Making War to Keep Peace (7 page)

But the war was largely viewed as a phenomenal diplomatic and military success; the allied forces had achieved their goal of removing the Iraqis from Kuwait with few allied casualties. Strengthened by his belief that Saddam had been mortally weakened, President Bush thought it best to declare victory and bring the U.S. troops home. Another February 28 diary entry suggests that Colin Powell's beliefs mirrored his own: “Colin last night put it in perspective—this is historic and there's been nothing like this in history,” Bush wrote. “Bob Gates told me this morning, one thing historic is, we stopped. We crushed their forty-three divisions, but we stopped—we didn't just want to kill, and history will look on that kindly.”
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But Saddam was not finished. He wasn't even chastened. Soon he would turn his wrath, and the remains of his forces, on the Iraqis themselves.

SADDAM'S NEXT WAR

The survival of Saddam Hussein and his military forces left Iraq's civilians, especially its minorities, painfully vulnerable. Shortly after he capitulated to coalition forces, he began a violent, intensive war against Iraq's minorities, focusing his wrath on all those who might oppose him inter
nally. In the months that followed, the Iraqi government's merciless treatment of its Kurdish and Shiite populations created terrible human suffering for more than 2.5 million refugees and precipitated a confrontation between two basic principles of international order. This conflict—between the human rights of refugees and the principle of noninterference in the internal affairs of states—initially delayed effective protection of Kurdish and Shiite ethnic groups.

A special report to the UN on the status of human rights in Iraq, written by Dutch diplomat and special rapporteur Max Van der Stoel and released in early 1992, described in gruesome detail a record of baseless arrests; unspeakable torture, including electric shock, burning, beating, rape, and the extraction of teeth and nails; and arbitrary executions of individuals, families, and whole villages. The report catalogues the torture and murder of children; the sudden, unexplained disappearances of Iraqi citizens; and a litany of capricious sentences before Saddam's despotic courts.

“It is clear,” Van der Stoel reported, “that deliberate actions of the Iraqi government have caused refugee flows, forced urbanization and internal deportation.”
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At least two million people fled to the Kurdish hills in the spring of 1991. “Detailed reports allege the destruction of some four thousand villages affecting well over a million people,” Van der Stoel wrote. Kurdish property was stolen and farmland mined, and people were gassed and denied food, fuel, and medicine through an internal blockade—a kind of “siege within a siege.”
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Iraq's one million Assyrians also suffered massacres, forced relocation, and the systematic destruction of their villages, churches, and schools. The Shia of southern Iraq, too, were special targets of Saddam's wrath—thousands were arrested, imprisoned, tortured, and executed.

Van der Stoel concluded that the Iraqi actions amounted to no less than genocide. After carefully documenting the charge, meticulously reviewing both detailed testimony from the victims and the Baghdad government's own explanations, he concluded that “[t]he Government of Iraq has systematically violated and continues to violate its international human rights obligations…. The number of victims suffering from these violations is certainly in the hundreds of thousands, if not much higher.”
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Humanitarian Intervention

In the freezing spring of 1991, Saddam's forces drove fleeing Kurds from their homes to the borders of Iran and Turkey, creating great human misery and threatening to destabilize Turkey and the always-tense relations in this area. In response, the Bush administration proposed passage of Security Council Resolution 688, which defined these massive human rights violations as a threat to international peace and security and providing the Security Council with a first-ever justification for the use of force in the internal affairs of a nation. A few months later, when warring Somali warlords and acute food shortages threatened hundreds of thousands of Somalis with starvation, Bush turned again to the Security Council to secure authorization for the use of force in the internal affairs of a member state. These authorizations to use force to provide humanitarian aid in a militarily risky setting differed from the authorization to drive out Iraqi forces. They were enacted after the heady victory in the GulfWar, when the idea that military force could and should be used for purposes beyond the protection of a nation's vital interest, was gaining acceptance.

A major innovation in the international law of human rights occurred on April 5, 1991, when the UN Security Council—led by the United States—passed a resolution condemning Iraq's repression of its civilian population as “a threat to international peace and security” and, thus, that it was the proper concern of the Security Council. Resolution 688 affirmed these two principles by a 10 to 3 vote (Cuba, Yemen, and Zimbabwe voted no, and China and India abstained). The two principles are consistent with the UN Charter, but both were major departures from conventional UN doctrine.
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In the past, the most brutal repression by a government of its own population was treated as an internal matter that was beyond the jurisdiction of the Security Council—even if it created a million refugees and put destabilizing pressure on neighboring states. Until the adoption of Resolution 688, Article 2(4)'s noninterference principle was accorded a position of paramount importance in most UN discussions of international law.
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Adherence to the principle of noninterference had prevented action to stop even the most terrible human rights violations. When Idi Amin
killed tens of thousands of Ugandans in the 1970s, and Pol Pot starved, beat, and worked to death approximately two million Cambodians from 1975 to 1979, the Security Council took no action. When Ethiopia's Mengistu Haile Mariam created a massive famine with his forced “villagefication” policy, the Security Council took no action. These humanitarian catastrophes were regarded as internal matters, as were China's Great Leap Forward of 1958 and the decade-long Cultural Revolution that began in 1966, each of which slaughtered untold millions. Only South Africa (which because of its racist government structure was considered an illegitimate state) was regularly scrutinized and condemned by the UN Security Council for its treatment of its own population.

