There Is A West by Alexander M. Haig

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

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Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2004 20:18:59 -0500
From: Foreign Policy Research Institute <fpri () fpri org>
Subject: **SPAM** There Is A West by Alexander M. Haig
To: David Farber <dave () farber net>

Foreign Policy Research Institute
WATCH ON THE WEST
www.fpri.org

THERE IS A WEST
By Alexander M. Haig, Jr.

Volume 5, Number 1
February 2004

This document is the text of the keynote speech delivered by
Alexander M.  Haig,  Jr.  to  the  Foreign  Policy  Research
Institute conference  on "Is  There Still a West?," February
12-13, 2004.   A  trustee of  FPRI, General  Haig is  former
Secretary of  State  and  former  Supreme  Allied  Commander
Europe.


                      THERE IS A WEST

                 By Alexander M. Haig, Jr.

I am  delighted to  speak to  you today here in Philadelphia
under the auspices of the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
FPRI is  near and  dear to  me and  we have had some history
together.   After returning from the Supreme Command of NATO
in  1979,  I  became  an  Institute  Senior  Fellow  at  the
suggestion of  FPRI's founder, the late Robert Strausz-Hupe.
Two of  the Institute's  scholars, Woody Goldberg and Harvey
Sicherman, worked  with me  to produce  an important book on
the Alliance.  Later, they joined me in Washington during my
time as  Secretary of  State.   I'm not  sure that any of us
fully recovered  from the  experience!  But we all benefited
from Robert's talent, skill, and devotion to the idea of the
West.  That idea, embodied in the Atlantic Alliance, rescued
Western civilization  from the  dangers of  communism during
the Cold  War.   Under NATO's  protection, both sides of the
Atlantic flourished together as never before.

In recent years, however, the concept of the "West" has been
challenged.  Critics of our values question whether the West
as constituted  is  even  worth  defending.    Others  doubt
whether the  democracies have  anything to  give the rest of
the  world.     After  the  Cold  War  ended,  the  doubters
increased.    They  argued  that  the  Soviet  Union  having
expired, it might be time for NATO to be retired.

Then came  September 11,  2001.  After rallying together, we
and some  of our  European allies  then fell  into a quarrel
over how  to deal  with the  dictator of  Iraq.   This  very
public dispute  aggravated earlier doubts.  Soon the critics
of NATO,  the only industry that never knows recession, were
in full  cry.  I can sum up their position this way.  First,
NATO is  no longer  necessary, having  fulfilled  its  great
mission of  deterring the Soviet threat.  Second, judging by
the split over Iraq, it does not work all that well anyway.

The critics  have had their say.  Now allow me mine.  First,
NATO is  more necessary  than ever precisely because much of
its most  important mission  has not been achieved.  Second,
the Atlantic  Alliance is actually in better shape than most
people think,  even on  the issue  of Iraq.   Third,  we can
adapt to  the new  challenges  only  if  we  understand  the
reality of  the military,  intelligence, and  political work
before us.

UNFINISHED BUSINESS
Let me  begin with  the unfinished  business of the Atlantic
Alliance.   Far too  many on both sides of the Atlantic have
forgotten the  main purpose  of the partnership.  It was not
only to  deter the  Soviet Union  but also to facilitate the
reconciliation of  the European nations whose quarrels twice
plunged the  world into  war.  Today's European Union is the
monument to that reconciliation.

But while  the pundits  have been fixated on the sophistries
of the  war over  Iraq, we  have failed  to notice  that the
European Union  may be  facing the  greatest crisis  in  its
history.  Most members are increasingly opposed to political
and economic  arrangements that  effectively give  Paris and
Berlin  license   to  protect  their  unsupportable  welfare
states.   Unbelievably, the European Commission is preparing
to sue  France and Germany for violating the Stability Pact,
a key  backstop  for  the  unified  Euro  currency.    While
analysts on  both sides  of the  Atlantic pontificate  about
common European  Union foreign  policies and common European
Union defense  policies as a replacement for NATO, in Europe
today there  is neither  the money nor the political will to
do either.

