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WORLD POLICY JOURNAL
Killing
One’s Progeny As if we needed reminding, the debate over how to tackle Iraq has illuminated again how Washington is at best ambivalent, at worst downright dismissive, about America’s role in international institutions—even though the United States was instrumental in creating most of them. And where else but in America would a diplomat, in this case Charles Liechenstein, who died in August, be remembered in obituaries mostly for having told the United Nations that any time it wanted to leave American shores, he would be down at dockside waving farewell. The interesting question is what lies behind this ambivalence, or hostility. One of the better kept secrets of American politics is that ordinary citizens, when asked in opinion polls, repeatedly and emphatically express support for the United Nations and other international organizations, and almost always say that they prefer that Americans not go into battle alone. Polls show that only a vehement minority would rejoice at the dock with Mr. Liechenstein. So what actuates politicians and White House staffers who miss no opportunity to belittle the United Nations? For some— Sen. Jesse Helms, former chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee is one—it is surely a matter of deeply felt conviction, a fear that meddling foreigners will compromise American sovereignty. But this does not explain why a mainstream Democrat like President Bill Clinton so limply supported paying treaty-obligated back dues to the United Nations and initially blocked the use of the word "genocide" to describe the slaughter in Rwanda in 1994 for fear that the world organization—and worse, the United States—might have to get more actively involved in stopping it. Vehemence works in shaping official attitudes toward the United Nations, just as it works when special-interest lobbies succeed in framing other foreign policy issues. Lawmakers and White House aides find it easier to placate a fanatic minority than to make the effort to energize an inactive majority. As a result, in the name of "reform," the United Nations has been hamstrung by congressional demands for intrusive American oversight and zero-growth budgets. This takes place at a time—and under an innovative secretary general, Kofi Annan— when the organization badly needs flexibility to tackle a barrage of twenty-first century problems, including cross-border crime and terrorism, the AIDS epidemic, and the inequalities of a global economy that fuel revolts against Western-style free enterprise and democracy. The United Nations Population Fund has lost almost 13 percent of its budget since the White House stopped payments in 2002 on false reports that the agency, using American money, was complicit in forced abortions in China. In the 1960s, the United States was in the forefront of international birth control programs, and supported the founding of the fund. At the World Trade Organization, another body that the United States, as a champion of free trade, was instrumental in creating, Washington is now defending protectionist policies that benefit domestic American industries, from agriculture to steel. The International Criminal Court (ICC) the most significant advance in international law in at least half a century, begins life this year under broad attack from Washington, which finds it "flawed" and is using its considerable muscle to weaken if not destroy it by demanding total immunity for Americans. After the Second World War, Americans led the way in creating war crimes tribunals in Germany and Japan, and were early supporters of a permanent court to try future dictators for genocide, crimes against humanity, and other atrocities. In the 1990s, Madeleine K. Albright, as ambassador to the United Nations, pressed hard for criminal tribunals for the Balkans and Rwanda. Those tribunals, even more than the victors’ courts in Germany and Japan, set the pattern for the permanent neutral judicial process now embodied in the ICC. The list goes on. Americans were pioneers in the environmental movement and strong on nuclear disarmament. Now environmental agreements and treaties curtailing weapons development and possession— among them the nuclear Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty and the convention against antipersonnel land mines—are dismissed as affronts to American opinion, if not American sovereignty. On social issues where the United States could justifiably be in the lead, conventions on children’s rights and the elimination of discrimination against women go unratified. Other international bodies have been spared a direct attack chiefly because Washington has such unassailable dominance. Most prominent are the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. NATO has been all but ignored by President George W. Bush in the war against terror, despite the alliance’s unprecedented invocation after 9/11 of the all-for-one military clause in its charter. (NATO may soon feel the influence of a burgeoning European