E-mail this article Print this article Search web archive Related stories Daniel Chirot Donald Hellmann Resat Kasaba Retired Navy Capt. Pete Soverel

With the demonstrations on both sides of the war, an endless stream of retired generals providing live TV commentary, and continuing international debate, it can be hard to find any common ground about the U.S. and British attack on Iraq.

But in a conversation with Times chief political reporter David Postman, University of Washington academics who study the region, warfare and international relations agreed on one thing: that the war is a radical departure for American foreign policy. A Turkish-born sociologist, a retired Navy captain and military strategist, a French-born political scientist and an expert on Asia differ on whether that radical change is a good or bad thing. But in this edited transcript of the conversation, they explain what the new Bush doctrine likely means for the future of U.S. foreign policy — and how it's playing out so far in the war.

Seattle Times: Has anything happened that either surprised you or has changed your thinking about this war or this policy in any way?

Understanding the Iraqi conflict This interview with scholars is the result of a partnership of The Seattle Times, the University of Washington Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, Northwest Cable News and KING 5 News. Focused on giving the community greater context for understanding the war in Iraq, the effort will include an upcoming conversation with experts to be televised on Northwest Cable News. If you have questions about the war, e-mail iraqquestions@ seattletimes.com. We'll share some of those questions — and answers from experts.

Kasaba: I was really surprised how they handled the Turkish politics and the possible Turkish participation of this campaign. To think that there was an assumption that $6 billion or $10 billion or some loan guarantees could be used as a bribe to get Turkey joined in the campaign. They were quite confident about this it seems. And more seriously all this was done in public. It almost became an issue of prestige that it would be obvious that if it said yes at that point it would be because of the money that they had got.

But I think that really obviously hampered some of the initial efforts of the war plans and the coalition. And it delayed some of their actions.

Daniel Chirot: What I'm surprised about is how clumsy our diplomacy has been. And, I read some of the European press; I particularly read the French press. I'm buying French newspapers, and I'm buying American newspapers and many others. And I also know many people in France or whom I correspond with by mail regularly, even some relatives. And the people I know, and the newspapers I read are not all by any means automatically anti-American. But they have become so. And the astonishing thing is how far across the political spectrum that runs in all of Europe, and all of Western Europe. Certainly not Eastern Europe. Because in Eastern Europe it's true that many people are so grateful to us for helping them end communism.

It's one thing to not bother to bring your natural enemies over to your side. But to alienate your friends and to alienate people who would normally be sympathetic, that's serious. I think it's been somewhat, I'm afraid, deliberate, on the part of some people in the administration.

Times: To what end?

Chirot: I think that they believe that it's possible for the United States to do everything alone. Now I'm not a confidant of Donald Rumsfeld or of the Vice President or of Paul Wolfowitz. I know something about him. He's a very sophisticated, knowledgeable man. Today in the Wall Street Journal there was an article about how the statements he made to NATO right before we went into Afghanistan needlessly alienated NATO members. They, NATO members in Europe, were eager to help the United States. Arguably their armed forces aren't very strong. They can't do very much but it was symbolic and they were eager to help. He went to Europe and he said, "We don't need you. Forget it. You're irrelevant." And at the time it seemed like only a minor matter but it actually was one of a whole series of steps that had been taken, that seemed to make it clear to the Europeans that we have contempt for them. And no one, neither a people nor government like to be treated with contempt.

It is a deliberate attempt on the part of some of our strategists who really would like to see the institutions set up around the world — United Nations, NATO and a whole lot of other arrangements — completely revamped.

Donald Hellmann: I think George Bush and his advisers are not conservatives. They are the most radical group of people we have had running our government, perhaps, since WWII. I don't say that invidiously. I just think, you know that sometimes a sharp break is important. But they are radicals. They are radicals in the sense that they are not building institutions. Unilateralism is a decision to make the decisions for yourself. I wish that they would seriously consider what alternative there is to the U.N. But I don't see that.

And that not only is going to alienate opinion, that's going to provoke others to create arrangements ultimately with institutions that cut us out. And therefore the United States by adopting unilateralism is basically forfeiting a huge component of their capacity to be a world leader.

Times: When you all talk about this it seems the debate is more about unilateralism, the U.N., NATO, our allies, as opposed to the right or wrong of going into Iraq for a regime change there.

Kasaba: I think they are related, because I think the way in which they went to war suggests to people in other parts of the world that this is the first step, actually, of the broader process, broader policy. In fact, this is not an aberration but really the first step in the new sort of unilateralist vision that the U.S. government is going to pursue. There is really no serious attempt to build these alliances, to repair these institutions, and if anything people hear statements, "Well, maybe North Korea is next maybe. Iran is next, maybe Syria is next." And that of course, this scares a lot of people.

Pete Soverel: I put a different spin on it. I get nervous with the term unilateralism. I'd rather approach it more from the direction that Don has talked about. Which is, this is definitely a radical administration. They intend to remake the world. And there are regimes out there that are nervous about that.

