US Foreign Policy and the Gulf Wars

Decision-making and International Relations

Ahmed Ijaz Malik

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780857738905
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'armée et de la marine

The US-led coalition which launched an invasion of Iraq on 20 March 2003 led to a decade-long military presence in the country. In the run-up to that invasion, many comparisons were made with the 1991 Gulf War. Ahmed Ijaz Malik takes these two instances of military intervention by Republican US governments to highlight how the official discourse of leaders and decision-makers has an impact on foreign policy and its results. By taking these two examples, he examines how discourse affects real events, and the extent to which the legacy of the Cold War has influenced the decisions which are made at the upper echelons of the US government. US Foreign Policy and the Gulf Wars critically analyses the post-Cold War liberal cosmopolitan and realist discourses related to these two instances of US military intervention. Using an approach which Malik labels 'critical realism', this book examines the ways in which discourses often act as ideological covers for material interests, whilst still not holding a deterministic view whereby these interests alone shape policies. From this perspective, this book assesses the themes of 'Just War', humanitarianism and cosmopolitanism.
It furthermore uses the approach of 'critical realism' to engage with a variety of arguments on the emerging role of the US - as they were displayed in academic discourses and other intellectual contributions around each of the 1991 and 2003 wars. Malik relates these discussions to an analysis of the official discourses, documents and policies displayed prior to the 1991 and 2003 wars, as well as to an examination of the resulting actual conduct. Since the implications of the US military presence in the Middle East are so central to the study of International Relations and Security Studies, this book will be invaluable for specialists in these disciplines, as well as for those interested in policy formation and the wider Middle East.

PART 1

DEVELOPMENT OF THE THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVE

1

THE POST-COLD WAR ACADEMIC AND INTELLECTUAL ARGUMENTS ON THE USE OF FORCE BY THE US: DEVELOPMENT OF LIBERAL COSMOPOLITAN DISCOURSES

The philosophical ideas and moral arguments that contributed to the development of the debates on ‘just cause’ for waging wars also developed the concept of justice in a retributive sense – i.e. as a morally acceptable punishment for a crime. It can be observed that in the post-Cold War and post-9/11 discourses on war and strategy, justice was also broadly defined as distributive (social justice and the allocation of economic goods in a society) and restorative (reconciliation among the victims and broader fulfilment of their needs). Therefore, the ideas of humanitarian war, promotion of democracy and the earlier debated themes of civilizing¹ some identified societies and states also re-emerged, urging the developed, resourceful and free states to address the socio-political and economic problems of failing² and collapsing³ states. The emergence of these philosophies and arguments led to an expansion of the theoretical bases of these debates and was a move forward from the theorizations during the Cold War years, where international law, the statutes of the UN Charter and precedents from interstate relations had been employed to draw the parameters of the discourses on war. The previous Cold War theorizations had also served to validate the primary rationale behind the idea of ‘state’ and the fundamental principles supporting it, for instance, the state’s sovereignty, which had contributed to the development of a society of states, international law and international organizations. The state-centric theorization during the Cold War years had also contributed towards the enrichment of the realist philosophy of international relations. Similarly, the UN had maintained a significant status as an international mediatory institution.

