Before & After: US Foreign Policy in 2001

Before & After: US Foreign Policy in 2001
Phyllis Bennis
To be published in Anuario CIP 2002, Icaria/FUHEM, Barcelona 2002
Spanish translation

The shape of US foreign policy in 2001 is divisible into two easily distinguishable parts: before and after September 11th. But in identifying those two periods as different, we must be very careful to separate substance from appearance, essence from rhetoric. It is not true that "everything changed" after the terror attacks in New York and Washington. The core of US policy - domestic and foreign - remained unchanged. It was the policy of empire: the management of global dominion, and the consolidation of unchallenged strategic control.

Because foreign policy, even for the world's sole super-power, requires more than its specific activities around the world. Foreign policy also includes the justifications and frameworks asserted by political elites to give shape and normative coherence - of whatever sort - to their power trajectory. After September 11th, it was precisely these policy frameworks, the explanations designed to justify policy actions, which changed quite dramatically. The actions themselves remained remarkably consistent before and after, though earlier tendencies towards military aggression and unilateralism increased drastically after September.

By the end of the year the Bush administration's increasingly unilateralist position had been consolidated despite a highly public effort to claim the mantle of international coalitions and partnerships as the seeming linchpin - at least during the Afghanistan phase - of its "anti-terrorism" war. It was a claim of pride for a few top officials in the generally unilateralist Bush administration and a broad swath of similarly inclined US policymakers, but it was a claim that most of the rest of the world understood to be false. In fact, 100 days after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, an international poll was released demonstrating just such a disparity. "A sampling of the political, media and business elite on five continents said that they believe the United States is mostly acting unilaterally in the fight against terrorism", the Washington Post reported. "By contrast, 70 percent of American opinion-makers in the survey said the United States is acting jointly with its friends and is taking into account the interests of its partners in the war on terrorism". Not for the first time, Washington's power-brokers had fallen victim to their own propaganda.

The US was by no means the only government whose professed foreign policy doctrines and justifications shifted significantly following September 11th. But Washington's shifts had much farther-reaching influence, not only because of its own direct projection of raw military power. When the Bush administration claimed "self-defense" to justify limitless war abroad and seemingly unconstrained authoritarianism at home, governments across the globe cited smug versions of the same "self-defense" claim to rationalize previously hidden campaigns of repression and human rights violations, especially against Islamist-oriented opposition forces.

In return for joining the US "coalition", Russia expected and got a free hand in Chechnya, China in its restive Muslim border regions, both Pakistan and India in and around Kashmir (at least until their regional conflict threatened to spill out of control), Turkey even more impunity in its Kurdish southeast, Uzbekistan throughout its territory. Perhaps most overtly (though not in the first days of the crisis), Israel's General Ariel Sharon was given a public green light by the Bush administration to further brutalize the population of occupied Palestine. Around the world, a new cry arose from spin-doctors working to explain their coalition-allied governments' inexcusable human rights violations and repression to the world community: "There is no basis for criticism - we're just exercising the same right to self-defense that the US is doing in Afghanistan".

Before

Prior to the events of September 11th, most Americans paid little attention to global events, not even to the actions and policies of their own government around the world. Beyond the broadest, most general concerns, few international developments reached the top of the public agenda. Certainly many Americans recognize that global warming and the AIDS epidemic represent serious threats to their own well-being. But that rarely leads to recognition of the disproportionate US responsibility for causing global warming, or of how US neglect and criminally low levels of foreign aid make solutions to the AIDS crisis in Africa or elsewhere vastly more difficult. However sharp the occasional polemics, elections rarely turn on the candidates' foreign policy differences.

But in 2001 illusions remained. One was that US actions in countries around the world could best be nobly described as "nation-building" or "democratization", and that US foreign aid was generous and designed to lift up the poorest of the poor. Few Americans considered that US policies abroad might be viewed as anything other than friendly and benign by the people who lived outside the US, and who were the targets of those policies.

A few months after September 11th the influential analyst Fareed Zakaria described how "the United States has sought to use its great wealth and influence to insulate itself from the troubles of the globe. In the months preceding Sept. 11, the Bush administration went several steps farther. All its initiatives and statements - national missile defense, the withdrawal from six treaties in as many months, the criticism of nation-building- were efforts to disentangle itself from the rest of the world. ... But the world comes back to bite you".

It was indeed "the troubles of the globe" and their after-bite from which US elites sought to insulate themselves. But Zakaria left out the other half of the story of US global engagement. Gaining and maintaining control over the world's resources, its lands and spaces, the world's labor and the world's accomplishments, all remained central to the US national agenda. Throughout 2001 -before AND after September 11th - the foreign policy of the US remained the policy of a strategically unchallenged dominion, at the apogee of its power and influence, rewriting the global rules for how to manage its empire.

