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Opposition
to War Against Iraq
By
Richard
Falk
Professor of International Law and
Practise, Princeton University
TFF associate
September 20, 2002
Now that President Bush has put the argument for
preemptive war against Iraq before the United Nations as
the centerpiece of the war against terrorism, it becomes
a matter on national urgency to consider the merits and
drawbacks of this position. I believe that threatening a
preemptive war against Iraq represents a momentous
failure of American foreign policy, whether considered
from the perspective of international law, international
morality, or national interest, and so does the rest of
the world, including many of America's closest allies.
The evident insistence on initiating such a war in the
face of this international opposition would likely lead
to further anti-Americanism overseas and might even
ignite a grassroots revolt against US unilateralism. It
may still not be too late, but if this slide toward a
disastrous war is to be averted, the American people must
become quickly aroused and vocal in their opposition
before it gets underway.
So far, the domestic debate on the war has barely
touched on the core issues. In June after months of
passivity, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,
despite a Democratic chair, Senator Joe Biden, finally
organized hearings deferential to the president that
accepted as a premises the desirability of regime change
for Iraq, and confined inquiry to matters of feasibility
and costs. No genuine critics of the war policy were
invited to participate in these hearings that were
falsely advertised as a "national debate." This
cost/benefit appraisal made no dent on the public mood.
Skepticism toward the war was then lifted to a higher
level of public awareness when such national security
stalwarts as Brent Scowcroft, Henry Kissinger, Lawrence
Eagleburger, and James Baker voiced some pragmatic doubts
about the approach to Iraq being taken by the Bush White
House. In response, the Bush pro-war leadership, with
Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld out in front, suavely
seconded by Colin Powell, outlined as forcefully as
possible the administration argument for unleashing a
preemptive war against Iraq. And then on September 12th,
in the immediate aftermath of the Ground Zero anniversary
observances, President Bush articulated a modified
approach toward Iraq in a major speech to the UN General
Assembly. Its essence was to insist that Iraq be made by
the Security Council to obey resolutions calling for the
destruction of all facilities relating to weaponry of
mass destruction via the renewal of unrestricted
inspection. In the likely event that Iraq resists or the
UN fails to act, then the US would seize the option to
wage war.
There are several glaring weaknesses in this
presentation of Iraq policy, both by the Bush
administration and its mainstream critics. First of all,
it has excluded consideration of the relevance of
international law, as well as the exclusive authority of
the United Nations when it comes to waging a
non-defensive war. Secondly, it avoids altogether the
manifestly unconstitutional claim that the president has
the legal power to initiate such a war without formal
Congressional authorization. Thirdly, it puts forward a
series of "facts" about Iraq's behavior that magnifies
any threat it poses out of all proportion to the
realities, while calling for a preemptive war that could
have dire regional and global consequences.
Throught the prior century there was a concerted
effort by the major countries of the world to put legal
limits on the discretion of states to wage war. The
United States participated fully in these efforts, which
reached their climax in relation to the establishment of
the United Nations. The key commitment of the UN Charter,
as expressed in Article 2(4) is the obligation to
"refrain in their international relations from the threat
or use of force against the territorial integrity or
political independence of any state." There are two lines
of exception to this blanket prohibition, the most
important being the right of a state to act in
self-defense. But the Charter restricts this right
carefully by affirming in Article 51 that action in
self-defense is only permissible in response to a prior
armed attack, and even then, only provisionally, with
final authority to use defensive force vested in the UN
Security Council.
But it is admittedly important not to be trapped by
legalism, through adopting an overly rigid reading of
international law that imposes on a state unreasonable
degrees of vulnerability affecting its basic security.
For instance, I believed that international law was
properly stretched to view Afghanistan as subject to an
American claim of self-defense despite the indications
that September 11 was the work of al-Qaeda, and the link
between the two was not convincingly set forth.
Nevertheless, it would have been unreasonable, given the
nature of the Taliban regime and the continuing
megaterrorist threat directed at the United States, to
refrain from acting in self-defense. Law grows in
response to necessity, as confirmed by public opinion. In
my view, what was legally, morally, and politically
justifiable with respect to Afghanistan is completely
unacceptable in relation to Iraq.
It is here that the factual contentions of the US
Government must be considered alongside the legal rules
governing recourse to war. The essential Bush argument is
that Iraq is acquiring weaponry of mass destruction
including nuclear weaponry, that its past behavior
suggests that it will likely use such weaponry against
American targets or transfer the weaponry to terrorist
groups that will strike, and that therefore to avoid such
catastrophic harm it is necessary to act in anticipation.