During the Cold War years, the US approach to the UN underwent a drastic change. This trend was a consequence of UN Resolutions, which had been perceived by the US leaders as favouring the USSR. US–UN relations had been further undermined by UN Resolution 3379, which had condemned the Zionist agenda of Israel. This resolution, passed in 1975, defined Zionism as a form of racism because it was based on racial discrimination and so signified a threat to world peace. The resolution called upon all countries to oppose this racist ideology.⁴ On the other hand, a vast majority of UN member states felt deep-rooted suspicion towards the US’s promotion of global capitalism. Some scholars argue that this suspicion can be attributed to the colonial exploitation experienced by many newly independent states. In addition, during the Cold War years the Soviet model had appealed to some of the member states as a viable alternative to capitalism. Therefore, in theory there were fears among the pro-Soviet Third World states that a worldwide capitalist market economy would mean rival centres of power and influence, which might threaten the regimes during the difficult period of post-independence nation building.⁵ Collectively, these factors added an economic and financial side to US discontent towards the UN. The US ambassador to the UN at that time (1965–68), Arthur J. Goldberg, gave his opinion about the UN’s inability to apply Article 19 and penalize defaulters, thereby serving a subtle warning to the UN and hinting at the possibility of withdrawal of US financial support if the UN did not impose the principle of collective financial responsibility. In 1972, the US budget for the UN had been reduced from 31.52 per cent to 25 per cent. In 1974, ten years before pulling out of the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the US Congress stipulated that no funds were to be specifically reserved or spent to support the UN until the US president certified that it had ceased anti-Israeli actions. This hostility towards the UN reached its height during Reagan’s presidency. US Senators Jesse Helms and, later, Nancy Kassebaum made amendments to the reduction of the US budget for the UN, which played a significant role in the suspension of financial support for the UN. During the 1980s, an ideologically conservative institute, the Heritage Foundation, which had once been regarded as an organization ‘on the outer fringes of respectability’,⁶ gained credibility and influence as a think-tank. The Heritage Foundation’s United Nations Study Project sent out a barrage of anti-UN monographs, capturing the growing resentment towards the global organization and channelled it towards policy recommendation.⁷These developments were an addition to the already existing discourses questioning the writ, validity and necessity of the UN.

In contrast, at the time of the decision to launch the first Gulf War in 1991, President G.H.W. Bush’s approach to the UN had displayed a complete turnaround. Although he had served as the Vice President under Reagan, during Bush’s time UN-bashing had ended, the Heritage Foundation’s influence had gradually minimized, budgetary reforms had been initiated at the UN and Bush had started efforts to engage collectively with the USSR and the UN.⁸ Therefore, marking a drastic shift from Cold War policy, G.H.W. Bush attempted to gain US Congress approval for the war by turning to the UN for its sanction, and praised the UN for its international role in promoting international justice. This shift in policy and the related financial and strategic aspects of these changes will be explained in the concluding section of Chapter 3.

In focusing on the discourses surrounding the two Gulf Wars, it can be observed that there was a significant difference between the post-Cold War and post-9/11 discourses on these wars. From the perspective of the 1991 Gulf War, international law and the UN Charter remained the fundamental sources for determining legitimacy on the questions of self-defence and preventive war; in contrast, in the post-9/11 discourses leading up to the 2003 Gulf War the validity of international law and the UN Charter was questioned. The roots of this trend can be traced to the approach of US presidents towards the UN during the Cold War. This difference will be examined in the analysis of these case studies.

While tracing the emergence of the post-Cold War debates that focused on the role of non-state actors, I shall analyze the arguments that went beyond the notion of state sovereignty and the concepts of self-defence and justice. These debates initiated the arguments calling for the reinterpretation of legal obligations related to the principles of self-defence and ‘justifications for war’, as manifested in Articles 2(4) and 51 of the UN Charter. Furthermore, the ‘just war’ theorists identify themselves as liberals, and debate the need for identifying a common ground between the realist and idealist arguments on war. They argue for retributive justice through the employment of war and further argue for distributive and restorative justice while appealing to the idealist and cosmopolitan principles of peace and socio-economic welfare. As liberals, the ‘just war’ theorists also criticize the left for being complacent towards the terrorists who had given an anti-imperialist hue to their destructive agendas. Therefore, these theorists also contribute towards the promotion of a new liberal-left ideology, presenting their own justifications for war.

