[IP] There Is A West by Alexander M. Haig
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Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2004 20:18:59 -0500
From: Foreign Policy Research Institute <fpri@xxxxxxxx>
Subject: **SPAM** There Is A West by Alexander M. Haig
To: David Farber <dave@xxxxxxxxxx>
Foreign Policy Research Institute
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THERE IS A WEST
By Alexander M. Haig, Jr.
Volume 5, Number 1
February 2004
This document is the text of the keynote speech delivered by
Alexander M. Haig, Jr. to the Foreign Policy Research
Institute conference on "Is There Still a West?," February
12-13, 2004. A trustee of FPRI, General Haig is former
Secretary of State and former Supreme Allied Commander
Europe.
THERE IS A WEST
By Alexander M. Haig, Jr.
I am delighted to speak to you today here in Philadelphia
under the auspices of the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
FPRI is near and dear to me and we have had some history
together. After returning from the Supreme Command of NATO
in 1979, I became an Institute Senior Fellow at the
suggestion of FPRI's founder, the late Robert Strausz-Hupe.
Two of the Institute's scholars, Woody Goldberg and Harvey
Sicherman, worked with me to produce an important book on
the Alliance. Later, they joined me in Washington during my
time as Secretary of State. I'm not sure that any of us
fully recovered from the experience! But we all benefited
from Robert's talent, skill, and devotion to the idea of the
West. That idea, embodied in the Atlantic Alliance, rescued
Western civilization from the dangers of communism during
the Cold War. Under NATO's protection, both sides of the
Atlantic flourished together as never before.
In recent years, however, the concept of the "West" has been
challenged. Critics of our values question whether the West
as constituted is even worth defending. Others doubt
whether the democracies have anything to give the rest of
the world. After the Cold War ended, the doubters
increased. They argued that the Soviet Union having
expired, it might be time for NATO to be retired.
Then came September 11, 2001. After rallying together, we
and some of our European allies then fell into a quarrel
over how to deal with the dictator of Iraq. This very
public dispute aggravated earlier doubts. Soon the critics
of NATO, the only industry that never knows recession, were
in full cry. I can sum up their position this way. First,
NATO is no longer necessary, having fulfilled its great
mission of deterring the Soviet threat. Second, judging by
the split over Iraq, it does not work all that well anyway.
The critics have had their say. Now allow me mine. First,
NATO is more necessary than ever precisely because much of
its most important mission has not been achieved. Second,
the Atlantic Alliance is actually in better shape than most
people think, even on the issue of Iraq. Third, we can
adapt to the new challenges only if we understand the
reality of the military, intelligence, and political work
before us.
UNFINISHED BUSINESS
Let me begin with the unfinished business of the Atlantic
Alliance. Far too many on both sides of the Atlantic have
forgotten the main purpose of the partnership. It was not
only to deter the Soviet Union but also to facilitate the
reconciliation of the European nations whose quarrels twice
plunged the world into war. Today's European Union is the
monument to that reconciliation.
But while the pundits have been fixated on the sophistries
of the war over Iraq, we have failed to notice that the
European Union may be facing the greatest crisis in its
history. Most members are increasingly opposed to political
and economic arrangements that effectively give Paris and
Berlin license to protect their unsupportable welfare
states. Unbelievably, the European Commission is preparing
to sue France and Germany for violating the Stability Pact,
a key backstop for the unified Euro currency. While
analysts on both sides of the Atlantic pontificate about
common European Union foreign policies and common European
Union defense policies as a replacement for NATO, in Europe
today there is neither the money nor the political will to
do either.
We ought to face the truth. Our European allies, trying to
deepen and expand a contentious economic union, have not
reached a common identity. They will be hard pressed to
sort out new arrangements much more suited to an
international economy far more complex and global than ever
imagined by the founders.
Therefore, is this the time for the Atlantic Alliance to
dissolve, throwing huge additional doubts about the future
of the European experiment? A Europe "whole and free" has
been the bipartisan pledge of American presidents since the
end of the Cold War. It is the integration of transatlantic
security that remains the bedrock upon which the European
experiment must rely. This is not finished business, not by
a long shot.