It was not a new story. Two thousand years before, Thucydides described how the Greeks conquered the island of Mylos to ensure stability for their Empire's golden age. Mylos was invaded and governed according to laws wholly different from those ruling the fledging democracy in Athens. The occupied island was governed by what came to be known as the law of empire, bearing no resemblance to democratic or international law. The Roman and Ottoman and Russian empires behaved the same way in ruling their far-flung possessions. During the last hundred and fifty years the sun-never-sets-on-us British and other European empires did much the same thing. And now, at the turn of the newest century, having achieved once unimaginable heights of military, economic, cultural and political power, it is Washington's turn.

But Americans do not see themselves as imperial conquistadors, have never seen their country as the center of a global empire of unprecedented power. Americans largely believe they could seize control of resources, consolidate their country's global power, simply because their nation [and themselves] had the right to do so. And they expected to remain protected from any consequences. They became accustomed to impunity.

The attack on the World Trade Center did not mean an "end to innocence" as was widely claimed. Americans were not "innocent" of the carnage US policies had wrought around the world. They were, however, largely ignorant of that carnage, as much as they were of the policies responsible for it. They had come to rely on a century-old sense of American impunity, born of geography and oceans, and now combined with the arrogance of unchallenged power. Americans took for granted that nothing US policymakers did around the world would ever have any serious consequences on their lives at home. So raining bombs on Afghanistan, or claiming Persian Gulf petroleum to be "our oil" as President Carter memorably described it, or providing massive military aid and diplomatic support to Israel's occupation, or imposing crippling sanctions on Iraqi civilians - would never, in the popular mind, have any impact here at home. As a result, far too many Americans were surprised by the attacks of September 11th.

It was inescapable that people were shocked - the seizure of planes filled with unknowing innocents to use as massive bombs against buildings full of ordinary people was without doubt a horrifying, shocking event. People across the world were shocked by the scale, by the cruelty of the attack. But surprise that such an event might be contemplated - as distinct from shock that it actually happened - was a reaction widespread only among Americans. The breadth of domestic public support for George Bush's "anti-terrorism war" arose from the intense, no-other-option propaganda that bombarded Americans from the first hours after the September 11th attacks. But the urgency and intensity of that support derives equally from Americans' confrontation with the loss of their imagined impunity.

Public support for the US war in Afghanistan seemed to be rooted in the sudden sense of individual vulnerability that accompanied that loss of national impunity. If "we" go after "him" (given the bin Laden-specific propaganda), the logic seemed to go, "I" or "my family" will be safe. It was in that context that self-defense and anti-terrorism took hold as the new twin pillars of US foreign policy. This framework quickly supplanted not only the anti-communism of the Cold War and George Bush Senior's New World Order, but laid to rest as well the global interventionism masquerading as multi-lateralism at the heart of the Clinton foreign policy.

When the Clinton administration came into office, "assertive multi-lateralism" was the claimed basis for foreign policy. The commitment was always more rhetorical than real, and after the disastrous Somalia debacle of 1993, even the slogan dropped off the agenda. But versions of it continued to surface, on occasion, because it somehow continued to resonate with the American people. The idea, if not the reality, of the US moving in concert with the international community, participating with, rather than isolated from other countries, shaped a popular paradigm for post-Cold War foreign policy. And many people believed the rhetoric. Many were prepared to accept the Clintonites' claims that it was only because of "the congress" or "the senate" that the US failed to pay its UN dues, or to ratify treaties on the rights of children or the International Criminal Court.

So when George Bush Junior came into office in January 2001 in a bitterly contested and ultimately false victory, it was against the image, the rhetoric, of the "multi-lateral" Clinton years that Bush foreign policy would be measured.

Bush Begins

George Bush took office following a campaign in which he condemned "nation-building", rejected most pending (and a few existing) treaties, and promised that US troops would never become involved in peacekeeping. (He also called for a more "humble" foreign policy. All major actors on Bush's foreign policy team agreed on one fundamental point: that American hegemony on a global scale was not only possible but appropriate - they agreed that US might really did make right.

But within that broad political agreement there was a big strategic debate over just how that US domination could best be achieved. The debate began right at the beginning, during the early 2001 confirmation hearings in the Senate for Bush's cabinet choices. The debate was drawn most sharply between Secretary of State Colin Powell on the one hand, and the Pentagon chiefs, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz on the other. Powell envisioned a US-dominated international "consensus", however militarized it might be, in whose name US policies could be imposed. The "Wolfowitz cabal", as the New York Times dubbed the deputy secretary and his semi-official Defense Policy Board of hard-line rightwing hawks, demanded a unilateral assertion of military power as the first-choice option. They viewed the US as an unchallenged superpower that needs to pay little attention to the views of, or the pressures on, its allies.

Right from the start Bush asserted his own bold unilateralist approach. He rejected any US support for or adherence to the Kyoto treaty on global warming, and that he was considering withdrawal from the seminal Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty with Russia. He reinstated the so-called "gag rule", prohibiting any mention of abortion by the staff of any health organization anywhere in the world if it received any US funds for any of its other unrelated work.

