Stand firm on fight for rule of law

By ROBERT PATMAN

The pre-emptive invasion of Iraq by the United States and its allies without authorisation from the United Nations indicates that American exceptionalism is becoming a major obstacle to an international consensus on security.

For some time, President Bush's Administration has insisted that Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction remain a clear and present danger to the US. This is despite the fact that Iraq's military capabilities have been degraded by a 50 per cent fall in the country's gross national product since UN sanctions were imposed in 1991, and that the US and Britain controlled half of Iraq's airspace through no-fly zones.

Moreover, without producing any conclusive evidence, the Bush Administration has asserted there are close links between Saddam's secular dictatorship and the fundamentalist al Qaeda terror network. The Bush team have argued that it is only a matter of time before Saddam provides al Qaeda with weapons of mass destruction to use against the US or its allies.

But most of the countries on the UN Security Council believe Iraq poses no realistic threat to the US and that the unauthorised invasion will only inflame the Middle East and undermine the global fight against terrorism.

So why does the Bush Administration have such a distinctive view of the Iraqi threat? A consciousness of being exceptional - that the US was founded upon values that were different from the rest of the world - has traditionally given American foreign policy a sense of moral mission and destiny.

At the same time, US exceptionalism has been reshaped by the end of the Cold War, the repositioning of the Republican Party and the impact of September 11.

During the Clinton years a group, the Project for the New American Century, became highly influential in Republican circles. Many of the key participants became leading figures in Bush's Administration. These included Vice-President Dick Cheney, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Defence Under-Secretary Paul Wolfowitz.

This group advocated the active pursuit of US global primacy, and condemned President Clinton's policy of containment towards "rogue states" like Iraq. From the mid-1990s, the project called for the overthrow of Saddam.

In January 1998, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld and others associated with the project wrote to Clinton saying that if Saddam acquired weapons of mass destruction, he would pose a threat to American troops in the region, to Israel, to moderate Arab states, and to the supply of oil.

With the election of Bush, a strengthening of US unilateralism in foreign policy was discernible. But it was only after the terrorist attacks of September 11 that the ideas advocated by the project group really gained momentum.

Within days of those attacks, Wolfowitz was among those advocating unilateral military action against Iraq on the grounds that al Qaeda could not have pulled off the attacks without Saddam's assistance.

By January 2002, Bush was persuaded. In his State of the Union address he labelled Iraq, Iran and North Korea an "axis of evil", and warned that he would "not wait on events" to prevent them from using weapons of mass destruction against the US. Since then, the President has stated repeatedly his intention to remove or forcibly disarm Saddam.

While Bush eventually turned to the UN in November to advance that goal through Security Resolution 1441, his Administration made it clear that the US reserved the right to use force if further support from the Security Council was not forthcoming.

Global interdependence has done little to dent Bush's distinctly American internationalism. Indeed, Bush's America remains an old-fashioned partisan great power rather than a truly global power. And given the US's enormous structural power in military and economic terms, Bush's willingness to bypass the UN can only be a concern for the security of most players on the world stage, including New Zealand.

It is important that New Zealand continues to uphold the notion of a rules-based international order and to support the UN as the embodiment of the multilateral process.

The Clark Government's decision not to support military action against Iraq without a mandate from the UN is sensible. It is also a position that accords with the views of most people in traditional allies such as Britain and Australia, and the views of a significant number of Americans.

New Zealand must not be defeatist in its diplomacy, but be prepared to work actively for the strengthening of the international rule of law. In particular, it and other democratic countries must campaign to reverse the Bush Administration's opposition to the new International Criminal Court.

That court is designed to close the loophole whereby individual terrorists or war criminals, such as Saddam, can evade justice by hiding behind the protection afforded by the notion of state sovereignty.

* Robert Patman teaches political studies at Otago University