The evidence as to acquisition is skimpy and speculative,
at best, with most assessments suggesting that Iraq would
lack any capacity to produce nuclear weapons for five
years or more, and would then possess only a nominal
capability. Furthermore, the contention that Iraq would
threaten or use such weapons, and especially against the
United States, completely fails any test of
credibility.
Administration officials brand Iraq as an aggressor
state on the basis of its two wars with neighbors, Iran
in 1980, and Kuwait in 1990. It should be recalled that
revolutionary Iran was acting very provocatively toward
secular Iraq, and that Baghdad's recourse to war was
tactically and diplomatically encouraged by the United
States, which helps explains why the UN failed to condemn
Iraq's aggressive moves at the time. It should also be
remembered that the first Bush president supported
military assistance to Iraq long after it used chemical
weapons in the late 1980s against the Kurdish village of
Halabja and in the last bloody stages of the war with
Iran. It is also important to recall is that the American
ambassador to Iraq in 1990 sent extremely mixed signals
to Saddam Hussein just prior to the Iraqi invasion of
Kuwait, seeming to suggest that the future of Kuwait was
a regional matter of no strategic concern to Washington.
None of this is meant to excuse Iraq or Saddam Hussein,
but to demonstrate that there is no basis in Iraq's past
behavior to brand it as a reckless aggressor state, much
less driven by a visionary terrorist worldview, and thus
no reason to lose confidence in the capacity to contain
and deter Saddam Hussein in the future.
More important than this background on the American
relationship with Iraq up to the Gulf War, is a look at
Iraq's behavior. Its dictatorial leadership is brutal and
unprincipled, without question, but in its international
relations it acts as a secular state, calculating its
actions against probable costs, adjusting to
miscalculations in a rational, self-serving manner. It
accepted a stalemate with Iran after nine years of
warfare without fighting on; it withdrew from Kuwait in
the face of the US-led coalition's military superiority,
and faced with defeat, it accepted the terms of a
humiliating ceasefire, the most punitive peace
arrangement since the burdens imposed on Germany after
World War I, which were later widely blamed for fueling
the rise of political extremism under the
ultra-nationalist leadership of Hitler. Iraq has been
careful for more than a decade not to be linked to
international terrorist activities, and not to give the
US grounds for attacking. In fact, so far as al Qaeda is
concerned, the indications to date are that there has
been enmity rather than solidarity, as Iraq's regime has
a record of suppressing Islamic activities, and is
ironically regarded by Islamic forces as an example of a
decadent secular state in the Western style.
Let us also consider Iraq's capabilities. Contrary to
strategic expectations at the time, Iraq in 1980 was
unable to defeat Iran in their long war despite the fact
that Iran was in the midst of revolutionary turmoil that
was thought to have dramatically degraded its military
capabilities. In the Gulf War Iraq put up no resistance,
and sustained severe damage to its overall industrial
infrastructure from which it has never recovered. These
military encounters suggest the impotence of Iraq as a
regional offensive threat. This impotence has been
reinforced since 1991 by the most punishing sanctions in
history, by extensive destruction of Iraqi stocks of
chemical and biological weapons under UN supervision, and
by American threats of a devastating reaction in the face
of any Iraqi provocation. Such a containment strategy has
enjoyed great success throughout the past decade, and
there is every reason to suppose that it would work even
in the unlikely event that Iraq should acquire over the
next several years some minimal nuclear weapons
capability. It is ridiculous to treat that possibility as
posing any sort of threat to the United States, or even
to Iraq's neighbors. Nothing would more quickly bring
about the utter destruction of Iraq than its threat or
use of such weaponry, and it is obvious that even its
clear acquisition would in all likelihood prompt a
devastating American military reaction.