Nor are we out of the woods on the relationship of the West
with Russia. Over the last decade, NATO has expanded further
east. Many former Warsaw Pact members have joined. Others
aspire to do so. This expansion should be put in a
geopolitical perspective. Many of those nations formerly
under Soviet domination have been anxious to join the
Alliance because, in their view, NATO is the only
organization that will protect them against a recurrence of
Moscow's ambitions. Others would argue that this is a
profoundly backward attitude. After all, the Soviet Union
is no more, its fire extinguished.
I would put it differently. The flames may be out but the
embers are still smoldering. Russia's direction remains
uncertain and current signs are not so promising. On his
recent visit to Moscow, Secretary of State Powell wrote in
Izvestiya of the new Russia: "Political power is not yet
fully tethered to law. . . . Key aspects of civil
society-free media and political party development, for
example"-have lost their post-collapse independence. Let me
put it in plain English: President Putin is an
authoritarian, not a democrat. He wants a strong state more
than he wants a free one.
The foreign policy picture also gives "pause," as General
Powell put it. Moscow's leaders still seem to regard the
near abroad as a kind of sphere of influence that Russia has
a right to dominate. How else can we explain the presence
of Russian troops in Georgia? Or the warning that new
members of NATO should not have Alliance forces based in
them?
No one can be sure how the often-agonizing evolution of
post-Soviet Russia will turn out. Meanwhile, for various
reasons, the United States will be reconfiguring its
military posture in Europe. In the process, we should not
allow, or give the appearance of allowing, Russia to dictate
what we do. We must assure new NATO members that they are
indeed fully part of the Alliance. We cannot afford two
NATO's, one an "old Europe," fully protected by the
Alliance, the other a "new Europe," which remains subjected
to a Russian sphere of influence.
In short, even as we focus on the wider challenge of
terrorism, we should not forget the older challenge of a
Europe whole and free. We are not there yet. Let the fire
department remain on standby alert. Only through the
stability guaranteed by the Atlantic Alliance can the
Europeans work out the terms of their union.
THE ALLIANCE IS BETTER THAN IT LOOKS
I turn now to my second point. The Alliance is working
better in the War on Terrorism than most people think, even
on the issue of Iraq. To understand this situation, and the
very public difficulties of the past year, we should keep in
mind a troubled history.
As some of you have come to expect, I'll be blunt. Both
U.S. and European policies designed to deal with
international terrorism have been a 30-year chronicle of
abject failure. As an American, I find little in this
record to boast about. In Lebanon and later Iran-Contra,
for example, the Reagan Administration failed in a way that
encouraged the terrorists. I resigned because of Lebanon
and what I believed to be excessive Saudi influence in our
capital. Subsequent American presidents did little better.
It took the invasion of Kuwait for us to get started on that
arch terrorist Saddam. Then having helped to draft a
restrictive charter for the "Gulf War," we failed to finish
the job. That made Saddam not just a survivor but a hero.
As for the Clinton Administration, just think of the list:
the first World Trade Center bombing, Khobar Towers, the
Cole, the two embassies, while al-Qaeda and its many
affiliates metastasized under our noses. We just didn't
face up to the task. Instead, we retreated into passive
half-measures that relied on the civil court system and an
occasional cruise missile attack to put off the day of
reckoning. That day arrived on September 11, 2001.
President Bush found himself face to face not only with the
disaster but was heir to thirty years of lost American
credibility. That left no alternative but to make war on
terrorists, including Saddam Hussein, the beneficiary of
earlier failures.
There is a bad and complicated history here; and we will
need the maximum effort to overcome it. Re-establishing
credibility is painful and often bloody. Yet, we are in
better shape than meets the eye. I'm not talking only about
intelligence sharing and police cooperation, both essential
parts of the war on terrorism. Consider the following
evidence. The U.S.-led war in Iraq has benefited directly
from French and German military help. If you watched
American and British planes flying in the skies over
southern France, if you saw the flow of coalition forces on
the roads leading south from Germany at the time of the Iraq
invasion, you would never have imagined that Paris and
Berlin opposed the war.
On the diplomatic side, the German Foreign Minister has
declared again and again that Germany is ready to play its
part in assuring the success of U.S. efforts in Iraq.
