War in Iraq: An Advance or Set Back to Middle East Peace?

good evening i'm joe nye dean of the kennedy school and welcome to our forum this is a not what you would call an ordinary circumstance for a forum we are indeed on the eve of war and speaking as dean i want to say that the kennedy school community has a long tradition and reputation for debating difficult policy issues but preserving what is essential to a university which is we're the place that part of society where we bring reason to deeply emotional policy issues and in that sense uh while we have different views among ourselves we do not have an institutional position our institutional role is to make sure that we have reasoned discussion and debate of these policy issues and that reasoned discussion and debate depends upon civility and i'm pleased to say that we have a tradition of that civility of respecting each other's views even when we have deep disagreements and that'll be true both tonight on this panel where we have a range of views in the faculty from those who oppose to those who reluctantly agree about the war uh to the weeks ahead where they community as a whole students faculty and staff will have the same set of views so i think it's essential that as we go through our discussions in this evening and in the weeks to come that we remember what it is that makes this special why it is that universities are different in bringing reason to bear when other parts of society often do not do so in addition i would say remind you that tonight after this forum where you will hear from faculty members on it there'll be a student-led in organized forum which will be about what does public service mean in a time of war and i'm very proud of the kennedy schools student government for organizing that and i'll remind you of that at the end of the program we are going this evening we're going to try to focus on a particular set of questions which were advertised in the in the announcement which are those that revolve around one of the three major arguments that have been used for the war and that's the argument related to regime change in democracy if one looks at the arguments that uh president bush has used uh there are really three main arguments one has been that there's been a connection to terrorism in september 11th that does not have wide belief outside the united states though apparently about half the american people think there's a connection the second argument has been the argument about disarmament that saddam hussein has violated resolutions since uh resolution 687 by preserving weapons of mass destruction he's violated resolution 1441 that was passed in september and that the enforcement of u.n resolutions that were chapter seven resolutions is an appropriate use of force indeed the british attorney general argued just recently that there was a legal basis resting on those resolutions for the war in any case people are divided on that issue but there is a there has been a good deal of discussion of it the third issue though is the one that we wanted a third question is the one that we want to try to focus on at least initially tonight and that's the argument that that saddam hussein is a brutal dictator of a large mostly secular society and that the removal of saddam hussein will not only be better for the human rights of the iraqi people but would be a way to create democracy in iraq and thereby spread democracy in the middle east and that this transformation of not only iraq but the middle east is the argument for going to war even though it may sometimes fly in the face of the other arguments for example people who who in the international community who believe that this was about disarmament who heard the administration talking about regime change said wait a minute why are we going along on this disarmament if you're going to do regime change anyway so there are problems about the consistency or whether these three arguments trip all over each other but let's not worry about that tonight let's focus on this key or central argument which is uh the question of what are the prospects for creating democracy in iraq and the middle east and i'm going to ask questions of our panelists that are related to that set of themes and then as we open it up to uh to the audience uh as a veteran of kennedy school forums i know there's no constraining what people will ask in their questions but at least at the beginning we'll try to try to have something of a theme along those lines let me start with stephen walt immediately to my left steve walt is as those of you the school know our academic dean he is also a very distinguished professor who was written widely in the field of international politics and most recently has been a major participant in the debate among intellectuals about the issue of whether we should go to war in iraq and has been uh i would say one of the leading voices among realists who say we should not go to war but that's not the question i'm putting to him tonight the question that i want to put to you steve is what can you generalize from the experience that the united states has had with using military force to occupy countries and try to create democracy what does the record show there's if we were to say uh what are the topic tonight what are the prospects for creating democracy in iraq after this war what does history tell us if we take a broad historical view the first point i'd make is that this is a pretty familiar story major powers have imposed their will on weaker societies at lots of points in history they've done so because they thought it was in their security interests and they've usually convinced themselves that doing this was good for the people they were doing it to or doing it for britain russia france germany and the united states have all done this in the past and when they formed colonial empires they usually eventually were thrown out because the people they had brought these benefits to decided those benefits really weren't what they wanted so this is an old story in some sense the second point i'd make is that the american experience with doing this is the american track record in exporting peace and democracy to the rest of the world isn't a particularly encouraging one here's a list of places we've intervened with military force since hundred uh cuba the philippines nicaragua several times korea lebanon guatemala the dominican republic