For Iraq, however imprudently, it is probably the case
that such weapons are viewed as potentially valuable, but
only for defensive purposes to stave off an attack. After
all, Washington has give Iraq few options. Iraq has been
under a constant threat of invasion, its territorial
sovereignty repeatedly violated by US/UK air attacks in
the so-called no-fly zones, and the United States, the
most powerful country in the world, has made it a major
tenet of its foreign policy to push for a regime change
in Baghdad by every means available, whether legal or
not. These include financing and arming exile groups,
covert operations, rallying support at the UN and around
the world for an invasion, sustaining cruel sanctions for
over a decade, and periodic bombardment of Iraqi
territory. In such circumstances, in a self-help
international system, it is hardly surprising that Iraq
would seek by the only means available to it, to deter an
attack upon itself. Such efforts would seem consistent
with the accepted idea that the prime obligation of a
sovereign state, and its prevailing government, is to
defend itself against foreign enemies. Also, for
Washington to insist on a regime change in Baghdad is not
an acceptable demand. Such an interventionary demand
denies the people of Iraq their right of
self-determination, which has become recognized in
international law as the most fundamental of all human
rights.
Waging a preemptive war against Iraq is extremely
unwise. It would likely unleash all sorts of dangerous
forces in the region and the world. It would, to begin
with, create the one set of conditions in which Iraq
under attack would be inclined to use the most
destructive weaponry at its disposal or to allow the main
enemies of the United States to gain access to such
weaponry. All governments, including our own, believe
that in a war involving survival, there are few
restraints, if any, and that whatever can be done to hurt
the enemy should be done. Certainly World War II was
fought in this way by the Allied side, and yet because
its outcome defeated fascism, it is generally viewed as
the prime example of "a just war."
But there are other dangerous side-effects that should
give pause to the war-makers in Washington: an Islamic
coup in Pakistan leading to a regional war with India in
which both sides have nuclear weapons; escalating oil
prices triggering a world depression; civil strife in the
Middle East, with anti-West regime changes in Saudi
Arabia and Egypt; an inter-civilizational holy war
between Islam and the West (which would amount to an
unintended endorsement of Osama bin Laden's approach to
world history!); and possibly most serious of all, a loss
of international support for the struggle against the
persisting al Qaeda threat, which should remain the
overriding security concern of the White House.
The Bush leadership has so far failed to convince even
sympathetic European leaders, with the partial exception
of its British junior partner, that a war against Iraq is
justifiable by reference to law or necessary in relation
to the threat posed. It is important to contrast the
American success in building support around the world for
the Gulf War, and more recently, in relation to the war
against Afghanistan, with its pronounced failure to gain
international backing for a war against Iraq. To disrupt
the al Qaeda network seems justifiable and necessary,
given its visionary worldview and its genocidal tactics;
such an adversary, fully prepared to pursue suicidal
missions, cannot be deterred: since Afghanistan there is
no longer any real target area, the struggle against
terrorism is defined irrationally, and there is no way of
discouraging further attacks except by destroying the
capability to engage in terrorism. But to transpose such
reasoning to Iraq is to confuse the issue. Unlike al
Qaeda, Iraq can be deterred, and if not, is acutely
vulnerable to retaliatory violence, and will remain so
for as far ahead as it is possible to see. The case for
preemptive war is without substance and should be
abandoned.
In view of these considerations, an American recourse
to war against Iraq would involve amount to undertaking
an aggressive war. It would be an outlaw action likely to
kill thousands of civilians, as well as risk the lives
and jeopardize economic wellbeing of Americans and
others. It is conceivable that under some set of future
circumstances a convincing case for preemptive war could
be made, but this is not it. To so rupture the Charter
framework of legal constraints would amount to a great
setback for world order in the 21st century. It would
also be an affront to the United Nations pledge "to save
succeeding generations from the scourge of war." If the
White House defiantly goes ahead with its war plans, the
United States would find itself cast in the role of being
a menace to world order, an enemy of humanity, as well as
being guilty of Crimes Against the Peace in a Nuremberg
sense.
We are left with the question as to what should be
done. There is the call by President Bush for full Iraqi
compliance with UN resolutions relating to weapons of
mass destruction and delivery vehicles, as verified by
unrestricted inspection. There is the Iraqi demand, with
wide regional and global support, for an end to
sanctions. From Iraq's perspective, it is
self-destructive to pursue a nuclear weapons option, just
as from the US perspective it is self-destructive to
pursue a preemptive war option. Both sides would serve
their national interest, as well as the global interest,
by backing off, allowing a revival of inspection under
responsible UN auspices that generated international
confidence without encroaching excessively on Iraqi
sovereignty. Such a win/win solution would be a great
victory for peace, for constructive diplomacy and a
multilateral approach, and for the United Nations. It
would also allow the United States to refocus on the real
threat to security arising from al Qaeda's continuing
dedication to its anti-American jihad.
©
TFF & the author 2002
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