Resolution 688 could only be passed because the cold war had ended, the Soviet bloc had collapsed, and the major governments were changing their views about the proper business of the Security Council. China, which could have blocked the passage of the resolution (as it could have blocked the passage of the Gulf War resolutions), did not, probably because of its powerful distaste for standing alone.
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In early April 1991, the Security Council considered a second measure to save the Kurdish refugee population. British prime minister John Major argued for the creation of secure enclaves inside Iraq, protected by the United Nations, that would be large enough to include population centers. The European Community supported Major's position, but the United States, the Soviet Union, and China expressed reservations about the violation of Iraq's territorial integrity. UN support for the safe haven concept would reappear in the Bosnian conflict, again giving respect for human rights priority over respect for territorial integrity.
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These proposals were a clear indication that the new world order would have substantially higher standards of conduct than the old and would give a greater priority to the rights of people compared with the rights of whatever government is in power.

George H. W. Bush's Vision

These emerging views were congruent with George H. W. Bush's vision. He was convinced that Americans had a special mission and he frequently spoke of it.

He shared with Wilson, FDR, and Truman the twentieth-century American dream of a world of law and peace preserved through collective action—a world order based on “peaceful settlement of disputes, solidarity against aggression, reduced and controlled arsenals, and just treatment of all peoples.”
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Bush described his dream in a speech to the UN General Assembly on September 21, 1992. His adult life, he said, had been marked by successive conflicts between tyranny and freedom, and deep divisions between totalitarianism and democracy. Now, with the end of the cold war, he dreamed of transcending these divisions:

The three dominant challenges of this new world would be to keep the peace, prevent proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and promote prosperity for all in an open economic order. Bush believed the United Nations would have a special role in meeting these challenges: to provide and coordinate peacekeeping, enforce nonproliferation, and eliminate the walls that divide people and prohibit trade.

Bush saw the defining characteristics of the new world order as a global perspective, a proclivity for multilateral engagement and collective action, a lesser reluctance to use force, and a greater deference to and broader reliance on the UN for pursuit of American foreign policy objectives. He gave high priority to the institutionalization of the Security Council's role in actions under Article 51, emphasizing the council's role in each phase of the response to the Iraq invasion.

After Iraq withdrew its forces from Kuwait, Bush sponsored a major expansion of the Security Council's jurisdiction to include humanitarian intervention into the internal affairs of states. In April 1991, his efforts resulted in Resolution 688 and the creation of a UN mission to enforce surveillance. Within the year, Bush sponsored a resolution calling for the use of force, if necessary, under Chapter VII to deliver
humanitarian relief to starving Somalis. Each of these actions substantially expanded the jurisdiction of the Security Council into areas from which it had previously been excluded.

Through his repeated moves into multilateral arenas, his more frequent use of force, his reliance on collective action and UN Security Council permission to act, and his repeated expansion of UN jurisdiction, Bush significantly altered U.S. policy and expectations concerning the use of force and the role of multilateral institutions.

In Kuwait, Bush wanted more than an extra layer of legality for his decision to turn back Saddam Hussein's invasion. He wanted to establish and strengthen a precedent for collective response to aggression through the UN. In
A World Transformed
, he describes how he sought to use the Gulf War to reinvigorate the Security Council:

Desert Storm was a collective action, taken through the United Nations, in which a number of countries joined together to defend a member state against international aggression with authorization of the Security Council. This is the one use of force clearly foreseen and accepted in the UN Charter.

Operating under a clear mandate and with Bush's leadership, the United States organized and led a predominately American multinational force in a massive, successful effort that quickly achieved its stated goal: the withdrawal of Iraqi forces from Kuwait. As Bush explained later, the war's beginning and end were guided by Security Council resolutions. U.S. forces, he said, did not pursue and destroy Saddam's forces because the authorizing resolution limited the scope of military action, calling only for Iraq's withdrawal from Kuwait.

But what kind of precedent for what kind of new world order did the Gulf War set?

From 1948, when the United Nations deployed 259 peacekeepers to oversee the armistice between Israel and the Arab states, until approximately the end of the cold war, UN peacekeeping was carried out according to the principles articulated by Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld in the Suez Crisis in 1956. The Hammarskjöld model assumed a conflict between states, a cease-fire, or between the parties to the conflict, the consent of the conflicting parties to the peacekeeping mission, the neutrality of the peacekeepers, and minimum use of force by peacekeepers.
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The model postulated a multinational military action authorized by the Security Council under Chapter VI of the UN Charter. But the Gulf War was assuredly not a peace operation—it was a war. The forces dispatched to enforce the resolution did not have Saddam's consent. They did not rely on peacekeeping rules of engagement or on the principle of minimum force. Instead, U.S. leaders, applying the lessons of Vietnam and the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine, operated on the principle of overwhelming force, congressional and popular support, decisive action, and victory as a goal.