War with Iraq threatens to blow world alliances apart

By RUPERT CORNWELL

WASHINGTON - This truly is the season of "collateral damage". As everyone knows, that weasel phrase was coined by the Pentagon to hide the ghastly realities of war, of the killing of innocent civilians and the destruction of their means of living.

But even before it has started, war with Iraq threatens to do huge collateral damage of another kind - to the international diplomatic and security structures of the modern world.

The Iraqi crisis is poisoning trans-atlantic relations and relations within Europe. The United Nations and the North Atlantic alliance (Nato), not to mention what passes for a common European Union foreign policy: all could see their credibility undermined, perhaps fatally, if the present divisions persist.

The next few weeks could be decisive for all three. This is, in short, a Henry Kissinger moment, and the great man yesterday duly obliged.

The road to Iraqi disarmament, he told the Washington Post, was the most serious crisis for Nato since the alliance was born in 1949.

"If the US yields to the threat of a French veto, or if Iraq, encouraged by the action of our allies, evades the shrinking non-military options still available, the result will be a catastrophe for the Atlantic alliance and the international order."

In other words, Kissinger believes that not only "will the credibility of American power in the war on terrorism ... be gravely, perhaps irreparably, impaired", but in the most apocalyptic view of current developments, the main multilateral institutions put in place since 1945 are at risk of being sidelined, for good.

This judgment may be over the top. Nato, the European Union and the UN have had fraught moments in the past: Suez, of course - when the US intervened to brake the Europeans (Britain and France) just as the Europeans (the Governments of France and Germany and public opinion across the Continent) are trying to brake the US now; the deployment of intermediate nuclear weapons in Europe and the row over the Soviet gas pipeline to Europe in the early 1980s: all of these generated immense strains on the alliance.

As for the UN, on most major issues it was paralysed for the first four decades by the crisscross vetoes of the two superpowers.

Predictions of Nato's demise, or slide into irrelevance, have been a constant of the past decade.

But this crisis is different. It is a moment of truth in waiting since the Soviet Union vanished, removing the common existential threat that bound the US and Europe together.

The true end, if not the calendar end, of the 20th century occurred on Christmas Day 1991, when the hammer and sickle was hauled down from the Kremlin and replaced by the red, white and blue flag of the Russian Federation. The ideological scourges of fascism, nazism and communism which had made the century the bloodiest in human history had finally been extinguished.

Then there was a drifting inter-regnum, of small wars, economic good times and titillating scandals - which did not, however, stop the then French Foreign Minister, Hubert Vedrine, from coining the term "hyperpower" to describe the overwhelming relative might of the US. But under Bill Clinton, America seemed an emollient hyperpower.

The 21st century began not on January 1, 2001, but on the brilliant early autumn morning of September 11, 2001. That day's attacks in New York and Washington defined the new enemy: international terrorists who might strike, not with commercial jets loaded with kerosene, but with biological or even nuclear weapons. The attitude of the wounded, angry hyperpower was transformed overnight. September 11 laid bare not America's weakness but America's might.

Scholars theorised about "asymmetrical warfare" pitting shadowy terror groups against the US armed forces. The true asymmetry, at the root of the present strains between America and its allies, is in their respective military power. It is this that has definitively exposed the fiction that Nato and the UN are parliaments of equals. More plainly than ever, the decisions which matter are made in Washington.

Of course, personalities have played their part. Europe liked Clinton; he was in some ways an honorary European. Not so Messrs Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, with their blunt language and - in the case of the latter - unconcealed scorn.

Their vision of a Hobbesian world where the law of the jungle prevails, their readiness to use the power at their disposal, appals what Donald Rumsfeld calls "old Europe." And he is right. It is an old Europe; prosperous and peaceful, scarred by memories of the 20th-century horrors that blossomed on its soil, wedded to the status quo, instinctively believing change must be for the worse, and fearful that a strike against Iraq will cause more problems than it solves.

It is a Europe that simply does not see itself threatened by Saddam Hussein (or, for that matter, the terrorists). Here, too, the glue of a common foe that held fractious partners together against the Soviet Union is not there.

The question is, how far will the arguments extend? "Throughout my lifetime there have been differences," Rumsfeld assured yesterday. "Nato will not disintegrate."

But the alliance may slide into irrelevance. The row over defensive planning to help Turkey, a vital US ally, in the event of war with Baghdad, infuriates Washington. But the US can simply provide the Patriots and so on in a bilateral deal, bypassing Nato completely.

What is more, it talks openly of a major reduction in troop levels in Europe, which would symbolise its growing disdain for the Continent.

The second area of collateral damage is within Europe itself. The present Iraq crisis has once again proved that, when push comes to shove, Britain will - as de Gaulle proclaimed - always choose le grand large (the US), despite Tony Blair's efforts to have it both ways.

The real novelty is the division within the rest of Europe. France and Germany have always considered themselves the engine of European integration. Given that 18 European countries have expressed support for the US, that notion is questionable.

But France is the main butt of US anger - and not surprisingly, for it is at the epicentre of the third, and the greatest, institutional challenge exposed by the Iraq crisis: the future of the UN itself. The world body's finest hour was the coalition assembled under its aegis by the first President George Bush to drive Saddam from Kuwait.

How different now. "It's the UN that's really on the line," says Professor Michael Mandelbaum, a leading US foreign policy specialist.

"Iraq is now shaping up for the UN's credibility as the 1930s Manchurian crisis did for the League of Nations. The odd thing is that those who profess to love the UN the most (ie, the French) are undermining it, while those that don't greatly like it (the US), are trying to give it teeth. If it fails, no one would lose more than the French."

And if that happened, the UN might go the way of the League of Nations, and one fragile underpinning of the post-1945 world order would go with it.

- INDEPENDENT

Herald feature: Iraq