Authors: John Keegan
It was towards that form that ‘Europe’ gradually evolved in the years after the Second World War. Beginning with a Coal and Steel Community, to which were added an Atomic Energy Community and an Economic Community, with a European court and central bank as adjuncts, and eventually a European currency as a medium of exchange, the European Union was, on the eve of the Iraq War, when the framing of a constitution was at an advanced stage of drafting, almost the supranational body Monnet and Salter had wished to make it. Its executive, the Commission, monopolized the drafting of legislation to regularize its economic life; its parliament had rights only to approve, scarcely to alter, such laws; and the European court had authority to condemn governments in breach of Union legislation. In almost every respect it amounted to a supranational authority, to which the historic governments of Europe were subordinate.
In only one aspect was its authority deficient. It had no power to impose its will, either internally or externally. This was a crippling deficiency, its effect completely unforeseen by the European founding fathers, Monnet and Salter. They, products of an earlier and higher-minded age, were mechanistic in outlook and, believing in the power of economic sanction and collective legal
condemnation to regulate misbehaviour, had apparently imagined that treaty and international law would be sufficient to enforce the supranational will. It may be that, in their appreciation of the Union’s domestic behaviour, they were correct; the fundamental authority of the Union’s institutions has not hitherto been called into question, though the failure of France and Germany to abide by the Union’s financial stability pact gives warning of trouble ahead. It is in the Union’s external relations, those both of it as a collectivity and of its individual member states, that the weakness is apparent, and never more so than over the crisis with Saddam’s Iraq. The crisis of 2002–03 revealed a fundamental breach in foreign policy attitude between ‘Europe’, both the Union itself and most of the states that compose it, and America. The crisis made it obvious that the United States (originator of the League of Nations idea of collective action that inspired ‘Europe’, to be enforced at harshest by economic sanction) had been hardened by fifty years of Cold War confrontation to settle for nothing less than bringing transgressors of international order to compliance by military action. The neo-conservatives were merely expressing a national attitude. The Europeans, once so militarist, had by contrast espoused a philosophy of international action that actually rejected action and took refuge in the belief that all conflicts of interest were to be settled by consultation, conciliation and the intervention of international agencies. The conflict of approach between ‘hard cop’ America and ‘soft cop’ Europe became manifest in the months that preceded the outbreak of the war.
Iraq’s relations with the outside world were governed, following its unsuccessful annexation of Kuwait, by a series of resolutions adopted by the United Nations, eventually to number fifteen altogether. Before the adoption of Resolution 1441 on 9 November 2002, which the United States and Britain were to use as their legal justification for instituting military action against Iraq, the most important of the relevant UN resolutions was 687, adopted immediately after the First Gulf War. Framed to legalize military action if Iraq persisted in the acquisition or development of
weapons of mass destruction or their means of delivery – it should be remembered that the results of the First Gulf War had not given the victorious coalition forces the opportunity to inspect weapon sites in Iraq – it demanded unconditionally ‘the destruction, removal, rendering harmless of all chemical and biological weapons and all stocks of agents and all related subsystems and components and all research, development, support and manufacturing facilities related thereto; and all ballistic missiles with a range greater than 150 kilometres [approximately 93 miles], and related major parts and repair and production facilities’. Resolution 687 was accepted by international lawyers as reinforcing Resolution 678, that which had authorized the inception of the First Gulf War but which also legitimized all ‘subsequent relevant resolutions needed to restore international peace and security’ to the region.