vietnam bosnia kosovo afghanistan somalia none of these countries became a democracy quickly as a result of american military intervention most of those countries didn't become democratic at all a few did decades later uh the two big success stories of course are germany and japan after the second world war but these strikes me are quite special cases uh both of these countries had some prior experience with democracy and democratic forms of government both of those countries had started the wars in which they were defeated and most important of all both of those societies faced an external enemy the soviet union and a fear of communism at home that gave them a very powerful reason to want to ally with us and finally it's worth remembering that we ended up keeping troops in germany and japan for the next 50 years it wasn't a case of going into these societies and leaving later for that matter south korea which has become democratic over a period of decades we also still have troops in uh just one final closing point on this is what the prospect said will iraq be different i'll just quote you a noted american foreign policy expert who says once you've got baghdad it's not clear what you do with it is it going to be a shia regime a sunni regime or a kurdish regime how much credibility is that government going to have if it's set up by the us military how long do we have to stay and what happens once we leave that was secretary of defense dick cheney in 1991 explaining why going to baghdad wasn't a good idea those are still very valid questions to answer tonight and in the weeks to come uh our next speaker is canon mckia who is the only person here i believe who was born in baghdad and uh is a professor of middle east studies at brandeis and directs the iraq research and documentation project here at harvard he very bravely wrote a book exposing and describing the horrors of saddam hussein's regime some years ago originally under a pseudonym but then went public with it it was called the republic of fear the politics of modern iraq and cruel and he later followed that with a book called cruelty and silence what would you answer to the people who are skeptical that we can create a democracy in iraq when we have not only the well-known divisions between shia sunni and kurds but tribal and clan divisions within these groups and no long history of democracy many people have you have argued in favor of democracy in iraq many people have expressed skepticism not on the general historical record but on the particulars of iraq what would be your answer to those folks well firstly that that um that old bugabear of the divisions of iraq and to shia sunni and uh kurdish divisions that seemed that that are always presented as as being the reason why this country is somehow stuck in ancient feuds and that that go back to provide primordial primordial times that it seems to me is where one must begin it's a fallacy it's a myth it's a very much a journalistic myth that's been peddled around that's not to say that there aren't tribal problems tribal divisions they're very very minor iraq is an 80 urbanized society it's a society with universities all over the place it is a society that that has supported a very large middle class a technocratic class it has a it's one of the most well-read uh and and most literate populations in the middle east it it it is a society that produced technicians capable of turning um uh weapons around and generating weapons of mass destruction and modifying and creating them from from scratch it's uh it's actually boasted the first um a woman directs the whole germ warfare program in iraq has done for 25 years it's a it's a society in which those those divisions that you mention have never erupted as they have in lebanon or other parts of say the balkans into conflict at the social level the differences in the conflicts that occurred are always state driven they're from the top down and they've been accentuated during the course of this regime so there is no reason by looking back at iraqi history which is a violent history in other respects but it's not these divisions that are central to it there's no reason looking at iraqi history to think it cannot make the break another if i might say very important point here is to misunderstand completely the nature of the regime that we're dealing with here i noticed my colleagues said that we are talking about a country or situation in iraq where a major power is imposing its will on a weaker society that's not at all the way iraqis see it um the iraqis are by and large welcoming this uh intrusion by a major power they don't feel it as an imposition of of the will right now hundreds of my colleagues here in the west in the united states are pouring into kuwait to join general gardner's team thousands more are already in northern iraq infiltrating iraqi cities you can expect large sections many iraqi cities or portions thereof to fall before the american army even enters them uh i you the the idea that the networks that have been developed by these people over over many many years by the democratic wing of the opposition i might i might add you will see its work in the coming weeks of the war itself it will not be the case that uh an american army enters into a defeated population as it did in germany it will be a population that sees it that will wake up the day afterwards it's exactly opposite to the scenario presented by my colleague and that means you have a very different paradigm you have a very different model in iraq one might as well begin with the specificities of the iraqi situation and not uh uh generalities which which are very true in the case of the many examples that he mentioned but each country is different and the iraqi case is very different too if i might add one other little thing bothers me about this title here an advanced war in iraq an advance or a setback to middle east peace well now i saw that title and i just grabbed this thing off the shelf i hope you don't mind a little bit of drama here but it's uh it's uh it's an arabic register which i was given about 10 years ago by the kurds and it contains i'll just it's called here register of eliminated villages we have here the governorate district sub district name of eliminated villages map references uh more map preferences date of elimination and observations and comments on the villages inside this one book alone