CIAO DATE: 9/5/2007

Leslie Gelb on American Foreign Policy

Nermeen Shaikh

June 2007

Asia Society

Leslie Gelb is currently President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations. He was previously a correspondent and editor at the New York Times.

In this extensive interview with Nermeen Shaikh at Asia Society, covering Iraq, Iran, the rise of China, and the new constraints on US power, Dr Gelb explains why he was initially in favor of a three-state partition of Iraq, and his advocacy now of a decentralized, federal state structure. He elaborates on his subsequent work with Senator Joe Biden on a plan for Iraq. In responding to a question about Russia, Dr Gelb says that the proposed US missile defense system is "nonsense", and on the issue of Iran's nuclear program, Dr Gelb insists that talks are essential and that the military option cannot be ruled out.

Prior to the invasion of Iraq, in an interview with CFR.org, you argued in favor of the Bush Administration's position with respect to the threat that Saddam Hussein posed to the US. In the same interview, you expressed surprise that the majority of the American population did not support an invasion. Four years after this, how do you reflect on your position then?

Well, I did think then that Saddam was a serious threat to the United States and that we had to use force against him. The question was when and how to do it. We should have played out the streak with the UN inspectors, played out the UN line, because I think we did have some chance of getting greater international support, which is very important. And we certainly needed the time to plan better for how to conduct this war and the aftermath. But then it didn't come down to that. It came down to whether to go or not go at that moment. And yes, I was in favor of going. I did believe then that he either had certain weapons of mass destruction or would have them within the next few years and that this was the time to deal with that threat.

It never entered my mind for a moment that this operation could be conducted with such lack of intelligence as to put us in our present predicament. And I still believe that had the military operation -- which was quite successful and quick -- been followed up with a sufficient number of troops and some understanding that there was a country like Iraq that was different from Nebraska there was a good chance that we could have brought this off. This wouldn't have been making Iraq into a democratic, free-market paradise. I never believed that for a moment. But it would have been a stable Iraq without Saddam. And so, yes, I was in favor of it and I had hoped that it could have had these beneficial results.

There was one thing I didn't think of and one thing other supporters of the war at the time did not think of which is that Saddam didn't have any of these weapons of mass destruction but was afraid to admit it since it would appear to be such weakness that he would open himself up to attack from Iran or revolt from within. And since we didn't consider what turned out to be the truth it distorted our notion of the threat he represented.

But if the main reason was the claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, what distinguished Iraq from other countries that have nuclear weapons and that are not very stable -- Pakistan among them, or North Korea?

Iraq is a major oil producer. It has the second largest reserves in the region. Saddam was a threat to our main oil supply in the Middle East -- a threat to us and our allies. North Korea, alas, sits on nothing.

You also said that the military operation in Iraq was quite successful and quick. On what basis do you say that?

We defeated the Iraqi troops that remained in the field and we removed the Saddam government and did it within a matter of a few weeks, and at minimum cost. The question is what we did after that.

No one doubted that we could do this -- win that part of the war quickly. That is, defeat Saddam's armies and oust his government in Baghdad. The question was what then?

In fact, I went to the administration before the start of the war and said what I just said to you right now, namely, "What then? What happens after military victory?" Military victory is the easy part. I asked whether it would be helpful to get some think tanks together to work on alternative strategies and priorities that will be urgent after military victory. I spoke to Condoleezza Rice and to Steve Hadley at the time. We arranged a meeting with a couple of other think tank heads in Condi's office. She was in favor of doing it, actually. The head of the American Enterprise Institute, Chris DeMuth, said at the meeting, "What is this meeting all about? This is about nation-building. You're against nation-building. The President is against nation-building. Don Rumsfeld is against nation-building. Dick Cheney is against nation-building. That was one of their main criticisms of the Clinton Administration. And now you're going to do nation-building in Iraq? Do they know about this project?" I responded by saying that it wasn't so much a nation-building project as a plan for the post-military victory period. What should the US do in Iraq so that there isn't chaos and worse? At any rate, he put the fear of God into Condi Rice and into Steve Hadley. And two weeks later they called me and said the project was finished before it began. So these were things that we had all thought about. By the way, George Packer in his book [The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq] verified the story I just told you.

Was anybody ever in doubt that the military operation so defined -- that is, defeating the Iraqi National Army and ousting Saddam Hussein's government -- would be relatively simple?

No, no. No one doubted that.

But no one anticipated what would come after that?