security organization with a mind of its own, over which Washington will not have control.) The World Bank—officially the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development—and the IMF were born of the Bretton Woods agreements at the end of the Second World War as the economic branches of the United Nations family. But the United States, with its huge economic power, enjoyed from the start a built-in leading role in both the bank, whose president has always been an American, and the IMF, where weighted voting gives the United States and its closest allies a virtual veto. Against this background, it is understandable that Europeans and others see evidence everywhere of American bullying or resistance to consultation on major international issues. Abroad, the philosophical divide is seen as widening between the last superpower and the rest. But a debate has also arisen within the United States itself. The swagger about "going it alone" in attacking Iraq in the face of widespread dissent so alarmed the strategists of the successful 1991 war to free Kuwait from Saddam Hussein that it has pitted some of those old Persian Gulf warriors against fellow Republicans now in charge in Washington. The dissent may have tempered President Bush’s speech to the United Nations General Assembly on September 12, when he listed all the Iraqi violations of Security Council resolutions to justify collective action. But in the end, the speech was more of an ultimatum to the Security Council than a plea for partnership. The message was: Do something, or we will. Council members know, however, that it was Washington that often dictated what the organization did— or more relevant now, didn’t do—about Iraq during the 1990s. American
Obduracy From the August 1990 Iraqi invasion and occupation of Kuwait until the lightning war began in February of the following year, President George Bush and his secretary of state, James A. Baker III, worked assiduously to build an international coalition of remarkable breadth and durability, staying within the bounds of the Security Council virtually every step of the way. After the war, the United States was instrumental in constraining Iraq in a tight arms inspection regime that by American officials’ own admission did more to disarm Saddam than the fighting had accomplished. U.N. weapons inspectors blew up military sites and arms production plants, and destroyed or dismantled tons of ammunition, arms, and equipment. But by the late 1990s, the highly qualified weapons inspectors from more than two dozen countries had been fatally compromised by the Clinton administration and were withdrawn ahead of American and British bombing in late 1998. They were not permitted to return, even after the original inspection body, the United Nations Special Commission, was replaced by another, the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, designed to meet some Iraqi complaints. Now leading Bush administration figures, such as Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, have abandoned all pretense of wanting the inspectors returned to Iraq, even though the Iraqis now say they can come back. The united front on Iraq disintegrated in slow motion. In the first years of the Clinton administration, when Albright was the American ambassador to the United Nations, the United States kept intense pressure on Saddam Hussein through a unified Security Council. When that diligence slipped, and Washington could offer no diplomatic alternatives to an embargo that inflicted obvious pain on ordinary Iraqis, Saddam Hussein seized the moment. Playing on the sympathy of outsiders who saw the privation in Iraq but were often reluctant to blame Saddam’s own reign of terror, the Iraqi leader made a mockery of the disarmament program through sham inspections. The result, as I observed firsthand as a correspondent, was to split the Security Council as Russia, France, and China, sensing lack of direction in Washington, opportunistically took up their own agendas with Iraq. As Kofi Annan warned the council two years ago: "We are in danger of losing the argument, or the propaganda war—if we haven’t already lost it—about who is responsible for this situation, President Saddam Hussein or the United Nations." At the United Nations, it was evident by early 1998 that Washington no longer intended to confront Iraq through the Security Council. The evidence of widespread hardships in Iraq did not provoke a comprehensive rethinking of sanctions but instead led the council to devise a system, known as the "oil for food" program, that allowed Saddam Hussein’s regime to sell some oil to buy civilian goods, but under U.N. controls. That system has since been liberalized to allow unlimited oil sales and the purchase of a vast range of goods and services. But, to the unbounded annoyance of Baghdad, the U.N. Secretariat, through its Office of the Iraq Program, has control of both revenues and expenditures, and draws on this money, held in escrow accounts, to aid the Kurds in their no-fly-zone enclave in the north, to pay