Read the first part of this post here.
Chapter B. Policy Implications for Failing and Newly Liberated States
The proliferation of nuclear weapons, it is widely recognized, constitutes a grave threat to our security and to global peace. If Iran and North Korea continue to develop their nuclear programs, as well as long-range missiles, they will endanger our allies (from Saudi Arabia and Israel to South Korea and Japan) and, in the longer run, American and European homelands as well. Moreover such proliferation will push other nations to develop nuclear weapons, increasing the chances that states eventually will confront one another in the deadliest fashion imaginable. And the more that such weapons are available, the more likely they are to end up in the hands of terrorists.
Although few doubt that deproliferation serves basic security well, the question remains: is the best way to achieve deproliferation through regime change, or by granting those nations that seek nuclear weapons iron-clad security guarantees? I examine this issue by first reviewing one of the great successes of diplomacy, the deproliferation of Libya, and its implications for democratization. I then apply the lesson of Libya to other rogue states, including North Korea and Iran.
The Libya Lesson
In 2003, the United Nations lifted the economic sanctions previously imposed on Libya following its agreement to accept responsibility for the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing and to pay $2.7 billion in damages. Toward the end of the year, Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi dramatically announced that his nation was voluntarily dismantling its nascent nuclear program and other weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs, as well as committing Libya to fight international terror. Indeed, Libya's centrifuges and mustard gas tanks, as well as some SCUD missiles, were loaded onto a U.S. ship and removed. Sensitive designs of nuclear warheads were transported on a chartered 747 to the United States. Thirteen kilograms of highly enriched uranium were moved to Russia (America has no blending-down facilities for uranium), and chemical weapons shells were destroyed. Tripoli has been credited with helping the United States to shut down a global black market for nuclear weapons technology run by the Pakistani scientist A. Q. Khan. In short, major contributions to international security were made on two most important fronts: nuclear disarmament and prevention of terrorism.
If Libya may be said to have earned an A in deproliferation, it earned at best a D in advancing human rights. It remains a crime to criticize the government or "the Leader," and Law 71 forbids opposing the Revolution, the September 1969 uprising in which Qaddafi seized power. Although the infamous People's Court and the People's Prisons were abolished in 2005, this amounts largely to window dressing, as the People's Prisons inmates were shipped to other prisons. Torture is outlawed, but several allegations of torture remain unresolved, including those concerning a 1996 uprising at the Abu Salim prison. In another troubling case, five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor, charged with infecting 426 children with HIV, were tortured until they confessed, and were then sentenced to death. Freedom House, a U.S.-based group, continued to list Libya as one of the five worst nations in stemming the flow of free information. For all these reasons, rather than rewarding Libya for its contributions to global security, human-rights groups demand that the international community continue to limit Libya's access to the world's markets and to put off normalizing relations.
How the international community responds to Libya's nuclear disarmament and cessation of support for terrorism--without a shot being fired--is of considerable importance, given that most analysts strongly agree that the world would be much more secure if other nations would follow the same course, especially Iran and North Korea. By recognizing that Libya has met international security standards, other rogue nations will note that if they move in the same direction, efforts to bring down their authoritarian regimes will cease. They will be given full access to various international institutions, all sanctions will be lifted, and investment will be encouraged, although promotion of democratization by non-lethal (educational and cultural) means will continue. That is, if a threatening nation meets the security standards set by the United States and its allies and largely supported by other parts of the international community, without necessarily meeting human-rights standards, it would reap substantial rewards. By contrast, if these rogue nations are told that they will be restored to good standing as members of the international community only if they also replace or drastically alter the form of their regimes, they will be much less likely to consider abandoning their programs of developing weapons of mass destruction and their support for terrorism. The first strategy is in line with the Security First approach; the second--with the Neo-Con notion that democratization drives security.
Unfortunately, from the Security First viewpoint advanced in this volume, it took three years after Libya chose to change course for the United States to restore full diplomatic relations with the Qaddafi government, to remove it from the list of nations that sponsor terrorism, and to lift the sanctions imposed on nations on that list. When I wrote in 2003 that Libya should be treated as the poster child of deproliferation and a model for other rogue states, I was widely criticized. However, in 2006 Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice stated that Libya served as an "important model" for the way the disputes with North Korea and Iran could be resolved. Better late than never.
