Statecraft. Margaret Thatcher

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СКАЧАТЬ context of remarks by President Havel, this sort of stuff makes me nervous. President Bush, like any leader in time of war, was justified in raising the rhetorical temperature. But anyone who really believes that a ‘new order’ of any kind is going to replace the disorderly conduct of human affairs, particularly the affairs of nations, is likely to be severely disappointed, and others with him.

      In fact, one of the first purposes to which I committed myself in the period after I left Downing Street (and after Saddam Hussein was left in power in Baghdad) was to throw some cold water on the ambitious internationalism which the Gulf War spawned. So, for example, speaking to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council in November 1991, I did not dispute that a new state of affairs had emerged as a result of the fall of Soviet communism and the advance of democracy and free enterprise – 1 did not even quibble with the expression ‘New World Order’. But I also urged caution. I recalled the eerily similar language about ‘New World Orders’ which characterised diplomatic discussions between the two World Wars, and I quoted General Smuts’ epitaph on the League of Nations: ‘What was everybody’s business in the end proved to be nobody’s business. Each one looked to the other to take the lead, and the aggressors got away with it.’

      Had I been less tactful, I might have added that Saddam Hussein also ‘got away with it’ – at least to the extent that he was still causing trouble in Baghdad while President Bush and I were writing our memoirs.

      There were important lessons to be learned from the Gulf War, but only some were absorbed at the time, and some wrong conclusions were also drawn. In one important way, the campaign against Saddam turned out to be untypical of post-Cold War conflicts. The degree of consensus about military action was the result of a temporary and fortuitous series of conditions. Once Russia and China became more assertive, the UN Security Council was unlikely to be an effective forum for dealing with serious crises. Equally untypical was the fact that Saddam Hussein had managed to unite most of the Muslim nations against him. Much as he tried, he was thus never able to rely on anti-Western feeling to provide him with useful allies. Saddam was a blunderer. But as a rule in the post-Cold War world it was more likely that events would follow Samuel Huntington’s thesis of a ‘Clash of civilisations’, where opposing religions and cultures wrestled for dominance, than Francis Fukuyama’s forecast of ‘the End of History’, where democracy was the inevitable global victor.*

      The real lessons of the Gulf had nothing to do with New World Orders but a lot to do with the fundamental requirements for successful interventions. It was the decisiveness of American leadership under President Bush and the superiority of American military technology which ensured the defeat of Saddam. America’s allies – particularly Britain and France – helped. Diplomatic efforts to keep the coalition together were also valuable. But American power and the resolution to apply it won the war – and they could have won the peace too, if excessive concern for international opinion had not prevented America’s demanding the complete disarmament of Iraqi forces.

      What the Gulf War really demonstrated was the necessity of American leadership. But this was not to everyone’s liking – not even, one suspects, entirely to the liking of the US State Department. Multilateralism – in effect, the use of force only under the authority of the United Nations and for international purposes – became almost an obsession in the years that followed.

      It is worth recalling just how much of a contrast this was with earlier American interventions. Under President Reagan the actions against the regimes in Grenada in 1983 and Libya in 1986 were unashamed exertions of American power in defence of American and broader Western interests.* Nor had President Bush shown before the Gulf War any inclination to break away from this formula. When on 20 December 1989 the United States overthrew the government of General Noriega in Panama it acted decisively against a drug-trafficking thug who had apparently been planning attacks on American citizens and who was implicitly threatening vital American interests in the Panama Canal. It was a large operation involving twenty-six thousand US troops and it provoked an international outcry – I was almost alone among other heads of government in voicing strong support.

      But with the emergence of the doctrine of the New World Order such robustness was diluted in the search for international consensus. The intervention in Somalia was the high – or perhaps low – point of this subordination of US national interests in favour of multilateralism. In December 1992 President Bush authorised the deployment of up to thirty thousand US troops to safeguard food supplies for the Somali population, suffering starvation largely as a result of the chaotic conditions that followed the overthrow of the previous President Muhammad Siad Barre in January 1991. President Bush justified his action to the nation in a televised address:

      I understand the United States cannot right the world’s wrongs, but we also know that some crises in the world cannot be resolved without American involvement, that American action is often necessary as a catalyst for broader involvement of the community of nations. Only the United States has the global reach to place a large security force on the ground in such a distant place quickly and efficiently, and thus save thousands of innocents from death.

      In fact, Somalia was the first of the ‘humanitarian interventions’. Later under President Clinton the multilateralist doctrine was pressed to its limit and beyond. In May 1993 the UN took control of the operation. Five thousand of the twenty-eight thousand troops were American: this was the first time that American soldiers had served under UN command – a radically new departure. Thus far eight Americans had been killed in combat in Somalia. But as opposition among the Somali warlords – particularly the most powerful of them, Muhammad Farah Said – grew, the situation deteriorated. In the end more than a hundred peacekeepers (including thirty US soldiers) were killed and more than 260 (including 175 Americans) were wounded. Six months after a gun battle that left eighteen American dead in October 1993, the US officially ended its mission in Somalia. By the time the United Nations operation was wound up a year later it had cost the UN itself $2 billion and the US some $1.2 billion in addition. The well-intended intervention left behind it chaos as bad as ever it found. Its legacy was also much agonised heart-searching about the components of a fiasco which had dented American prestige and rendered American public opinion extremely wary about other such ventures.

      The Somalia intervention exemplifies all the classic features of what not to do. Its objectives were insufficiently thought out; it suffered from ‘mission creep’ – the tendency to expand involvement beyond what is originally envisaged, and beyond what available resources permit; and, finally, lines of command were blurred.

      I suspect that the Bush and Clinton administrations had been keener to respond to the sufferings in Somalia by ‘doing something’, because since the late autumn of 1991 they had been doing little to prevent or remedy the sufferings in Croatia and Bosnia. (I deal with these and subsequent Balkan matters in a separate chapter, because they are so interlinked and because they contain their own lessons.*) But we should recall that until the Washington Agreements of March 1994, which ended the Croat-Muslim conflict, the US had been studiedly absent from the former Yugoslavia, arguing that this was a European problem for Europe to solve. And only in August 1995 was European-led diplomacy finally abandoned, as NATO bombing in support of Croat-Muslim ground forces established a new balance of power and paved the way for a kind of peace.

      The intervention in the autumn of 1994 in Haiti marked the beginning of a gradual shift back towards an American foreign policy that reflected American national interests. More than sixteen thousand Haitian refugees had been intercepted by the US Coast Guard in the months preceding the US mission. These were mostly economic migrants, but undoubtedly the corrupt, authoritarian military government in Haiti had made things worse. Accordingly, the UN Security Council sanctioned an American-led military intervention to restore President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power. In fact, negotiations led by former President Jimmy Carter resulted in a peaceful handover by the Haitian military regime СКАЧАТЬ