We ought  to face the truth.  Our European allies, trying to
deepen and  expand a  contentious economic  union, have  not
reached a  common identity.   They  will be  hard pressed to
sort  out   new  arrangements   much  more   suited  to   an
international economy  far more complex and global than ever
imagined by the founders.

Therefore, is  this the  time for  the Atlantic  Alliance to
dissolve, throwing  huge additional  doubts about the future
of the  European experiment?   A Europe "whole and free" has
been the  bipartisan pledge of American presidents since the
end of the Cold War.  It is the integration of transatlantic
security that  remains the  bedrock upon  which the European
experiment must rely.  This is not finished business, not by
a long shot.

Nor are  we out of the woods on the relationship of the West
with Russia. Over the last decade, NATO has expanded further
east.   Many former Warsaw Pact members have joined.  Others
aspire to  do so.    This  expansion  should  be  put  in  a
geopolitical perspective.   Many  of those  nations formerly
under Soviet  domination  have  been  anxious  to  join  the
Alliance  because,   in  their   view,  NATO   is  the  only
organization that  will protect them against a recurrence of
Moscow's ambitions.   Others  would argue  that  this  is  a
profoundly backward  attitude.   After all, the Soviet Union
is no more, its fire extinguished.

I would  put it  differently.  The flames may be out but the
embers are  still smoldering.   Russia's  direction  remains
uncertain and  current signs  are not  so promising.  On his
recent visit  to Moscow,  Secretary of State Powell wrote in
Izvestiya of  the new  Russia: "Political  power is  not yet
fully tethered  to  law.  .  .    .  Key  aspects  of  civil
society-free media  and  political  party  development,  for
example"-have lost their post-collapse independence.  Let me
put  it   in  plain   English:     President  Putin   is  an
authoritarian, not a democrat.  He wants a strong state more
than he wants a free one.

The foreign  policy picture  also gives  "pause," as General
Powell put  it.   Moscow's leaders  still seem to regard the
near abroad as a kind of sphere of influence that Russia has
a right  to dominate.   How else can we explain the presence
of Russian  troops in  Georgia?   Or the  warning  that  new
members of  NATO should  not have  Alliance forces  based in
them?

No one  can be  sure how  the often-agonizing  evolution  of
post-Soviet Russia  will turn  out.   Meanwhile, for various
reasons,  the   United  States  will  be  reconfiguring  its
military posture  in Europe.   In the process, we should not
allow, or give the appearance of allowing, Russia to dictate
what we  do.   We must assure new NATO members that they are
indeed fully  part of  the Alliance.   We  cannot afford two
NATO's,  one   an  "old  Europe,"  fully  protected  by  the
Alliance, the  other a "new Europe," which remains subjected
to a Russian sphere of influence.

In short,  even as  we  focus  on  the  wider  challenge  of
terrorism, we  should not  forget the  older challenge  of a
Europe whole  and free.  We are not there yet.  Let the fire
department remain  on  standby  alert.    Only  through  the
stability  guaranteed  by  the  Atlantic  Alliance  can  the
Europeans work out the terms of their union.

THE ALLIANCE IS BETTER THAN IT LOOKS
I turn  now to  my second  point.   The Alliance  is working
better in  the War on Terrorism than most people think, even
on the issue of Iraq.  To understand this situation, and the
very public difficulties of the past year, we should keep in
mind a troubled history.

