two editorials from the NY Times

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

War in the Ruins of Diplomacy

March 18, 2003



 

America is on its way to war. President Bush has told
Saddam Hussein to depart or face attack. For Mr. Hussein,
getting rid of weapons of mass destruction is no longer an
option. Diplomacy has been dismissed. Arms inspectors,
journalists and other civilians have been advised to leave
Iraq. 

The country now stands at a decisive turning point, not
just in regard to the Iraq crisis, but in how it means to
define its role in the post-cold-war world. President
Bush's father and then Bill Clinton worked hard to infuse
that role with America's traditions of idealism,
internationalism and multilateralism. Under George W. Bush,
however, Washington has charted a very different course.
Allies have been devalued and military force overvalued.

Now that logic is playing out in a war waged without the
compulsion of necessity, the endorsement of the United
Nations or the company of traditional allies. This page has
never wavered in the belief that Mr. Hussein must be
disarmed. Our problem is with the wrongheaded way this
administration has gone about it.

Once the fighting begins, every American will be thinking
primarily of the safety of our troops, the success of their
mission and the minimization of Iraqi civilian casualties.
It will not feel like the right time for complaints about
how America got to this point.

Today is the right time. This war crowns a period of
terrible diplomatic failure, Washington's worst in at least
a generation. The Bush administration now presides over
unprecedented American military might. What it risks
squandering is not America's power, but an essential part
of its glory. 

When this administration took office just over two years
ago, expectations were different. President Bush was a
novice in international affairs, while his father had been
a master practitioner. But the new president looked to have
assembled an experienced national security team. It
included Colin Powell and Dick Cheney, who had helped build
the multinational coalition that fought the first Persian
Gulf war. Condoleezza Rice had helped manage a peaceful end
for Europe's cold war divisions. Donald Rumsfeld brought
government and international experience stretching back to
the Ford administration. This seasoned team was led by a
man who had spoken forcefully as a presidential candidate
about the need for the United States to wear its power with
humility, to reach out to its allies and not be perceived
as a bully. 

But this did not turn out to be a team of steady veterans.
The hubris and mistakes that contributed to America's
current isolation began long before the attacks of Sept.
11, 2001. From the administration's first days, it turned
away from internationalism and the concerns of its European
allies by abandoning the Kyoto Protocol on global warming
and withdrawing America's signature from the treaty
establishing the International Criminal Court. Russia was
bluntly told to accept America's withdrawal from the
Antiballistic Missile Treaty and the expansion of the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization into the territory of the
former Soviet Union. In the Middle East, Washington
shortsightedly stepped backed from the worsening spiral of
violence between Israel and the Palestinians, ignoring the
pleas of Arab, Muslim and European countries. If other
nations resist American leadership today, part of the
reason lies in this unhappy history.

The Atlantic alliance is now more deeply riven than at any
time since its creation more than a half-century ago. A
promising new era of cooperation with a democratizing
Russia has been put at risk. China, whose constructive
incorporation into global affairs is crucial to the peace
of this century, has been needlessly estranged. Governments
across the Muslim world, whose cooperation is so vital to
the war against terrorism, are now warily navigating
between popular anger and American power.

The American-sponsored Security Council resolution that was
withdrawn yesterday had firm support from only four of the
council's 15 members and was opposed by major European
powers like France, Germany and Russia. Even the few
leaders who have stuck with the Bush administration, like
Tony Blair of Britain and José María Aznar of Spain, have
done so in the face of broad domestic opposition, which has
left them and their parties politically damaged.

There is no ignoring the role of Baghdad's game of
cooperation without content in this diplomatic debacle. And
France, in its zest for standing up to Washington,
succeeded mainly in sending all the wrong signals to
Baghdad. But Washington's own destructive contributions
were enormous: its shifting goals and rationales, its
increasingly arbitrary timetables, its distaste for
diplomatic give and take, its public arm-twisting and its
failure to convince most of the world of any imminent
danger. 