Well, a lot of people anticipated what would come after. The CIA certainly did as we can see from the National Intelligence Estimate which was published recently. In fact, everybody who knew anything about Iraq predicted just these kinds of problems -- maybe not as bad as they have been but that's only because they didn't realize we would be so stupid! For example, on oil production: Wolfowitz told the Congress that the Iraqis would pay for the war out of their oil production. Well, we went ahead on our own to do a Council [on Foreign Relations] study. We put together a Council Task Force and, of course, talked to the oil companies -- who know within an ounce every bit of oil in every country in the world, including Iraq under Saddam. They knew exactly what they could produce and what they could produce after a war with certain adjustments to their production capabilities. They said it would take five years before they could produce more than a couple billion dollars worth of oil. So this information about oil production and the revenues from it was available to the administration, too. I assume either they didn't get it or more likely, they ignored it. But people certainly knew what the problems would be.

You also said in the same interview that if the war went badly -- which, indeed, it has gone and continues to go -- Bush would probably be voted out of office. Why was he not voted out in 2004?

Because it wasn't observably bad enough. He deserved to be voted out of office and it was clear to people who were following it carefully but the Bush Administration and its supporters were throwing so much dust in the air that a lot of Americans were still confused about how bad the situation was. It really has been subsequent to the 2006 elections that Americans began to see more clearly what was going on. So they didn't know. If they had known I think he would have been defeated.

I will return to Iraq in a bit but there's another article of yours that I read in Foreign Affairs called "The Rise of Ethics in Foreign Policy", in which you say that moral principles -- in particular, although not exclusively, the emphasis on human rights -- have now become part of international affairs discourse and that this is a good thing, and that it cannot be confused with or perceived as a contemporary version of the white man's burden. You cite the value-laden language of the lead-up to the Iraq war as an example: promoting democracy, human rights, spreading freedom and so on. The question I want to ask is that even in the most ghastly of empires in the 19th century -- the Belgians in the Congo -- the professed goals of the intervention were always benevolent. The Belgians, for example, went to the Congo saying they were going to end slavery, build railroads, spread progress and freedom. So what, in your mind, actually differentiates the language (and the practice) now from then?

Well, I'm not sure a lot does distinguish the two. In the United States, human rights considerations were not a major part of US foreign policy until the Carter Administration. And there was a big fuss in the Carter Administration over exactly what role they should play. Some people, like myself, believed that it was important to stand up for our values and to do what we could to promote tolerance, and did not view this as a trade-off in most cases to focusing on our other national interests. In this piece you cite, I don't talk about promoting democracy or demanding human rights changes as any near-term fixes that the United States is capable of achieving nor that we should subordinate security or major foreign policy concerns to them over the short- and medium-term. To me they are the kind of long-term goals that should be built into our policy and our efforts to push them in other societies should be consistent with their history and culture. The problem was that the consensus on these values mattering became a consensus to act now, to change the world tomorrow. And both Republicans and Democrats were guilty of it.

And you see this as happening after the Cold War or during the Carter Administration?

It happened, really, during both the Carter and Reagan administrations. It's Carter who introduced these things as immediate concerns in foreign policy, and not just the long-term development of democracy -- which was part of the Roosevelt and Truman policies. Carter was mainly concerned with human rights violations in right-wing regimes. When Reagan came in, he extended those concerns to left-wing regimes as well -- as should have been the case all along in any event. I thought it was good that this matter was lifted out of politics -- that is, the Democrats weren't getting attacked because they cared about human rights because now the Republicans were in favor of doing something about human rights as well. But what happened, as I said in the piece, was that they lost sight of what was practical to accomplish in what time-frame.

Going back to Iraq, in an op-ed written for The New York Times in late 2003, you argued for the partition of Iraq -- the "three-state solution", as you termed it. With the plan you subsequently drafted with Senator Biden you explicitly moved away from partition to advocating a decentralized, federal state. Could you tell me what accounted for this transition?

In the piece, I felt that the laws of history were going to speak to the breakup of the state. I did say at the end of that piece that the best solution would be a confederation where the country would be kept together. But I doubted at that point that this was possible. I thought it would split apart and that nature would have its way on this and you would have a three-state solution. I thought then that this would be better than an all-out civil war, ethnic cleansing and so forth, which I thought would be inevitable otherwise. I wrote a piece about six months after that in The Wall Street Journal where I backed off from any notion of thinking of this as outright partition and the establishment of three separate, independent states because it seemed that it wasn't good for the Iraqis and that it increased the risks of regional war. So I adjusted the position and began to talk of it as a move toward federalism, as large-scale regional autonomy.