As some  of you  have come  to expect,  I'll be blunt.  Both
U.S.  and   European  policies   designed   to   deal   with
international terrorism  have been  a 30-year  chronicle  of
abject failure.   As  an American,  I find  little  in  this
record to  boast about.   In  Lebanon and later Iran-Contra,
for example,  the Reagan Administration failed in a way that
encouraged the  terrorists.   I resigned  because of Lebanon
and what  I believed  to be excessive Saudi influence in our
capital.   Subsequent American presidents did little better.
It took the invasion of Kuwait for us to get started on that
arch terrorist  Saddam.   Then  having  helped  to  draft  a
restrictive charter for the "Gulf War,"  we failed to finish
the job.   That  made Saddam not just a survivor but a hero.
As for  the Clinton  Administration, just think of the list:
the first  World Trade  Center bombing,  Khobar Towers,  the
Cole,  the  two  embassies,  while  al-Qaeda  and  its  many
affiliates metastasized  under our  noses.   We just  didn't
face up  to the  task.   Instead, we  retreated into passive
half-measures that  relied on  the civil court system and an
occasional cruise  missile attack  to put  off  the  day  of
reckoning.     That  day  arrived  on  September  11,  2001.
President Bush  found himself face to face not only with the
disaster but  was heir  to thirty  years  of  lost  American
credibility. That  left no  alternative but  to make  war on
terrorists, including  Saddam Hussein,  the  beneficiary  of
earlier failures.

There is  a bad  and complicated  history here;  and we will
need the  maximum effort  to overcome  it.   Re-establishing
credibility is  painful and  often bloody.   Yet,  we are in
better shape than meets the eye.  I'm not talking only about
intelligence sharing  and police cooperation, both essential
parts of  the war  on terrorism.    Consider  the  following
evidence.   The U.S.-led  war in Iraq has benefited directly
from French  and German  military  help.    If  you  watched
American  and  British  planes  flying  in  the  skies  over
southern France,  if you saw the flow of coalition forces on
the roads leading south from Germany at the time of the Iraq
invasion, you  would never  have  imagined  that  Paris  and
Berlin opposed the war.

On the  diplomatic side,  the German  Foreign  Minister  has
declared again  and again  that Germany is ready to play its
part in  assuring the  success  of  U.S.  efforts  in  Iraq.
Germany and  France have  also  cooperated  in  pushing  the
Iranians toward  cooperation on  nuclear inspections.   NATO
itself is in Afghanistan and may yet play a role in Iraq.

The point  is that  the political divisions over one element
in the  war on terrorism did not translate into a disruption
of essential military cooperation.

We  should   therefore  be  careful  not  to  exaggerate  or
aggravate the  breach.    The  Atlantic  Allies  failed  the
diplomatic test on the first round but contained the damage.
In the  final analysis,  no one  here or in Europe wished to
injure the fundamentals of NATO over the fate of Saddam.

SURMOUNTING THE CHALLENGE
Even though  I am  reassured that  the Alliance  still has a
pulse, that  is not enough.  We shall have to do better-much
better-in the  future if we are to win this global struggle.
This brings me to my third and final point:  How to overcome
the military,  intelligence, and political challenges of the
war on terrorism.

It may  surprise you  that I think we face a severe military
challenge.    After  all,  the  initial  U.S.-led  coalition
campaigns in  Afghanistan and  Iraq achieved  rapid  victory
with few casualties.  Coordinated air, ground, and sea power
reached  into   the  most   remote   battlefields,   quickly
destroying enemy  formations with skill and precision.  Some
have taken  these campaigns  to mean  a new  type of warfare
that  substitutes   firepower  for  manpower,  airpower  for
infantry,  and  technology  for  physical  presence  on  the
battlefield.  And to a degree, it does.

But, is  this still evolving style of warfare, very much the
child of  necessity, as  well as strategic design, to beomce
the model  for NATO's  future strategy,  let alone  our  own
force structure?  Is it ready to become the model for all of
NATO to  emulate?   The answers are not in yet.  But here is
the challenge.   Let's  not fool  ourselves.   We should not
allow  recent  successes  to  blind  us  to  the  limits  of
technology.

Our victory  depended heavily  on a highly skilled coalition
military force  that included  infantry and  armor  able  to
improvise and  modify plans  in the  midst of  battle.    No
technological innovations  or machines can replace this age-
old human  dimension of  warfare.   We will continue to need
"boots on the ground."