There was some trepidation right from the beginning. Newspaper editorials and pundits, already concerned about Bush's proudly proclaimed ignorance of foreign affairs, expressed discomfort about the consequences of these high-profile withdrawals from international engagement. Among the public, there was also some unease about the increasingly go-it-alone tendencies of US policy pronouncements. Neither Bush nor his vice-president Dick Cheney took sides in the high-profile debate between their aides, but both made clear their own unilateralist tendencies.

Bush's unilateralism differed less in substance, and more in rhetoric and emphasis from Clinton's approach. The multilateral gloss of the Clinton years had captured a certain part of the public imagination, so the shift under Bush seemed more significant than it really was. And in certain key issues, at least some Bush aides took positions very close to Clinton's own.

Iraq

Along with North Korea and China (both of which fell off the radar screen quite soon), policy towards Iraq emerged from the beginning as the sharpest reflection of the highly contentious debate among Bush aides. Secretary of State Powell staked out a position emphasizing re-tooled economic sanctions, continuing or tightened military sanctions, and continued bombing in the no-fly zones. It was, like Clinton's, an approach driven by domestic politics, and was essentially a continued policy of containment. It was designed to shore up the almost collapsed allied coalition supporting the US in the region. In that context, protecting the Arab and other regional allies was particularly important.

Powell's opponents within the administration, incl  uding Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, were long-time backers of a much more militarily aggressive policy. They emp  hasized increased military support for the so-called Iraqi opposition. Their policy was overtly aimed at overthrowing Saddam Hussein, if not the Iraqi regime, in what was primly defined as "regime change". Their strategy called for providing military training to the London-based Iraqi National Congress (INC), who would, with the help of US planes and ground troops, then "liberate" Iraq by militarily defeating the 400,000-strong Iraqi army. Committed unilateralists and military strategists all, this group cared little for the niceties of coalition politics.

All of the Bush hawks had signed a high-profile 1998 letter to President Clinton, calling for greater military backing for the INC. It was a contentious position, and remained so when the Bush administration came into office. General Anthony Zinni, then chief of the Pentagon's Central Command (and later Bush's envoy to Israel-Palestine), had come out strongly against the INC, saying he did not believe the London-based opposition was a viable force in Iraq. Referring to the 1961 Playa Giron debacle in Cuba, Zinni said arming the opposition could turn Iraq into "a Bay of Goats". But the INC itself had high hopes for the Bush administration. Less than three weeks after President Bush was sworn in, INC spokesman Sharif Ali Bin Al-Hussein noted a "marked shift" in interest and attitude of Bush, compared to the Clinton Administration. "It's a different ballgame now", he said. It's tangible how big the change is".

But not everyone in the Bush administration wanted such a big change. Once in office the Bush hawks toned down their rhetoric somewhat from their overheated language during the Clinton years. Even Wolfowitz told his Senate confirmation hearing that while he supports US military backing for an opposition force inside Iraq, "I haven't yet seen a plausible plan" for doing so. And Vice-President Cheney, also part of the arm-the-INC contingent during his 1990s years in the private oil sector, told CNN on March 4, 2001 that ''I don't believe [Saddam Hussein] is a significant military threat today.'' (That, of course, was before September 11th.)

None of the talk about "regime change" in Iraq, and none of the posturing of the INC had any visible impact on the nature of the Baathist regime in Baghdad. The regime's tight control and reliance on repression remained largely as it had been throughout its decade-long partnership with the US against Iran during the 1980s. That war itself, as well as the renewed Desert Fox attacks of 1998 had severely eroded the regime's military and economic capacity. But ironically (though perhaps not unexpectedly) it appeared economic sanctions had increased popular support for the regime. Even during the Iran-Iraq war and its devastation, most Iraqis were accustomed to a middle class level of home life and comfort. Suddenly faced with insufficient food, dirty water, no income, no education, it should have been no surprise that they would be far more concerned about feeding their children than about who was in power in Baghdad. The first year of the Bush presidency saw no change in how US policy continued to undermine the only real social force with the potential for changing the regime or democratization in Iraq - the educated middle class, now demoralized and bitter under the devastation of economic sanctions.

There was also no change in the status of Iraq's alleged weapons programs. Despite claims by US and some international officials that "we know" the regime in Baghdad is continuing to produce weapons of mass destruction and advanced missile capability, the truth is that we know no such thing. Since the UNSCOM inspectors left Iraq in December 1998 on the eve of the US bombing raids (not expelled, as so many inaccurate news reports blithely repeat), there has been little credible information regarding Iraq's current capacity. A small stream of defectors eager to sell their stories and their value to western asylum officials continues to emerge with tales of grandiose WMD programs still underway. But without inspectors on the ground it remains impossible to verify their claims. While their number is likely to grow, the defectors' stories validate only the urgency of getting UN inspectors back into Iraq and into countries and onto borders throughout the arms-glutted region - something that will be possible only when economic sanctions are lifted.

