Interventions (2 page)

Prologue

PEACEKEEPER, PEACEMAKER

K
ofi, they've made an honest man of me,” Colin Powell said, with a huge smile across his face. The relief—and the exhaustion—was palpable. I could not help but smile along with my friend, and wanted to share in his comfort. The U.S. secretary of state had called and asked to come see me in New York six weeks after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and with his typical confidence appeared on the thirty-eighth floor of UN headquarters by himself, with no aides and without the U.S. ambassador at his side. I could only be impressed by the resilience of this man, who had endured so much to argue for a war he clearly did not believe in. “They've found the mobile labs, and while we're not prepared to make the announcement yet, you'll see the news reports tomorrow.” U.S. forces in Iraq had discovered what they thought were mobile labs for the production of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and Powell was emphatic that this time it was real. The war had been justified; the cause affirmed.

While I did not have any reason to doubt Powell's sincerity, I was not convinced that this was, in fact, the hard evidence of WMD that U.S. forces with increasing desperation were searching for in Iraq. I had been down this road before—most vividly six months earlier when John Negroponte, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, had asked to see me privately in order to show me some of the evidence that the United States had accumulated about Saddam Hussein's illicit weapons program.

As Negroponte and the senior CIA officer accompanying him flipped through image after image—explaining in solemn tones the gravity of the evidence—a disturbing pattern emerged: it was all circumstantial. They would show an image of a building from five years ago, and then show another image of the same building two years later, immediately after a U.S. strike, but now rebuilt with a new roof and trucks entering and exiting. One of my aides then remarked: “But this doesn't really show us anything except that a building was built, then bombed, then rebuilt. How do you know what's in those buildings? It could be anything!” This was not what Negroponte had expected. As the CIA officer sat silently collecting his images, I asked a few more questions to which they had less than complete answers.

What had been presented to me by Negroponte as a unique opportunity to realize the severity of the threat managed only to do the opposite. As we entered my private office following the meeting, another one of my aides wondered aloud: “Why would they promise such definitive revelations only to bring at best highly circumstantial evidence? Is it because they think we can be convinced so easily, or is it because this is all they have, and that we're asking the basic questions that they're avoiding?”

We would soon learn the answer.

After September 11, following an initial outpouring of support for America, a heavy curtain soon fell between America and the rest of the world. To many Americans, and the Bush administration in particular, a global response was eminently justified by the barbarism visited upon the country and two of its greatest cities. For much of the global community in those days—shocking though this seemed to many Americans—the greatest threat to world peace came not from Saddam, but from an enraged and vengeful United States. Tragically, the chaotic, bloody aftermath of the subsequent invasion of Iraq did little to change this perception.

If 9/11 changed the world, the consequences of the Iraq War were of a similarly dramatic magnitude—from the Arab nations, appalled by the mayhem unleashed following the fall of Saddam, to the deep distrust among Security Council members bruised by the torturous negotiations in the run-up to the war to the growing isolation of a United States no longer as feared or respected. What the United States had lost, as a consequence of the invasion, was the benefit of the doubt. This pained me deeply. Throughout my years as secretary-general, I had often found myself in the role of global interpreter, explaining the United States to the world, and the world to the United States. Despite the singular contribution of the United States to the UN's founding and its mission in the decades that followed, after Iraq, America was too often unwilling to listen, and the world unable to speak its true mind.

—

O
n the ground in Iraq, the costs of the war could be measured in the more than one hundred thousand civilian lives lost in the turmoil following the invasion. Internationally, the war resulted in broken relations and hardened animosities, but also in the damage to the personal integrity and the standing of some of the principal players involved. No one endured this passage more painfully or publicly than Colin Powell, who would ultimately resign after the Bush administration had exploited, and exhausted, his stature. And no leader would carry with him the consequences of the Iraq War more lastingly than Tony Blair.

