The United Nations Security Council and War:The Evolution of Thought and Practice since 1945 (70 page)
Authors: Adam Roberts,Vaughan Lowe,Jennifer Welsh,Dominik Zaum
Bush faced a very different response to calls for Council action in 2003 than his father had in 1991. But equally, the domestic political climate he faced was vastly different: whereas the father had to use Council decisions to generate Congressional authorization for the use of force, the son was given the green light by Congress well before Security Council support was certain. With some in the US Administration committed to the overthrow of Saddam Hussein as a much-needed demonstration of US power after 9/11, an atmosphere developed in Washington apparently influencing intelligence findings that soon overstated the threat.
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On 16 October the US Congress passed a joint resolution authorizing military action.
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Under tremendous pressure from Washington, in November 2002 the Security Council adopted Resolution 1441.
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Resolution 1441 found Iraq had been and continued to be in ‘material breach’ of its disarmament obligations but afforded it one ‘final opportunity’ to meet its disarmament obligations, through an enhanced inspections regime. It ambiguously threatened ‘serious consequences’ for Iraqi non-compliance. This represented a compromise between the US and UK, which sought to make authorization for the use of force ‘automatic’ upon Iraqi non-compliance, and other members of the Council, which maintained that a ‘second Resolution’ would be needed before any military enforcement action.
Resolution 1441 resulted in the return, after four years of absence, of weapons inspectors to Iraq. Whether this inspections exercise was fated to prove a blind alley is open to debate. The UK representative on the Council at the time, Jeremy Greenstock, argues that ‘the fact that there was unanimity, while it did not help provide a basis for a second resolution in March, did in my view help to bring the Security Council together … after the conflict.’
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His French colleague, Jean-David Levitte believes that Resolution 1441 could have provided a good basis for negotiation between Europeans and Americans, had the Europeans been united.
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Recalling that France was then quite open to the use of force against Saddam Hussein as long as it was authorized by the Security Council, he notes that his first senior visitor in Washington, mid-December 2002, was a French military officer offering the Americans 15,000 troops, the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier
Charles de Gaulle
, and other military assets, under the right political dispensation.
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However, with the UK increasingly lined up behind the US diplomatically and as an unconditional military partner, Washington had little reason to negotiate with Paris (or the rest of the Council members) to meet conditions on its use of force.
In early December, Iraq presented the ‘currently accurate, full and complete declaration’ on its weapons programmes demanded by Resolution 1441. The US, trying to spring a trap,
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pointed to omissions in this declaration as material breaches in themselves. But most Council members were disposed to give UNMOVIC and the IAEA more of a chance. The weapons inspectors quickly set to work, conducting 237 inspections at 148 sites between November 2002 and March 2003, even as the US began a massive military build-up in the Persian Gulf.
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By early January, Washington had given Paris clear signals that the US was intent on a military solution.
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Paris privately offered Washington a significant compromise, promising a degree of accommodation as long as a clash in the Council was avoided – suggesting that Washington ‘[j]ust do what we did for Kosovo’ – not seek an explicit authorization of the use of force but instead rely on existing Resolutions.
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But Blair had promised his public a second resolution.
The pattern of P5 mutual accommodation in the post-Cold War era seemed to make a veto by one Western power of an initiative vital to others unlikely.
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Yet Washington was dismissive of its diplomatic antagonists, with Rumsfeld denigrating
France and Germany as ‘old Europe’.
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President Chirac soon hardened his opposition to military action, characterizing it as ‘the worst of solutions’ and ‘an admission of defeat’, which ‘everything must be done to avoid’.
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But the prospect of a French veto remained implied rather than explicit. Chirac’s rhetoric helped generate a wave of public sentiment well beyond France intensely opposed to American militarism, which German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder rode to an election victory. Russia and China, too, were supportive of France.
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Indications from chief weapons inspectors Hans Blix and Mohammed El-Baradei that Iraq was improving its cooperation were read by the US and UK as a classic Iraqi smokescreen pointing to further deception, while France and Russia suggested it proved that Resolution 1441 was bearing fruit.