Resolution 678 had underpinned the actions of the United States, Britain and other allied nations in enforcing restraint on Saddam in the years after 1991, in particular the ‘no fly’ principle in northern and southern Iraq. The heightening of Western hostility towards Saddam, following the election of President George W. Bush and 9/11, was at first largely justified by invoking 678, which remained in force. Then, as the new American administration became increasingly concerned by the threat of Iraq’s continuing with its development of weapons of mass destruction, 678 came to seem insufficient. In 1999, as the Clinton administration drew towards its close, a new resolution, 1284, had been passed in the United Nations, intended to reinforce the régime imposing inspection measures against weapons of mass destruction imposed by 687. That measure had created an inspection system known as UNSCOM, which had proved extremely effective, far more effective than recognized at the time or afterwards. UNSCOM worked inside Iraq for over seven years, discovering and destroying much of Saddam’s arsenal of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). As its agents could use the leverage of denying oil sales in the face of Iraqi non co-operation, its demands for access to WMD sites had usually to be obeyed, to Saddam’s
disgust. UNSCOM’s operational success led eventually to his refusing its inspectors any farther facilities in 1998 and their withdrawal from the country. UNSCOM was replaced by UNMOVIC, an altogether less rigorous régime, under Resolution 1284; even 1284 was opposed by several members of the Security Council, including Russia and France, which were profiting commercially by provisions that allowed Saddam to export oil in return for humanitarian aid (the ‘oil-for-food’ programme); Saddam, like a Roman emperor of old, had instituted a rationing system to provide dutiful subjects with essentials. In any case, Saddam declined to respect 1284 and refused UN inspectors access.
Saddam’s defiance of 1284 inaugurated his downfall. It led the United States and Britain to seek a new UN resolution that would bring him to heel. Washington was less concerned by the need to restrain Saddam under legal authority. The UN Charter, though outlawing military action by one state against another unless authorized by the Security Council, provided, under Article 51, wide latitude for measures of self-defence. The United States had acted under Article 51 to attack the Taleban in Afghanistan in 2002. Britain, however, more influenced by the prevailing European distaste for military action of any sort, unless legally buttressed, was anxious to observe the proprieties. The Prime Minister, Tony Blair, remained committed, however, to supporting President Bush in the war against terrorism, in which Saddam Hussein was identified by Western intelligence as a frontrunner. America was anxious to secure British support in any move against Saddam. During September and October 2002, therefore, American legal officers co-operated with their British counterparts to draft a new resolution for submission to the UN, which would authorize joint military action. Its wording was finally agreed in early November and submitted to the Security Council as Resolution 1441. It stated that Iraq was still in ‘material breach’ of Resolution 678 of 1990 and all subsequent resolutions affecting its régime. It required the Iraqi government to prove that it no longer possessed weapons of mass destruction and to co-operate with the inspectors of UNMOVIC. It allowed it a ‘final
opportunity’ for co-operation; it warned that, failing such cooperation, ‘serious consequences’ would follow.
Much has been made subsequently by legalists of the Security Council’s failure to adopt its usual form of words, ‘all necessary means’, to warn of the threat of military action. That seems specious. Resolution 1441 clearly menaced Saddam with severe penalties at the hands of the responsible powers unless he opened Iraq to unrestricted inspection of its military facilities. Should he fail to do so, a repetition of 1991 would follow. Then his forces had been deployed on the territory of Kuwait, proclaimed by him, illegally, to be Iraq’s nineteenth province. What he now risked, if he persisted in intransigence, was a direct Western attack on the territory of Iraq proper.
Following the passage of Resolution 1441, there ensued a curious passage of diplomatic dissent by the larger European powers and domestic protest by their populations. The reaction to Resolution 1441 was highly ‘European’. The Union’s inner circle, France, Germany and Luxembourg, though not Italy, the latter taking unexpectedly a stoutly Atlanticist position, struggled by every means to distance themselves from the decisions of the United States, to put legal obstacles against military measures in its way and to mobilize opposition to its policy in the United Nations. Newer members of the European Union, Spain in particular, gave America wholehearted support, as did recent and aspirant member states in Eastern Europe. Popularly, a European fault line appeared. East of the old Iron Curtain, the European population came out for President Bush. Correctly recognizing Saddam as essentially Stalinist, they supported America’s determination to discipline the sort of tyrant who had created the system under which they had suffered for so many of the postwar years. Their governments took a similar position. Poland, which most valued its new status as an American ally through its membership of NATO, actually agreed to send a small military contingent to join the coalition forces. Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania granted vital staging rights to American forces. The Czech Republic and Latvia disassociated themselves from expressions of anti-American
opinion. West of the old Iron Curtain, by contrast, popular anti-war majorities appeared. They were large in France and overwhelming in Germany. Even in Britain, whose government proved America’s staunchest ally throughout the diplomatic crisis of 2003 and the war that followed, many newspapers declared an anti-American position and demonstrations staged by crowds estimated to include over one million people took to the streets.
