In Defense of the United Nations

By Eugene B. Kogan

Washington, D.C., December 8, 2004 — In the kerfuffle created by the calls in the U.S. Congress for Kofi Annan to step down as the United Nations Secretary General, it is easy to lose sight of a momentous opportunity to strengthen the U.S.-U.N. relationship.

The run-up to the U.S.-led preventive war against Iraq in March 2003 has severely strained, but not broken the ties that bind the U.N., the world’s preeminent international organization, and the United States, the sole superpower and the U.N.’s founding and most important member. President Bush’s reelection last month presents a unique, if unexpected, opportunity to put the U.S.-U.N. relationship back on a sound footing.

As the President has said, the victory on November 2 gave him “political capital” that he intended to “spend.” In addition to spending political capital, Bush must also think about how to invest it for the future. Where foreign relations are concerned, one of the more strategically important investment opportunities is the revitalization of the U.S.-U.N. relationship.

There is no getting around the fact that the United States needs an effective United Nations. The U.S. needed the U.N. framework after September 11, 2001 to galvanize the international community in the fight against international terrorism. Congress acted wisely by promptly releasing the U.S. arrears to the U.N. The U.S. came to the U.N. Security Council earlier this year to pass a resolution, which outlawed proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

After an unnecessary period of hesitation, the U.S. also asked the U.N. for help with reconstructing Iraq. The U.N. team, led by Carina Perelli, Director of the U.N. Electoral Assistance Division, is doing the critical work of preparing that country for elections in January 2005. At a press conference on November 19, Samir Shakir Mahmood Sumaidaie, the Iraqi Ambassador to the U.N., urged the U.N. to do more and welcomed Secretary General Kofi Annan’s recent decision to increase the number of U.N. electoral assistance staff on the ground.

As it starts its second term in office, the Bush Administration faces unprecedented challenges all around the world. In Northeast Asia, North Korea flaunts its arsenal of nuclear weapons and refuses to return to the six-party negotiating table. In the Middle East, large parts of Iraq are in chaos, and the January elections are in danger. And in Africa, a humanitarian catastrophe in Sudan is getting worse by day. The broader international threats of terrorism and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction also loom large.

Despite the enormous challenges, Bush’s new term offers unique opportunities, which are not to be missed. During his visit to Canada last week, the President committed himself to fostering a “wide international consensus among three great goals”: spreading freedom through multilateral action,fighting global terrorism, and bringing democracy to the Middle East. The most effective way for Bush to achieve such consensus is to engage the world community through the United Nations, in starting a dialogue about the common approaches to the major issues of world peace and security, such as terrorism and WMD proliferation. With purposeful guidance from the White House, the U.S. is also well-positioned to lead the process of U.N. reform.

It is time for President Bush to appoint a Coordinator for UN Reform. The Coordinator would work with the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. and the U.N. Secretary-General’s High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, which released its report, “A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility,” last week. In November 2003, Kofi Annan charged the Panel with recommending “clear and practical measures for ensuring effective collective action” to confront post-9/11 global threats. If it is really serious about making the U.N. more effective, the Bush Administration must put someone in charge of monitoring the implementation of the 101 recommendations contained in the Panel’s important report. One candidate for the position of UN Reform Coordinator would be Brent Scowcroft, a member of the Panel who served as a National Security Advisor to President Bush’s father.

A constructive approach to the U.N. is in order. The U.N. is (and has always been) a flawed institution, and the Oil-for-Food scandal is just one indication of that. Yet, almost 60 years after its founding, in an age when global cooperation against transnational threats is a necessity rather than luxury, the United Nations plays an indispensable role in addressing the foremost challenges to world security. One of the reasons is that by virtue of its universal membership, the UN is a unique legitimating mechanism. Its actions and proclamations carry weight all around the world.

Building a strong base of international legitimacy has always been and remains the critical step that the United States has to make to ensure that its actions are effective in achieving their goals. One of the more important and tragic lessons of the Iraq War is that the lack of legitimacy results in tactical and strategic costs that are unaffordable in the long term even for a country as powerful as the United States.

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The author, Eugene Kogan, is Senior Political Analyst, Americans for Informed Democracy.

E-mail: oped_comments@yahoo.com.

Reconsidering Kerry’s “War Vote”

By Eugene B. Kogan

Washington, D.C., Sep. 28 — President Bush’s campaign persists in asking pointed questions about Senator Kerry’s “vote for war” against Iraq two years ago. The claim that Congress’s Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of October 11, 2002, was a “vote for war” reflects the letter of the resolution, but flies in the face of its spirit.

