The atlantic crisis of confidence

International Affairs

Volumn 80, Issue 4, 2004, Pages

  Allin, Dana H ^a  

^a INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR STRATEGIC STUDIES   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 3142701590     PISSN: 00205850     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2346.2004.00409.x     Document Type: Review

References (28)

1. Harold Meyerson, 'In Iraq, without options', Washington Post, 7 April 2004.
2. 'The violation of the Geneva Conventions and that refusal to let the courts consider the issue have cost the United States dearly in the world legal community - the judges and lawyers in societies that, historically, have looked to the United States as the exemplar of a country committed to law. Lord Steyn, a judge on Britain's highest court, condemned the administration's position on Guantánamo in an address last fall - pointing out that American courts would refuse even to hear claims of torture from prisoners. At the time, the idea of torture at Guantánamo seemed far-fetched to me. After the disclosures of the last 10 days, can we be sure?' Anthony Lewis, 'A president beyond the law', New York Times, 7 May 2004.
3. Tony Karon, 'How the prison scandal sabotages the US in Iraq', Time, 4 May 2004, http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,632967,00.html.
4. This assessment of the threat being long rather than short term does not rely on the benefit of hindsight. I made the same assessment on the eve of the war. See Dana H. Allin and Steven Simon, 'Powell makes the case for a strike on Saddam', Financial Times, 6 Feb. 2003.
5. François Heisbourg, 'American hegemony? Perceptions of the US abroad', Survival 41: 4, Winter 1999-2000, pp. 15, 16.
6. This point is central to the celebrated thesis of Robert Kagan in Paradise and power: America and Europe in the new world order (London: Atlantic, 2003).
7. Dana H. Allin, NATO's Balkan interventions, Adelphi Paper no. 347 (Oxford: Oxford University Press/International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2002), pp. 57-61.
8. 'A year after Iraq war: mistrust of America in Europe ever higher, Muslim anger persists', The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 16 March 2004, http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=206.
9. Zbigniew Brzezinski, speech delivered in Washington DC on 28 Oct. 2003, http://www.prospect.org/webfeatures/2003/10/brzezinski-z-10-31.html.
10. I would not pretend that I opposed the war, as a matter of principle, all along. I agreed that the problem and the evil of Saddam needed to be addressed; that long-term containment of that problem was an increasing liability; and that the moral and legal case for war looked strong. I was not convinced, however, that the choice for war at that moment in the spring of 2003, with only one major ally, and given the demands of the struggle against Al-Qaeda, was strategically wise. And I was hardly alone in being unnerved by the reckless disregard of the Bush administration for a cost-benefit equation that appeared - in common-sense terms - precariously likely to swing deep into negative territory if things were not managed wisely. And they were not managed wisely.
11. Fareed Zakaria, 'The price of arrogance', Newsweek, 17 May 2004.
12. See transcript of Clarke's interview by Tim Russert on NEC News, 'Meet the press', 28 March 2004, http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4608698/. See also Richard Clarke, Against all enemies: inside America's war on terror (New York: Random House, 2004).
13. See transcript of Clarke's interview by Tim Russert on NEC News, 'Meet the press', 28 March 2004, http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4608698/. See also Richard Clarke, Against all enemies: inside America's war on terror (New York: Random House, 2004).
14. Walter B. Slocombe, 'Force, pre-emption and legitimacy', Survival 45: 1, Spring 2003, p. 125.
15. Robin Cook resignation speech, 18 March 2003.
16. For a sweeping critique of the intelligence 'groupthink' about Iraqi WMD, the war itself and its consequences, see Lawrence Freedman, 'War in Iraq: selling the threat', Survival 46: 2, Summer 2004.
17. There are places, such as Pakistan, where the issues of proliferation and failed states intersect directly, but the main point is that they are central and indispensable elements of any western grand strategy for managing new security threats - notably, mass-casualty terrorism.
18. In April 2003 a deputy assistant secretary of state, Robert Bradtke, warned that vital American-French cooperation on law enforcement and intelligence-sharing could suffer because of France's opposition to the war. Whether Bradtke was issuing a threat or simply mentioning the likely consequences of the Franco-American feud, his comments highlighted the potential for mutually damaging spillover. See Dana H. Allin and Jonathan Stevenson, 'Punishing France: US shoots itself in the foot', International Herald Tribune, 2 May 2003.
19. For perhaps the earliest published assessment of the strategic reach of Al-Qaeda and jihadist terrorism, see Steven Simon and Daniel Benjamin, 'America and the new terrorism', Survival 42, Summer 2000. The article summary states that, some 18 months before the September 11 attacks, the authors, who had worked in the section of President Clinton's National Security Council concerned with terrorism, reported that the 19905 had seen 'the emergence of a new, religiously motivated terrorism that neither relies on the support of sovereign states nor is constrained by limits on violence. Its harbingers include the 1993 World Trade Center bombing in New York; the 1995 sarin-gas attack in the Tokyo subway; the 1996 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building; and the 1998 East Africa bombings. In their effort to inflict damage on a grand scale, some practitioners of the new terrorism seek to acquire weapons of mass destruction. Although no single individual bears responsibility, the face of the new terrorism belongs to Osama bin Laden, the exiled Saudi who has marshalled a network of operatives in more than 50 countries.'
20. Former CIA director James Woolsey is one of the most energetic proponents of this view. See 'Ex-CIA director: US faces "World War IV", CNN.com, 3 April 2003, http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/04/03/sprj.irq.woolsey.world.war/. See also David Frum and Richard Perle, An end to evil: how to win the war on terror (New York: Random House, 2003).
21. Former CIA director James Woolsey is one of the most energetic proponents of this view. See 'Ex-CIA director: US faces "World War IV", CNN.com, 3 April 2003, http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/04/03/sprj.irq.woolsey.world.war/. See also David Frum and Richard Perle, An end to evil: how to win the war on terror (New York: Random House, 2003).
22. Lawrence Freedman, 'The Third World War?', Survival 43: 4, Winter 2001, pp. 78, 61.
23. Jacob Weisberg, Paul Berman, Thomas Friedman, Christopher Hitchens, Fred Kaplan, George Packer, Kenneth M. Pollack and Farced Zakaria, 'Liberal hawks reconsider the Iraq war', Slate, 12-16 Jan. 2004, http://slate.msn.com/id/ 2093620/entry/2093641/.
24. An even greater threat, arguably, was Pakistan and the global nuclear supermarket that was being run under the auspices of one of its top nuclear scientists, A. Q. Kahn, who sold technology to a mind-boggling list of clients, including Iran, Libya and North Korea. The United States has decided to accept the bizarre pretence that Kahn ran this black market more or less on his own. Absurd and distasteful as it is, this pretence may serve US and even broader international interests, since Pakistan's help is needed in the continuing fight against the Taleban and Al-Qaeda, and since there is probably no more direct way to force Pakistan into cooperating against nuclear proliferation.
25. Robert Chase, Emily Hill and Paul Kennedy, eds, Pivotal states: a new framework for US policy in the developing world (New York: Norton, 2000).
26. Morton Abramowitz, 'After Iraq, shrinking horizons', Washington Post, 31 July 2003.
27. James F. Dobbins, 'America's role in nation-building: from Germany to Iraq', Survival 45: 4, Winter 2003-2004, p. 109.
28. Author's conversations with French officials in Paris and London.