How much support has the Biden-Gelb plan received and from whom?

Well, a little -- not much, and actually more from Republicans than from Democrats. A lot of Republican Senators and Congressman have endorsed it. I think they have a better sense of reality than a lot of the Democrats. Democrats have been focused almost entirely on withdrawal, rather than on the possibility of a political settlement -- and that's a big problem. If Democrats imagine you can have anything other than all-out civil war in that country as a result of American withdrawal within a year, they're nuts. We owe it to ourselves and we certainly owe it to them to make an effort, a serious effort, at a political deal. Now what the Bush people have been doing is not a serious effort because they've been trying to make a political deal by creating a strong central government of national unity. Now, they've tried for four years and failed for four years. Because the fact of the matter is there is not enough trust or mutual confidence to allow this central government to function. The alternative to a strong central government is a federal government. And while that's hard and it's even harder now than it was before, it fits the reality of things. Here I go back to that original article three and a half years ago. The reality is it's not really one country; it's at least three countries that's been held together by brutal force for hundreds and hundreds of years. And now that that brutal centralizing force has been removed, the centrifugal forces will dominate.

There are many people who argue that the violence in Iraq is, in fact, exacerbated by the presence of the American military-

I agree.

According to this argument the military presence is part of the problem and not the solution.

I agree. I think withdrawals have to be thought of strategically as part of a process of pushing for a political settlement. You've got to tie the two together. I think our presence unites a lot of the Iraqis against us. Without setting an end date on it, our withdrawal over time would allow us to pursue real common interests with a lot of Iraqis that we can't pursue as long as we are there in force and represent the common enemy to a lot of them. The withdrawal process will open their minds to the common interests underneath that.

Let me say a little about what these common interests. In the case of the Sunnis in the center of the country, we have a powerful joined interest with the former Baathists and with all secularists -- and that's the majority of them -- against the jihadis. The jihadis are doing more damage to those Sunnis than they're doing to us. Once we allow the common interest to form, once they see that our presence is not permanent, they do not have to unite with fellow Muslims against us, we can unite with them against the jihadis and they'll do a much better job of ridding the country of the terrorists than we will. These are basically secular people and they don't want to be run by religious fanatics.

Now, in the south, we also have common interests with the Shias that can't come to the fore as long as there's a major US troop presence in the country. Again, they have to unite against us. They don't want us there as what they see as a permanent occupant. The Iraqi Shia have been slaves, in effect, for hundreds and hundreds of years. And they don't want to become slaves now to the Persian Shias. We can help them maintain their independence and that's what they want.

So withdrawal of US forces needs to be tied to this kind of strategy that gives us a chance at a political settlement. Otherwise, the withdrawal will just create the certainty of additional bloodshed for which we will be in good part responsible.

But what is the hesitation to a political settlement along the lines you suggest -- namely, a decentralized, federal framework -- together with a timetable for withdrawal?

Well, I think that the Democrats are so fixated on withdrawals they don't want to think of anything else. They think anything else gets in the way. They want out.

There are also some very good arguments against the federal approach. One is that the people are mixed together and how can we separate them? And the answer is -

But a federal structure wouldn't mean that you'd have to separate them at all. Only a partition would mean that.

Well, a federal structure where there would be a good deal of autonomy in each of the governments would involve separating them. A lot of people wouldn't feel safe in particular areas. My answer to that is we must offer to help people move and set them up if they want to do so, which is not a huge thing in Iraq. It's not like the Indians and Muslims at the end of the Raj. Another concern is that there isn't the capability at the local level for federal government. That's correct if you're talking about who is going to be the mayor of a town but if you're talking about who is going to run a regional government, the Kurds have already demonstrated they're quite capable of doing it. They've been doing it for 13 or 14 years now. The others could do it as well in other parts of the country. But these are legitimate concerns. There's also concern about how to deal with cities where there's considerable mixing of ethnic and religious groups. My answer to that is it's a tough problem but if they're interested in making the overall deal that's the best way we have of reducing the risks of their killing each other in the cities.

But where does the real opposition come from? The real opposition comes from our best friends in the region -- the Saudis and the Jordanians and the Gulfies. They have been the ones telling the administration that federalism is partition and that federalism, therefore, is death. Because their regimes are all predicated on centralized regimes. And if you let this snake into the house in Iraq it will slide into their domains as well and their governments will be in jeopardy. And our administration is very attentive to the views of the Saudis and the Jordanians and the others.

Not just this administration, of course.