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On 5 February Colin Powell, reprising Adlai Stevenson’s role in the Cuban Missile Crisis, presented a multimedia dossier detailing ‘evidence’ of Iraqi WMD to the Security Council.
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The presentation was broadcast live around the world, in an atmosphere of real tension, but failed to produce a ‘smoking gun’, focusing instead on shadowy photographs and assertions of connections between Iraq, al-Qaeda, and nuclear proliferators. Only his claim that Iraq was manufacturing prohibited missiles has held up well.
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Washington’s attacks on one set of UN instruments (inspections) and its narrow reliance on the other (sanctions) greatly undermined its international support. When UNMOVIC and the IAEA began to produce tentative evidence of Western intelligence failures, visiting sites identified by the US and UK without finding anything of substance, and the IAEA declared that Iraq was not in the process of reconstituting its nuclear programme, the US stepped up its criticisms of inspections.
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This seemed to fulfil an earlier promise by Vice-President Cheney to Hans Blix that the US would, if necessary, ‘discredit inspections in favour of disarmament’.
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The US deployed all the diplomatic, financial, surveillance, and military leverage at its disposal to influence votes in the Council, particularly targeting
Non-permanent Council Members such Angola, Chile, Guinea, Mexico, and Pakistan.
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To Washington’s fury, France did likewise.
Sensing that unilateral military action by the US and the UK was in the offing, France, Russia, and Germany agreed to list ‘benchmarks’ for Iraqi compliance and to consider a second resolution setting out an inspections timetable stretching over the coming months. But with over 200,000 troops in the Persian Gulf and the summer heat and sand storms fast approaching, Washington was in no mood to wait.
Blair was in a bind, committed to a war that large sections of his own party and much of his public opposed. British diplomats worked frantically to bridge the gap between the US and France, but without success. On 24 February 2003, the US, Britain, and Spain introduced a draft resolution stating that the Council ‘[d]ecides that Iraq has failed to take the final opportunity afforded to it in resolution 1441 (2002)’.
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Legal advisers of both US and UK indicated that this would revive the authorization to use force provided by Resolution 678, reopening the hostilities begun in 1991, which had lain dormant under a ceasefire for twelve long years.
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But British efforts were to no avail. On 5 March the Foreign Ministers of France, Germany, and Russia met in Paris, and agreed to block any resolution authorizing the use of force. On 7 March another meeting of the Security Council at foreign minister level failed to break the deadlock. A French proposal to allow a further 120 days of inspections was rejected by the US.
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The UK announced one last-ditch draft text, allowing Iraq until 17 March to demonstrate complete cooperation.
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This shifted no country’s vote.
With a timetable for war now in place, President Chirac made explicit what had until then been only implied: France would veto any resolution that would lead to war. With perhaps three vetoes imminent, and, importantly, lacking even those affirmative votes needed to meet the minimum threshold for passage of a Resolution (9 votes), Blair, Bush, and Spanish Prime Minister José Maria Aznar, after an hour-long meeting in the Azores Islands on 16 March, withdrew the draft resolution.
On 17 March President Bush delivered an ultimatum to Saddam Hussein:
Saddam Hussein and his sons must leave Iraq within 48 hours. Their refusal to do so will result in military conflict, commenced at a time of our choosing …. The United Nations Security Council has not lived up to its responsibilities, so we will rise to ours.
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Although Coalition Special Forces had already been operating in remote areas of Iraq for two days, major hostilities commenced on 19 March 2003, when Bush, reacting to intelligence about Hussein’s whereabouts, ordered an air strike against him at Dora Farms, which proved unsuccessful.
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The ground war, dubbed ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’, began the next day. Just over two weeks later, after meeting weak resistance from a dispirited Iraqi military, US troops took control of the Baghdad airport. By 9 April US troops had taken control of central Baghdad, pulling down an iconic statue of Hussein in Firdos Square. Hussein himself, and many of his top Ba’ath regime leaders, vanished.
In the weeks following the occupation of Iraq, the high costs of this venture gradually emerged. The US-led occupation force was soon revealed as both undermanned and under-prepared, with looting in the immediate aftermath of the invasion gradually spiralling into terrorism, insurgency, and, more recently, intense sectarian conflict. Without the participation of a broad military coalition analogous to that assembled in 1991, the brunt of these costs – military, financial, and political – fell on the US and UK.