you have 396 eliminated villages now that is slightly more than 10 percent of the total number of villages we know were wiped out in iraq now how anybody can think doing away with the regime that has done that is in somehow whatever else may happen even if it's not called democracy just a slight whatever else may happen in the country is not going to be an advance uh to peace in the middle east in the very general broad sense of this word i don't know what they're talking about thank you thank you [Applause] john ruggy is next in line john is the kirkpatrick professor of international affairs and director of the center for business and government here at the school and from 97 to 2001 he was assistant secretary general of the un and a key advisor to kofi annan john you and i recently heard kofi annan say the un does not do regime change it is difficult for states in the u.n to agree that regimes should be changed uh it does disarmament it does peacekeeping and other things but not regime change and we saw that the un uh was that we were not able to get a security council majority on this question of whether there should be a second resolution backing up the 1441 resolution how much damage has that done to the capacity of the un to help reconstruct iraq after the war oh as to what extent will the bush administration need to turn to the u.n and if it turns to the u.n will there be somebody there and how will the u.n play a role after the fighting after the shots have died down what will be the role of the u.n then joe when um kofi annan said that to us being a polite fellow i didn't remind him of a speech that i actually worked hard on in september 99 for him on humanitarian intervention um a secretary general who's committed to the idea of humanitarian intervention for some purposes can't also be entirely opposed to regime change because the two do go together but i let it pass at the time the i think what he meant to say was that um the whatever the united nations gets involved in by way of violating the the sovereignty of a particular member state of the un uh ought to have broad support uh internationally ought to be uh where possible endorsed by the security council but in fact he was not entirely consistent on that score either because he came about as close to endorsing the kosovo intervention as any secretary general could uh even though it had not been approved by the security council so there is a streak in kofi anan that has some sensitivity to the issue that that we're discussing here although i think in the present case um he was he he was fully convinced that security council backing in fact was possible and was deeply disappointed that diplomacy went off the rail and i think for the longest time he kept stressing the importance of unity in the council one because it's the right thing for a secretary general to say but also because i deeply believe that until fairly recently he believed that it was possible to achieve and my own discussions with the ambassadors on the security council led me to believe that that was a correct assessment and we get in to why it went off the rail on some other occasion so that's that would be the first part of my answer the second part of my answer um is that what role the un plays after the the shooting stops has far less to do with kofi annan and with the united nations than it does with the united states and the decisions that are made in washington and there i'm not particularly sanguine on the part of the u.n there has been a planning committee chaired by the deputy secretary general now for a couple of months on post-war planning for humanitarian work which is going to be absolutely critical two-thirds of the iraqi population depends on food support from the oil for food program that has to be put back together immediately somehow so humanitarian work reconstruction and institution building is something that the un has been involved in elsewhere and that's what this task force has been doing they're as prepared as one can be if you don't understand what the overall political framework is going to look like you can only do so much of that kind of planning but my concern is actually with with the administration in washington not with the the the team in new york if i review the cast of characters um in the administration there aren't a lot of people who by genetic predisposition have the have um the the the experience or the sensitivity to reach out and and and to be maximally inclusive as you have to be it seems to me uh in order to make a political rebuilding of iraq a successful rebuilding a high probability event the post-war coordination with the united nations has been very limited there have been only a couple of visits from washington to the u.n to talk about what needs to be done after the war the ngos who will be on the front lines for providing humanitarian assistance and other kind of work have not been adequately consulted they're not quite sure what they're supposed to do i think in part that exemplifies a certain predisposition on the part of the administration and i would say finally that the track record in afghanistan is decidedly mixed when when the u.s has been forced to choose between institution building in afghanistan or meeting the immediate agenda of the united states interests in for example chasing al qaeda institution building in afghanistan has suffered so my concern joe to summarize again is not with the u.n i think they will be ready to do whatever they're asked to do my concern is is with washington thank you our next uh speaker is dan glickman who is the director of the institute of politics here at the school and who served in president clinton's cabinet as secretary of agriculture but before that was a member of congress from 1977 to 1995 and he was chairman of the house select committee on intelligence and he told me that he had actually voted to stop the sale of agricult or food products to iraq in 91 and voted for the first gulf war resolution dan as you look at the question of democracy and regime change and your colleagues in the congress congress has been relatively quiet about this um senator byrd made an eloquent uh speech but there's not been people have not been eager to step forward uh in this debate uh is that because there's a internal division or people are conflicted in other words they want to support human rights they want regime change but they