The result is a war for a legitimate international goal
against an execrable tyranny, but one fought almost alone.
At a time when America most needs the world to see its
actions in the best possible light, they will probably be
seen in the worst. This result was neither foreordained nor
inevitable. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/18/opinion/18TUE1.html?ex=1049002026&ei=1&en=
b2f3cb3fd8858d49

Things to Come

March 18, 2003
By PAUL KRUGMAN 




 

Of course we'll win on the battlefield, probably with ease.
I'm not a military expert, but I can do the numbers: the
most recent U.S. military budget was $400 billion, while
Iraq spent only $1.4 billion.

What frightens me is the aftermath - and I'm not just
talking about the problems of postwar occupation. I'm
worried about what will happen beyond Iraq - in the world
at large, and here at home.

The members of the Bush team don't seem bothered by the
enormous ill will they have generated in the rest of the
world. They seem to believe that other countries will
change their minds once they see cheering Iraqis welcome
our troops, or that our bombs will shock and awe the whole
world (not just the Iraqis) or that what the world thinks
doesn't matter. They're wrong on all counts.

Victory in Iraq won't end the world's distrust of the
United States because the Bush administration has made it
clear, over and over again, that it doesn't play by the
rules. Remember: this administration told Europe to take a
hike on global warming, told Russia to take a hike on
missile defense, told developing countries to take a hike
on trade in lifesaving pharmaceuticals, told Mexico to take
a hike on immigration, mortally insulted the Turks and
pulled out of the International Criminal Court - all in
just two years. 

Nor, as we've just seen, is military power a substitute for
trust. Apparently the Bush administration thought it could
bully the U.N. Security Council into going along with its
plans; it learned otherwise. "What can the Americans do to
us?" one African official asked. "Are they going to bomb
us? Invade us?" 

Meanwhile, consider this: we need $400 billion a year of
foreign investment to cover our trade deficit, or the
dollar will plunge and our surging budget deficit will
become much harder to finance - and there are already signs
that the flow of foreign investment is drying up, just when
it seems that America may be about to fight a whole series
of wars. 

It's a matter of public record that this war with Iraq is
largely the brainchild of a group of neoconservative
intellectuals, who view it as a pilot project. In August a
British official close to the Bush team told Newsweek:
"Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to
Tehran." In February 2003, according to Ha'aretz, an
Israeli newspaper, Under Secretary of State John Bolton
told Israeli officials that after defeating Iraq the United
States would "deal with" Iran, Syria and North Korea.

Will Iraq really be the first of many? It seems all too
likely - and not only because the "Bush doctrine" seems to
call for a series of wars. Regimes that have been targeted,
or think they may have been targeted, aren't likely to sit
quietly and wait their turn: they're going to arm
themselves to the teeth, and perhaps strike first. People
who really know what they are talking about have the
heebie-jeebies over North Korea's nuclear program, and view
war on the Korean peninsula as something that could happen
at any moment. And at the rate things are going, it seems
we will fight that war, or the war with Iran, or both at
once, all by ourselves.

What scares me most, however, is the home front. Look at
how this war happened. There is a case for getting tough
with Iraq; bear in mind that an exasperated Clinton
administration considered a bombing campaign in 1998. But
it's not a case that the Bush administration ever made.
Instead we got assertions about a nuclear program that
turned out to be based on flawed or faked evidence; we got
assertions about a link to Al Qaeda that people inside the
intelligence services regard as nonsense. Yet those serial
embarrassments went almost unreported by our domestic news
media. So most Americans have no idea why the rest of the
world doesn't trust the Bush administration's motives. And
once the shooting starts, the already loud chorus that
denounces any criticism as unpatriotic will become
deafening. 

So now the administration knows that it can make
unsubstantiated claims, without paying a price when those
claims prove false, and that saber rattling gains it votes
and silences opposition. Maybe it will honorably refuse to
act on this dangerous knowledge. But I can't help worrying
that in domestic politics, as in foreign policy, this war
will turn out to have been the shape of things to come.  




http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/18/opinion/18KRUG.html?ex=1049002057&ei=1&en=
ffada1b3d2d224d4


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