Iraq II: Redefining International Politics

Mabel Van Basten

The second Iraq war has seen the United States make significant changes to International Politics and Law. These changes have carried out because of the United States's strength as the remaining superpower but they have important implications for regional disputes around the globe and how regional combatants should respond to each other in a military conflict. U.S. spokesman have sought to downplay these changes by suggesting that they only apply to the United States, and that too in the case of Iraq. But the rest of the international community is likely to take the lessons of the second Iraq war to heart and to incorporate them in their own grand strategies and military doctrines. These shifts are of particular interest to the countries of South Asia since they clearly apply to the India-Pakistan conflict as it has evolved in the past decade. The major shifts in international politics are:

• Legitimizing a doctrine of preemption
• Reinforcing the Geneva convention
• Criminalizing the first use of Weapons of Mass Destruction
• Legitimizing the targeting of Leadership
• Making illegal the role of third-party combatants
• Questioning the role of the United Nations

The Doctrine of Preemption

In recent times, the doctrine of preemption has had a rather dubious record in international law. It was used by the Japanese in Pearl Harbor to destroy what was viewed as an unacceptable American presence in the Pacific. It was also used by the other axis countries during the second world war. Israel used it to justify its attack on the Arab forces in 1967. International Law has not considered preemption a valid reason for war initiation and politically it has been condemned as an act of aggression. Now, however, the Bush Administration has made it a centerpiece of its military doctrine. The Bush Doctrine was best spelled out by Condoleeza Rice in aninterview to the New Perspectives Quarterly:

The concept of not waiting to be attacked goes back a long way in history. It isn't new in that sense. But it is also the case that preemption or "anticipatory defense" ought to be used sparingly. It isn't a blanket policy.

There are certain kinds of regimes that, if they acquire weapons of mass destruction, we must consider a danger because we know their history. The history here is extremely important. Anticipatory defense should not be used as a cover for aggression. It really should be a rare occurrence.

There are threats amenable to being dealt with in other ways, whether through diplomacy, or even coercive diplomacy, or, in the case of India and Pakistan, the involvement of the United States and Great Britain in helping to resolve the conflict.

But there are a few cases that may get beyond other means. Then, you have to reserve the right to use force.

Finally, there is a difference between preemption of capabilities and regime change. They are not the same. You may more often, as the United States has done in the past, preempt capability. But preempting for regime change ought to be a very rare occurrence.

It becomes clear from this statement that some have the right to preemption while others do not. And it is for the United States to decide and legitimize who will have the right to preempt. The question is whether the international system will permit the United States the sole arbiter in declaring when preemption is permissible and legitimate.

The question becomes an important one given the statements coming from various Indian officials regarding the Indian right to wage a preemptive strike on Pakistan to halt cross border terrorism. The Indian position has been that Pakistan makes a better case for preemption than Iraq did, because the latter possesses nuclear weapons and associated delivery systems, and is the world's headquarters for terrorism—being the home for both the Taliban and al-Qaeda The Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid was correct in writing that Afghanistan did not provide strategic depth to the Pakistan military. Instead, it provided strategic depth to al-Qaeda and Taliban. Terrorist attacks launched from Pakistani soil have killed and maimed thousands of Indian civilians and, therefore, the Indian government can make an equally compelling claim that it has to take preventive action to protect its citizens.

Geneva Convention and Nonparty combatants

The United States, in the Iraq conflict, made several important policy statements regarding the enforcement of the Geneva Convention. Most notably, prisoners of war were not to be tortured or otherwise mistreated. The U.S. made it clear that surviving members of the Iraqi regime would be held accountable for any such violations.

From an Indian perspective, the United States' reiteration of the Geneva Convention is heartening since it makes the obvious point that Pakistani violations of the convention are equally unacceptable. The torture of Indian troops by Pakistani forces or irregulars (as happened in Kargil) can in the future be met with serious complaints to the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court.

The other issue is the role of third-party combatants in a conflict. In the past, the world has tended to ignore ideologically motivated people who have gone to other countries to fight. Thus the entry of jihadis from friendly Muslim countries into Bosnia was ignored by the international community as a cause for concern. Similarly, "guest militants" as groups like the Hurriyat like to describe international terrorists from Afghanistan, Somalia, and Chechnya who are operating in Kashmir, have never been subject to global prosecution. Now, the United States, has made a serious change in policy about how such combatants should be treated and labeled their role as being illegal (this actually began with Operation Enduring Freedom and the establishment of Camp X-Ray in Cuba). Again it will be difficult for the United States to withdraw from this position because it is likely to encounter similar situations with foreign Jehadis in other operations it conducts other operations in the Middle East or possibly in Central Asia.

Criminalizing First-Use

During the Cold War, the international community laid great emphasis on preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction through the creation of multilateral treaties and by using bilateral measures like economic and military sanctions. Little thought was given to how to respond to an actual use of weapons of mass destruction, particularly nuclear weapons, by any state.