worry a little bit about the way we're doing it or is it just that the strategy is to lay low no matter what because when you see when the chips fall then you declare yourself afterwards or uh i mean what what's behind the congress on this and looking ahead with us how important will the democracy argument be what will congress be willing to pay and do if we see american troops beginning to be picked off by snipers or we see terrorism and so forth will they hang in there for the kinds of long periods that are necessary for reconstructing iraq or not what tell us a little bit how it looks from the country i don't think the congress has been quiet i think they have been astoundingly disengaged i mean article one of our constitution is the congress and the founding fathers really wanted that branch of government to be a check or a break on the executive branch of government in fact if you read some of the federalist papers that's a theme that runs all the way through it was that the congress is the voice of the people and they're supposed to be the ones that kind of are the oversight authority over it and it hasn't taken place i think there are a lot of reasons why uh and i think it's been a serious problem let me first say that i did vote for the first gulf war resolution in 1990 and i probably would have voted for this one as well but i just want to repeat a little bit the story that joe says because it tells you a little bit about the congress in 1990 a week before saddam invaded kuwait senator casabaum of kansas and i offered an amendment to stop the department of agriculture from providing concessional food aid assistance to iraq they were one of the largest purchasers of u.s wheat and u.s rice we had been visited by some human rights activists and we said why is the government subsidizing this man we offered this amendment we first won and then we lost on a re-vote uh the administration at that time of george bush senior 41 argued strongly against the amendment and a week later saddam invades kuwait it it kind of leads you to believe that perhaps over a period of time the set of signals that might have been sent by both the administration and the congress were not very realistic in dealing with this madman and so i think that we have to look at that from the standpoint of the future the second point i would make is this those of you who watch c-span the last few days watch tony blair and jack straw do an incredible detailed intelligent thoughtful job of of answering questions and intellectualizing all the intricacies of of the problem i mean they went through hell and i turned on c-span and watch the united states senate at the same time debate the reallocation of education funds from one account to the other and i thought to myself what is going on here you know the fact of the matter is this is probably a legitimate use of american force but people are probably going to die and where is the congress where are the people that are supposed to represent the american people and all of this going on and quite frankly they were at my judgment they were absent without leave now there are a lot of reasons for this i think part of it has to do with the fact that uh as joe mentioned you know success have as many fathers and failure as an orphan and so members of congress are risk-averse and don't want to do anything that hurts the troops and when national security comes they ordinarily do like to give some deference to the president and it's understandable and i i did that when i was there but but uh and i also think from the standpoint of the democrats is is that there is a real concern about equivocation on national security issues being a real vulnerability and so i think you find the opposition party not really wanting to to take this issue on but i i would have to tell you that this is a very serious structural problem for us as we deal with what happens now because um whereas the parliamentary system in the uk was able to have a genuine debate our system to date has not i mean we had a debate about four and a half months ago and there's basically been very little serious legislative discussion since then and one of the things that i have thought about is that in the area of at least foreign policy and national security issues are we seeing the culmination of a major transformation in the american political system where separation of powers is actually a hindrance in discussing war and peace that is is that we separate one branch separates itself out because it doesn't want to have to have the burden of dealing with the issue and is perfectly willing to give that burden to the executive branch of government i hope i'm wrong but i think that's something that thinkers in this country ought to talk about uh what probably will ultimately work against that is the thing that i mentioned that joe talked about which is if things start going badly and no doubt in part they will go badly nothing will go perfectly congress will become then perfectly eager to enter the oversight debate vigilantly and the second thing is is the power of the purse which means the administration still have to find money to pay for all of this and that still thank god hopefully that article one power includes the power to appropriate dollars for war thank you our final panel member is michael ignatiev who's the car professor of human rights practice and director of the car center on human rights policy here at the school um he was also a member of the independent kosovo commission one of the leading public intellectuals who's dealt with these issues um recent author of a very interesting and provocative article in the times magazine called the american empire the burden and let me ask michael to say a little bit about where the human rights community has been on this issue and where it may be going uh i'll preface that by saying the kennedy school i think has had more than a half a dozen forums on iraq in the last few months to my mind the one of the most interesting ones was when we had uh christopher hitchens uh and brian hare here and the reason it was particularly interesting is that they reversed positions from where they were in 91. brian hare who was head of catholic charities had in 91 supported the first gulf war and now opposed this war on the grounds that it had not been proven to be necessary and therefore to his mind did not meet the final criteria of last resort that