On the question of sanctions, Powell's coalition-focused approach took priority. In the spring of 2001 the Bush administration, with British backing, attempted to impose a new resolution in the Security Council, one based on "smart sanctions" against Iraq. Few believed the new arrangement would seriously improve the horrific humanitarian crisis still dominating Iraq's economic and social life. None of the other countries on the Council were very enthusiastic, and Iraq's neighbors, Jordan and Turkey, were particularly dismayed by the proposal's call for stringent controls on their longstanding informal trade with Iraq. Soon Russia announced its intention to veto the resolution, and shortly after September 11th and the first efforts to draw Russia into the coalition, the US withdrew it from consideration.

(US efforts at the UN were hampered further by the administration's failure to have won Senate approval for its nominee for UN Ambassador, John Negroponte, demonstrating to the world Bush's disdain for the world body. Many senators initially opposed the former ambassador to Honduras because of his involvement in covering up serious human rights violations by US allies during the contra war of the 1980s. But the Democratic opposition eventually gave way, and Negroponte's appointment was finally ratified.)

Debate on a new US approach in the Security Council was just beginning when the September 11th attacks took place. The debate within the administration was still not resolved; key players were reported to have shifted sides, but the debate moved into a much broader public arena. Suddenly Iraq policy was not an esoteric issue, but was shaped by its connection - or lack of connection - to the September events. And suddenly the debate was being waged outside of the administration, involving members of congress, reporters and newspaper editorials, television debates and a plethora of "talking heads". There was no serious evidence that the Iraqi regime had any connection to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The longstanding antagonism between the determinedly secular Saddam Hussein and all representatives of political Islamism was widely known. But the long years of demonizing the Iraqi leader meant that many in the US were prepared to embrace a new war against Iraq as part of the "war on terror" even without a connection to the September 11th events.

The stakes remained high, and the pressures on the administration increased. The focus on smart sanctions collapsed, and in early December the US agreed to withdraw its proposal and extend the existing sanctions for an additional six months. It gave Russia a claim to leadership. But US power was stronger than ever with the September 11th "coalition" underway and no country, including Russia, was prepared to stand against Washington's wishes. As the year ended, public calls to "expand the war to Iraq" escalated, and rumors swirled around the UN that Washington was orchestrating a new military approach to Iraq. The new approach would be based on coercing the permanent veto-wielding members of the Security Council to accept a US plan for new military strikes against Iraq later in 2002. The strikes would be legitimized by a new UN resolution that would authorize the use of force by "member States" or a "coalition of the willing" (read: the US and its allies) in response to any Iraqi refusal to accept new arms inspectors. In mid-December Congress passed a resolution identifying any such Iraqi action as a "mounting threat" to US security, thus helping to lay the foundation for a new war.

Israel-Palestine

US strategy in the Middle East has been remarkably consistent since about the time of the Six Day War in 1967. Its three pillars remain oil, Israel, and stability. Which one of those three is primary at any given time may shift, but the three remain constant.

Under Clinton, for reasons involving a combination of domestic politics, personal ambition and strategic planning, there was no doubt that Israel was by far the most important. Shepherding the tortuous negotiations of the Oslo process remained at the top of the Clinton foreign policy agenda. That had required creating and consolidating a high level of dependence on the US by the Palestinian leadership, while simultaneously maintaining and even strengthening the "special relationship" between the US and Israel. But in what would be the last highly visible failure of the Clinton administration, the negotiations had collapsed. The legacy would remain unfinished, the final photo op not taken.

When the Bush officials were sworn in, they represented an entirely different approach to the triad of US strategic interests in the Middle East. This was not an administration - or a president - with long-standing political ties to Israel, to pro-Israel forces within the US, or to the US Jewish community. Their interests lay first in oil, not Israel. This was not simply an administration supportive of the oil industry (after all, what US administration since Second World War has not understood the importance of oil?). These were individuals whose personal and family fortunes were intimately tied to the fate of Big Oil. They didn't support the oil industry - they were the oil industry.

Top officials of the Bush Junior administration were returning to public office after years in the private sector. For most of them, that meant the oil industry. Dick Cheney spent his out-of-office years as CEO of the Halliburton Oil Services corporation, providing key infrastructure assistance to, among other clients, Iraq's besieged oil sector. Condoleeza Rice had spent years as a vice-president of Chevron. During their off-years, US officials and US oil companies had negotiated on a perfectly normal basis with the Taliban officials for pipeline rights in and through Afghanistan. One of the key interlocutors of that period was Zalmay Khalizad, a former consultant to UNOCAL oil and Reagan-era Pentagon official who coordinated US backing for the Afghan mujahideen in the 1980s, appointed in January 2002 as Bush's special representative to the new post-Taliban government in Kabul. Khalizad's opposite number, in this case also serving as a consultant to UNOCAL oil, was no other than Hamid Karzai, the US-installed president of the "new" Afghanistan.