compensation to victims of the Gulf War, and to meet the expenses of the inspection commission. In establishing the two no-flight zones, in southern as well as northern Iraq, the United States and Britain did not get Security Council approval for collective action. With inspections blocked by Saddam, the Clinton administration threatened military action but again failed to use the Security Council effectively. Instead, Madeleine Albright, now secretary of state, agreed to a high-risk visit to Baghdad early in 1998 by Secretary General Annan to sign a cooperation agreement with Saddam. The Iraqis believed they had successfully circumvented the Security Council—a significant psychological boost and perhaps a critical turning point. The agreement, which in theory was supposed to allow resumption of inspections, in practice was violated almost immediately by the Iraqis. Then the United States, without explaining its policy shift, simply pulled the chair from under the chief inspector, Richard Butler, when he proposed intrusive probes in the summer of 1998. Diplomats at the United Nations said that it seemed apparent to them that Washington was preparing to act alone, as the United States and Britain would indeed do later that year in military strikes on Baghdad. Meantime, reports began to emerge that the United States had used inspections as a front for covert intelligence operations. Iraq effectively exploited these revelations to strip the inspection regime of its neutrality and moral authority. Diplomatically, the United States was often absent when the Iraq brief needed work in New York. American ambassadors came and went in these crucial years, and at times there was no top envoy at all. When Richard C. Holbrooke arrived in 1999, after a long and tangled confirmation process, he did not take on the Iraq issue. He would later say that he had inherited a dead-end policy and that his more important task was to negotiate (ultimately with almost complete success, though with bitter concessions by others) an end to Washington’s debt crisis at the United Nations. American dues were reduced in return for a promise from Congress to pay back most—though not all—of U.S. arrears, then amounting to well over $1 billion. Holbrooke’s considerable powers of analysis, his stamina for relentless negotiation, and his take-no-prisoners tactics of persuasion were lost when the Iraq impasse needed them most. The Iraqi albatross slid into the purview of George W. Bush. Rhetorical
Crowing Instead of Diplomacy Beyond Iraq, there were other setbacks for the Security Council. Attitudes toward the United Nations on the part of the Defense Department and White House during the Clinton administration are exposed authoritatively by Sarah B. Sewall, deputy assistant secretary of defense for peacekeeping from 1993 to 1996, in a new book, Multilateralism and U.S. Foreign Policy: Ambivalent Engagement, a collection of essays by policy experts. "Early in the Clinton Administration," she writes, "U.S. officials frequently looked to satisfy short-term political goals via the U.N., sometimes regardless of the consequences for the organization or for other U.S. objectives in the longer term." Sewall adds that Washington pushed the United Nations into one ambitious mission after another, then perversely denied the organization’s peacekeeping department the resources—troops or money—to carry them out, as was evident in the tragedies in Somalia, Bosnia, and Rwanda. "Washington often pushed the U.N. beyond any reasonable expectations, and then stepped away when the U.N. failed," she concludes. In Somalia, after 18 American soldiers were killed in 1993 in an operation entirely under U.S. command, President Clinton "wrongly implied that the U.N. was to blame." 1 American participation in international peacekeeping was soon significantly curtailed. The United States stalled votes for new multinational operations, even in the face of catastrophe, because of an obligation to give Congress two weeks’ notice of any new mission. Moreover, American diplomats said behind the scenes, with the then-growing American debt to the United Nations, who wanted more peacekeeping bills? This antipathy to international institutions, rampant in Congress and the Pentagon, is not found in any depth among the general public. Repeated polling by organizations such as the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland, the Pew Foundation, the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, Gallup, Harris, Wirthlin, and the United Nations Association of the United States, among others, finds that Americans want the country to play an active role in the world, but in co-operation with others. Evidence of this is in plain sight as Americans by the thousands flock to meetings of international organizations. They react to government decisions they see as damaging to international cooperation. After the United Nations Population Fund lost its American contribution, for example, two women in California and New Mexico started a grass-roots campaign to compensate for the $34 million loss by asking 34 million Americans to give $1 each to the fund’s American support group. The University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes, run by Steven Kull, coauthor, with I. M. Destler, of Misreading the Public: The Myth of a New Isolationism, 2 has tracked most major polls for several decades, and posts its findings on a website, www.americans-world.org. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, several polls found what Kull’s program calls a "near unanimous" preference for a multinational campaign against terrorism, and for Security Council approval for military action. A Harris poll taken within two weeks of 9/11—at the height of emotional flag-waving and fervent expressions of American patriotism— found 95 percent of respondents agreed with the statement that the war on terrorism should "be seen as an effort by many countries working together, not just a U.S. effort." Eighty-eight percent thought it important to get the support of Arab and Islamic nations. An ABC News poll in late August this year found similar sentiments on Iraq, with only 39 percent of respondents approving of a U.S. attack if allies oppose military action. This majority is rarely heard on Capitol Hill, Kull and others conclude, because more vocal minorities focused on often ungrounded, if traditional, fears of losing sovereignty to international organizations command the attention of politicians, who in turn pass on these minority views to the media. Too often sheer ignorance—not reasoned theories of unilateralism or even isolationism— seems to guide vociferous politicians energized by anti-internationalist or special-interest groups like the anti-abortion lobby. An illustrative case: establishing benchmarks in 1999 by which the president (with some waiver rights) must certify that the United Nations is not making decisions that would undermine or jeopardize the Constitution, American sovereignty, or American property. (Congress had earlier forbidden UNESCO from naming exceptional American attractions as World Heritage Sites without U.S. permission. The United States left UNESCO during the Reagan administration. Both presidents Clinton and Bush said they would rejoin, but Congress has to allocate the money.) Congress also required that the United Nations not impose taxes on Americans or create a standing army. None of those steps was remotely being considered by the organization. To tighten its financial straitjacket, Congress said no U.N. agency was to be allowed to borrow money outside the system to bolster its budget. The United Nations had earlier toyed with the idea of raising money through bonds, an idea that was quickly scotched by the Clinton administration. In January 2000, Senator Helms, as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, came to the Security Council and threatened members with U.S. withdrawal from the organization if Washington did not get its way. The quiet outrage in the chamber was evident in diplomatic rebukes from the ambassadors of Canada, Britain, and France, and in a more impassioned retort from Martin Andjaba, Namibia’s ambassador. He took Helms to task for his claim that the anticommunist Reagan Doctrine had brought freedom to the world without the U.N.’s help. That doctrine, Andjaba said, had instead denied his country freedom from apartheid South Africa, and had prolonged the Angolan civil war. Peter van Walsum, the Dutch ambassador, told Helms that his threat to pull the United States out of the United Nations was a "nightmare" for Europeans, who cannot forget the collapse of the League of Nations before the Second World War. "We continue to hope," van Walsum said, "that one day the majority of the American people—including the Senate Foreign Relations Committee— will appreciate everything this organization has done for the spread of democratic ideas all over the world." The message from the Security Council was clear: the United States did not end the Cold War or defeat communism single-handedly, and it was not serving its own interests as the preeminent global power by threatening the United Nations now. The 1990s had offered the world a glaring display of new fortress Americanism among conservative Republicans and the cringing of Democrats afraid to take them on. To the distress of America’s friends everywhere, the world’s oldest and most innovative democracy had failed to engage and lead the inter-national system through the postcommunist years, squandering a crucial decade. —September 18, 2002 *Barbara Crossette, a former New York Times correspondent in Asia, was the paper’s United Nations bureau chief from 1994 to 2001. 1. Susan B. Sewall, "Multilateral Peace Opera-tions," in Multilateralism and U.S. Foreign Policy, ed. Stewart Patrick and Shepard Forman (Boulder, Col.: Lynne Rienner, 2002), pp. 191–224. 2. Steven Kull and I. M. Destler, Misreading the Public: The Myth of a New Isolationism (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1999). [Go to interactive discussion forum]
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