The Wars on Terrorism and Iraq

Human Rights, Unilateralism and US Foreign Policy

Margaret Crahan, John Goering, Thomas G. Weiss

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781135995065
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Essays in Politics & International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

'If I had the power to do so, I would make this book compulsory reading for all who exercise political power in our world today! Instead, I will keep my fingers crossed that it will be read by as many members of Congress and of the current US administration as possible, and by a wide cross-section of policy analysts, diplomats, academics and human rights defenders.' - Mary Robinson, Former UN High Commissioner for Human RightsWars on Terrorism and Iraq provides a timely and critical analysis of the impact of the wars on terrorism and Iraq on human rights particularly internationally, as well as related tensions between unilateralism and multilateralism in US foreign policy. The distinguished contributors examine the consequences for international relations and world order of the traditional standard bearer for human rights and democracy (the United States) appearing not to be championing the rule of law and negotiated conflict resolution. The authors also suggest effective policies to promote greater fulfilment of human rights in order to achieve peaceful accord within nations, and stability internationally.

Part 1
Framing the debate

1 The interplay of domestic politics, human rights, and U.S. foreign policy

Tom J. Farer

However fine a symbol of cosmopolitan sympathies they may be, human rights are not yet connected in the U.S. electorate’s mind to a set of foreign policy guidelines. As a symbol, therefore, they remain available for appropriation by advocates of almost any position. The contributors to this volume share the conviction that it is possible to anticipate, however provisionally, the human rights consequences of today’s foreign policy projects and their associated grand strategies. This essay is a nascent effort to clarify the substance, purposes, and sources of the doctrines and strategies that have been competing for dominance over U.S. foreign policy.

During the 12 years between the destruction of the Berlin Wall and the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, the foreign policy of the George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton administrations lacked an overriding theme, possibly because it lacked an organizing Manichaean focal point. Themes were indeed debated by politicians and commentators, usually in dyadic terms: unilateralism v. multilateralism, humanitarian intervention v. national self-restraint, realism v. idealism, coercive v. persuasive diplomacy, and the West v. the rest. There were also values like human rights and democracy airily invoked but ambiguously and controversially expressed in the quotidian details of policy.

September 11 and the subsequent war on terrorism provide a new, thoroughly Manichaean policy template with implications for domestic as well as foreign affairs. But within that template the existing dyads and values continue to color debate. Should we organize coalitions of the willing or act through the United Nations? Should we ethically sanitize any government that aspires to join the war on our side or seek ideological coherence among our allies? Should we succor failed and failing states or simply quarantine them and deter export of their pathologies? And what restraints should human rights impose on our means? In short, September 11 does not absolve us from dealing with old issues. The context has arguably changed; the traditional divisions within the community of foreign policy analysts and practitioners have not.

The post-Cold War debate over grand strategy

As soon as the Cold War became history, analysts, practitioners, and politicians began debating four grand strategies.¹ One, often labeled “neo-isolationism,” called for withdrawal from overseas military commitments and a corresponding reduction in defense expenditures. Its advocates were a curiously mixed crew. There were the libertarians, who championed a minimalist foreign policy that would in turn help make minimalist government possible, and were confident that two oceans, nuclear deterrence, weak neighbors, non-existent competitors for global power, and regional balances of power outside the western hemisphere made minimalism safe, indeed safer to the extent that it discouraged U.S. involvement in other peoples’ quarrels.² Libertarians are not provincial in their sympathies; they believe that free markets and the U.S. example make the world a better place.

Starting with similar security premises but rather more provincial values, basically the traditional conservative conviction that duties are owed only to members of one’s own national tribe, the shrinking band of paleo-conservatives, led by the perpetual presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan, arrived at roughly the same general policy preference.³ Despite its contrastingly cosmopolitan view of human obligation and sour view of American society, so did the old left (epitomized by Noam Chomsky),⁴ driven by the conviction that the structure of social power assures that the U.S. will generally act ungenerously. Thus it joined some odd bedfellows in urging minimal engagement with the rest of the world albeit for the sake of the world.

Selective engagement, the second grand strategy, also had its adherents. While they too were generally sanguine about the U.S.’s long-term security position, they regarded regional power balancing as sufficiently problematic to require monitoring and occasional intervention either to restore or to reinforce local power balances in regions or sub-regions of real importance to the United States. One advocate, the European commentator Josef Joffe, called explicitly for a foreign policy of “offshore balancing.”⁵

Since the importance of different regions and sub-regions is likely to vary over time and since reasonable people can and will differ in their perceptions of the need for U.S. intervention to prevent the emergence of regional hegemons, selective engagement invariably slides toward the two other competitors for doctrinal dominance: unilateral and multilateral global engagement. Adherents of these last two had much in common. They believed that developments worldwide can have a serious impact on the security and welfare of the American people and that a relatively benign global political, economic, and military environment requires unremitting involvement. They differed, however, in at least two respects: in the way they prioritized threats and, more importantly, in basic ideas about remedies.

Global unilateralists, like selective engagers, emphasized classical political– military threats, precisely those that are most amenable to mitigation by military power, the resource that the United States possesses in singular abundance.⁶ Global multilateralists, while they would not eliminate, would at least flatten the hierarchy, thus reducing the steep distinction between threats that often yield to coercive diplomacy and threats like pandemics, global warming, destruction of the seas’ living resources and the rain forests, and volatility in the global economy that are not amenable to military remediation.⁷ Nor, of course, will they yield to any other form of unilateral action.