The consequences of this oil primacy for the new administration when they took office in early 2001 were two-fold. First, they rejected the Clinton approach of intensive, high-level engagement in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. Certainly at the diplomatic level, despite whatever shifts were underway between Israel and oil interests, Washington's special relationship with Israel would remain paramount in any negotiations with Palestinians (who do not, in any event, have any oil of their own). But by pulling back from the most visible spot largely in the post-Camp David abyss of the Oslo process, the Bush administration signal was read in the Arab world as potentially shifting towards a more balanced position. They were prepared, to all appearances, to let Israel-Palestinian negotiations founder for an indeterminate period of time.

Second, the Bush team continued the Clinton-era tendency to ignore potentially dangerous developments in Saudi Arabia. Despite Israel's priority position during the Clinton years, oil was still vital to US interests in the region. The repression by the royal regime, the resulting restiveness of the young and no-longer-as-rich-as-they-expected Saudi population, the young Saudis' vulnerability to Islamist extremism and the royal family's complicity with it, were largely ignored. The only response was the occasional ratcheting up of security for the thousands of US troops occupying isolated military bases across the kingdom. Small surprise, then, that the emergence of Saudi Arabia, the most important US ally in the Arab world, as the most important venue for anti-US militancy in the Arab world, took place largely beneath the radar of US intelligence agencies.

The immediate result of the new emphasis on the oil side of the strategic triangle meant that the increasingly bloody conflict underway in the occupied Palestinian territories, and occasionally inside Israel itself, was simply not as high a priority for the Bush administration - as long as it didn't threaten broader regional interests. Colin Powell would not be sent off immediately for high-profile shuttle diplomacy. Unlike the micro-managing approach of the Clinton years, the Bush team announced, there would be no high-profile special envoy and no intention of getting involved until the parties were ready to make peace. It was widely viewed as a withdrawal from active involvement in the "peace process".

In the meantime, active US involvement, on the ground if not in the diplomacy, was not withdrawn at all: massive, multi-billion dollar grants of economic and military aid to Israel continued unabated. Israeli purchases, mostly with US taxpayers footing the bill, of F-16 fighter jets, Apache helicopter gunships, missiles, a host of advanced weapons being used against civilians, all continued. US diplomats continued to threaten and use the veto when the Security Council considered deploying unarmed international observers in the occupied territories. The US withdrew from participation in the World Conference Against Racism held in Durban, South Africa, ostensibly because of the criticisms of Israel's treatment of Palestinians under occupation. (Many believed that the US pull-out was equally in response to the possibility of having to answer claims for reparations or other responsibility for the US slave trade. But publicly it was all about Israel.) US backing of Israel and Israel's occupation continued despite the temporary disengagement from the peace process.

General Ariel Sharon, widely known as the "Butcher of Beirut" for his role in the 1982 massacre of Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon, became prime minister of Israel early in 2001. His election, or perhaps one should say the defeat of his opponent, the Labor Party's Ehud Barak, was Israel's response to the collapse of the peace talks and the increasing resistance of the second Palestinian intifada.

Early on, Sharon was welcomed formally by the White House oilmen, but there was no indication of the affectionate collegiality that characterized the Clinton-Barak relationship. Sharon's abrasive, military approach, as much as his unwavering commitment to constructing new and expanding old settlements throughout the occupied West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Arab East Jerusalem, made him a difficult partner for Washington. On a couple of occasions there was even a hint of mild exasperation in Washington towards Sharon's most egregious actions. But those hints were never matched by US action.

After September 11th, first indications were mixed. Israel, and Israel supporters in the US gloated, saying "now they'll see what it's like", even as US disaster teams began digging for the dead in the ruins of the World Trade Center. Israeli Defense Minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer, bragged in the first days after September 11th that "we have killed 14 Palestinians in Jenin, Kabatyeh and Tammun, with the world remaining absolutely silent". In the last days of 2001, Ben Eliezer was elected the new leader of the Labor Party.

Some thought that Israel would be sacrificed to the needs of Washington's coalition-building. Belligerent voices inside Israel quickly rose to claim that this time, unlike the Gulf War of a decade earlier, Israel would not accede to US demands that it stand aside, abjuring any military strike even when Iraqi missiles struck near Tel Aviv.

The Bush administration did not make any such demand. Of course no al Qaeda attacks were launched against Israel, and Israeli claims that Palestinian organizations resisting its illegal military occupation were somehow the equivalent of the World Trade Center terrorists, persuaded no one. But the US did change its posture in regard to Israeli-Palestinian negotiations after 9/11. The hands-off, coolly disinterested approach was over. Instead, getting negotiations back on track became a high priority - not because of a sudden commitment to Israeli-Palestinian peace for its own sake, but because the US withdrawal from the peace process was being viewed in much of the world as an abandonment of both sides. And in restive Middle Eastern countries, where delegitimized rulers faced hostile populations already angry over their governments' ties to the US, it became crucial to show that Washington was indeed committed to supporting some version of Palestinian rights.

