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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
Charles A. Kupchan, professor of international affairs at Georgetown University; senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations:
John Kerry should continue to support America's efforts to bring order to Iraq -- but without embracing the Bush administration's naive assumption that the war has paved the way for the immediate establishment of liberal democracy in Iraq. The goal in the near term should be security and stability. Furthermore, Kerry should keep in mind the power of nationalism in the Middle East, seeking to limit the size and duration of America's military presence in Iraq.
When the Senate voted on the congressional resolution backing the Iraq war, its members widely embraced two critical assumptions. One was that the Bush administration would use the coercive leverage provided by congressional approval of the resolution to explore fully a diplomatic solution, resorting to war only as a last resort. Furthermore, the Senate presumed that Washington's diplomatic efforts would enable the United States to assemble a broad international coalition should war prove unavoidable. The second critical assumption affecting the Senate's vote was that President Bush's main justifications for the war -- the presence of WMD and Iraq's links to al-Qaida -- were credible.
In light of the fact that the Bush administration did not exhaust its diplomatic options, failed to build an international consensus, and saw its main justifications for attacking Iraq evaporate, a vote for the war resolution hardly obligates Kerry -- or any other member of the Senate or House -- to stand by the administration's handling of the conflict or its governance of post-war Iraq. Indeed, to criticize Bush's rush to war, his diplomatic missteps and his bungled management of post-Saddam Iraq is not to flip-flop, it is to exercise responsible leadership.
The Iraq war and the Bush administration's go-it-alone tendencies have cost the United States one of its most precious commodities: its legitimacy in the eyes of the world. Three key changes are needed to regain America's standing abroad. The first is a Kerry victory in November and the return of a brand of U.S. leadership that inspires global confidence -- not resentment. The second is a series of policy initiatives from the new administration aimed at restoring America's political capital abroad. Of particular importance are measures to revive the Atlantic partnership, protect the global environment and pursue multilateral means of limiting the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The third key step entails the rebuilding of a moderate bipartisan coalition in the United States, a coalition critical to putting U.S. foreign policy back on a centrist and responsible course.
Michael Lind, senior fellow at the New America Foundation; author of "Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics":
Neither John Kerry nor any other member of the U.S. Congress voted for the war in Iraq. They voted for the threat of war as a tool of coercive diplomacy. The Iraq Resolution was a conditional declaration of war, like Eisenhower's Formosa Resolution of 1956 and Johnson's Southeast Asia Resolution of 1964. Conditional declarations of war allow the president to threaten war in an effort to achieve diplomatic results.
Congress authorized President Bush to use the threat of war in order to coerce Saddam Hussein into allowing intrusive arms inspections to determine whether his regime possessed weapons of mass destruction in violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions. The policy worked. The buildup of U.S. armed forces pressured Saddam into allowing arms inspectors. They discovered that, indeed, he probably had no weapons of mass destruction. Since it was likely if not certain that Saddam posed no real threat, the existing sanctions regime should have been continued, with the addition of intrusive arms inspections. Most of the U.S. troops who had taken part in the buildup as part of America's successful coercive diplomacy should have been transferred to Afghanistan, where they were needed to fight al-Qaida and the Taliban and to pacify the country.
The members of Congress who voted to give the president the threat of waging war to pressure Saddam into allowing intrusive arms inspections were vindicated, when coercive diplomacy in Iraq succeeded. By proceeding to wage war, President Bush disobeyed the express terms of the congressional resolution, which authorized him to use "necessary and appropriate" force only in two circumstances: to "defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq" and to "enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council Resolutions regarding Iraq." Because the inspectors had determined that there was no threat to the U.S. from Iraq, and because Saddam had broadly complied with all "relevant" (arms-related) Security Council resolutions, neither of the two express conditions for either the threat or the actual use of force had been met.
George W. Bush waged the war in defiance of the terms of the resolution which he claims authorized it. Bush asked Congress for the authority to threaten force to pressure Saddam Hussein into admitting international arms inspectors. Then, after the success of that policy made war unnecessary, he proceeded to wage a war of regime change which Congress had not authorized. Bush, not Kerry, is the flip-flopper.