There is something less here than a simple policy polarity. Specifying a pure example of either the unilateralist or multilateralist is not easy. There is a continuum of attitudes and a tendency for policy-makers to position themselves rhetorically near what they believe the U.S. electorate will perceive as the center. For example, it is virtually a cliché to describe the Bush administration as “unilateralist.” Yet when pressed on this point, senior officials reject the designation. They invoke their efforts to construct different coalitions for different tasks.⁸ In the war in Iraq they have been at pains to publicize the numbers of cooperating states (including those preferring to remain anonymous) many magnitudes larger than those directly engaged in the fighting.⁹ So, they argue, they cannot be categorized as unilateralists; they simply are not in favor of multilateralism for the sake of multilateralism, as one senior official put it in a private meeting or, in the words of another still higher official speaking semi-privately, they are not “lowest-common-denominator” multilateralists.¹⁰

By comparison, the Clinton administration was widely seen as distinctly multilateralist. The President struggled to secure appropriations from Congress to pay U.N. arrears. He signed global environmental agreements and the treaty establishing an International Criminal Court (ICC). And in the case of Somalia, he antagonized conservatives by placing U.S. troops at least notionally under the direct authority of the U.N. Secretary-General.¹¹ Yet following the lethal firefight in the streets of Mogadishu, Clinton authorized U.N. Ambassador Madeleine Albright to deliver a lecture at the National War College declaring readiness to use force without reference to or even in defiance of the world organization’s Charter. In an address that could as easily have been written by her Reaganite predecessor, Jeane Kirkpatrick, the future Secretary of State remarked that the United States would approach international conflicts on “a case by case basis, relying on diplomacy whenever possible, on force when absolutely necessary.”¹²

Although the rhetoric of more-or-less liberal Democratic and of plainly conservative Republican officials often seems indistinguishable insofar as multilateralism is concerned, right-wing commentators perceive a qualitative difference between the real attitudes of themselves and liberals of all stripes. One way of getting at that difference is through an operationally meaningful definition of multilateralism. If it includes everything from ad hoc coalitions of the willing—even if the will be bought or coerced—to world government, in policy terms it means nothing. But if it attaches substantial value to the institutionalization or the “normalization” of cooperation by means of legal rules and intergovernmental bureaucracies, then real differences quickly emerge.¹³

One good indicator of a serious commitment to multilateralism is unintentionally found in Albright’s War College speech in which she proposes that the U.S. should use multilateral institutions only instrumentally. That proposition is deaf to the possibility that one end might be strengthening multilateral institutions precisely because they facilitate cooperation. If institutions are used only when they abjectly serve immediate purposes, we weaken them by implicitly announcing a lack of commitment to cooperation on any terms other than our own. Who needs institutions if our intention is to determine our ends and means independently and then bludgeon others to help shoulder the costs? The test of a serious commitment to multilateralism is willingness to discuss ends and means and to modify them in order to foster cooperation not only in the instant case, but in a multitude of others that will eventually reach the policy agenda.

Unilateralism in historical context

Throughout the Cold War era, a defining characteristic of the right wing in U.S. politics has been hostility to international organizations and the integrally related encumbrance of international law. To the extreme right, international organizations were part of a left-wing if not fully communistic threat to U.S. sovereignty and culture. In recent years the basic hostility, particularly to international institutions but also to international law in its current form, has emerged from provincial fortresses into segments of polite society, acquiring on the way the sophisticated accent of high-gloss policy journals¹⁴ and the leading business newspaper.¹⁵ Of course, unease about foreign entanglement has a venerable historical pedigree, extending back to the generation of the Founding Fathers.¹⁶ Reluctance to take sides in the clashes of the Europeans did not, however, coincide with hostility to international law. After all, the nineteenthcentury legal order, premised on the equal right of states large and small to govern their internal affairs, to use oceanic trade routes on the same terms, and to be neutral in relation to the conflicts of third parties, was peculiarly beneficial to weak states. In order to defend its self-perceived rights under international law the new country even fought against Great Britain in the War of 1812.

The sense that legal restraints on the use of national power served national interests did not expire when the U.S. itself joined the club of the powerful at the end of the nineteenth century. On the contrary, the then small foreign policy establishment, manned largely by East Coast bankers and lawyers, became leading advocates of legal restraints on the use of force, clashing fiercely with their German counterparts at The Hague Peace Conferences of 1897 and 1904.¹⁷ Charles Evans Hughes, a Republican and a conservative in the idiom of the time, spearheaded the U.S. effort. While Senator Henry Cabot Lodge played the leading role in blocking U.S. participation in the League of Nations after World War I, overall foreign policy elites sustained the turn-of-the-century commitment to international law during the interwar period.¹⁸ The U.S. prominently backed and signed the Naval Limitation Treaty and the Kellogg–Briand Pact ostensibly outlawing war for purposes other than self-defense, a restraint that went well beyond the language in the League of Nations Covenant.¹⁹

This tradition of upper-class commitment to international law as a vehicle for advancing national interests reache...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part 1: Framing the debate
• Part 2: Human Rights and the War On Terrorism
• Part 3: U.S. Unilateralism In the Wake of Iraq
• Conclusion