Most importantly, success in war means more than winning the
first encounters.  We need coordination between the campaign
and the  post-war plans  if victory  is to  be secured.  The
forces on  hand must  be up to that task.  And so must their
civilian leaders.

I will turn now to a most sensitive issue, our intelligence.
The war against Saddam was justified by his defiance of U.N.
resolutions for  over a decade.  He nullified the cease-fire
that ended  the 1991  war.  This was a fundamental challenge
to  international  order  and  the  U.N.  itself,  far  more
fundamental than the size of his stockpile.

Even more  significantly, as  noted, it  was a  challenge to
America's already-squandered  credibility.   Washington  had
organized the  war to  defeat him in Kuwait.  Washington had
held the  sanctions in play against increasing international
criticism.  But Washington had failed to resolve the problem
of a  terrorist with  the intention  and  means  to  acquire
weapons of  mass destruction,  and to  use them.    And  two
American presidents,  President Bush  and President Clinton,
had passed the problem along.

Our intelligence, and those of other states, all agreed that
Saddam had  the intentions  and  would  have  the  means  to
accumulate a  new arsenal  of WMD  once the  sanctions  were
lifted.   And no one-no one-expected those sanctions to last
much longer.   Indeed,  they  were  already  being  violated
wholesale.   Let us  also not  forget that  the no-fly zones
protecting the Kurds and, less effectively, the Shiites from
Saddam's vengeance,  were being  contested almost  daily  by
Iraqi anti-aircraft  fire.    Those  were  our  pilots,  and
British pilots, they hoped to bring down.

Clearly,  Saddam  was  an  urgent  crisis  long  overdue  of
resolution.   He had  shown that you could pursue aggression
and  terrorism,  and,  despite  American  and  international
opposition, you could live to fight another day.  Beyond any
doubt, the  Bush Administration  would have had to face this
crisis sooner  or later.   9/11  made it sooner.  Any war on
state-sponsored terrorism  would have  Saddam at  the top of
the list.

So the intelligence was right on the big issues of intention
and preparation.  The debate is whether we should have known
the real  state of  the stockpiles.  A fallible intelligence
service is  not necessarily inept.  But when I read that the
CIA is  still critically  short of operatives on the ground,
it  reminds   me  of   1979  when   I  barely   survived  an
assassination attempt  in Belgium.  The then-Director of the
CIA  told   me  it   was  the  work  of  Belgian  nihilists.
Apparently, they  were so  nihilistic, no one had ever heard
of them.   Nor  could they  be found.   So, I asked the West
Germans what  they knew.   Within three months, they said it
was the  Baader-Meinhof gang  hired by the KGB.  Later, when
the wall  fell and  the East  German part  of the  gang  was
rounded up,  its leader  confessed to  the accuracy  of  the
charge.

It's not  only a  matter of  money or  recruiting.  If we're
ever going  to get this straight, the Congress of the United
States  will   also  have  to  look  at  itself  instead  of
proliferating  commissions.     The   CIA  was   seduced  by
technology because  the Executive  Branch drove  it that way
and because Congress put it out of the covert business.  Our
Presidents, Senators  and Representatives  did not  like the
sort of  people employed by the CIA to gather information on
the ground.   They weren't the kind that you would want your
mother to meet.  They could nenver join Philadelphia's Union
League.   Worst of  all, they  won't look good testifying to
Congress.   The CIA's  troubles  in  this  respect  are  all
homemade.  We'll have to risk some dirt if we're going to be
serious about the intelligence business.

Finally, one more challenge must be surmounted.

To fight the war on terrorism, we need a transatlantic forum
or institution  able to  concert the  diplomacy,  unify  the
strategy,  facilitate  intelligence  exchange  and  military
reform.   In short, we need NATO.  Or to be more precise, we
need to re-energize NATO.