The measure authorized the President to use force against the “continuing threat posed by Iraq.” On October 8, on the eve of the vote in Congress, Bush delivered a major address to the nation on the Iraqi threat. He said:

“Approving this resolution does not mean that the military action is imminent or unavoidable. This resolution will tell the United Nations, and all nations, that America speaks with one voice.”

This spirit of the resolution was also reflected in the speeches that legislators from both parties made before the vote. Senator John Warner (R-VA) stated that passing the authorization was important to convince Saddam Hussein that American and international resolve is “real, unshakable and enforceable if there is to be a peaceful resolution.” Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) said that passing the resolution made diplomatic success at the U.N. “more likely, and, therefore, war less likely.”

The resolution was not a “war vote” because, at the time, the Administration claimed publicly that Bush had not yet made the decision to use force. Rather, Congress voted for diplomacy. The authorization demonstrated the unified resolve of the U.S. government to ensure — by force, as a last resort — that Iraq disarms. Indeed, when he testified before the U.S. House of Representatives International Relations Committee on September 19, 2002, Secretary of State Colin Powell stated unequivocally that the proposed authorization “is not a resolution that is a declaration of war to go to war tomorrow.” The measure, Powell continued, “is an expression of support for what he [President Bush] might have to do if the actions that we are trying to take in the multilateral organization, the United Nations Security Council, are not successful.” The congressional action was thus designed to strengthen Secretary Powell’s position as he negotiated the passage of the unanimous U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441, which put the pressure of the world community on Iraq to accept international inspections. These inspections, had they been allowed to run their full course, would have demonstrated that Iraq was indeed disarmed.

Unfortunately, despite the numerous public statements to the contrary, President Bush was not interested in just ridding Iraq of WMD. Instead, he was focused on changing the Iraqi regime. Already in April 2002, Bush remarked to a British reporter: “I made up my mind that Saddam needs to go. That's about all I'm willing to share with you.” That is why Bush did not let the inspections run their course, and proceeded with determination in early 2003 to unseat the Iraqi leader.

Scholars argue that Congress can authorize hostilities either by an authorization to use force or by a declaration of war. Two examples of the former that they can point to are the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution of August 7, 1964 and the congressional Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of January 12, 1991. In 1964, after U.S. ships in the Gulf of Tonkin reported to have been fired upon by the North Vietnamese, Congress passed the measure, which came to be known as the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, authorizing President Lyndon Johnson “to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression.” And in 1991, Congress authorized President George H. W. Bush to use force in order to enforce U.N. Security Council Resolution 678 and expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait. In both cases, the Congress was authorizing the prompt use of the United States Armed Forces.

This was not the case in October 2002, when Congress issued an anticipatory authorization to use force, relinquishing its Constitutional right and responsibility to decide when and whether to initiate hostilities against Iraq, and instead passing the buck to President Bush. As a result, the President was left with an unprecedented authority not only to wage war — as is envisioned by Article 2 of the Constitution — but also to declare hostilities between the United States and Iraq, which, as per Article 1, is the responsibility of the Congress.

In hindsight, Congress committed a colossal blunder in October 2002 by giving President Bush such expansive war-making authority. Despite the President’s charged rhetoric about regime change throughout 2002, the Congress allowed itself to be misled by the Administration’s frequent assurances that Bush had not made the decision to use force. In the end, it was right for Congress to demonstrate the nation’s resolve to disarm Iraq and threaten the use of force. It was unnecessary and wrong, however, to allow the President to decide when and whether to use force. Unfortunately, the amendment proposed by Senator Carl Levin (D-MI), which reserved for Congress the final decision on whether to use force in case U.N. diplomacy failed, was defeated.

The Bush campaign’s questioning of Senator Kerry’s alleged “war vote” in October 2002 is disingenuous and misleading. The war in Iraq had just one vote in March 2003 — President Bush’s.

Eugene B. Kogan is the John Kenneth Galbraith Fellow at the Americans for Democratic Action Education Fund and Senior Political Analyst at Americans for Informed Democracy in Washington, D.C.

Another 9/11 Debate: America’s World Role

By Eugene B. Kogan

National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice’s public testimony on April 8 before the commission investigating the September 11 attacks revealed important details about how the Bush Administration responded to the increasing threat of international terrorism before 9/11. While the commission continues to reconstruct America’s actions in the run-up to the deadly attacks, the Bush Administration must initiate a national debate about the strategic course that America has taken in the aftermath of 9/11.