There is no question that the Pentagon and everybody back there understands that it's not possible to act unilaterally. You have bombers flying from Missouri to Iraq, they have to be tanked. So Spain, Portugal, United Kingdom, maybe Turkey, these countries have to give basing rights for your tankers otherwise your bomber can't get there. So there's no question that you have to build a coalition. Seems to me what the administration is doing is that it has concluded, especially with regards to the United Nations, that this institution is not capable of resolving these intractable and dangerous problems.

All you have to do is go read their national-security strategy. It says right out front what they want to do: Rogue states are going to go away. You're going to defend the United States from terrorism and you are going to promote a democracy. So if you're not a democracy, you're in the cross hairs.

The Times: But does that make them radical?

Soverel: I think that completely radicalizes them. Because the whole notion after WWII in the United Nations was the notion of the indivisibility of sovereignty. While you did it inside your borders, it was OK. Well, this administration is saying that it's not OK what you do inside your borders. If you're killing people inside your borders, we're going to use power and we're going to take you apart. We view that kind of behavior as threatening to the United States. We are going to remake the world.

Now I definitely agree with Dan that the diplomacy leading up to this was extraordinarily clumsy. I served for three years at NATO as a director of defense operations there. One of the things that works in NATO is consensus. There's tremendous pressure on states to come to a mutually agreeable decision. Now I don't know what went first here, whether the French dug in their heels and made it a problem first or whether the U.S. acted without consulting with the French.

We need to make sure that NATO is on our side. And that is the real threat for the future as I see it — the U.S. didn't do that. But maybe even more alarming was that the French went outside of NATO and tried to put together an anti-U.S. coalition. And nobody in this administration is going to forget that. This has compromised in some pretty fundamental ways the ability of the United States and France to work together.

Times: Is there a redefining of sovereignty? It seems that the Bush administration's rationalization for this was not what's happening within the borders but what's happening across the borders — the exporting of terrorism.

Chirot: Saddam Hussein left alone is clearly a threat, first of all in his region. His ambition has always been clear: to create an Arab superpower that would then redeem the historical position of Arabs in the world.

Ultimately, in the long run it would have been a major threat. I think it should have been possible to convince our allies that this is really what was at stake. By saying that this was an immediate threat and that there was a direct link to terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center, that was a patent lie.

So by giving reasons that are not the real reasons for why we're doing this, we are giving the impression that regime change is really the only thing we are interested in. You can make a case for that for Iraq. But then you have to make the case. And you absolutely have to separate that from the rest of the world. We do have strategists, people in various think tanks and so on who have publicly said, and who are being listened to by the president and this administration: "After this, North Korea." No wonder everyone is scared.

Hellmann: It's not simply the fault of the Bush administration that we are where we are. A radical reordering of institutions' vision of the world was absolutely essential at the end of the Cold War. I mean the world had ultimately changed in fundamental ways. The first President Bush refused to do that, saying he had trouble with the vision thing. Clinton was interested in other things, he just ran around, you know. He didn't focus. He was very weak and bears a huge responsibility. This president came in and as an even more minimal activist.

We managed to become this enormous power without any clear rationalization, other than our own values — I mean, basically, democracy and American capitalism. What was different about this is this was put out as a doctrine and it's a principle. And everyone went, "My goodness it's pre-emptive." And if you go back to the Washington think tanks, they are publishing books to justify empire — moving on to conquering other countries in the Middle East. This is unheard of.

The Times: Looking at what the president has said really since Sept. 11, don't you think he is trying to show Sept. 11 as a historic moment on par with a world war that forces America to change the way it thinks about itself and about the world? Is that not then maybe a good argument for a sort of radical change?

Soverel: Well, first of all, there's no question this has electrified the president. You know it has completely transformed his presidency in the way he has approached international affairs.

I'd like to go back just a little bit in time. In the Cold War we tended to use military forces to deny an advantage to an adversary or to communicate our determination to deny their success: Korea, Vietnam and so forth. The transformation of the military capability in the 1980s transformed the opportunities available to the United States so that in the 1990s you have at your disposal a military capacity to defeat an adversary. Not communicate with them, not to display that you're determined not to let certain things happen, but to actually defeat them. So you defeated the Iraqis in Kuwait, you overthrow the regime in Grenada. And these are total wars; you're aiming in an unlimited objective. You overthrow your adversary in Panama. You overthrow your adversary in Serbia. You overthrow your adversary in Kosovo, and in Afghanistan.

So, 'Don't call us up, don't tell us you want to negotiate. You're either going to hand over Osama Bin Laden or we're going to defeat you.' And you're looking at the same situation now. This is a component now of the political and military events that have transformed the international community.

The Times: Does 9/11 or that continuing threat justify that change?

Chirot: Well, the straight answer is yes. Looking back a little bit we can see the terrible mistakes we've made earlier. And here I agree with Don completely. The first big mistake was to stop the war against Iraq in 1991. Not only was it a mistake to let Saddam Hussein go but then we perpetuated the mistake, and this is part of our problem right now in Iraq, by double-crossing the Shiites, and Kurds. There are some estimates that there were 50 thousand killed; some are more than that. We just let it happen and we had fighter planes overhead watching their helicopters come and slaughter people and their ground troops come and slaughter people and this was 12 years ago and people don't forget.

