America Reaps the Failure of Diplomacy

STEPHEN FIDLER / Financial Times (UK) 6mar03

What happened? Washington's foreign policy establishment is still digesting the implications of a horrible week for American diplomacy.

In short succession, the Turkish parliament rejected an agreement to allow US troops to invade Iraq from its territory. Days later in Paris, the foreign ministers of France, Russia and Germany declared their determination not to let a second United Nations resolution pass that would authorise the use of force in Iraq.

The Bush administration has often been criticised for the failure of its public diplomacy. These efforts, notes Michael Yaffe of the National Defense University, have concentrated on explaining American values to the Middle East. But values are not the issue, he says: "All we hear from the region is that we don't like your policies."

If public diplomacy has been weak, private diplomacy has more than matched it.

For weeks, American officials have said that when it came to a second UN resolution, Russia would in the end come on board. And if Russia did, so would China, leaving France to decide whether to wield a lone veto.

Washington, or at least Colin Powell's State department, has not given up hope. There is still a chink of light because nobody has yet used that four-letter word. But the probability that the US and Britain will fail to win a second resolution has risen sharply.

None of this was inevitable. It derives in part from a view among some US officials that all Washington needs to do is provide leadership and the rest of the world will follow. But this is not the stuff of great power diplomacy, and has left many American allies around the world feeling irrelevant and unconsulted.

If the quest for a second resolution does fail, it will have been a chronicle of a failure foretold. Those hawks who tried to persuade Mr Bush that involving the UN would merely delay US plans to oust Saddam Hussein as Iraqi leader, would have been proved right. But the rightness of their predictions would in part derive from their own actions and statements.

Mr Bush has himself been less than convincing, observers say. His decision to go for a second resolution was in part a favour to his closest ally, British prime minister Tony Blair. But he has repeatedly said the US does not need a second resolution, and he has failed to galvanise the whole of the government towards achieving that end.

Foreign policy experts in Washington say that convincing Russian president Vladimir Putin of the need to support US policy is something that has to be done at levels above Mr Powell's pay grade. The president, they say, simply has not spent enough time talking to Mr Putin.

It is difficult to divine Mr Putin's motives for allowing his foreign minister to throw in his lot with Paris. There were several possible explanations, Gareth Evans, the former Australian foreign minister, said on Wednesday, "of which the least plausible is that he has taken a strong stand of principle". Perhaps the Russian leader felt Washington had spent too much time offering blandishments to Turkey.

The Turkish parliament rejected these because there was much more than money at stake. (Welcome to Islamic democracy, Mr Bush.) A second UN resolution would almost certainly have changed the outcome of the vote.

Yet despite the revisionism in Washington this week about the importance of Turkey to the US military, the vote hurt. The US can mount a successful invasion of Iraq without basing troops in Turkey, and the parliament in Ankara could yet change its mind. But lack of Turkish co-operation would increase the risk, perhaps significantly, of something going wrong in the military campaign; and it would make much more difficult the task of securing the peace.

US difficulties with Turkey grew in part because Washington did a favour to a friend: this time, Lord Robertson, the Nato secretary-general.

Washington, which had ignored Nato in Afghanistan, could easily have moved into Turkey the necessary equipment to defend it against the minimal risk of attack from Iraq. But the US went along with Lord Robertson's efforts to show Nato's continued relevance and agreed to a vote to allow Nato assets to be moved into Turkey to defend it.

The French saw this as an attempt to secure support for war in Iraq via the back door. A huge fight ensued, which spilled over later into the Security Council.

Failure to win broad international backing for the invasion - or at least the fig-leaf of a second resolution - would sharply reduce the margin of error for Mr Bush and Mr Blair. The success of their Iraq policy will then be seen to depend on a succession of almost perfect outcomes. There will need to be no big setbacks in the military campaign, minimal civilian casualties, no bloody battle of Baghdad. The troops will have to be greeted as liberators, and Iraq's weapons of mass destruction exposed for the world to see.

Stephen Fidler will be writing a regular commentary on the Iraq crisis