Some argue that there was much less to the Libyan program of WMD than meets the eye, or at least as it had been built up by the press. Hence, they argue, Libya does not deserve much of a reward or recognition for giving up whatever programs it had. Even if this were the case, much is to be gained by nations giving up their mere ambitions to launch such programs. In the case of Libya, however, its WMD program was far from trivial.
Libyan scientists at the Rabta facility made, in a ten-year period ending in 1990, about twenty-five tons of sulfur mustard gas, a chemical weapons agent. Libya imported two types of centrifuges from A. Q. Khan's global nuclear black market, the aluminum P-1s (Pakistan-1), and the more advanced P-2s. In fact, these and other items Libya purchased from the Khan network would have sufficed to produce ten-kiloton bombs. Experts figured that "Libya could have produced enough fuel to make as many as 10 nuclear warheads a year."
Among the terrorist groups Libya sponsored in one way or another were the IRA, the ETA Basque separatist group in Spain, and the Abu Nidal Organization. However, as of 2003 Libya had not only withdrawn all such support, but closely collaborated with the U.S. war against terrorism.
Still, the United States dragged its feet. Libyan officials expected, after such a radical change in their conduct, that Washington would generously reward them. To their disappointment, only a small U.S. liaison office was established in Tripoli. In fact, some now believe that "Washington's temporizing toward Libya has undermined its nonproliferation victory and has reinforced rogue-state conviction that disarmament will not get one far with Washington. . . . Giving up WMD alone should have been enough to warrant normalization of relations with the U.S." Several former diplomats stated that "the Bush administration risked losing the terrorism list as a useful diplomatic tool if it didn't illustrate ways countries and organizations could successfully remove themselves." Above all, the U.S. delay in rewarding Libya, and setting it up as a model for the world, occurred largely because the commitment to democratization has continued to be a U.S. foreign policy leitmotif, and Libya was making rather little progress on this front. Although the United States continues--and should continue--to foster respect for human rights in Libya by persuasive means, it did move in the right direction when it finally recognized and rewarded the grand contribution of Qaddafi's rejection of WMD and terrorism to our security and to world peace.
Applying the Libya Lesson to Iran and North Korea
As of mid-2006, the United States has continued openly seeking regime change in both Iran and North Korea. The United States continued to condemn the government of the mullahs in Iran, barely acknowledged Iran's contributions to curbing al-Qaeda, and increased funds for Iranian groups seeking to undermine the mullahs' regime. Meanwhile, in the case of North Korea, U.S. opposition to communist forms of government has a long pedigree. Cold War, anticommunist precepts are now applied in current condemnations of North Korea's violation of human rights. In dealing with both nations, the military option for disposing of the regimes has repeatedly and often been discussed within and around the Bush administration. All this fits the democratization-drives-security assumption.
What would a change of strategy, to Security First, entail? Both Iran and North Korea are reported to have sought nonaggression treaties or security guarantees from the West as part of a deproliferation deal. If these deals could be struck and faithfully carried out, they would in effect entail "trading" deproliferation, verified by vigorous inspections and by denying these nations their own weapons-grade fuel production, in exchange for leaving their authoritarian regimes in place.
The fact that Iran and North Korea have sought out such deals is not widely known and hence deserves some documentation. Selig Harrison of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars reported that Iran, during 2004 negotiations with the "European Three," offered guarantees that its nuclear program was "exclusively for peaceful purposes," in exchange for an understanding that the West would provide "firm commitments on security issues." Similarly, North Korea has repeatedly put security guarantees on the table as one of its conditions for halting nuclear-weapons programs.
There is no way to determine a priori whether Iran and North Korea made these offers in good faith or merely to gain time in order to further expand their nuclear programs. From their viewpoint, however, one can readily see the reasons these regimes might seek such a deal. Both nations are facing military bases belonging to the United States and its allies close to their borders. If the United States and its allies were willing to remove those bases and provide assurances that they would neither attack directly--nor indirectly subvert these harshly authoritarian regimes, one can see why their governments might be willing to give up their nuclear weapons programs. The only way to find out if this analysis is valid is to offer a deal.
One thing, however, is clear on the face of it: one can hardly expect these governments to consider seriously a deal that would remove from power the very same people who must agree to the deal--which is exactly what regime change entails. It would be like demanding that Bush turn over the reins to Al Gore, or replacing the U.S. Constitution with the Islamic shariah!