Similarly, the cosmopolitan debates about a ‘just war’ and the preventive use of force are based on the principles of human rights and human security, extending these themes to the need for socio-economic reforms for achieving wider global peace. Overall, the liberal ‘just war’ theorists, the liberal-left and the cosmopolitans share an approach towards international relations that is opposed to realism and can also be classified as liberal internationalism.⁹ The initial arguments focus on the shift in paradigm from ‘post-charter self-help’ to ‘pro-democracy’ strategies. In the post-Cold War era, ‘post-charter self-help’ emerged as a framework for understanding contemporary international law, relating to the recourse to force. This framework will be explained in the relevant section; however, it was based on claims that: (i) the rise of a new value-hierarchy (of justice surpassing peace); (ii) the failure of the UN Charter to establish consensus on peace building; (iii) the need for launching just reprisals to correct past injustices; (iv) the increasingly transforming nature of conflict in post-Cold War world politics; (v) persistent problems of interpretations of the statutes on self-defence in the UN Charter; and (vi) the difficulties in the enforcement of UN’s rulings, meant that states might explore strategies other than those prescribed by the UN Charter.¹⁰ ‘Pro-democracy’ strategies implied the pursuance of policies for the promotion and sustenance of democratic regimes, this being the right of the democratic members of the international community to aid, directly or indirectly, those fighting for their democratic entitlement.¹¹This was one of the theoretical developments that went further beyond humanitarian intervention. The purpose of analyzing these themes is to lay the groundwork for the extension of the debates in the next section, following the liberal advocacy of a proactive war for the deliverance of justice, humanitarianism and promotion of democracy.

Elaborating the themes from the previous section, I critically analyze the ‘justness of cause’ from the perspective of jus ad bellum, according to the ‘just war’ tradition¹² and the liberal, liberal-left and cosmopolitan arguments on the ideas of justice, the right of self-defence and the promotion of humanitarianism and democracy. The philosophical question addressed by the liberal ‘just war’ theorists was the moral justification for war. While arguing that moral principles can be applied in this way, the theorists opposed the realist claims that international relations is a perpetual state of war, that states rationally pursue their interests through the employment of war and that the success of such wars serves as a source of their legitimacy. Similarly, arguing for a preventive war to ensure the security of the threatened and innocent non-combatants in the US, while calling for humanitarian intervention in other failing and collapsing states, the liberal ‘just war’ theorists took a bellicist stance, as opposed to idealists, who had been sceptical towards the justification and employment of war as the ‘means’ to ‘ends’. Similarly, the theorists oppose the pacifists who argue that war should be outlawed. While sharing a global vision, liberal ‘just war’ theorists are sceptical about the Kantian transcendental idealist notion of Perpetual Peace, as well as the cosmopolitan case for use of force,¹³ authorized by international agencies such as the UN. From the perspective of the US’s hegemony and the emerging international order, the liberal ‘just war’ theorists, the liberal-left commentators and cosmopolitans also argue for the promotion of neoliberal and capitalist economic policies along with democracy. Therefore, their arguments can be critically analyzed from the Marxist point of view. In the theoretical domain, these debates overlap the issue of US’s policy of war against Iraq.

In order to relate the debates to post-Cold War US foreign policy, the liberal case for ‘just war’, the ‘WoT’ and humanitarian intervention is explained, along with the liberal-left’s arguments, the cosmopolitan case for the use of force for humanitarianism and democracy and the significance of liberal economic policies. This leads to the identification of interplay and points of convergence in the arguments from liberal, liberal-left and cosmopolitan sides. These arguments are compared with those of the realists in Chapter 2, in order to explain the developments in the discourses from the post-Cold War and post-9/11 periods, and examine the collective effects of these developing discourses on the policies of the US decision-makers at the time of both Gulf Wars.

The liberal, liberal-left and cosmopolitan arguments are related to the question of the evolution of US hegemony in post-Cold War and post-9/11 international relations. The purpose is to place the arguments from the post-Cold War and post-9/11 discourses in the perspective of US foreign policy towards Iraq, and the conduct of the wars of 1991 and 2003 and their aftermath. This approach serves to identify and demarcate the grounds for the theoretical analyses, comprising the liberal cosmopolitan arguments in light of the realists’ arguments, which are set out in Chapter 2, and provides analyses of the two Bush administrations in the case studies.