“Yo, Blair, how're you doing?” As soon as I read these first words of the exchange between U.S. president George W. Bush and UK prime minister Tony Blair captured by a rogue microphone at the July 2006 G8 summit in St. Petersburg, I thought of Blair, and knew he had to be cringing. Offering to travel to the Middle East, he told Bush that he was happy to leave immediately to try to reduce tensions. When Bush replied that his secretary of state Condoleezza Rice would be going soon, Blair remarked that he could prepare the way for her diplomacy. The aide who handed me the transcript of the exchange said I should read on. They had been speaking about me, it turned out—and not in flattering terms.

I arrived at the G8 summit four days into the raging war between Israel and Hizbollah. Hizbollah had triggered the war when it fired rockets at Israeli border towns before crossing the Lebanese border to attack an Israeli patrol, taking two of its personnel hostage. This provoked a heavy military response by Israel against the militant group, as well as against the Lebanese state and the country's infrastructure as a whole. I was determined to press for a cessation of hostilities and argue the case for the deployment of an international force as a condition for a durable peace. I knew I had annoyed at least one of the leaders there by asking Russian president Vladimir Putin to change the agenda and allow me to address the key session of the summit. As Bush and I engaged in a charged and pointed debate about my argument in front of the other leaders—with only France's president Jacques Chirac joining in at the very end of the session—it was clear that Bush saw this as a simple matter of good versus evil. He was blunter still with Blair. “What about Kofi?” Bush had continued, according to the transcript. “I don't like his cease-fire plan . . . His attitude is basically cease fire and everything sorts out . . . What they need to do is get Syria to get Hizbollah to stop doing this shit and it's all over . . . I felt like telling Kofi to call, to get on the phone with Assad and make something happen.”

Now I wish that I—or anyone—could simply “make something happen” with just a phone call. And while the U.S. policy of isolating Syria meant that I was one of few global leaders communicating with the Syrian leadership, getting a solution would take more than just a conversation. Given the complex set of interests and motivations in Syria—and among its neighbors, including Israel—this was a three-dimensional chess game played between the wiliest and most mutually distrustful of powers.

In fact, the Lebanon war was not just a wrenching tragedy for the Lebanese and Israelis. It was—in its tangled and bloody roots, its complex regional character, and its carefully UN-negotiated conclusion—a reflection of those forces of global order and disorder that I had been wrestling with throughout my decade as UN secretary-general. Intervention in long-standing conflicts; the rights and responsibilities of sovereignty; the role of peacekeeping; the place of the UN in the era of American dominance; the emergence of nonstate actors engaged in asymmetric conflict; the personal shuttle-diplomacy of a UN secretary-general in a fragmenting world—each of these was at stake in the Lebanon war. A simple battle between good and evil it was not.

For Blair, however, this conflict—no less than Iraq—was refracted through his lens of a meta-conflict between modernity and the medieval, between tolerant secularism and radical Islam. We had met privately in St. Petersburg before the formal summit session, and when I told him that the G8 statement had been too weak and too vague to make any difference on the ground, he replied coolly that the question was not whether Israel could be convinced to cease fire today, but rather in “ten days or two weeks.” Two weeks? I gave him an astonished look. His only response was that the conditions for a cessation of hostilities were not yet in place. This was not the Blair with whom I had agreed so passionately about the moral necessity of a humanitarian intervention to halt the Serbian attacks on the Kosovar Albanians in 1999—a stand that compelled me to override my own commitment to Security Council authorization of the use of force, and which cost me greatly with major powers, including Russia and China. Something had changed in Blair, and with it, I felt, his ability to act as a credible mediator in this conflict.

I was concerned with the scale and scope of Israel's retaliation from the outset. Of course, the Israelis were justified in responding. Any nation, when attacked, has a right to defend itself. Israeli positions had been raided across an internationally recognized border. And I had personally certified the Blue Line in 2000 after working closely with Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak to enable his withdrawal of Israeli forces from Lebanon after an eighteen-year occupation. But Israel's justified defense of its borders rapidly became about something far greater, and far more difficult to achieve—namely, the destruction of a popular guerrilla organization with ample means of survival and retaliation.