In part this neglect stemmed from the fact that any nuclear exchange was expected to be in the context of a broader world war that would probably lead to mutual assured destruction. The one conflict in which the international community could have made its diplomatic presence felt, and actually codified international behavior, was the Iran-Iraq crisis. Then, however, a war between two Islamic states was seen as beneficial to the western strategic worldview because it bled dry the two radical competitors for regional power in the Persian Gulf. It was only after the Iran-Iraq war was over that concern was voiced about Iraq's WMD cache. In the second Iraq war, however, the Bush Administration has unwittingly prohibited the first use of WMD in warfare. Various officials of the Bush Administration sent out warnings that if the Iraqi forces used weapons of mass destruction, they would be held responsible. Washington was clearly signaling that the first-use of weapons of mass destruction was unacceptable. The United States thus laid down a law that serves the interests of India and other status quo nuclear states.

The most troubling aspect of Pakistan's nuclear weapons doctrine has been that country's espousal of a first-use policy. The policy has never been condemned internationally, especially since it would have interfered with the United States's ability to pursue the war on terror in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But what India needs to do now is mobilize the international community to articulate what punitive measures will be taken against a state that first uses nuclear weapons. These could include, criminal prosecution of the national leadership for war crimes (as the Bush Administration would have done had chemical and biological weapons been used in Iraq-II), a refusal to provide economic assistance for rebuilding after a nuclear conflict, and long terms diplomatic and military sanctions. For the past year the Indian government has been deeply concerned about the issue of cross-border terrorism and threatened to take preemptive action against it. What it now needs to do, is to articulate why the first-use of nuclear weapons is unacceptable and how countries like Pakistan and North Korea need to be contained precisely because the espouse such a military doctrine.

Targeting Leadership

The United States has reintroduced the concept of targeting leadership as a legitimate objective of war fighting. The U.S. did this during the Second World War when it assassinated Japan's Admiral Yamamoto—the planner of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Now, the Pentagon has added one more euphemism to its politically correct terminology—targets of opportunity. Targeting Saddam Hussein and his sons was seen as the best way to quickly terminate a war and to secure the U.S. objective of an Iraq whose infrastructure was by and large left untouched. What the United States has stated, therefore, is that if a country's leadership does not follow international norms, either internally or externally, it can be legitimately targeted in the course of a conflict. From an Indian perspective, this suggests that targeting leadership of the Kashmiri terrorists groups based in Pakistan is an acceptable course of warfare.  

Bypassing the United Nations

Any institution is as strong as the individual countries that comprise it and their combined political will to make that institution successful. In the 1990s, the United Nations, with its role in Kuwait, Somalia, and the Balkans was viewed as having
achieved the objectives of its founders and become the principal organ for maintaining international peace and security. Multilateralism had triumphed over the divisive politics of the Cold War. A more cynical view was that the United Nations had reverted to the role it had played for the superpowers—in this case the remaining superpower—in the 1940s and 1950s—where it was the institution that could be used to further the interests and goals of Washington and Moscow. Thus in the in the 1940s and early 1950s, the United Nations was an organization that allowed the United States to intervene in Korea and later to hammer out a settlement to the Korea war. It was also useful in attempting to provide the solution to the Congo crisis. It could also be used to keep Mainland China out of the international arena.

As the membership of the United Nations General Assembly grew, and it attained a more democratic nature, the UN began to reflect the concerns of the newly independent states and became an organization that did not suit the long-term interests of either superpower. It was thus ignored in serious attempts at managing the Cold War. The Vietnam War was settled outside the orbit of the UN and the Egypt-Israel peace accord came from American diplomacy. Indeed between 1950 (Korea) and 1990 (Kuwait) the UN did not pursue a collective security mission that entailed the large-scale use of force.

The Indian government has made it clear that the call for a plebiscite was overtaken by events: the Kashmir Assembly's ratification of the accession to India in 1953; Pakistan's joining of CENTO and SEATO changed the situation in the region; and, more recently, by the fact that large transfers of population into Pakistan-held Kashmir would make such a plebiscite unworkable. It is time for India to bury the UN resolutions and put pressure on the Bush Administration to publicly state that the resolutions are unworkable. This has to be the price for a sustained long-term security relationship between the United States and India. The United States, with Iraq II, has rewritten some of the long-standing tenets of international relations behavior and strengthened others to the point that they put rogue states on notice. Pakistanis already worry that they are likely to be one of the next targets of the war on terror. The course of the Iraq war, and the rules of engagement it has created, can only serve to increase that fear in Islamabad. It is India's job, therefore, to push these issues in the international arena so that other countries that also suffer from terrorism put pressure on Washington to universally apply the new rules of engagement that it has used in the second Iraq war.  

Interested nations will have to argue that if the United States expects the war on terror to resonate well in other countries, it has to be willing to apply the same tough rules on terrorist groups and their state sponsors in other regions of the world. Otherwise, the actions in Iraq will only be viewed as the tactics of a unipolar bully.