It was the active opposition of governments formally allied to the United States that most troubled Washington and caused the greatest diplomatic damage. Germany, throughout the Cold War years America’s most compliant ally on the European continent, revealed a face to Washington never previously shown. Gerhard Schroeder, its Chancellor, actually campaigned for re-election on an anti-American platform, apparently seeking to compensate for his personal unpopularity by espousing the popular mood of the moment. President Chirac of France went much farther. Chirac had a long personal involvement with Saddam’s régime. As Prime Minister in the 1970s he had received Saddam in France, escorted him on a tour of French nuclear facilities and negotiated an agreement by which France sold Iraq the reactors, one containing enough enriched nuclear fuel to construct at least three nuclear warheads. He also agreed to train 600 Iraqi scientists and technicians in nuclear technology. Under farther military agreements France supplied Iraq with $1.5 billion’s worth of military equipment, including fighters, surface-to-air missiles and air defence equipment. Much of this material was destroyed during the First Gulf War. Iraq paid in oil but also entered into trading arrangements with France which, under the oil-for-food programme, resulted in France selling Iraq $1 billion’s worth of exports as late as 2002.
Yet neither his long association with Iraq nor the pressure of a major Muslim minority in his country wholly explain Chirac’s bitter anti-Americanism in the months preceding the war. What he felt, and it was felt too by many politicians and millions of electors in France, Germany, Britain and elsewhere, was something different and new: a distaste for and hostility towards the use of
military action for state purposes. The mood was not one of pacifism but of a changed outlook on the world which might be defined, in a term chosen by Professor Kenneth Minogue, as ‘Olympianism’. Olympianism is by definition supranational – the European Union is in essence supranational, not intergovernmental – and seeks to influence and eventually control the behaviour of states not by the traditional means of resorting to force as a last resort but by supplanting force by rational procedures, exercised through supranational bureaucracy and supranational legal systems and institutions. One of the most striking developments in the world since 1945 has been the rise and proliferation of such bodies. The United Nations, deficient as its powers are, is the most obvious; the Hague Tribunal, set up to try war criminals, including those who commit crimes against their own people, and the European Court of Human Rights are others. The most notable, however, is the European Union, a truly Olympian body, since it seeks to supersede the governments of its constituent member states but to do so while lacking any ultimate means to enforce its decisions. Treaties, laws and regulations – millions of regulations – are the media of its power.
To many Europeans the Union provides an example and a vision of how the whole of the world might one day be governed. They are able to believe what they do because, thus far in its existence and development, none of its major decisions have ever been rejected by a member state. The workings of the Union do seem to lend credence to the idea in which Olympians most want to trust: that laws will be obeyed by their mere promulgation and that treaties can be self-enforcing.
The idea is, of course, illusory. ‘Covenants without swords are but words’ judged the supreme realist Thomas Hobbes and nothing that has happened since the seventeenth century gives reason to expect otherwise. Olympians, and particularly those who live within and are committed to the supranationalism of the European Union, have persuaded themselves differently. As long as ‘Europe’ continues to make apparent progress towards ‘ever closer union’ they can persist in the belief that civil servants will eventually
displace soldiers and that judges can be supreme commanders.
It was not surprising therefore that the growing prospect of a resumption of war against Saddam should, in the spring of 2003, have brought the crisis that it did in the Western world. All European governments, those recently liberated from Communist oppression excepted, were run by men affected to some degree by Olympianism. The American government, by contrast, was run by men who were emphatically not so influenced. The neo-conservatives, who included in practice the President himself, were old-fashioned believers in the irreplaceable importance of the nation state and in the ultimate primacy of arms as a means of enforcing the national will. Hence the nature of the quarrel that ensued: on one side of the Atlantic the insistence that Saddam should allow unfettered access to Iraq’s territory by inspectors authorized to go wherever they choose and see what and whomsoever they desired, under threat of unilateral military action in the event of noncompliance; on the other, an equally powerful insistence that such inspection should not be constrained by a time limit and that, if military action were to be undertaken, a farther UN resolution, beyond Resolution 1441 of 9 November 2002 which threatened ‘serious consequences’ – the ‘second resolution’ as it became known – should be adopted. In the event, as the dispute hardened, President Chirac appeared to oppose the taking of any military action at all and to be ready to use the French veto in the Security Council to oppose it.