So the pressure was on to get the parties back to the negotiating table. But the US was trying to revive what was already a long-dead approach. The Palestinian uprising was operating at full force, and the stale call for the Palestinians to end their resistance, without any political end game in sight, while Israel continued settlement expansion and full military control of even the "autonomous" parts of the occupied territory, never had a chance. The new efforts foundered, until a sudden upsurge in Israeli casualties changed the US position. Palestinians, many of them children, were continuing to die at shocking rates that had ceased to shock the international community. Then, from mid-October there was a significant diminution in armed Palestinian resistance, part of a private agreement between Yasir Arafat's Palestinian Authority and the Islamist resistance organization Hamas. The agreement called for a suspension of Hamas suicide attacks as long as Israel suspended its assassination policy against Hamas leaders and activists. The agreement held - until Israel assassinated a well-known Hamas leader, Mahmoud Abu Hanoud, with a helicopter gunship. Soon thereafter, two retaliatory suicide bomb attacks left dozens of Israeli civilians dead, and Sharon's government moved towards full-scale war against Palestinian towns, villages and refugee camps.

At that point, the Bush administration changed its tune, and officially embraced Sharon's rapid escalation of military force. Asked whether the US was concerned about its military hardware being used against civilians, Bush administration spokespeople repeated the line that "Israel is a sovereign country and has the right of self-defense". It was a claim repeated by every Israeli government official, with the smugly added line, "just like the US is doing in Afghanistan". (It is probably not a coincidence that the US embrace of Sharon's militarism came just after the fall of the Taliban in Mazar-e-Sharif. The coalition, it seemed, was no longer quite as important as before.)

By the end of the year, the illusions of Oslo's "autonomy" were shattered. The Israeli military was operating with impunity inside virtually every Palestinian town supposedly under "complete" Palestinian authority. Sharon was warmly welcomed at the White House, and Yasir Arafat remained persona non grata. By mid-December, Arafat was essentially under house arrest in Ramallah surrounded by Israeli tanks, and on Christmas was prohibited from celebrating midnight Mass in Bethlehem.

News pundits in the US began talking about what a "post-Arafat" Palestine might look like. Sharon deemed Arafat "irrelevant", even as Israeli military attacks on Palestinian police stations made certain that the Palestinian Authority remained incapable of providing any level of security for Palestinians OR for Israelis. Arafat's depleted prestige began to rise again at that point, even among a population long despairing of their leader's inability to provide strategic direction. And despite their mutual antagonism, it seemed unlikely that Sharon actually wanted to get rid of Arafat, given the unlikely prospects for either negotiations or stability among any potential group of successors.

What was also far from certain was whether Israel's - or at least Sharon's - goal was to get negotiations going again at all. There were clear indications, including his own statements, that Sharon had abandoned any effort towards a comprehensive peace as hopeless idealism. His goal appeared to be much narrower, aimed at imposing some kind of temporary stability - not peace, but an absence of Palestinian resistance to continuing, even escalating, Israeli control.

Ariel Sharon remained a general, and while he was perhaps most famous for the Sabra-Shatila massacre, it may be an earlier moment in his long career that Sharon was remembering as 2001 drew to a close. In 1971-72, the Israeli occupation was only about five years old. In Gaza, the shock of the 1967 war was wearing off, and hints of a nascent campaign of resistance emerged. It wasn't anything that could be called an uprising, but it was the beginning of something that might make the Israeli occupation forces' work more difficult. Ariel Sharon was the defense minister. And he recognized that small hints of resistance could later blossom into big-time trouble. He chose a military solution - and sent the tanks in to pacify Gaza. It wasn't pretty, as the tanks and bulldozers cleared new roads through heavily populated refugee camps. People were killed, and it took almost a year. But at the end of the campaign Gaza was pacified. General Sharon knew that peace - real, lasting, comprehensive peace - could not be imposed with tanks and guns. But stability can. It may not last forever - in Gaza it lasted 15 years, until the first intifada or uprising began in 1987. But an awful lot can change in 15 years. And that may be what General Sharon was counting on.

In the meantime, any potential for reopening serious negotiations in 2002 after the Bush administration's "we're all in this together" embrace of Sharon's military assault and rejection of talks, must be based on leadership from outside Washington. Earlier in 2001 several European countries had seemed willing to take some initiative in crafting a new approach to Israel-Palestinian diplomacy, one rooted in ending occupation as the basis for a new kind of peace and security. German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder took the lead in the summer, when Israel seized the Orient House in Jerusalem, long a venue for Palestinian diplomats to meet with European and other international counterparts. After September 11, those European voices were largely silenced. An important test of the emerging European unity will be its willingness to challenge US domination of Israel-Palestine diplomacy - domination which has so far brought only bloodsoaked failure. If not Europe, other countries such as South Africa may be willing to take the lead in getting the Israel-Palestine conflict back onto the UN agenda.

The United Nations

The UN began to gain credibility -and later a Nobel Prize for Peace - during the early parts of 2001. The willingness of governments to use the UN as an independent vehicle for challenging, rather than acceding to, US domination, appeared to be on the rise. In early May, governments from around the world voted to bump the US off the Human Rights Commission. The vote reflected the frustration of numerous countries, especially in western Europe, with the continuing US rejection of the United Nations and other international commitments, including those on human rights. As Harold Koh, human rights chief in the Clinton administration, wrote in the Washington Post, "the world was trying to teach us a lesson". UN officials and European diplomats explaining the vote pointed to the US imposition of the death penalty; its refusal to sign or ratify numerous treaties and conventions including those guaranteeing the rights of women and children, the CTBT, land mine prohibitions and the International Criminal Court; its abandonment of the Kyoto protocol on global warming and threats to the ABM treaty, and its rejection of international protection for the Palestinians. Secretary of State Powell described the veto of the protection resolution as one where the US "left a little blood on the floor", but the willingness of countries to challenge the US gave some additional integrity to the UN and its potential.

After years of multilateral talk under the Clinton administration, but little US accountability to collective decision-making and international treaties, it was not surprising the Europeans were furious when the Bush administration took unilateralism to unprecedented heights. The French had begun describing the US as a "hyper-power". In fact, in another secret ballot on the same day as the human rights vote, the US lost a second influential UN position, on the International Narcotics Control Board. Taken together, the losses reflected growing global dismay at the "go it alone" tendency in US foreign policy under the Bush administration, an approach that dismissed the significance of multilateralism, international law and the United Nations itself. (It was also probably not irrelevant that at the time of the votes, the US debt to the UN in unpaid dues totaled over $1.3 billion. While Congress voted to pay part of the arrears in a hasty post-September 11th decision, by the end of 2001 still only of the back dues had been paid.)

But after September 11th the potential for UN independence, let alone the possibility that the UN would emerge at the center of a new internationalist challenge to the US "law of empire" quickly faded. While the Security Council vote held within 24 hours of the attacks on the World Trade Center did not authorize any use of force, neither the Secretary-General nor any UN diplomats spoke up to dispute the US claim that its war in Afghanistan was somehow authorized under the UN Charter and that no Council authority was necessary.

The Bush administration claimed that Article 51 of the UN Charter, allowing a nation to use military force in self-defense, legitimated its entire unilateral war in Afghanistan. But Article 51 is quite limited, and allows the use of military force by a nation under attack only "until the Security Council has taken measures necessary" to deal with the problem. If, for example, the Pentagon had been able to scramble a jet to shoot down the second plane before it hit the World Trade Center, that would have been a legal use of urgent military force for self-defense. In terms of gaining Security Council authorization for the use of force BEYOND the immediate emergency force required, the US did indeed convene an emergency meeting of the Council within 24 hours of the September 11th attacks, and could have requested authorization at that time.

But Washington specifically did not call for Council action to respond, or even Council approval of a US response. Instead, on September 12, the Council passed resolution 1368, unanimously and with enormous emotional fervor, to condemn the attacks. In the text the Council "expresse[d] its readiness to take all necessary steps to respond to the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001", but it did NOT authorize any military response, whether by UN, coalition, or unilateral US military forces. The resolution was not taken under the authority of Chapter VII of the UN Charter, a prerequisite for any authorization of military force. And absent that authorization, the unilateral US military force launched weeks after the New York and Washington attacks, across the world against uncertain targets of unproven responsibility with inevitable and disastrous civilian consequences, remained a complete violation of international law and the UN Charter.

Washington turned to the UN as the war in Afghanistan peaked, but only to assign it responsibility for the massive humanitarian tasks that lay ahead. The Bush administration made clear it had no intention of carrying out that task itself; its self-appointed role was that of war-fighting, not nation-building. As 2001 wound down, the concern remained that the UN would be stuck trying to pick up the pieces left over from the destruction of Washington's war. If history proved consistent, the UN would not be provided with the political or financial resources required to do the job, but would still be blamed for "Afghanistan's failure" if (when?) warlordism and social collapse and widespread deaths from hunger and disease took hold once again.