Discourses on war and US foreign policy in post-Cold War international relations, leading to post-9/11 discourses on ‘just war’

Addressing the moral, legal and politico-strategic issues related to justifications for and motivations behind going to war, both the academics analyzing and explaining US foreign policy and the planners who formulated US strategy faced fundamental questions about the international role of the US and the employment of war in the post-Cold War era. The end of the Cold War promised an opportunity for the US to seek its professed objective of redefining its international role and recreating the international order, which already resonated with the notions of ‘Manifest Destiny’ and American exceptionalism. At the same time, the lingering inter- and intra-state contentions and low-intensity conflicts which had been the consequences of proxy wars – the remnants of the Cold War era – were gradually bringing the message home to the US that it would have actively to engage militarily in future conflicts. Moreover, with the relative decline of its post-World War II strategic adversary, the USSR, along with its ideological and economic communist agenda, the strategic thinking that had gradually developed during the Cold War required theoretical reinterpretation and reasoning, while the US grand strategy required new legal and moral justification. During the late 1980s, the USSR’s blocking ability against US endorsements in the UN had gradually been diminished; however, there also existed a perception in the Reagan administration that the majority of the Third World states in the UN General Assembly negated the endorsement of US goals in these bodies. The US maintained a low-profile policy of quasi-withdrawal from the UN during the 1970s and 1980s whilst simultaneously extending its control over the international economic institutions in which its interests remained predominant. Through these institutions it managed to penetrate many Third World states, offering open economic policies and structural adjustment programmes to settle their growing external debts.¹⁴ In addition, US military policy from the twilight of the Cold War was supported with the moral rhetoric of delivering justice. The notion of justice in these cases had been distributive and restorative. President Reagan promoted notions such as correcting ‘unjust’ conditions in Nicaragua, and G.H.W. Bush’s administration launched the military operations named ‘Operation Just Cause’ in the case of Panama in December 1989.¹⁵ While the US could virtually ignore the UN and allow the economic forces and institutions to continue shifting power relations in its own favour, any state that sought to control its own economic resources in its own interests, in contradiction to the external market forces, posed a challenge to the global economic system. Chile and Nicaragua suffered the consequences; however, the Gulf Crisis that led to the war of 1991 became a critical juncture for the US to engage with the UN in redefining its global role and the standing of its allies, including the United Kingdom (UK) and France. A Security Council under US governance could authorize military action that could serve a warning to any Third World country planning to build a military challenge to the system. The reason for the US initiative against Iraq (1991) remained obscured by the public ritual at the Security Council.¹⁶However, at the time of the 1991 Gulf War some of the post-Cold War debaters on war and the international order had philosophically and theoretically employed the theme of the ‘just war’ to explain the US role role as a hegemonic power and address the questions regarding its conduct of war in a plausible theoretical construct.

Moving further in terms of threat perception, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 raised these questions to a higher level by including the threats from unidentifiable adversaries with non-conventional strategies, and also exposed the strategic vulnerability of the US. Therefore, the arguments, debates and discourses that developed in post-Cold War and post-9/11 international relations contributed towards the extension of the theoretical horizons as well as the strategic policy objectives of the US grand strategy. The legal, ethical and politico-economic issues debated by academics could also be traced, respectively, in the policy statements and official discourses of the US administrations of G.H.W. Bush and G.W. Bush in their justification for these two wars.

Scholars theorizing about and explaining the post-Cold War debates have referred to a shift in the paradigm,¹⁷ in their discussions of the rights of self-defence and the need for adequate and justified responses against the non-state belligerent entities. This conceptual shift emerged primarily as a consequence of the transformed nature of international politics with the emergence of one greater hegemonic power, especially owing to the concerns about its potential hegemonic expansionism. Similarly, with the rise of non-state actors with unconventional ta...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part 1 Development of the Theoretical Perspective
• 1 The Post-Cold War Academic and Intellectual Arguments on the Use of Force by the US: Development of Liberal Cosmopolitan Discourses
• 2 Post-Cold War Realist and Neoconservative Discourses on US Foreign Policy
• Part 2 Discursive Analyses Comprising Factual Data Analysis
• 3 President G.H.W. Bush’s Administration and the 1991 Gulf War
• 4 President G.W. Bush’s Administration, 9/11, the 2003 Gulf War and 2005 Elections in Iraq
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography