Briefly on this matter of Dean and ‘unilateral’ action in Bosnia. I’m running late on a few deadlines at the moment. So I don’t have time to go into this at length. But I don’t think this is much of a contradiction, except possibly on the most superficial level.
The tenor of the whole Iraq debate has tended to make a fetish out of the narrow meaning of unilateral and multilateral. Both have their place. And I don’t think it’s a contradiction on Dean’s part at all to say we should not have waited for NATO to conduct air operations in Bosnia and yet also mount a critique of the president’s approach on Iraq.
Remember that in Kosovo, we knew the Russians would veto our plan. So we didn’t go to the UN, but went with NATO instead. As Fareed Zakaria aptly noted almost a year ago, the US never got UN approval for any of its three major military engagements in the 1990s. And few significant players suggested that it was necessary for us to do so.
So why all the hollering now over Iraq? Some on the right suggest that this is because of animosity toward president Bush or a rise in ‘anti-Americanism.’ But it’s not. It’s because the US has begun playing by very different rules in the last three years. It has moved from being a dominant power which most often works through a sort of informal consensus to one that increasingly seeks to act through dictation. We’ve become impatient with the minimal restraints on our power created by our participation in various international institutions and agreements — ones which actually serve to magnify our power. And nations around the world — not to mention publics — have increasingly looked to the UN as a brake on US power.
In short, the issue is not so much whether you get sign off from the UN or NATO on every particular thing you do. It’s a question of the totality of one’s approach to allies and the rest of the nation’s of the world. By that measure, the whole situation in the Balkans and the current one in Iraq could scarcely be more different.
This is a big issue and one that deserves more discussion. It’s also worth noting that getting our key European allies on board in the Balkans did play a big role in the long-term success of those operations — and the diplomatic isolation which eventually played a key role in Milosevic’s fall. And perhaps Dean has himself made too much of a fetish out of the word ‘unilateralism’ without fleshing out the critique more fully. But basically this issue with Dean and ‘unilateral’ action in Bosnia just strikes me as more silly word-game gotcha. Nothing more than that.
