Whatever Tony Blair will do in the months and years ahead, one thing is clear. Amidst the current tsunami of public cynicism, he is unlikely to call for Britain to support another just war aimed at freeing oppressed people. And a good thing, too, many will say. However, this reluctance is not the result of losing an argument about the principle of humanitarian intervention; indeed, that debate has been stifled from the beginning. Instead, political fall-out has surrounded WMD, an entirely different issue. So, firstly, why should we regret that the government’s case was based on the threat of WMD rather than the benefits of regime change? Secondly, how can this be attributed to domestic pressure to follow a flawed UN process? Thirdly, is there an alternative view of multilateralism that can combine internationalism with an open and principled debate?
Founding the case for war on Saddam’s illegal and dangerous possession of WMD was unfortunate both because of the debate it sidelined, and the debate it created. The debate it sidelined was the alternative – and, in many ways, more appealing – justification of regime change on primarily humanitarian grounds. In terms of identifying the need for regime change and measuring its success, it is clear both that Saddam was a continuing, barbarous menace to his own people, and that this is no longer the case. This contrasts starkly with the uncertain effects of war on the still unresolved threats of global terrorism and WMD proliferation.
Moreover, in terms of gaining support from the public in general, and the Labour movement in particular, an argument for regime change is morally and politically attractive. For one thing, it would have required opponents of war either to justify leaving Saddam in power, or to produce a viable alternative plan for his removal. Internationally, too, certain European nations, faced with claims about WMD, could make a reasonable case for giving inspectors more time. Having themselves participated in NATO intervention in the Balkans, they would have found it more difficult to justify the principle of non-interference in the face of brutal dictatorship.
The WMD basis for war was also unfortunate in creating a debate in which government felt obliged to rely upon, and partially reveal, inherently fallible intelligence. Such information, by its very nature, is both subjective and shrouded in secrecy, thus exposing all involved in its use to lingering charges of misrepresentation and bad faith. Post-war events have also highlighted the inevitable tension between demands for hard evidence and an essentially speculative threat – that Saddam might at some future point have supplied weapons to terrorist groups. In short, playing down regime change (to the extent that it became seen as little more than a welcome side-effect of eradicating WMD) shifted the focus of public debate away from a legitimate issue of principle – whether, when and how we should go to war for the sake of others – and towards corrosive questions of who knew what, when and from whom.
Despite all this, the government had little choice but to make such a case, because of domestic pressure to win a UN mandate. Any prospect of gaining such approval had to involve playing by the rules of international politics, even if it led to a less effective performance in the domestic debate. Under these rules, the only prospect of leading America ‘down the UN path’ lay in stretching the notion of anticipatory self-defence by establishing an imminent (or gathering, or potential) threat to national security.
Gaining such approval on the basis of humanitarian regime change would have been practically impossible, because of a central tension in the UN. On the one hand, its Charter aims at achieving freedom and security for all citizens, regardless of their nationality. On the other, the principle of non-interference in a state’s internal affairs can only be overridden by the Security Council, whose decisions are subject to the influence – and even veto – of governments whose very existence depends on the routine violation of individual freedom and security. Russia and China, for example, bearing in mind their policies in Chechnya and Tibet, have no interest in endorsing conflicts motivated by democratic and humanitarian considerations in virtually any case short of widespread genocide. This reality forced the government to choose between attempting to gain UN approval, and engaging in a debate based on the rights and wrongs of regime change.
Is this acceptable? There are serious arguments for and against such intervention, but surely we cannot be satisfied to have the debate rendered moot by our refusal to challenge the UN’s monopoly in bestowing international acceptability. For all of us who value multilateralism, the UN is vitally important as the ultimate forum for inter-state dialogue and negotiation. However, this position does not necessarily require the acceptance of Security Council approval as a prerequisite for international legitimacy. Morally, the UN system is based upon equality of states with no distinction between liberal democracies and oppressive dictatorships. The veto power of the ‘Permanent Five’ is based on the power balance of five decades ago, not on any modern ability to objectively decide what is best for the world. Politically, defending the Security Council’s unique ability to make action ‘international’ sets up an all-or-nothing choice between an internationalism that is almost impossible to achieve, and untrammelled unilateralism. If we abandon this dichotomy by accepting that there may be multilateral alternatives to the UN paradigm, then rather than going flat out for full Security Council endorsement – and twisting our case in the attempt – we could instead concentrate on applying pressure for America to act within alternative multinational forums.
NATO is an example of such an alternative forum. NATO approval signifies support from a diverse range of states; in the case of Iraq, it would still have required winning over several key opponents of the war. However, in crucial contrast to the UN, the case could have been made on the basis of humanitarian intervention, since the opponents would not have included those governments with greatest reason to fear the principle. In other words, pro-war leaders would still have had to persuade sceptical foreign governments – but the justification used would have been very different, and our own domestic debate might now be centring on how much life has improved for the Iraqi public, rather than on how little the British public can trust their politicians, intelligence services and media. Removing debate from the Security Council would have precluded international approval in the traditional sense, but we must ask ourselves why such approval is morally and politically necessary, if another approach can allow an honest debate and give us a better chance of persuading our democratic allies.
Similar reasoning applies to the role of the UN Human Rights Commission in assessing state violations of fundamental rights: the basis for humanitarian intervention. Bound by the principle of non-interference, and containing representatives from countries like Russia, Cuba and Sudan, this body is inevitably reluctant to make any real criticism of sovereign governments. Certainly, it is incapable of producing anything approaching an objective list of offending states. Yet such a comparative analysis of state records (a ‘table of tyranny’, one might say), is the only credible multinational alternative to America’s unilateral identification of the ‘axis of evil’. Such a ranking system stands the best chance of forming a basis for truly collective, international pressure. In particular, it would provide a statement of international opinion against which future proposals for action could be compared, for example when examining suspicions of prioritisation on the grounds of oil or revenge.
Such an analysis, impossible within the UN, could only be carried out by an ad hoc, co-operative grouping of democratic states showing basic respect for human rights. Indeed, leadership in such an organisation could provide an ideal testing ground for the British strategy of bridging the Atlantic. The argument is not that democratic states are flawless in their respect for human rights, but rather that the exclusion of the worst-offending governments is a prerequisite for any structured international condemnation of the most serious abuses. Again, the process would not be globally representative in a UN sense, but it would be more likely to produce a realistic basis for multilateral action – and much harder for the US to ignore.
In short, if we are in future to have a meaningful, important debate about the possibility of humanitarian intervention through a multilateral process, we must re-examine what we view as an acceptable international framework. The UN system, where guardians of international law can also be violators of international values, demands that we exclude the possibility – or at least concentrate on an alternative justification – with potentially damaging results. If, instead, we seek the real political and moral legitimacy of winning support from countries whose governments do not exist by abusing their own people, then alternatives to the UN must be contemplated with an open mind. By challenging the monopoly of the UN in deciding whether any action is internationally legitimate, we stand to gain a new, and potentially more workable, vision of multilateralism.