Germany and France have also cooperated in pushing the
Iranians toward cooperation on nuclear inspections. NATO
itself is in Afghanistan and may yet play a role in Iraq.
The point is that the political divisions over one element
in the war on terrorism did not translate into a disruption
of essential military cooperation.
We should therefore be careful not to exaggerate or
aggravate the breach. The Atlantic Allies failed the
diplomatic test on the first round but contained the damage.
In the final analysis, no one here or in Europe wished to
injure the fundamentals of NATO over the fate of Saddam.
SURMOUNTING THE CHALLENGE
Even though I am reassured that the Alliance still has a
pulse, that is not enough. We shall have to do better-much
better-in the future if we are to win this global struggle.
This brings me to my third and final point: How to overcome
the military, intelligence, and political challenges of the
war on terrorism.
It may surprise you that I think we face a severe military
challenge. After all, the initial U.S.-led coalition
campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq achieved rapid victory
with few casualties. Coordinated air, ground, and sea power
reached into the most remote battlefields, quickly
destroying enemy formations with skill and precision. Some
have taken these campaigns to mean a new type of warfare
that substitutes firepower for manpower, airpower for
infantry, and technology for physical presence on the
battlefield. And to a degree, it does.
But, is this still evolving style of warfare, very much the
child of necessity, as well as strategic design, to beomce
the model for NATO's future strategy, let alone our own
force structure? Is it ready to become the model for all of
NATO to emulate? The answers are not in yet. But here is
the challenge. Let's not fool ourselves. We should not
allow recent successes to blind us to the limits of
technology.
Our victory depended heavily on a highly skilled coalition
military force that included infantry and armor able to
improvise and modify plans in the midst of battle. No
technological innovations or machines can replace this age-
old human dimension of warfare. We will continue to need
"boots on the ground."
Most importantly, success in war means more than winning the
first encounters. We need coordination between the campaign
and the post-war plans if victory is to be secured. The
forces on hand must be up to that task. And so must their
civilian leaders.
I will turn now to a most sensitive issue, our intelligence.
The war against Saddam was justified by his defiance of U.N.
resolutions for over a decade. He nullified the cease-fire
that ended the 1991 war. This was a fundamental challenge
to international order and the U.N. itself, far more
fundamental than the size of his stockpile.
Even more significantly, as noted, it was a challenge to
America's already-squandered credibility. Washington had
organized the war to defeat him in Kuwait. Washington had
held the sanctions in play against increasing international
criticism. But Washington had failed to resolve the problem
of a terrorist with the intention and means to acquire
weapons of mass destruction, and to use them. And two
American presidents, President Bush and President Clinton,
had passed the problem along.
Our intelligence, and those of other states, all agreed that
Saddam had the intentions and would have the means to
accumulate a new arsenal of WMD once the sanctions were
lifted. And no one-no one-expected those sanctions to last
much longer. Indeed, they were already being violated
wholesale. Let us also not forget that the no-fly zones
protecting the Kurds and, less effectively, the Shiites from
Saddam's vengeance, were being contested almost daily by
Iraqi anti-aircraft fire. Those were our pilots, and
British pilots, they hoped to bring down.
Clearly, Saddam was an urgent crisis long overdue of
resolution. He had shown that you could pursue aggression
and terrorism, and, despite American and international
opposition, you could live to fight another day. Beyond any
doubt, the Bush Administration would have had to face this
crisis sooner or later. 9/11 made it sooner. Any war on
state-sponsored terrorism would have Saddam at the top of
the list.
So the intelligence was right on the big issues of intention
and preparation. The debate is whether we should have known
the real state of the stockpiles. A fallible intelligence
service is not necessarily inept. But when I read that the
CIA is still critically short of operatives on the ground,
it reminds me of 1979 when I barely survived an
assassination attempt in Belgium. The then-Director of the
CIA told me it was the work of Belgian nihilists.
Apparently, they were so nihilistic, no one had ever heard
of them. Nor could they be found. So, I asked the West
Germans what they knew. Within three months, they said it
was the Baader-Meinhof gang hired by the KGB. Later, when
the wall fell and the East German part of the gang was
rounded up, its leader confessed to the accuracy of the
charge.