Yes, what has been happening for over a decade does require a rethinking of a defense doctrine and it does require active intervention in a number of places. I have no disagreement with that at all. I also have no disagreement with the skepticism that the United States has with the United Nations. The United Nations has been ineffective as a peacekeeper everywhere. The only places where it is an affective peace keeper is where both sides agree that they need some symbolic number of soldiers essentially with out weapons in between them.

We may ultimately have a lot of people grateful to us if we really do overthrow Saddam Hussein. I think the Shiite population will be grateful to us. Whether they want us to run their lives is another matter. But some people there will continue to be mad at us. There will be incidents, there will be people killed, Americans killed, there will be aid workers killed, fights between the various groups there. Can we handle it? Well, it's not very promising.

It's a right decision to say we have to intervene more actively to prevent catastrophes like Sept. 11. But we all agree that we're not doing that the right way because we're not enlisting the support that we could get from a lot of other people and a lot of other countries who agree.

Look, the French can be pretty arrogant and are angry because English is the international language. But they're not idiots. They really do know that France is not ever going to run the world. That Napoleon isn't coming back. They would like to cooperate, and the same goes with the rest of Europe. Now, I wish that the French had taken the attitude that Tony Blair has taken, which is that it's easier to influence the United States by remaining an ally.

Kasaba: The link to Sept. 11 has never been established very clearly, so that is why the whole issue of rethinking sovereignty is important. To a lot of people, this looks like an old-fashioned kind of power grab in a way. And I think it is not very convincing when it is linked to the grandiose visions of democracy and rebuilding the region.

Hellmann: ...9/11...was an epiphany, for the president, on a personal level. We went from being humbled to being proactive. My point was earlier that 9/11 set us off on a bunch of ad-hoc indiscriminate actions. Basically, crisis driven. Driven as much by twists and turns of events over which we had no control. Leadership involves legitimacy as well as power. And we seem to have the single dimensional concept, which is power. I mean, this is Alice in Wonderland stuff. You can't talk about building a new world order where people are adapting in ad-hoc fashion because the threat of not agreeing with the United States would carry punishment which is much greater.

We're coming over, frankly, as imperialists because of all of this. And that's scary. Because if America stands for anything, it's the one truly successful international and free country in the world. And I won't get specific, but there are members of the administration that have kind of winked, and said, "Yeah, it is a little bit like the Roman Empire." That is totally antithetical to our cultural, political tradition and values. And I think that has shocked a lot of people. Not only here, but abroad. And I think that is so interesting and that's why it's ambivalence because we stand for ideals and now we're just marching into the sunset.

Seattle Times: Do you see that as empire building?

Soverel: No, it's not that. When you go for a regime change, you need to be thinking like Germany in WWII or Japan. I mean, when you use force to take down a regime, unless it's some rinky dinky regime like the Taliban, these guys aren't pop-up targets, they are not going to walk out in the desert and get blown away, they are going to fight in Baghdad. And so the only way to get rid of the regime is to go into Baghdad. Either go in there with infantry — bad idea because you concede your advantage — or you go in there with fire and you kill civilians. That's the tension.

I think you're going to have a hard time crushing the Republican Guard and replacing Saddam without pretty significant civilian casualties. And America is a principled country. You know we've been here for a couple of hours now, we can't have a discussion about foreign policy where we don't talk about values and about right and wrong and moral imperatives.

The Times: Do you think there is still time for good to come of this situation, for either Iraq or the Middle East?

Kasaba: I think so. There is still room but I think there has to be the right signs in terms of involving not only other governments and peoples in the Middle East but a broader coalition of countries from Europe and of other parts of the world.

Chirot: At this point, we're in it and we have to keep on going. If the United States were for some reason to stop and leave, that would be utterly catastrophic now. No one would ever trust us again. And we would leave a terrible mess, and many more people would be massacred in Iraq.

I'm quite sure, to answer your question, that when you overthrow the regime there are a substantial number of people in Iraq who will view us as liberators. But in order to have more of the world and in particular the Middle East view it that way, we have to immediately, directly and very forcefully make an Israeli-Palestinian peace that is equitable for the Palestinians as well as for the Israelis. And there we do have the power to do that, we can force both of those groups to make the necessary concessions.

Hellmann: Holding out hope, as some elements in the administration are, that Iraq would somehow become democratic and that this will, in a positive way, impact the rest of the Middle East — I hope it happens. But to seriously believe that it's going to happen, my own opinion is that it's not right or wrong, it's preposterous.

Soverel: A journey of a thousand miles starts with one step, and I think if we looked at, say, Central and South America, and you compare 1945 to 2003, over a 50-, 60-year period of time, there has been very dramatic progress in that direction. So I'm not prepared to accept that you can't envision a future in the Middle East where that's possible.

Hellmann: The notion of it happening is a long shot and I just hope we don't raise false hopes.

Kasaba: Some of the closest allies of the United States, like Saudi Arabia, or like Egypt, they don't really like this idea of democracy.

Chirot: But I don't know if we would either. Most Middle Eastern specialists say that if there were free elections in Saudi Arabia, there would probably be a fundamentalist Muslim regime.