Opinion: I was heartened to hear, if only according to the London Times, that George W. Bush is planning on overthrowing the Iranian mullahs as soon as November's election is out of the way. Over on this side of the Atlantic, the assumption is that regime toppling's been moved to the back burner, writes Mark Steyn
According to the conventional wisdom, Bush has embraced conventional wisdom. Sadder but wiser after the vicissitudes of his unilateral pre-emptive neocon adventuring, the chastened warmonger has come home to multilateralism. The other week, he had the G8, US-EU summit and NATO back to back and, bounced from Sea Island to Shannon to Istanbul for the privilege of shaking hands with the same gaggle of duplicitous Europeans in three different time zones, the President did a passable impression of someone who was pleased to be there.
In fact, most of Bush's present difficulties come not from swaggering cowboy unilateralism but because of excessive deference to multilateralism in the run-up to the Iraq war. Instead of deposing Saddam before the first anniversary of 9/11 (as yours truly urged), Bush was prevailed upon to "go the UN route", mainly to provide his most important ally, Tony Blair, with some multilateral cover.
As I wrote in March 2003, "The end result is that we'll be going to war with exactly the same participants as we would have done last August, and the one person weakened by going the UN route is the very one it was designed to protect: Mr Blair. The best way to help Blair would have been to get the war over six months ago." That would also have been best for Bush. As Michael Ledeen, National Review's great expert on which countries to invade next, always advises, "Faster, please."
Had Iraq followed hard on Afghanistan, it would have been trickier for the Dems to present it as a separate adventure disconnected from the war on terror. In the 17-month hiatus between the falls of Kabul and Baghdad, the anti-war movement ballooned, and the "what war?" movement - those devoted followers of Michael Moore who believe the whole thing's just some scam got up by Bush's Halliburton puppeteers - ballooned even more. Or, to put it another way, in adopting Blair's priorities, the President wound up with Blair's problems. Once Bush decided to "go the UN route", he was playing not to his ally's strengths but to his ally's weaknesses, and those weaknesses became his, too.
That's a cautionary tale for those who insist America falls in line with modern multilateral pieties. "I don't know when in the history of the alliance we've seen so many successes!" gushed the neo-multilateralist Rumsfeld at the NATO summit in Turkey. The Defence Secretary was using "success" in the multilateral- speak meaning of the word, which roughly translates into English as "failure".
The greatest of these many successes was the decision by the Alliance to expand its role in Afghanistan beyond Kabul to the country's somewhat alarmingly autonomous regions. So the enlarged NATO mission ought to be great news, right?
Er, up to a point. After the Secretary- General, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, put the squeeze on NATO's 26 members, they reluctantly ponied up an extra 600 troops and three helicopters for Afghanistan. That averages out at 23.08 troops per country plus almost a ninth of a helicopter apiece. Credit where it's due, the three Black Hawks all come from one country - Turkey. But it wants them back in six months' time.
Now I very much like Jaap de Hoop Scheffer. I've met him a couple of times before his present eminence, and he's one of the most thoughtful of European politicians - well- disposed toward America, not into stringing along with Chirac and the other Europoseurs for the sake of it. But he finds himself presiding over a sham alliance. Theoretically, it has millions of conscript troops at its disposal. But it has no ability to project more than a few thousand out of area - i.e., to any of the places anyone's likely to need them in the years ahead.
In other words, if a military alliance means a press release and a black-tie banquet for Bush, Chirac, Schröder and Co. once a year, NATO works fine. If a military alliance means functioning armed forces capable of fighting side by side and killing the enemy, NATO is a postmodern joke. The big burly Fijians who've done such a splendid job guarding currency convoys in Iraq have made a greater contribution than many of America's supposedly "major" allies. And, from a cost-benefit analysis, they didn't require months of endless diplomatic schmoozing by Bush, Powell, Rice and Rumsfeld, all consuming valuable time and money which, when you add it all up, makes it cheaper to add another 600 men to the New Hampshire National Guard rather than chase round a dozen European capitals trying to crowbar them out of NATO barracks.
If America fights the war on terror this way, she'll lose. Nonetheless, that's what John Kerry has just proposed in his exciting 10-point plan for Iraq:
1) Give France and Germany "fair access to the multibillion-dollar reconstruction contracts".
2) "Give them a leadership role in pursuing our wider strategic goals in the region."
3) "Realistically call on NATO to step up to its responsibilities."
4) Er, well, if we come up with a fourth point, we'll get back to you.
That's it? Bribe Chirac and Schröder with taxpayer dollars and a couple more summits to swank around at in the hope of getting them to promise military contributions they don't have? Even by Kerry's standards, this is lazy. If Bush survives the Blairisation of his war presidency and wins in November, he needs to embark on a campaign of gently putting to sleep America's pantomime alliances.
The US requires real allies with real assets: meaningful multilateralism.