Others also lost. France, which overplayed its diplomatic hand on Iraq seriously within the European Union setting, saw its own influence decline within that body, as it was enlarged in 2003 by the accession of members generally sympathetic to the US. Germany, which subordinated its UN diplomacy to French aims and tactics, was in a poor position to argue for a Permanent Seat in the Security Council in 2005, weakening the claims of its partners (Japan, Brazil, and India) in a strong but ultimately failed push for Security Council reform.
The UN itself also sustained considerable damage. On 22 May 2003 the Council adopted Resolution 1483, through which the P5 sought to chart a new working relationship with other countries on Iraq, despite lingering bitterness in some quarters. The text, including both aspirational and regulatory elements, was ‘as much … an invitation to further dialogue as … a detailed blueprint’ for how the Council would address occupied Iraq.
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It reflected a compromise between the US and UK, who sought an omnibus blessing recalling Resolution 687, and the French, Russians, and Chinese, who were eager to avoid repeating the
post facto
validation that was widely seen as characterizing Resolution 1244 in the wake of NATO’s Kosovo intervention. The resolution ultimately affirmed that the US and UK were occupying powers – a provision initially resisted by some coalition countries. At the same time, in contradiction to much traditional occupation law, the resolution gave the Coalition Provisional Authority a central role in transforming Iraq’s political and constitutional landscape.
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The US and UK decision to go to war without explicit Council approval effectively sidelined the UN. Addressing the Security Council, Kofi Annan asserted that ‘[w]e must all feel that this is a sad day for the United Nations and the international community.’
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The Council struggled to assert a clear role for the UN in Iraq, but the coalition was uninterested in any UN lead beyond humanitarian assistance. Although the US looked occasionally to the UN for assistance with elections and constitution-making in the years after it invaded, the UN’s role through 2006 proved at best cosmetic.
The UN’s sidelining over Iraq generated a genuine crisis of confidence amongst member states and UN staff, including the Secretary-General himself. This was only deepened by revelations by the Volcker Inquiry of the extent to which the legal-regulatory approach mandated by the Council in the OFF Programme had been politicized and corrupted. Yet this same inquiry largely overlooked the Security Council’s very serious failings of oversight and the complicity of several of its Permanent Members in the corruption of the OFF, notably through sanctions-busting by Jordan and Turkey.
By 2006, a newly sceptical US public was exerting pressure on the Bush administration to wrap up its military involvement in Iraq. Yet the US administration had no exit strategy, unable to turn to the allies it had so carefully cultivated in 1990. In face of the frightening violence on the ground, it was even denied the options of simply ‘declaring victory’. While Blair remained in office in Britain, it was far from clear that he was fully in power, the UK’s adventure in Iraq having significantly sapped his support within the Labour party and within the broader public.
ONCLUSIONS
The Security Council’s long engagement with Iraq has produced many losers. Saddam Hussein was put on trial for his atrocities and executed, but conditions on the ground in much of Iraq are distressing, risking regional conflagration in the event of full-fledged civil war. US international leadership has been undermined, and confidence in the UN is at an all-time low. The Iraq wars hold many lessons for the Council.
First, the Council’s long experience with Iraq points to the difficulty of waging a ‘war by other means’. The regulatory approach adopted by the Council towards Iraq from 1991 to 2003 mostly achieved its disarmament goals, although the sanctions regime became very leaky and caused severe suffering to Iraqi populations. Yet
waging ‘war by other means’ seems increasingly likely to be the Council’s preferred modus operandi, confronted by diffuse and asymmetric threats such as terrorism and WMD proliferation. The Council seems likely increasingly to focus on preventive regulation by states (as demanded by Resolutions 1373 and 1540).
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If the Council relies too heavily on
Chapter VII
to impose such regimes, this risks creating a perception amongst member states of the imposition of ‘legislation’ by a nonlegislative, unrepresentative supranational body.
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This will exacerbate sharp North-South fault lines at the United Nations, and risks setting the Security Council against the General Assembly.