The deal I suggest--if you deproliferate and cease supporting terrorism (the Libya formula), I will leave your regime intact--is less bitter than it might initially seem to some. It would not mean that the West must engage in some kind of Faustian bargain and give up its liberal soul to purchase security. Regime change is coming on its own in Iran soon
enough, and has already come in some form in most communist states--North Korea, granted, is an exception. In Iran, many reporters have found that the majority of the population rejects the mullahs' strict theocratic rule and would prefer modern political and economic life along Western lines (from consuming alcohol to sporting popular consumer brands). In spite of the mullahs' bellicose foreign policy pronouncements, their authority is waning. And there is much more conflict among various factions of mullahs than is commonly acknowledged in the Western media. Furthermore, Iran has started to liberalize its economy, which in the longer run tends to undermine politically authoritarian regimes. Also note that aggressive U.S. posturing damages the reformers' credibility. Iranian reformers have made it clear that U.S. announcements supporting liberal democracy in Iran discredit their efforts and even threaten their lives. (The United States declared in 2006 that it had set aside $85 million to help dissidents bring about regime change.) Akbar Ganji, an Iranian journalist who was arrested after returning home from a conference in Berlin in 2000, wrote shortly after his release:
For six years, I had been behind bars on account of investigative articles I had written about the assassinations of dissident intellectuals. On numerous occasions, my interrogators accused me, and the entire opposition to clerical rule, of being dependent on the United States. They even claimed that CIA agents with suitcases full of dollars routinely came to Tehran to distribute cash to members of the opposition, including reformists who supported the former president, Mohammad Khatami. Some of the interrogators took these propaganda claims seriously and asked prisoners about the location of these dollar-filled suitcases. . . .[W]e have . . . learned that we have to gain our freedom ourselves, and that only we can nourish that freedom and create a political system that can sustain it.
Indeed, when the CIA tried to undermine the Islamists in Somalia in the struggle for Mogadishu in early 2006, the Islamists won.
Finally, we must face the fact that no matter how much money and effort the United States and its allies expend, they cannot make such nations into liberal democracies. As we have seen time and time again, the West can easily topple Saddam or the Taliban, but it cannot easily found a liberal-democratic regime in their place. Hence, there is little to be lost and much to be gained by providing security guarantees and other rewards in exchange for vigorous and verified deproliferation, and an end to harboring, financing, and equipping terrorists.
Chapter C. Implications for Failing States
The most important change in the way we understand international relations since the 2001 attack on the U.S. homeland, and following the attacks on the Madrid train station and the London buses and Underground, is that security is threatened by what political scientists like to call "non-state actors," many of which are terrorists. The term "non-state actors" helps to signal that we have been used to thinking about international security in terms of nations concluding treaties with each other, developing international institutions such as the United Nations, "balancing" various powers, and so on-- arrangements all based on relationships between self-interested, sovereign states. In effect, even after 9/11, much more attention has been paid to the threats posed by Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, than by the terrorists themselves.
Unlike non-state actors, states have governments with which other states can negotiate or, if all else fail, that they can be threatened militarily. States are presumed to be able to enforce agreements and control their own borders and citizens. In contrast, terrorists have no clear address, symbolized by the fact that they wear no uniforms. Al-Qaeda maintains a loose network of groups in places as different as the Afghan-Pakistani border, Indonesia, the Philippines, Somalia, and the United Kingdom. In short, ensuring security when contending with non-state actors requires major changes in strategy. Some entail the introduction of new domestic security measures, which I have explored elsewhere. Some do concern the ways we deal with other nations--but many of these states are not in fact the kind that traditional international relations theory envisions. Today many of the nations we must contend with are failed or failing states, in which the government cannot compel obedience from its citizens, states in which dangerous non-state actors can run amok. Such states are ideal havens for terrorists and, as we shall see, are also often major sources of nuclear bombs and the materials from which they can be made. Regime change here entails nation-building of the highest order, turning failing governments into viable, effective ones. As I show in Part II, most of these efforts have failed, as is all too evident in the post-invasion situations of Iraq and Afghanistan, which were turned from authoritarian regimes into failed ones. Security calls for a different approach to failing states.