Copyright 2003 The San Diego Union-Tribune  
The San Diego Union-Tribune
February 16, 2003, Sunday
SECTION: OPINION;Pg. G-1

LENGTH: 1352 words

HEADLINE: NATO'S SPLIT; ATLANTIC ALLIANCE IS IN ITS GRAVEST CRISIS

BYLINE: Henry A. Kissinger; Kissinger is a former secretary of state and presidential adviser.

BODY:
The road to Iraqi disarmament has produced the gravest crisis within the Atlantic Alliance since its creation five decades ago. What is most extraordinary about the controversy is its irrelevance to the real options before the Atlantic countries.

Questions such as whether military action should follow several more months of inspections or whether containment of the Saddam Hussein regime is truly an option pale before the central issue, which, bluntly stated, is as follows: Were the United States to yield to the threat of a French veto, or were Iraq encouraged by the action of our allies to evade the shrinking nonmilitary options still available, the result would be a catastrophe for the Atlantic Alliance and for the international order in general.

If the crisis ends without regime change in Baghdad, if the United States marches 200,000 troops into the region and then marches them back out without having achieved more than a nebulous containment of a regime that has violated U.N. directives for more than a decade, the credibility of American power in the war on terrorism and in international affairs will be gravely, perhaps irreparably, impaired.

In such circumstances, the governments that have supported or tolerated the American buildup in the region would be jeopardized or driven to look for an exit. If the Saddam Hussein regime continues in power, based on the claim that he has complied with U.N. Resolution 1441 or that no adequate proof of violations exists, the U.N. process will have produced a debacle.

Iraq would emerge as the richest country in the region, with either caches of undeclared weapons of mass destruction or new ones built with the additional resources freed by the lifting of sanctions.

But if this is not what France and Germany seek, what is their objective? The fact that this crisis has broken out at such a late stage in the political process demonstrates an amazing lack of understanding in Europe of American realities. No government exposed to President Bush or his principal advisers after the passage of U.N. Resolution 1441 in November, 2002, should have doubted that, within months, it would face an American claim of a material breach and measures to overcome it.

In the end, French realism will not permit France to stand aside while its strongest ally -- that has stood by it through two world wars and the Cold War -- pursues its vital interests with a coalition of the willing.

But even if France acquiesces in the end -- as is probable -- a legacy of distrust will continue to weigh on Atlantic relations. The necessary reassessment of the existing poisonous atmosphere would do well to learn from history. A generation ago, comparable discord arose even though the Soviet threat at the time set limits to the implications. The two sides of the Atlantic are repeating a play in which they were principal actors once before and in the same region: the Middle East. Only now the roles are totally reversed.

In the mid-1950s, Britain and France still thought of themselves as major world powers. Britain had special interests in Egypt and the Gulf, France in Syria and Lebanon. Our European allies treated these interests as a flank of the Cold War. As they became increasingly conscious of the lack of resources to sustain that role, they invited America to undertake a joint effort in the Middle East as it had with respect to Greece and Turkey when Britain was no longer able to hold that line.

But the United States declined to assume the mantle. It was not prepared to associate itself with British and French interests in the Middle East (seen as essentially colonial).

And just as today our European critics support the war against terror but insist on fighting it with methods essentially of conciliation, so in the 1950s, the United States sought to serve its Cold War strategy by dissociating from its European allies on regional issues, expecting that post-colonial regimes would then seize the opportunity to join the struggle against Soviet imperialism. It was not to be. The post-colonial radical leaders treated U.S. overtures as helpful assists from a renegade imperialist, very rarely as acts of partnership in the Cold War.

The difference in perspective came to a head when, on July 26, 1956, Egypt's President Gamal Abdul Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal. Britain and France considered this a mortal threat to their lifeline to the Middle East -- and to their great power status.

While Britain and France may have been prepared to risk war, the United States was not. It treated the British and French warnings as bargaining maneuvers. The Eisenhower administration formally accepted the European objective of an internationally guaranteed use of the Suez Canal. But it rejected the use of force.

In such circumstances, diplomats resort to stalling and seek to transform substance into procedure -- as our European critics are now doing in the U.N. Security Council.

In exasperation and frustration, Britain and France finally went to war. Planning incompetently, distracted by the simultaneous Soviet suppression of the revolution in Hungary and burdened by bringing in Israel as an ally, Britain and France found themselves confronting an overwhelming U.N. vote of condemnation. The U.N. charge was led by the United States, voting with the Soviet Union against its allies -- for the only time in the Cold War -- and withholding support for European currencies in financial markets.

Today, France and Germany still have the option of permitting themselves to be persuaded by Bush administration lobbying or Hans Blix' final report of Feb. 14. In making that decision, America's European critics should remember that none of the hoped-for benign results of America's dissociation from its allies in 1956 were achieved. Nasser showed no gratitude for having been saved by American concern for the nonaligned. Instead, he presented the outcome as a personal triumph extorted from a reluctant United States. Pro-Western regimes toppled throughout the Middle East, among them Iraq's, starting a series of ever more radical convulsions in Baghdad.

Within five years, Egyptian troops invaded Yemen. In 1967, Nasser threw off the restraints established in the aftermath of the Suez crisis along the Israeli border and in the Straits of Tiran, unleashing the Six Day War, after which Egypt broke relations with the United States. These were not restored until Anwar Sadat did so in 1973.

The most profound impact was on the Western alliance, though it took years to work itself out.

History, of course, never repeats itself precisely. Nasser was no Saddam Hussein; the threat of Third World radicalism backed by Soviet arms was less insidious than contemporary terrorism combined with weapons of mass destruction. But then, as now, America's task was to overcome strategic dangers while fostering the aspirations for dignity, equality and progress of the peoples of the region. This goal did not require the humiliation of allies.

The main issue then, as now, concerns the nature of alliances, especially when no Soviet threat exists to set limits to allied discord. During the Suez crisis, America put forward three principles: that allied obligations were circumscribed by a precise legal charter; that recourse to force was admissible only in strictly defined self-defense; and that the United States had an opportunity to build relations in the developing world, in effect, at the expense of its allies. These principles are now being applied with a vengeance against America by its European critics.

They were not valid when the Cold War defined certain inescapable necessities. They are even dangerous today when the international system is in revolutionary flux.

Alliances do not function because heads of state consult their lawyers; they thrive precisely when they involve moral and emotional commitments beyond legal documents. And alliances whose partners believe they can benefit in the long term from the failures of their allies turn into a contradiction in terms.



GRAPHIC: 1 DRAWING; Barry Fitzgerald

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