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American Exceptionalism and the Multilateral Pretence
Or, John Bolton and the New Lawlessness
John Bolton's nomination to the position of US envoy to the United Nations signals that for the US, multilateralism now means little else than the unquestioning acquiescence of the world to the demands of a military superpower that is heady with its own strength and accountable to none. The international community has ample reason to worry.
By Sukumar Muralidharan
05/07/05 "EPW"
- - Where equivocation is the norm and contrived pretences of civility overwhelm the truth-telling function, John Bolton brings the prized virtue of plain speech. “There is no such thing as the United Nations”, he said at a meeting of the libertarian World Federalist Association in 1994. If the UN were to be shorn of a quarter of its floor space in New York, it “wouldn’t make a bit of difference”. In fact, on every occasion that the organisation has managed to overcome its inherent sloth and do some useful work, it was only because the US wanted it to. Those who did not appreciate the reality that the “UN worked when the US wanted it to” were simply unwilling to face the fact that the only permanent member the UN required was the US.
George Bush’s re-election last November was supposed to herald a second coming, of a kinder and gentler US president, attentive to world opinion and solicitous of multilateral cooperation in major transformative ventures. His tour of Europe in February represented the first overt statement of the new intent. But shortly after returning to firmer ideological terrain in his capital city, Bush chose to nominate Bolton as US ambassador to the UN. He followed up by picking Paul Wolfowitz as World Bank president, sending an obsessive ideologue with little scruple or perception of nuance, to the helm of the world’s largest multilateral lending body.
These events foretell interesting times ahead for diplomacy. Bolton’s nomination by a US senate committee has run into trouble, with the committee deciding to postpone its final decision. There were initial reports that a person who had served as a top intelligence analyst in the Department of State, was willing to testify that Bolton had been among the main authors of the new muscular approach towards facts, responsible for strong-arming US intelligence agencies into doctoring their findings on the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programme. To not put too fine a point on matters, Bolton had in his incarnation as Under Secretary of State in the first Bush administration, been an accomplice in forgery and the falsification of evidence.1
These reservations began rising to the surface at a critical juncture. The presidential commission on intelligence (headed by Judge Laurence Silberman and Senator Charles Robb) submitted its final report on the fiasco over Iraq’s WMD on March 31. Its final conclusion was simple: everybody was responsible for the colossal misrepresentations that paved the way to war in Iraq, and yet nobody was. The ‘Intelligence Community’, it determined, had been ‘dead wrong’ in “almost all of its pre-war judgments on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction”. The malaise sprang in part, from the very character – or the lack of it – of the ‘Intelligence Community’. “We need an intelligence community that is truly integrated, far more imaginative and willing to run risks”, it pointed out.
Public Attention
Without intending it, the Silberman-Robb (SR) commission directs public attention towards a host of other questions. How far, for instance, should the attributes of imagination and risk-taking go? Should the intelligence agencies be willing to stand up to pressure, to risk offending the political leadership of the time? Or should it be a loyal servant of the political compulsions of the moment? The SR commission offers nothing specific here, but does conclude, rather oddly, that political pressure was not a factor in the abject collapse of professional integrity in intelligence. “The Intelligence Community did not make or change any analytic judgments in response to political pressure to reach a particular conclusion, but the pervasive conventional wisdom that (Iraq) retained WMD affected the analytic process”. There was in short, no overt coercion, just the subtle pressure exerted by the prevalent climate of opinion. And in a footnote tucked in to an obscure corner, the SR commission adds that it did not consider the ‘separate issue’ of how “policy-makers used the intelligence they were given and how they reflected it in their presentations to Congress and the public”. This question quite simply, was no part of the commission’s charter.
The upshot is clear: the SR commission spent its time labouring over peripheral issues, preferring to avert its gaze from compelling evidence of the political manipulation of intelligence. And without remotely exhausting the catalogue of failures of the SR commission, the point is best illustrated by the manner in which it deals with an egregious case of forgery, which was in the tense months before the invasion of Iraq, blessed in quick succession by the US president, defence secretary and national security advisor.2 The commission concludes that three of the top five political officials charged with matters of national security, acted in innocent error. They were simply misinformed, since intelligence “failed to authenticate in a timely fashion transparently forged documents purporting to show that Iraq had attempted to procure uranium from Niger”.
