] 19 July 2003: "Another look at the case for war"
The opening leader in this week's Economist takes another look at the case for war, this time in retrospect, and comes to pretty much the same conclusions as it did before. Like many folks who were in favour of removing Saddam, but no big fans of Bush's foreign policy, I've been troubled by doubts, and I'm happy to say the piece does a good job of dealing with most of them. But the piece also gives a couple of caveats; the war may have gone better than expected, but the rebuilding of Iraq got off to a bad start, and may yet end in disaster. Needless to say, this is an outcome which is to be avoided. 1) Were there good grounds to threaten Mr Hussein with an imminent military attack if he did not comply with United Nations resolutions? 2) When he did not comply, were there good grounds for carrying out that threat? 3) After the military victory, have the allies acted in such a way as to make things better both in Iraq and in the region as a whole?It then proceeds to answer these questions, basically answering "yes" to the first two, and "it's too early to tell" to the last. In turn, Farrell addresses these points one at a time. [T]he thing about credible threats is that they have to be conditional if they’re going to be effective. In other words, you threaten to do something nasty to someone, unless that someone does whatever it is that you’re telling them to. [...]Unfortunately, this argument only works if you're willing to overlook the chronological order of events. Farrell is correct in that initially (prior to August 2002) the Bush administration—or to be more exact, that part of the administration represented by Rumsfeld and Cheney—proclaimed that it was going to inflict régime change on Iraq regardless of international opinion. However, at the insistence of Tony Blair and Colin Powell, the objectives were changed; the diplomatic route would be taken first, cajoling the Security Council to give Iraq one final opportunity to comply with resolution 687 (and all the subsequent resolutions which called on it to comply with 687). If Saddam failed to take this final opportunity, all bets would be off. So, initially, yes, the administration's state intent was not conditional; but the moment the Security Council passed resolution 1441, the threat did become conditional. Farrell continues with the second item: First of all, the Economist glides over the unfortunate fact that there is zero evidence ex post that Hussein posed a serious short term threat, as US and UK officials claimed [...]While this is arguably true (depending what you mean by "glide"), it's also irrelevant to the The Economist argument. The condition for averting military action was that Iraq comply with resolution 1441; and the point The Economist makes is that Iraq was clearly in "material breach" of this resolution. And at the risk of repeating myself, resolutions 687 and following placed the burden of proof on Iraq to demonstrate to the satisfaction of UNMOVIC and the IAEA that it had divested itself of all NBC weapons stockpiles and development programmes; the resolutions did not require UNMOVIC and the IAEA—or, for that matter, anyone else—to prove Iraq possessed either. Thus, the absence of "evidence ex post" is not only using hindsight, it is not germane to the question as posed by The Economist. On the Economist’s side of the equation is the behaviour of the French, which certainly didn’t inspire much confidence that they were taking the problem of proliferation seriously. But taking action, as the US and Britain did, without the sanction of the UN, is arguably more damaging still.Here we have a serious inconsistency. Given the French attitude and the fact that France is a veto-wielding Permanent Member, it follows that military action was never going to receive "the sanction of the UN"; and since, as Farrell acknowledges, the motivations of the French were highly suspect, it follows that lack of approval from "the UN" is not, in and of itself, sufficient to invalidate a particular course of action. Had the People's Republic of China been a Permanent Member in 1950, instead of the Republic of China, the troops opposing the North Korean invasion would not have been fighting with the approval of the Security Council; all other things being equal, however, this would have made no difference to the validity of the operation. Farrell kicks off his attempted refutation of the answer to the third question by quoting part of the leader: What can be said, though, is that so far the picture is mixed but on balance moderately encouraging. President Bush has certainly begun a serious effort to persuade Israel and Palestine to make peace, and that process has inched edgily forwards. …In Iraq itself the Americans made an appallingly bad start. Their reasons for having had no post-war plan are almost as incomprehensible as Saddam’s reasons for having neither complied with the UN resolution nor deployed any banned weapons. They have also failed, so far, to beat back or deter the guerrilla tactics being used against them. There are, though, some encouraging signs too. Chief among them is the establishment during the past week of the new 25-member Iraqi Governing Council.He then continues: Notice that the Economist leads off with an irrelevancy, hardly a sign of confidence in their argument. US