CIAO DATE: 09/04

Survival

 

 

Summer 2004 (Vol. 46 No. 2)

Articles

• War in Iraq: Selling the Threat

  Lawrence Freedman

  It is now regularly asserted that the American and British invasion of Iraq was ‘sold’ using an intelligence case that was not only erroneous but skewed by political bias—if not manufactured outright. An examination of the interaction between the development of intelligence assessments and the key decisions on policy reveals that the key assessment was a possible but speculative link between terrorism and WMD, one that could not be supported by evidence of links between al-Qaeda and Iraq. While the assertion that such links existed had a major impact on American opinion, international opinion was more influenced by Iraqi pursuit of WMD in violation of UN resolutions. Although this was not controversial among the intelligence agencies, the reality was more complex and less dramatic. This did not become apparent until after the decision to go to war had been taken. The main problem with this decision may turn out to be less the exaggerated expectations of Iraqi WMD and more the benign expectations of the consequences of regime change.

• Threat Confusion and Its Penalties

  Jeffrey Record

  In the wake of the 11 September al-Qaeda terrorist attacks on the United States, the Bush administration postulated a global threat that conflated non-state terrorist organisations and rogue states, most specifically al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. In so doing, the administration ignored key differences between the two, including interests, agendas and vulnerability to threatened and actual US military action. The price of threat confusion has been an unnecessary preventive war against Iraq that has alienated key friends and allies, diverted US strategic attention and resources away from the war on terrorism, and exposed the United States to an open-ended and unexpectedly costly counterinsurgent war in Iraq that it may not be able to win or sustain.

• Reassessment: The IISS Strategic Dossier on Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction

  Rolf Ekeus

  On 9 September 2002 the International Institute for Strategic Studies published Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction: A Net Assessment. This IISS ‘Strategic Dossier’ was widely publicised and cited in the intense debate leading up to the spring 2003 invasion of Iraq. In light of subsequent controversy about the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and to improve the Institute's ability to conduct such exercises in the future, the IISS invited Rolf Ekeus, former Executive Chairman of the UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) for Iraqi disarmament, to undertake an independent assessment of the analysis and conclusions contained in the dossier. In order to ensure the independence of Rolf Ekeus’s assessment, neither the IISS Director, John Chipman, who was in overall charge of the IISS Strategic Dossier, nor Gary Samore, its principal editor, have had any involvement in the editorial process leading to the publication of this article.

• Can North Korea be Engaged? An exchange between Victor D. Cha and David C. Kang

  Victor D. Cha and David C. Kang

  Discussion of North Korea's nuclear programme and what to do about it has become ideological and emotionally charged. Convinced that good policy serving American and allied interests is unlikely to emerge from such a debate, Korea experts Victor Cha and David Kang decided to step back from the histrionics and engage in a reasoned, rational and logical exchange on the nature of the North Korean regime and the policy that should be followed by the United States, Japan, and South Korea. Their debate was published in book form as Nuclear North Korea: A Debate on Engagement Strategies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). Survival invited Cha and Kang to continue their debate in these pages.

• China's Eurasian Experiment

  Lanxin Xiang

  An unexpected side-effect of the war in Iraq was to ease China's integration into the global mainstream. The US-led war triggered an anti-war ‘entente active’ of four major powers: France, Germany, Russia and China. For the first time in history, no major geopolitical conflict divides the powers of the Eurasian mainland. Three new strategic links have arisen—the Sino-Russian strategic partnership; the EU ‘Common Strategy towards Russia’; and what the EU and China are explicitly describing as ‘strategic’ cooperation—built with transparency, little fanfare and no declared common enemy. These developments will undermine the unipolar world that the United States is attempting to construct. At the same time, and quite remarkably, China is being drawn into a continental orientation. After years of hesitation, China's grand strategy of ‘peaceful rise’ has potential to be fulfilled on the Eurasian continent.

• China Debates Missile Defence

  Kori Urayama

  China has made a conscious effort to prioritise stable relations with the US and Japan over its long-term concerns about BMD. Many Chinese analysts, backed by sober technological assessments of the prospects for BMD deployment, have concluded that time is on China's side. But this does not imply that China's opposition to missile defences has ceased to exist. Beijing remains wary of US and Japanese intentions, and believes that BMD is aimed at China's containment. The United States and Japan, as they implement long-term plans for missile defence, should be aware that the latent Chinese opposition will be an enduring factor.

• Biotechnology and Bioterrorism: An Unprecedented World

  Christopher F. Chyba and Alex L. Greninger

  The web of measures that comprise the nuclear non-proliferation regime continues to hold at bay the ‘nuclear-armed crowd’ that was part of President John F. Kennedy's alarming vision in 1963. The number of nuclear weapons states in 2004 stands at only eight or nine, and assertive steps may yet keep this number from growing. The proliferation of biological weapons, however, is quite another matter. Biotechnological capacity is increasing and spreading rapidly. This trend seems unstoppable, since the economic, medical and food-security benefits of genetic manipulation appear so great. As a consequence, thresholds for the artificial enhancement or creation of dangerous pathogens—disease causing organisms—will steadily drop. Neither Cold War bilateral arms control nor multilateral non-proliferation provide good models for how we are to manage this new challenge. Much more than in the nuclear case, civilisation will have to cope with, rather than shape, its biological future.

• Not Such a Soft Power: The External Deployment of European Forces

  Bastian Giegerich and William Wallace

  Despite the failure of EU member states to meet their 2003 targets for the Headline Goal, which would make their formal commitment to a European Security and Defence Policy operational, there was significant progress in other areas of European defence cooperation that year. Among them were the ‘Berlin-Plus’ arrangements for cooperation between NATO and EU military operations; the transfer to the EU of responsibility for peacekeeping in Macedonia (Operation Concordia) and for policing in Bosnia; and the successful launch of the EU's first long-range operation, Operation Artemis, in the Eastern Congo. In fact, there has been a remarkable increase in the scale, distance and diversity of external operations by European forces—an increase that has scarcely registered in public debate across Europe, let alone the United States. At the same time that EU governments were slipping behind the Headline Goals target, they were sustaining 50,000–60,000 troops on operations outside their common boundaries, in more than 20 countries in southeast Europe, Afghanistan and Central Asia, Iraq and the Gulf, and Africa.

Review Essays

• The Land That Time Forgot

  Andrew Kuchins

Book Reviews

• Allies. The US, Britain, and Europe, and the War in Iraq

  William Shawcross. New York: Public Affairs, 2004.

  Pierre Hassner

• America the Vulnerable: How Our Government is Failing to Protect Us from Terrorism

  Stephen E. Flynn. New York: HarperCollins, 2004. 288 pp. $25.95.

  Jonathan Stevenson

• Making Australian Foreign Policy

  Allen Gyngell and Michael Wesley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. £18.99. 289 pp.

  Derek McDougall

• Rethinking the Middle East

  Efraim Karsh. London: Frank Cass, 2003. 208 pp. £17.50.

  Efraim Inbar