Members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization have, says its secretary-general, a “moral duty” to support the United States in its diplomatic and, if needs be, military offensive against Iraq. This odd pronouncement will not have gone down well with many NATO states.
Though the NATO secretary-generalship is nominally independent, Lord Robertson , a stalwart British Labor Party loyalist, can be expected to be obeying his old master’s voice. He is also no doubt seeking to conform to the dictates of Washington, which, in both coin and effort, remains the master power in NATO. Robertson’s invocation of morality clearly stems from the US-led campaign against global terrorism. Iraq has been branded a terrorist state and therefore its regime, and along the way, its long-suffering people, must pay the price of US-led vengeance. Yet, Robertson would seem to be avoiding another, no less important, moral issue, which is that George W. Bush is preparing to strike at Baghdad without providing a single piece of evidence that Saddam’s Iraq was in any way connected with the Sept. 11 attack.
The fact that Saddam had chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs has long been established. He gassed some of his own people and almost certainly used chemical and maybe biological weapons against the Iranians. Nevertheless, he appears not to have deployed these against the allied forces that liberated Kuwait. His drive for nuclear weaponry was a long way short of completion. The original UN inspections destroyed much of the infrastructure for all these programs and so far, it seems the new UN inspections have failed to turn up any evidence at all of a renewed effort to make this weaponry.
Yet, NATO’s Robertson sees it as the moral duty of NATO members to support the US, which he says, rather strangely, has been sticking by the book to UN procedures. Clearly, Robertson was on holiday when President Bush threatened that if the UN did not back his aggression toward Iraq, he was going to go ahead anyway. The French have stated unequivocally that they would only contribute toward an anti-Saddam alliance if the UN produced a second resolution, specifically authorizing the use of force. The Germans meanwhile, voted back their chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, partly because he made it pretty clear that regardless of what any UN resolution said, he was not going to commit the German military to a US-led Iraq campaign. Indeed, it seems that with the exception of the British, all the European members of NATO are concerned at what involvement in the Iraq campaign could cost.
Robertson’s comments serve to pinpoint the weaknesses and stresses within NATO. The British still fancy themselves as global policemen and Tony Blair clearly enjoys playing deputy to George Bush’s marshal. But only the Americans are prepared to spend on the men and the technology and the logistics to make NATO a workable alliance.
Morality doesn’t come into it. Most NATO members would rather spend their money on themselves rather than weaponry. If the US can afford the opposite view, then NATO’s plays are its for the calling. But by the looks of it, Bush need not expect too many deputies in his posse to get Saddam.
