What went wrong? Why, when the leader of the free world went to war with a brutal and hated dictator, did so many countries refuse to take America's side?For Rubin the fault lies squarely with Washington.
He argues that Washington’s shifting justifications for war, the failure to synchronize the military and diplomatic tracks and the Bush administration's rhetoric and style resulted in the loss of international support for action on Iraq. In Rubin's view, the Europeans would have eventually come on board if Washington had been willing to compromise on Iraqi compliance and allow more time for inspections.
These are familiar criticisms but many of them are threadbare and, despite the space allowed him, Rubin does little to refurbish them. A number of his criticisms, such as the Bush administration’s refusal to accept partial compliance with the requirements of Resolution 1441, and its refusal to compromise on this issue, don’t look like failures of diplomacy to me. They are the result of a policy decision to draw a line in the sand and to use the military build-up to put Iraq under pressure. The policies themselves are open to criticism and it’s true that the administration’s posture presented a number of diplomatic challenges, but to describe this as a failing of diplomacy seems to me to put the cart before the horse.
Take Rubin’s view on American attempts to gain a second resolution.
Having decided to seek a second resolution, why couldn't the United States even muster a majority of votes? This failure will be long remembered. The convenient response was to blame Chirac, on the grounds that his veto threat made it impossible for the undecided council members to support a losing cause. But the real story is more complex.Yes, more complex but still not Washington’s fault, as Rubin himself seems to accept when he notes two pages later that “France's opposition made passage of a second resolution impossible”.
And it wasn’t just French opposition:
Berlin, Moscow, and Paris joined forces, insisting that the Iraqi threat did not justify an American-led invasion and claiming that the inspections were serving their purpose: Iraq was no longer in a position to develop a militarily significant arsenal of biological or chemical weapons. With the emergence of this new alignment, London's hopes for passage of a second resolution were crushed.What I find amazing is Rubin’s view that opposition to the war in Iraq by Russia and our erstwhile allies in Europe was due almost entirely to American diplomatic failings, rather than the result of the divergent interests of the nation states involved. For Rubin:
The real surprise was that the world's democracies did not see the importance of upholding UN disarmament demands or ending the misery of the Iraqi people. One explanation is that Bush's emphasis on personal diplomacy between leaders was not enough to win him support in democratic countries, where governments cannot simply act in complete defiance of public opinion.This seems to me to display a certain credulity, as does this:
Even French President Jacques Chirac acknowledged that the deployment of U.S. forces had pressured Saddam into agreeing to these measures. Chirac's mistake, however, was to think that he could limit the United States' role to supporting his own favored policy for Iraq: containment through aggressive inspections.Chirac’s policy involved much more than “containment”; it involved the maintenance of Saddam’s regime, trade links with Iraq and French influence in the Middle East. But Rubin, while questioning the Bush administration, seems to take pretty much everything else at face value:
All of the key players in Europe now say that they would have been prepared to support or at least sanction force against Iraq if it had not fully disarmed by then. And waiting that long would have demonstrated to all that Washington was prepared to go the extra mile to secure international backing. But the Bush administration showed no such willingness.I had expected a partisan assessment of Washington’s failings from Rubin but his uncritical acceptance of the post-war meanderings of European politicians suggests a naïve ignorance as to how European statesmen play what used to be called the Great Game.
There were real diplomatic failings in the run up to war: the failure to get Russia on side at an early stage accelerated the development of the Franco-Russian axis of opposition to the war, the failure to gain the support of Turkey, at one time a key Nato ally, hampered the timely deployment of our forces; and the administration’s difficult relationship with Hans Blix made it unlikely that we would get the report we needed at the UN.
Rubin touches on each of these, and makes some interesting points, but the essay as a whole seems to miss the wider and more important question: What national strategic interests were France, Russia and Germany pursuing in opposing American action on Iraq?
In my opinion, the answer to that question would serve as a better guide to future American diplomatic efforts than any number of post-mortems on the administration’s so called diplomatic failings.