efforts to jump-start the Israel-Palestine peace process are laudable, if belated. However, they have almost nothing whatsoever to do with the merits or defects of the US invasion of Iraq.This representation is less than honest, since he has omitted the opening paragraph dealing with the third question, which reads: Ultimately, even if the grounds for going to war in March 2003 were strong, the case for it also depended on the notion that America and its allies were determined to make the country and its troubled region more peaceful, more prosperous and less threatening in the future than might have been the case had Mr Hussein been left in place. Many of the opponents of the war thought they were not: that Iraq might be left to collapse in civil war or else might be repressed and exploited as an American colony; that countless fresh grievances would be created, causing more terrorism; and that there would be no serious American effort to bring about peace between Israel and the Palestinians.Emphasis mine. Thus, the segment does not, in actual fact, "lead off with an irrelevancy"; moreover, it addresses a concern voiced by various opponents of the war. If that concern had "almost nothing whatsoever to do with the merits or defects of the US invasion" (a point on which I am inclined to agree) Farrell is directing his objection at the wrong party. More important, however, is the fact that Farrell omits the opening line of the paragraph he does quote, which reads: It is, of course, far too soon to come to a judgment about this. What can be said, [...]This line forms the essence of The Economist's response to its own third question, and as such is possibly the most important sentence in the whole article. The response to two of the three questions has been an unequivocal "yes," but as the leader opines, two out of three may not be bad, but it's not good enough. As a result, the answer to the third question is crucial to the matter of the war's validity as a whole. Thus, to omit this sentence strikes me as odd in the extreme. In his conclusion Farrell states, Clearly, the editors realize that they’ve been sold a pup; they’ve toned down their previous assertions that Saddam presented an imminent threat to world peace, without explicitly abandoning them.That's rather a straw man, since The Economist has not, as far as I can tell, ever argued that the threat presented by Saddam was "imminent." Perhaps the editors do feel they've had the rug pulled from underneath them, but if so, this is entirely a result of the American failure to plan beyond the waging of the actual war, something which did not become apparent until after the cessation of "major combat operations." But more damningly - does the Economist really think that the potential long term threat that it’s worried about - proliferation of nuclear weapons to unstable or dangerous regimes - has been mitigated by the decision to go in at short notice, all guns blazing?I'm not sure where this "short notice" comes from. As the leader points out, almost superfluously, Operation "Iraqi Freedom" was launched twelve years after the passing of resolution 687. In the intervening time, just about every method of coercion in the diplomatic toolbox short of full-scale ground war had been tried to no avail. Resolution 687 declared the cease-fire between Iraq and the members of the 1991 Coalition, conditional upon Iraq's full compliance with the conditions set out in the resolution. One can only imagine the cosequences of allowing Iraq to continue in the manner it had. Note that UNMOVIC had been existence for almost four years before a member of the organisation ever set foot in the country it was supposed to inspect; had it not been for the pressure exerted by the US, UNMOVIC might never have gotten into Iraq at all! How would this have advanced the cause of non-proliferation? Of course, UNMOVIC's role was not to verify that Iraq had divested itself of nuclear weapons; that was the job of the IAEA. But that brings up another point, which is that Farrell is neglecting bioweapons, chemical warfare agents and delivery systems; questions remained unanswered regarding all three categories right up to the start of the war. It's actually noteworthy that the article (in that conveniently skipped paragraph) speaks of "the grounds for going to war in March 2003"; in other words, failure to adequately deal with the aftermath of the war might invalidate the war as it has been conducted, but this would not affect the justification of military action against the Iraqi government in a more abstract context. It would be facile to dismiss this as backpedaling, since it's actually wholly consistent with earlier leaders in The Economist. Moreover, the validity of casus belli is not affected by the manner in which the subsequent war is waged. The former is a matter of international law, and to a certain extent ethics and morality; the latter is matter of strategy. There is, then, a distinction to be made between supporting "war" and supporting "this particular war in its current form." Unfortunately, this is a distinction was lost in the discussions regarding the war, which polarised into "for" and "against" without much middle ground. It's also a distinction which Henry Farrell seems unwilling to acknowledge, more's the pity. |
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