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الاثنين 21/05/2007 |
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الاثنين 21/05/2007 |
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حرب
واحدة وغايات مختلفة بقلم:
رونالد براونشتاين لوس
أنجلوس تايمز - 16/5/2007 إن رؤية بلير لمجتمع دولي أقوى
دفعته إلى دعم بوش في العراق Ronald Brownstein Same
war, different goals Blair's
vision of a stronger international community pushed him
to support President Bush on Iraq. May
16, 2007 HISTORY
WILL forever link Tony Blair, the outgoing British prime
minister, with George W. Bush against a backdrop of
carnage in Iraq. That is, in one sense, as it should be.
For all of Blair's brilliant success in reshaping and
reviving the Labor Party, the failure in Iraq looms as
his most consequential decision. Yet, as Blair arrives
in Washington today for a valedictory sit-down with
Bush, the simple conflation of the prime minister and
the president obscures the contradictions of their
partnership. Though
Blair and Bush marched into war together, they did so in
the service of distinct and even opposing visions. Long
before 9/11, Blair argued that no single nation could
solve the 21st century's toughest problems. Only through
international cooperation could the world confront
challenges from global warming to global terror.
"We
are all internationalists now, whether we like it or
not," Blair insisted in a landmark 1999 speech to
the Chicago Economic Club. The best hope for stability
and progress, he declared, was for the world to unite
behind "a new doctrine of international community." For
Blair, international action against Saddam Hussein was
meant to embody that collaboration. In the weeks before
war in 2003, Blair portrayed the invasion as an
opportunity for the world community to prove it could
come together to enforce global rules. Bush
welcomed Blair's support. But in Iraq, the president had
something very different in mind. Whatever its other
motivations, the invasion was intended to demonstrate
the consequences of threatening U.S. interests after
9/11. For Bush, Iraq was a rock through the window of
the world's outlaw regimes. And in that mission, trying
to encourage "international community" by
accepting constraints on American action was not only
unnecessary but counterproductive. Even
after the war, Blair never stopped preaching the virtues
of an "international community that … acts in
pursuit of global values." But he undercut his
ability to promote such a community by locking arms with
Bush on an Iraq strategy that alienated much of the
world, during the invasion and in its aftermath. At
crucial moments, Blair sublimated his inclusive
internationalism to Bush's brusque unilateralism. As
Blair steps aside, it's reasonable to ask whether his
fellow center-left political leaders around the world,
including U.S. Democrats, can excavate from the wreckage
in Iraq anything valuable in his original conception of
"international community." The answer should
be yes, but only after carefully picking through the
rubble. In retrospect, Blair's Chicago speech contained
a debilitating flaw that helps explain his failure to
anticipate the risks in Iraq.
Blair's
speech was shaped by the American-led interventions in
Bosnia and Kosovo, and it overflows with baby boomer
confidence about the capacity of good intentions to set
the world right. His vision was missing the astringent
understanding of the fallibility of both men and nations
that anchored the foreign policy thinking of Cold
War-era realists like Reinhold Niebuhr, the brilliant
American theologian. Iraq exposed that blind spot in
Blair. The war has demonstrated again, in ways Niebuhr
might have anticipated, that there are limits to our
ability to shape other societies or even to fully
anticipate the consequences of our actions.
Blair
compounded his initial error as the war with Iraq
arrived. He faced the intellectual challenge of squaring
his vision of a collaborative international community
with his decision to join the U.S. in an invasion
launched without explicit United Nations authorization
or broad global acceptance. Blair's response was to
channel the logic of the American military officer in
Vietnam who declared it necessary to destroy a village
in order to save it. If the American-led coalition
refused to act against Iraq because it could not obtain
U.N. approval, Blair argued, the international community
would be revealed as impotent and irrelevant.
That
paralysis, he insisted in his final prewar speech to
Parliament, "would do the most damage to the U.N.'s
future strength." Only by flouting the U.N., in
other words, could Bush and Blair safeguard the future
of collective international action. That
argument turned out to be spectacularly wrong. The lack
of international support and legitimacy for the war
enormously complicated the task of rebuilding Iraq. And
the breach that the war widened between the United
States and the world swallowed Blair's cause of an
engaged global community mobilizing against other
transnational threats. Ignoring international opinion,
unsurprisingly, proved no way to revitalize
international cooperation. The
tragedy of Blair's partnership with Bush on Iraq is that
the prime minister knew better. The irony of their
partnership is that each has virtually guaranteed that
his successor will pursue a more consensual and
pragmatic foreign policy — not by providing a model to
emulate but by demonstrating so painfully the price of
the alternative. ----------------- نشرنا
لهذه المقالات لا يعني أنها
تعبر عن وجهة نظر المركز كلياً
أو جزئياً
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من حق الزائر الكريم أن ينقل وأن ينشر كل ما يعجبه من موقعنا . معزواً إلينا ، أو غير معزو .ـ |