On the day of the attack, I told Condoleeza Rice that I feared Israel would soon discover the limits to what could be achieved by force. There had to be a political agreement, a political understanding, I argued. Hizbollah was an organization with deep roots in Lebanese society and represented many long-standing, popular local grievances. It could not be disarmed by military means alone. But Israeli leader Ehud Olmert would have none of it. In my call with the prime minister the next day, he said that Israel was “not going to stop any military operation against Hizbollah,” but rather was going to “intensify it.”

Olmert's demands were, in principle, legitimate: a release of the Israeli soldiers captured in the raid, withdrawal from the border, and the complete disarmament of Hizbollah as called for in UN Security Council resolution 1559. That did not mean, however, that they were obtainable through war. Indeed, everything we knew about the history of guerrilla warfare—in the region and around the world—suggested that there would ultimately have to be a negotiated solution, no matter how long or relentlessly Israel struck Lebanese targets.

Insisting on these conditions being met even before agreeing to a cessation of hostilities was a recipe for war without end. This much I knew from the first hours of the conflict, and over the next three weeks I took this message to anyone with power to influence the parties. Ten years of painful, drawn-out negotiations with the Palestinians and Israelis had taught me a grim lesson about the futility of killing off the first stages of a settlement between mortal foes.

Israel was already under siege on a second front, Gaza, where Hamas had attacked an Israeli border post two weeks earlier, killing two soldiers and kidnapping a young corporal, Gilad Shalit. An Israeli leader without a military background, Olmert needed to demonstrate decisiveness and strength. And ample license was given. The United States, along with the United Kingdom, took the view that Hizbollah had given the Israelis a unique opportunity to crush what had become a state within a state in Lebanon. Washington appeared to have decided that its primary responsibility in the early stages of the conflict was to buy time for the Israeli Air Force to inflict what it hoped would be a strategic defeat on the movement.

For an organization like Hizbollah, mere survival means victory. Ever since its founding in response to the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, Hizbollah had become part of the fabric of Lebanese society—whether one liked it or not. And I made clear my own disapproval when I spoke to the Security Council one week into the conflict and condemned Hizbollah's “deliberate targeting of Israeli population centers with hundreds of indiscriminate weapons.” I concluded that “whatever other agendas they may serve, Hizbollah's actions, which it portrays as defending Palestinian and Lebanese interests, in fact do neither. On the contrary, they hold an entire nation hostage.”

By not losing, Hizbollah was winning. And for Israel, much more than another battlefield victory had been gambled. The essential myth of Israel's invincibility—its strategic deterrence of its Arab neighbors—was now at risk. As its military commanders and political leadership came to recognize their miscalculation, their tactics became ever more desperate. Over the following three weeks, Israel carried out a widespread air campaign stretching from suspected Hizbollah positions in the south to the suburbs of Beirut and every major infrastructure artery, including bridges, roads, and air and sea ports. The state of Lebanon was being crippled, and more than one thousand civilians were killed—without, however, putting a halt to Hizbollah's indiscriminate rocket attacks. During the same period, the group fired thousands of rockets, hitting targets as far as Haifa, and forced more than a million Israelis into shelters night after terrifying night.

—

I
n Lebanon, Israeli and U.S. policymakers had attempted to change the country's politics through military force. I had, in my own way, been disabused of the notion that the international community could fully understand the forces at play in such societies. In 2000, I was visiting Islamabad on a long-planned trip to Pakistan that coincided with the Taliban's destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas. There I met with the man who represented the Taliban to outsiders as its foreign minister, Wakil Ahmad Mutawakil. I was staying at the Marriott Hotel (which, in 2008, was destroyed in an al Qaeda bombing), and as the Taliban delegation entered my suite, I knew that we were dealing with an entirely new phenomenon in international affairs.