Experts in English language usage could spend much time figuring out whether ‘transparently forged documents’ could possibly be ‘authenticated’. Was the ‘Intelligence Community’ required to render a forgery authentic? Was its cardinal sin the inability to do so? The SR commission holds the intelligence services up to a high standard of performance, but does not quite insist that their capabilities should extend quite this far. Rather, it holds them guilty of not warning high administration officials off the treacherous territory of forgery, before they went out on a limb with public statements founded on the concoctions. The concerned cell within the Central Intelligence Agency, the commission records, only “requested and obtained copies of the documents several months later” – presumably meaning that the CIA only obtained the documents after Bush had in presumed innocence, proclaimed during his State of the Union speech in January 2003, that Iraq was seeking to procure uranium from Niger. By this time though, the SR commission points out, even the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) had raised “serious doubts about the authenticity of the documents”.
Tenuous Case
The case that the commission makes is tenuous in the extreme. At an ‘on the record’ White House briefing in July 2003, deputy national security advisor Stephen Hadley admitted that the ‘uranium from Niger’ claim was removed from a speech Bush intended to make in October 2002, after a specific warning from the CIA on its dubious provenance. The CIA in fact, sent two memoranda to the president in quick succession – on October 5 and 6 – recording its reservations on the sources and documentation behind this allegation. Astoundingly, the SR commission, despite having access to all the necessary information, blithely ignores these two memoranda. Instead, it unburdens itself of the lofty judgment that the failure to review the documents on the Niger uranium deal, amounted to egregious neglect by the ‘Intelligence Community’.
Informed discussion in the US and the world community now has gone beyond this vacuous fable of intelligence failure, to examining the political interests that drove the US into war. Identifying the source of the Niger uranium forgeries clearly, would unravel at least a part of the mystery. The accepted wisdom so far has been that the documents were fabricated by some foreign interests and fed through Italian military intelligence, to a credulous US ‘intelligence community’. This rather fanciful construction has been laughed out of court by everybody with even the remotest understanding of how intelligence and national security agencies function. Vincent Cannistraro, a former head of counter-terrorism at the CIA and intelligence director in the National Security Council during the Reagan administration, did little more than state the obvious on a recent radio interview. The Niger documents, he said, were produced in the US, and only funnelled through Italian agencies to give them a veneer of credibility. The subterfuge did not work and the intelligence agencies, from the moment they set their eyes on the forgeries, were embarrassed – even terrified – at the burden of vastly consequential decisions the documents were expected to bear. Urged by an interviewer to reveal what he knew about the identity of the forger, Cannistraro demurred. Much was known, he said, but not definitively confirmed. The interviewer was persistent. Would the name of Michael Ledeen, he asked, be of any significance in this connection. Obvious relieved that he would bear any potential legal liability, Cannistraro responded that anybody suggesting Ledeen as the source of the forgery, ‘would be very close’ to the truth.3
Michael Ledeen is identified by the rather vainglorious appellation of ‘Freedom Scholar’ at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). He is also a consulting editor with the online version of the right-wing weekly, National Review (www.nationalreview.com). In his most recent contribution to this forum, Ledeen, while raising ‘two cheers’ for the SR report, contested its conclusion that the pre-war assessments on Iraq’s WMD were ‘dead wrong’. All that was known, he argued, is that no WMD have been found. But then, he had long been arguing that Iraq had spirited away its WMD stocks to Syria and Iran prior to the war. There had been no conclusive refutation of this proposition, except in the report of the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) in early 2004. But since the ISG itself was drawn from the ‘Intelligence Community’, a professional fraternity that the SR commission ‘savages for hundreds of pages’, it makes little sense to accept its findings as ‘canonical’.4
Innovative Military Doctrine
There is a wonderfully innovative military doctrine underlying Ledeen’s blather. A small, defenceless country facing the most awesome military arsenal ever built – including the scarcely concealed willingness to use incendiary bombs, napalm and depleted uranium – would rather smuggle out its own weapons and roll over in abject surrender, all for the perverse satisfaction in later months of seeing its adversary lose face. But this purely doctrinal curiosity apart, Ledeen needs to be taken seriously, since he displays the obsessive mindset of a larger ideological alliance. No single aspect of this influential cabal of neo-conservatives (or neocons) is of greater moment today than its ability to evade accountability, to overwhelm any possibility of public scrutiny. No adverse finding of fact is any more than a temporary inconvenience, nothing so consequential that it cannot be submerged in a welter of polemic and obscured from public attention.