It's not only a matter of money or recruiting. If we're
ever going to get this straight, the Congress of the United
States will also have to look at itself instead of
proliferating commissions. The CIA was seduced by
technology because the Executive Branch drove it that way
and because Congress put it out of the covert business. Our
Presidents, Senators and Representatives did not like the
sort of people employed by the CIA to gather information on
the ground. They weren't the kind that you would want your
mother to meet. They could nenver join Philadelphia's Union
League. Worst of all, they won't look good testifying to
Congress. The CIA's troubles in this respect are all
homemade. We'll have to risk some dirt if we're going to be
serious about the intelligence business.
Finally, one more challenge must be surmounted.
To fight the war on terrorism, we need a transatlantic forum
or institution able to concert the diplomacy, unify the
strategy, facilitate intelligence exchange and military
reform. In short, we need NATO. Or to be more precise, we
need to re-energize NATO.
NATO can be the forum to reconcile differences and take
joint action. It can be the inculcation of new military
forces and doctrine. And the alliance enjoys a unique
public legitimacy on both sides of the Atlantic.
I think we are moving in that direction. It will be easier
to do so, however, once we engage in a little intellectual
hygiene. A few bad ideas need to be washed away. For
example, the notion that the United States can remake the
world in its own image, on its own, as a reaction to
violence from abroad dates from Woodrow Wilson's time. It's
an old populist con detached from reality; calling it a
neocon doesn't make it any better. Does anyone believe that
the United States can turn Afghanistan and Iraq into
thriving democracies; reconcile India and Pakistan;
transform the Middle East and do it all with a 10-division
army and a $500 billion deficit? Frankly, we're lousy
imperialists. We have neither the civil service nor the
patience. Further we lack the ambition. As Secretary of
State Powell told the Archbishop of Canterbury, the only
territory we've ever asked for is enough ground to bury our
dead.
There is another bad idea that needs to be washed away.
Some of our European critics hide a visceral anti-
Americanism under the banner of multilateralism. They play
upon people's resentment of an America that does not always
speak softly or tactfully. But when you peel back the
veneer, you find something we have seen before. These
critics are the lineal descendants of those who opposed
American leadership in the Cold War. Then, they argued that
NATO's effort to sustain a credible deterrence was the real
threat to peace, not Soviet military power. Now they argue
that America, not the terrorists, threatens the peace. They
were wrong then. They are wrong now.
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said that the opponents of
American action must offer an alternative that actually
deals with the problem. He's right. President Bush warned
that if multilateralism becomes a slogan for inaction, it
will simply turn the UN into a League of Nations. I agree.
But the proven basis for a working multilateralism is the
Atlantic Alliance. If we cannot put together a coalition of
the West before we go to the UN, then forget about doing it
once we get there.
I recognize that there are risks, big risks in this
approach. NATO has a lot of unfinished business in Europe.
We may overload it by adding to its burdens the coordinated
campaign of the war against terrorism. The allies may not
agree. Things can get worse. They usually do before they
get better.
Yet, there is little choice but to take the risks. When all
is said and done, terrorists threaten the international
order every bit as much as the dictators of old. Everything
we have built up, the entire web of international
relationships, our great cities, our global communications
will be lost if terrorism becomes the way to succeed in
achieving political objectives.
Some have called this a war of civilizations. I disagree.
It is more accurately a war for civilization. Not theirs,
for the terrorists have none, but ours. The war against
terror is thus a war for the West and all those who share,
or wish to share, our values.
In this grouping of the West, I also include many Muslim
peoples. The Turks, good members of NATO, are evolving a
synthesis that combines a Muslim faith, a democratic
government, and a modern economy they hope will become part
of the European Union. President Bush has noted that more
than half the world's Muslims already live under
democratically instituted governments. In Indonesia,
Pakistan, and even Saudi Arabia, a violent struggle has
commenced between those anxious to join modern civilization
and those who hope to destroy it. This, too, is a war for
the West.
It is a war we must win.
Churchill once said that when nations have had the power
they have not always done right, and when they wished to do
right they no longer had the power. The Atlantic Alliance,
working with other nations, including a growing China,
certainly has the power. There is a West. And by putting
NATO to work for it, we can assure not only the peace of the
21st Century but also the future of our civilization.
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