LONDON, 17 October 2003 — Is our aim to prevent war or to pre-empt apparent threats? There is an important difference; not just in the semantics. In Bush-speak pre-emption may mean taking military action in order to avoid some presumed catastrophe looming over the political horizon. Preventing war means taking some bold, resolute action, short of war, to try and remove the probable cause of belligerency.
Actually the US can and does do both, despite the presumption by critics that it is obsessed with the second to the exclusion of the first. In Liberia, where it has just withdrawn its forces, the US, by putting some ships with Marines off shore and a mere 200 peacekeepers on the ground, shored up the morale — and expertise — of a West African peace keeping force that so far has done a remarkable job in quieting the country and forestalling a likely new round of internecine strife.
The US, it may be forgotten, did the same thing in Macedonia in ex-Yugoslavia in 1992. Whilst war was boiling in Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia the US sent troops into still peaceful Macedonia and, working under the UN flag, reminded the local antagonists that they were being watched and at the same time bolstered those politicians inclined to compromise with the knowledge that the world was on their side.
The problems we now face are legion. Few pretend that rooting out Al-Qaeda, putting Iraq on its feet or defanging Iran and North Korea are easy tasks. On the other hand if we cast our eye back to the way the world has changed since 1945 — decolonization, the emergence of new regional powers, the rapid spread of highly sophisticated military technology and the collapse of the Soviet empire — it is striking how many of these developments, all of which could have triggered major wars, progressed to a peaceful conclusion. A great amount of radical change has been negotiated and parlayed into a peaceful transition — and a good part of that through the UN and other international institutions.
One good example is when the Baltic states finally broke away from the Soviet Union. Unsurprisingly they tried to refuse citizenship to the large numbers of native Russians that over the years had settled there. Moscow was highly angered and threatened to stop the withdrawals of Russian forces. Many on both sides talked of war.
The multilateral East-West body, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, led by Sweden, sent in high powered teams of negotiators and although the questions of troop withdrawals and citizenship for Russians living in the Baltic states were never formally linked a deal was arranged, not least because the Western allies, infused with their own principles on the rights of minorities, could see the point of the Russian argument.
Good leadership can anticipate crises building up a military head of steam not only by the deft use of peacekeepers or international mediation but by taking a dispute to the World Court. Nigeria and Cameroon recently did this, avoiding a border dispute that risked seriously destabilizing the oil rich region of the Gulf of Guinea which provides a sizable 15 percent of US crude oil imports. There had been military skirmishes between the two neighbors and, as Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo told me in a recent interview, he faced strong pressure from his minister of defense to go to war. Obasanjo overruled the military and insisted that the dispute be taken to the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
Last October the court upheld the Cameroonian claim. There was much champing at the bit in Nigeria, but Obasanjo faced his critics down and a year later the issue is mute.
What has now become undeniably clear in retrospect — although many informed and sober people have been making the point for years — is that the preventive work the UN arms inspectors did after the 1991 Gulf War was so successful it should have avoided, in a normal, more self-disciplined, political atmosphere, the need for this year’s war. If it hadn’t been for Sept. 11 it is highly doubtful that the US and British governments would have ever convinced themselves (for sure, their intelligence services would not have bent so much with the political wind) that war was necessary.
Prevention has a lot more going for it than pre-emption. We don’t have to choose between intervention and inaction. Why should we be forced to choose between two types of failure when there is a good alternative? “The problem” as Pierre Sane, a former secretary-general of Amnesty International once said, “is not lack of early warning, but lack of early action”.
Many diplomats, aid workers and human rights activists with an ear to the ground know where the problems are building up to seismic proportions. Since 1945 the world has developed many tools for dealing with them.
Contrary to the defeatist spirit of our current malaise there have been plenty of successes which should inspire us to face down the clarion calls for pre-emptive war and instead encourage us to step up the pace of preventive action.
