Democratic US presidential
nominee John Kerry's foreign-policy speech at New York
University (NYU) has been widely hailed as a
long-overdue effort to place some daylight between
himself and the incumbent president, George W Bush,
regarding Iraq. In his September 20 address, the
Massachusetts senator appropriately took the president
to task for launching the war prematurely, mishandling
the occupation, misleading the US public regarding the
deteriorating situation on the ground, and pursuing
policies that have weakened America's security
interests.
However, the speech also contained a
number of disturbing elements regarding how Kerry would
handle Iraq as president and why he voted to authorize
the invasion in the first place. More disturbingly,
Kerry's speech appears to endorse the Bush
administration's efforts to undermine the United Nations
and international law and its penchant for unilaterally
imposing US military force in contravention of
international norms.
Despite Kerry's belated
acknowledgement that the war was a mistake, he insists
that now "we must do everything in our power to complete
the mission ... [and] get the job done". This sounds
disturbingly familiar to the line Americans heard during
the late 1960s and early 1970s by supposed "moderates"
who argued that, while the US should never have become
embroiled in the Vietnam conflict, "now that we're
there, we need to stay and finish the job".
The
nearest thing Kerry seems to offer in terms of a
withdrawal strategy is the Iraqi equivalent of
"Vietnamization", encouraging the government that
Washington installed in Baghdad to train more Iraqis to
kill Iraqis so as to minimize the number of US
casualties. Kerry says it could take about four years to
complete the process, which is the same amount of time
between Richard Nixon's inauguration as president in
January 1969 and the Paris Peace Agreement in January
1973, among the bloodiest years of the Vietnam War.
Kerry, then, is in essence proposing four more years of
war. One can only think of John Kerry as a young veteran
in 1971 testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, asking: "How do you ask a man to be the last
man to die for a mistake?"
Kerry has long
emphasized that he could bring in allies to help the
United States fight this bloody urban insurgency, citing
the Bush administration's arrogant and dismissive
treatment of allies regarding US policy toward Iraq.
Kerry, however, has shown the same kind of arrogance:
when the newly elected government of Spain announced
last spring that it would fulfill its long-standing
promise to withdraw its forces from Iraq unless the
mission were placed under the United Nations, Kerry
responded by saying, "I call on Prime Minister [Jose
Luis Rodriguez] Zapatero to reconsider his decision and
to send a message that terrorists cannot win by their
act of terror." To Kerry, apparently, if a government
insists that there be a UN mandate in place before it
participates in the occupation of a foreign country, it
is sending the wrong message to terrorists.
While a president Kerry would indeed probably
have greater respect among most foreign leaders than
President Bush, the main problem in getting help in Iraq
at this point is not a matter of personal style or
diplomatic acumen, but the failure of the policy itself.
In bowing to growing demands that he come out
against war, Kerry has begun to rewrite history to
justify his earlier pro-war stance. For example, Kerry
claims that under the circumstances present in October
2002, when he and his congressional colleagues made the
fateful decision to grant President Bush unprecedented
warmaking authority, "any president would have needed
the threat of force to act effectively". Kerry went on
to say, "The idea was simple: We would get the weapons
inspectors back in to verify whether or not Iraq had
weapons of mass destruction."
This is an
extraordinarily misleading statement. Saddam Hussein had
finally agreed to unconditional unfettered United
Nations inspections as demanded by the UN Security
Council on September 16, 2002, nearly four weeks prior
to Kerry's vote authorizing the US invasion.
Similarly, Kerry claims that, had he been
president, he would not have invaded Iraq. Yet when Bush
launched the invasion in March 2003, Kerry supported
him, even backing a Republican-sponsored resolution
declaring that the US Senate "commends and supports the
effects and leadership of the president ... in the
conflict with Iraq".
Dismissing the
UN In any case, the fact remains that he joined
the majority of his Senate colleagues in granting
President Bush the right to invade Iraq at whatever time
and under whatever circumstance he so chose, a decision
he defends to this day. Despite the disastrous
consequences of that vote, Kerry insisted during his NYU
speech that "Congress was right to give the president
the authority to use force to hold Saddam Hussein
accountable".
Why, though, was it up to the
president of the United States to "hold Saddam Hussein
accountable"? The dispute regarding the destruction of
Iraq's proscribed weapons, delivery systems and weapons
programs and the ability of UN inspectors to verify
these actions was never between Iraq and the United
States; it was between Iraq and the United Nations. It
was therefore up to the UN Security Council, not any
individual member state, to hold the Iraqi regime
accountable. Kerry, however, arrogantly insists - the UN
Charter notwithstanding - that the US government alone
has the right to decide how and under what circumstances
regimes being challenged by the United Nations should be
dealt with.
In fact, Kerry joined the
Republicans in voting down a substitute amendment
proposed by Michigan Democrat Carl Levin that would have
authorized the use of force against Iraq if it was
sanctioned by the United Nations Security Council. It
was the Security Council that had imposed these demands
on the Iraqi regime in the first place and threatened
Iraq with serious consequences if it continued in
non-compliance. However, Kerry joined the Republicans in
insisting instead that President Bush should be able to
launch an invasion on his own without Security Council
authorization.
Ironically, when US allies have
defied Security Council resolutions, Kerry has defended
them. For example, he has supported Israel's annexation
of occupied East Jerusalem, which Israeli forces seized
in June 1967, despite a series of Security Council
resolutions demanding that Israel rescind its annexation
(such as resolutions 262 and 267). He has also endorsed
the rightist Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's
efforts to colonize large sections of the West Bank,
despite a series of resolutions calling on Israel to
withdraw from these illegal settlements (such as
resolutions 446, 452, 465, and 471).
Thus, in
John Kerry's world, the United States alone can decide
which Security Council resolutions to enforce and how
they are enforced. No less than Bush, Kerry seeks in
effect to overturn the post-World War II international
system based upon the rule of law and collective
security in order to impose a Pax Americana forcibly.
Despite the ways Kerry and his supporters might want
to spin it, the Democratic nominee - like Republican
Bush - is a militarist and a unilateralist quite willing
to undermine the authority of the United Nations to
assert US hegemony in that oil-rich region.
Indeed, the only thing more dangerous than
electing John Kerry president of the United States would
be to re-elect George W Bush.
Stephen Zunes
is a professor of politics and chair of the Peace
and Justice Studies Program at the University of San
Francisco. He is Middle East editor of the Foreign
Policy in Focus Project and the author of Tinderbox:
US Middle East Policy and the Roots of Terrorism
(Common Courage Press, 2003). This article is posted
with permission fromForeign Policy In Focus.