Lost amid the barrage of mutual accusations between Rice and Richard A. Clarke, the former Bush counterterrorism tsar, are the seeds of a truly important dialogue about America’s role in the world. Rice was at pains this week to rebut Clarke’s scathing criticism that Iraq, not al-Qaida, was the “urgent” priority for the Bush Administration before 9/11. Yet, she did relatively little to address Clarke’s truly important point—that the Iraq war was a distraction from the war on terrorism, not its central part, as the Administration still argues.

The Washington Post editorial on March 23, while disagreeing with Clarke’s position, called it “a legitimate alternative to Bush administration policy.” The New York Times editorial on March 26 also called for “a grown-up national conversation of how best to deal with terrorism”.

The Bush Administration must level with the American people about 9/11, and about how the events of that day led America to adopt a misguided, unilateral foreign policy strategy—in Iraq and beyond.

The attacks of 9/11 robbed America of its sense of invincibility and security. Our leaders, however, made us believe that 9/11 showed that America was weak. 9/11 thus developed into a syndrome: that not to feel weak, we must act forcefully, whatever the rest of the world thinks. “In the world we have entered, the only path to safety is the path of action,” President Bush said on June 1, 2002 in his speech at West Point.

Our allies perceived 9/11 as a call for the world to unite in the face of the common danger of international terrorism. “What is at stake today is nothing less than the survival of civilization,' wrote former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose country had previously suffered many terrorist attacks. The Bush Administration, however, took 9/11 not as an attack against civilization, but rather as an assault exclusively against America and the American people. President Bush’s demand, nine days later, that the world choose between “us” and the terrorists was superfluous. “Today, we are all Americans,” declared the French daily Le Monde on September 12. Its invincibility violated, America allowed itself to be blinded by righteous rage, ignoring the hand of help that the whole world extended to her. Squandering the opportunity to emerge as a leader of a world united in a common cause, this country instead chose the torturous path of world domination.

There is a glaring difference between domination and leadership: since 9/11, America has been in command, but rarely exercised real leadership. From Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan in October 2001 to Operation Iraqi Freedom in March 2003, America chose to ignore what the rest of the world thought and, instead, pursued what it thought was best for the world. In Iraq, this strategy backfired. Many of our traditional and most capable allies refused to help bear the financial or military burden of reconstruction unless America started sharing political authority in Iraq—something this Administration has been steadfastly refusing to do ever since President Bush announced the end of major hostilities on May 1, 2003.

Americans Deserve to Hear the Truth about 9/11 and Iraq:

Truth #1:

The events of 9/11 robbed us of our sense of security. Forceful actions, while they demonstrate our might, do not always make us more secure. The Iraq war, for instance, has not made America safer. One of the rarely mentioned justifications given for the war was the need to open a new front in the “war on terror” in Iraq, in order to deflect terrorist attacks from the U.S. homeland. When speaking to the troops during his surprise Thanksgiving visit to Iraq on November 27, 2003, President Bush said: “You are defeating the terrorists here in Iraq, so that we don't have to face them in our own country.” If Americans are to judge the war by this standard, then we are certainly no more secure today than we were before March 2003. Just consider the record.

On December 21, 2003, the Secretary of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge, announced that the national terror threat alert was being raised from “elevated” (yellow) to “high” (orange). He said: “The strategic indicators, including al-Qaida's continued desire to carry out attacks against our homeland, are perhaps greater now than at any point since September 11th, 2001.” That the war in Iraq has not made Americans more secure could also be witnessed over the weekend of January 31 and February 1 when five flights from England and France were cancelled due to fears that terrorists can again attack the United States using hijacked planes.

Truth #2:

As our experience in Iraq teaches us, acting with arrogance diminishes the prospects of cooperation with the rest of the world. In the short term, no doubt, we can say that we do not care. We are strong enough to conduct foreign policy how we choose—alone or with a coalition of committed allies. However, this is unsustainable strategically because in order to defeat terrorism, a unified response from the international community is required.

Truth #3

Only if the U.S. begins to whole-heartedly cooperate with the international community, when confronting the threat of terrorism and other challenges, such as proliferation of deadly weapons, can the American people hope to regain at least a fraction of the pre-9/11 feeling of security.

A national conversation about America’s post-9/11 world role is long overdue. It is a conversation that every American family should have because we asall Americans have the biggest stake in our country’s future.

The author is an international affairs analyst in Washington, D.C. He writes and lectures on U.S. foreign policy, terrorism and nuclear nonproliferation.