NATO can  be the  forum to  reconcile differences  and  take
joint action.   It  can be  the inculcation  of new military
forces and  doctrine.   And the  alliance  enjoys  a  unique
public legitimacy on both sides of the Atlantic.

I think  we are moving in that direction.  It will be easier
to do  so, however,  once we engage in a little intellectual
hygiene.   A few  bad ideas  need to  be washed  away.   For
example, the  notion that  the United  States can remake the
world in  its own  image, on  its  own,  as  a  reaction  to
violence from abroad dates from Woodrow Wilson's time.  It's
an old  populist con  detached from  reality; calling  it  a
neocon doesn't make it any better.  Does anyone believe that
the  United  States  can  turn  Afghanistan  and  Iraq  into
thriving  democracies;   reconcile   India   and   Pakistan;
transform the  Middle East  and do it all with a 10-division
army and  a $500  billion deficit?    Frankly,  we're  lousy
imperialists.   We have  neither the  civil service  nor the
patience.   Further we  lack the  ambition.  As Secretary of
State Powell  told the  Archbishop of  Canterbury, the  only
territory we've  ever asked for is enough ground to bury our
dead.

There is  another bad  idea that  needs to  be washed  away.
Some  of   our  European   critics  hide  a  visceral  anti-
Americanism under  the banner of multilateralism.  They play
upon people's  resentment of an America that does not always
speak softly  or tactfully.   But  when you  peel  back  the
veneer, you  find something  we have  seen  before.    These
critics are  the lineal  descendants of  those  who  opposed
American leadership in the Cold War.  Then, they argued that
NATO's effort  to sustain a credible deterrence was the real
threat to  peace, not Soviet military power.  Now they argue
that America, not the terrorists, threatens the peace.  They
were wrong then.  They are wrong now.

UN Secretary  General Kofi  Annan said that the opponents of
American action  must offer  an  alternative  that  actually
deals with  the problem.  He's right.  President Bush warned
that if  multilateralism becomes  a slogan  for inaction, it
will simply  turn the UN into a League of Nations.  I agree.
But the  proven basis  for a  working multilateralism is the
Atlantic Alliance.  If we cannot put together a coalition of
the West  before we go to the UN, then forget about doing it
once we get there.

I  recognize  that  there  are  risks,  big  risks  in  this
approach.   NATO has a lot of unfinished business in Europe.
We may  overload it by adding to its burdens the coordinated
campaign of  the war  against terrorism.  The allies may not
agree.   Things can  get worse.  They usually do before they
get better.

Yet, there is little choice but to take the risks.  When all
is said  and done,  terrorists  threaten  the  international
order every bit as much as the dictators of old.  Everything
we  have   built  up,   the  entire   web  of  international
relationships, our  great cities,  our global communications
will be  lost if  terrorism becomes  the way  to succeed  in
achieving political objectives.

Some have  called this  a war of civilizations.  I disagree.
It is  more accurately  a war for civilization.  Not theirs,
for the  terrorists have  none, but  ours.   The war against
terror is  thus a  war for the West and all those who share,
or wish to share, our values.

In this  grouping of  the West,  I also  include many Muslim
peoples.   The Turks,  good members  of NATO, are evolving a
synthesis  that   combines  a  Muslim  faith,  a  democratic
government, and  a modern economy they hope will become part
of the  European Union.   President Bush has noted that more
than  half   the  world's   Muslims   already   live   under
democratically  instituted   governments.     In  Indonesia,
Pakistan, and  even Saudi  Arabia, a  violent  struggle  has
commenced between  those anxious to join modern civilization
and those  who hope  to destroy it.  This, too, is a war for
the West.

It is a war we must win.

Churchill once  said that  when nations  have had  the power
they have  not always done right, and when they wished to do
right they  no longer had the power.  The Atlantic Alliance,
working with  other  nations,  including  a  growing  China,
certainly has  the power.   There is a West.  And by putting
NATO to work for it, we can assure not only the peace of the
21st Century but also the future of our civilization.


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