It remained uncertain whether the Bush administration would learn the lessons of Somalia, even if too late to stop the Afghan war. In the early 1990s, the UN's special envoy to Somalia, Mohamad Sakhnoun, crafted an innovative and potentially successful plan to begin rebuilding Somali society following years of crippling civil war. US strategists disagreed, and instead moved to militarize the international community's involvement in Somalia. The Pentagon refused to place its soldiers under UN authority, so a parallel US military deployment was sent to Mogadishu. It was those internationally unauthorized soldiers who got into trouble in 1993, leading to the deaths of 18 US Rangers and several hundred Somali civilians - and the Clinton administration's commitment to peacekeeping died with them. The clearest lessons, if Bush and his advisers paid attention, would be to let the UN take the lead, and don't assume a military approach is the best.

But at the end of 2001, the UN as a whole remained on the back burner of Bush administration strategic consideration.

Europe

Much closer to the front burner in 2001 was Europe - in particular NATO. While wary of greater European unity, the NATO military alliance remained a favorite of the Bush administration. But even that embrace of NATO was more tactical than collaborative for US policymakers. Early in its tenure, the Bush administration threatened a partial or even full withdrawal of US troops from the NATO-led forces in the Balkans. Europe complained, and that threat was never realized. But after September 11th, faced with new military actions, Bush's Pentagon saw no problem in re-raising the possibility of pulling US troops out of Bosnia and Kosovo for deployment to Afghanistan. This time around, Europe appeared far less likely to object. It was Europeans, not the US after all, who invoked the NATO Charter's Article V following September 11th, thus deeming the attack on US targets an attack on all NATO members.

After September 11th, European governments were quick to join the Bush "coalition". But the uncritical endorsements of EU heads of state were not matched by public sentiment in Europe. The German Greens were badly split over support for the war, French prime minister Jospin split with his president to declare that France was not at war, the Irish were uneasy, in Italy 50,000 anti-war protestors answered a much smaller pro-US government-sponsored rally (despite an appearance by Luciano Pavarotti at the government rally). And by the end of the year, a major split between the US and Europe developed over the Bush administration's insistence on military tribunals and the death penalty for accused terrorists, with the Europeans insisting that EU human rights conventions prohibited extradition of anyone to a country with the death penalty - including accused terrorists.

Certainly the Bush administration looked to Europe to take the lead in rehabilitating Afghanistan. Whether it would accept broader European political initiatives (in Israel-Palestine diplomacy, Iraq, etc.) remained, at the end of 2001, a very uncertain proposition - and whether Europe would demand such independence of action remained a question as well.

After

When the planes attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, George Bush and his aides had a choice of how to respond. The choice they made was the immediate call for a military response, the call to war for the American people and for everyone else in the world who wished to be "with us", rather than treated as if they were "with the terrorists". The only choice offered was to go to war, to lay waste Afghanistan, relying on a coerced coalition, without a hint of UN authority.

There was another choice, but it was rejected. That choice would have been to immediately deem the attacks a crime against humanity, and call for a new, global coalition to find and bring to justice the perpetrators, while beginning a major effort to examine root causes for such atrocities within US foreign policy. The president could have started with a commitment to demonstrate to the world that the US, its government and its people were in fact different from the terrorists, and that it would begin with a pledge that not one more innocent life would be lost in pursuit of that goal. He could have gone on to say that the 9/11 attacks made the US government realize it had been wrong to oppose the International Criminal Court, and that beyond pledging full financial and political support to the ICC in the future, that it would begin that day to provide new support for the United Nations. That support would enable the UN to establish a new judicial agency, backed by a new international enforcement mechanism, to cooperate with regional forces to search for those responsible for the attacks. And then to establish a new UN Department of Preventive Diplomacy, with enough support and backing to ensure that such an attack never happened again.

It should not have been too soon, even in the epicenter of that anguish, to begin to ask questions, to ask why. It should not have been to soon to begin answering the suddenly common question, "why do 'they' hate us". It should not have been too soon to ask why we here in the US had never imagined or believed that we would suddenly come face to face with what The Independent's Robert Fisk described as "the wickedness and awesome cruelty of those who claim to speak for a crushed and humiliated people".

But those choices were rejected. The choice made was for war. The coalition's primacy already began to diminish when military victory in Afghanistan seemed close at hand. What do those choices say about new directions for US foreign policy? At the end of 2001, the Powell-Wolfowitz split between supporters of a multilateral approach [however false or coerced] and those demanding aggressively unilateral military actions, remained undecided.

We know that a weak, ultimately illegitimate president saw the September 11th crisis as a great gift, enabling him to consolidate his faltering credibility (domestic and international), and to implement, largely outside the press spotlight, the long-standing goals of the right-wing Republican agenda. Aside from domestic policies that undermined hard-won environmental defenses and civil liberties protections, the first year of the Bush presidency saw vastly enhanced power shifting to the executive branch, treaties rejected, military force asserted in place of diplomacy, and foreign policy imposed on the rest of the world through an unchallenged law of empire.

It was, as the satirist Tom Lehrer once wrote, "a good year for the war buffs". It wasn't much of a year for the rest of us.

Copyright 2002 CIP/Fuhem