This is where the seeming digression from the life and times of John Bolton returns to the main narrative of the new norms of multilateralism – of accountability and transparency – that are being crafted by the second Bush administration. Bolton’s origins are in the same ideological stable that nourishes Ledeen. Prior to joining the first Bush administration, he was senior vice-president at the AEI. He served as assistant attorney general in the Reagan administration and assistant secretary of state with the elder Bush. Ledeen was involved in the minute operational planning of the Iran-Contra scandal, which contrived to circumvent all rules of legislative oversight and executive accountability that had been painstakingly put in place after the excesses of the Nixon administration. After the conspirators were caught in the act, Bolton from his vantage point in the Justice Department, managed successfully to fend off the more serious threats of prosecution and conviction.
What is it that moves the likes of Bolton and Ledeen? The short answer is a deep conviction in American exceptionalism. Though known to operate in a particularly lawless and brazen fashion in inner policy councils, Bolton and Ledeen also offer another face to the world: of ideologues willing to rationalise the doctrinal foundations on which their politics rests.
In a 2003 book, The War Against the Terror Masters, Ledeen put it with an excess of bombast, which perhaps accurately mirrored the depth of his conviction: “Creative destruction is our middle name, both within our own society and abroad. We tear down the old order every day. Our enemies have always hated this whirlwind of energy and creativity, which menaces their traditions (whatever they may be) and shames them for their inability to keep pace. Seeing America undo traditional societies, they fear us, for they do not wish to be undone. They cannot feel secure so long as we are there, for our very existence – our existence, not our politics – threatens their legitimacy. They must attack us in order to survive, just as we must destroy them to advance our historic mission”.5
Unsurprisingly, it is a historic mission that cannot recognise any of the fetters of multilateralism or international law. Bolton had occasion to elaborate on this point in 1999, when out of government, in an article for Foreign Affairs. International law, he claimed, was a domain of ‘euphoric impracticality’, since it failed to meet any of the tests normally imposed on ‘law’. Firstly, there could not be any means of linking international law to “the political consent of the global population”; and secondly, it held out no possibility of a “definitive dispute-resolution mechanism, or any agreed-upon enforcement, execution, or compliance mechanisms (short of war)”.
Few Illusions
Bolton had few illusions that the discourse on international law – and the ‘new world order’ that was supposed to be raised on its foundations – though ostensibly targeted at the worst abuses against humanity, was in truth aimed at curbing the autonomy that the US enjoyed. “Although war criminals are, in a public relations sense, easier targets for advocates of binding international law”, he wrote, “the US is their ultimate objective”. Unwittingly establishing a symmetry between the worst crimes against humanity and the US need for freedom to operate at will anywhere in the world, Bolton continued: “Individual villains who commit heinous crimes may kill individuals or entire populations, but only the US can neutralise or destroy the ‘new world order’ itself”.
Bolton then moves on to the proposition that the conflict with the very concept of ‘international law’ is inherent in the US constitution. American intransigence, he argues, is grounded in the “fact that the US and its constitution would have to change fundamentally and irrevocably before binding international law becomes possible”. And without quite elaborating on the specific rights and entitlements where the US constitution and international law could be in conflict, he warns against any theory that is “quick to declare the world’s strongest and freest representative democracy to be in constant, flagrant violation, simply for adhering to its own constitution”.6
Consent of the Governed
Neither Bolton nor Ledeen pause in the midst of their lofty discourse to explain how forgery, or a certain freedom and creativity with documentation, is often a necessary device to win the ‘consent of the governed’. Neither do they dilate on the necessity for the “world’s freest and strongest representative democracy”, to seek frequent recourse to bluster and bullying, to have its way in both the domestic and international arena. Those would be minor quibbles in the master narrative of American exceptionalism, to be dismissed out of court. With Bolton’s nomination to the UN, this peculiar sensibility, with all its obsessions and pathological blindnesses, moves explicitly to the global battleground. Multilateralism in this discourse, means little else than the unquestioning acquiescence of the world in the rampage of a military superpower – heady with its own strength and accountable to none – across the world stage The international community has ample reason to worry.
Emal: sukumar@vsnl.com
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