is essential in just war theory and hitchens who would actually oppose the first gulf war was in favor of this gulf war largely because saddam hussein was such a tyrant essentially it was a human rights argument is there a consensus within the human rights community about this how long will it stand up what happens is we look into the questions that you raised when you said american empire the burden uh will the human rights people be there urging that we stay in after their somalia like episodes which start to illustrate for the american people some of the costs that that go along with empire so tell us a little bit about the human rights community and their staying power i think first of all joe that um the use of human rights arguments to justify coercive military force are controversial at all times in the human rights community uh partly because of the right to life the sense that human rights commits you to respect human life it's a deontological system that says it doesn't matter whether 25 million people gain their freedom if 10 15 20 000 people die it's a system that says you can't make moral and public public policy choices in straight utilitarian terms if if that cost is there it's a real irrevocable human loss so many human rights professionals believe passionately that it was wrong for the president to use the human rights characteristics of the regime so eloquently described when kanan showed you that book that it was wrong for the president to use human rights arguments to craft a case for coercive inspections and then the use of force there are other human rights uh people myself included who believe that the human rights characteristics of the regime are deeply relevant to the question of whether force is justified because the human rights character of the regime tells you whether it is an external danger and whether its possession of weapons of mass destruction constitutes a peace to a threat to international peace and security under the charter so let's be clear there is a very deep division about the appropriateness of human rights arguments in this case and most human rights organizations have not taken an explicit position in favor or against war they have tried instead to use their platform human rights watch amnesty other organizations to warn the public quite appropriately of the very large human costs that may be entailed and every one of us tonight knows that young american men and women young iraqi men and women may be dying by the time this forum is over so human rights has a useful function in the sense of warning us of those costs but i to state my own view believe that in crafting arguments for the use of force human rights arguments are relevant deeply relevant uh moving to the future to pick up some of the things that have been said and i'm saying them partly because one of the students whom i think many members of the school remember with deep affection ali cindy kennedy school mid-career is in air bill or in the countryside north of erbil right now sending members of this community emails telling them what it's like to expect imminent attack this is relevant because to the question can you build a nation in iraq following war ali cindy and five million kurds in the no-fly zone have been creating a nation building institutions building free institutions building economic development since 1991. so to the claim it can't be done you can abuse the undeniable progress that the kurds in that no-fly zone have made since 1991 if we uh if the military operation is decisive the iraqi opposition of which cannon mckee is a distinguished member has spent 30 40 years planning for a democratic free iraq which is federal which is secular which lives at peace with its neighbors and takes the oil and does something better with it than developing chemical and biological weapons you have to remember what the the time and effort and struggle that the iraqi national congress has put into the nation-building business so with respect to my friend and colleague steve wolf the question what's the american record in nation building may be slightly misposed because the pronoun is wrong the key question to ask is what are the capacities of the iraqi people when freed from tyranny to create nations evidence in the northern fly zone is that their nation-building capacities are pretty good and and secondly that the capacity of iraqi national congress to plan for the future it seems to me to be grounds for hope the second thing i think that's very important to say however is that prime minister blair and i think much more reluctantly president bush have seen an entailment a linkage between nation building in iraq and nation building in the middle east that is there is an entailment between justice for the iraqi people and justice for the palestinian people this is where in my judgment the crunch is going to come it is very difficult to build freedom and security in iraq but one situation that might be fatal to the national security interests of the united states is to have american military power in iraq and continued violence and death on both sides in the middle east that seems to me to be a recipe for long-term mass casualty terrorism in the united states not to be alarmist but it and therefore the commitment to build a nation in iraq i think necessarily as prime minister blair insists entails a very strong expenditure of presidential prestige and power to make sure that at the end of this awful ordeal through fire that this region passes through that there will be at the end of the day two states side by side partitioning and sharing the land between the middle east and the jordan river two states viable contiguous at peace with each other not a bantustan but a real viable democratic state in palestine that in my judgment taking my you know neutral academic ad off and putting my own position on that a free and democratic state in palestine is the very precondition in my judgment for the security of the state of israel and and it is also in national security terms the very precondition for the capacity of american power to go into

Channel: Harvard Kennedy School's Institute of Politics

Views: 141

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: National Security, US Government, Middle East & North Africa, International Terrorism

Id: TlzmJFPGmS0

Length: 38min 52sec (2332 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 08 2021