Yes.

So moving beyond Iraq: Russian President Vladimir Putin has reacted strongly against US plans for a missile defense system, dismissing American claims that the system is directed against threats from Iran and North Korea. What do you see as the significance of this missile defense system now? And how do you think that the stand-off with the Russians can be resolved?

This defense missile system seems like nonsense to me. First of all, it doesn't work and there's no prospect of its working in any near-term sense. None of these tests really have been successful. Secondly, Iran -- and it's supposedly predicated on the threat from Iran -- is not likely to have this kind of capability for a number of years to come. And if the Iranians start testing, and we still regard them as a serious threat at that time, we could always go after the test sites, which seems a much more certain and far cheaper option than building a missile defense system. The Russians follow that same logic and wonder that if all this is true, then why the devil are the Americans building it? And their answer is not that the Americans are stupid and are overreacting. Their answer is they've got some subterfuge and they're really doing it against the Russians. We, who are often paranoid about what's going on in the world, ought to recognize paranoia in others. And that's the case in Russia.

So why are the Americans pursuing this missile defense system now?

Because there are a lot of people who think that the way to deal with Iran and North Korea down the line is to have the capability to knock down their missiles, since we probably won't be able to prevent their nuclear programs. For all the shouting and bluster of the administration about preventing North Korea and Iran and others from developing nuclear capability, I think they're beginning to get the picture that the only way to stop it may be invasion and they're not quite up to it at the moment.

So do you think that there should be serious consideration given to targeted military strikes against Iran's nuclear facilities?

I think that's always got to be an option and everyone has got to recognize it as something, under certain circumstances, that we might do.

There are many analysts, Zbigniew Brzezinski among them, who argue that persistent comments by American officials to the effect that the military option cannot be ruled out in fact impedes serious negotiations from taking place and strengthens Iranian nationalism. How would you respond to that?

I disagree with them. I wouldn't go around threatening every week or every month or every year. I would just have the capability to do it and everyone would recognize it. I just wouldn't make it an issue. We need that capability and there's no president of the United States who would want to be without it but I wouldn't go around threatening them; that's idiotic.

But everybody knows, obviously, that the US has the capability. The fact that it's stated in this language -- namely, the military option can't be taken off the table -- can be interpreted as a threat precisely for this reason: it's a threat that doesn't need to be made; it's quite self-evident what the US could do.

They might, they might. The United States retains the capability, under international law, to take pre-emptive action when we feel we're in imminent danger. No one disputes this; it is a fact of international law. I'm not talking about preventive war, which is what the Bush language was. It was much more. It went way beyond pre-emption saying that if we felt somebody could develop into a threat in the future we'll come after them. I think it had negative effects in Iran and elsewhere. But what I'm talking about is just having the capability and letting it speak for itself. The United States has had that capability forever. And people didn't make it an issue until Bush made it an issue.

I just wonder why it is that it needs to be stated. Do you agree that American officials repeatedly insisting that no option can be removed-

It's foolishness. All we need is the capability. If someone asks the question we can just say, "We don't take any options off the table because we have to be able to protect our country." We're not threatening them but we have the capability to protect ourselves.

Do you think that negotiations between the Americans and Iranians could resolve this situation?

Who knows? But you don't know unless you do the diplomacy.

So you would advocate direct talks?

Absolutely, you have to have diplomacy. It's idiotic not to be talking to them. It's a way of expressing your power. It's a way of finding out information. And you can't find it out through the Swiss!

A number of analysts, including senior representatives of the American foreign policy establishment, have predicted a decline in US hegemony and an eventual shift in power towards Asia, specifically China. Others point to the fact that this fear of American decline may just be part of the general insecurity and fear generated by the present administration since, as Fareed Zakaria says in a recent article, "By almost all objective standards, the United States sits on top of the world." How do you respond to this?

We do sit on top of the world but we can't dictate to the world.

Do you think US hegemony is in decline?

I don't think we ever had hegemony.

Do you think US power is diminishing in the world?

I think US power in the modern world -- as vast as our power is -- is limited and constrained by the power of others to resist and the cost of overcoming that resistance. This is what I'm writing about in the book I'm just finishing. It's a book about international power in the 21st century and it addresses the issue of how the United States is the greatest power in history and yet others don't do what we tell them to do. This is because there are severe constraints and limitations on being able to exercise your power. This does not mean we're powerless or that we resort to force in order to get our way. It means that we have to learn how to use power in a different way than we're used to. That's what the book talks about.

So do you think the US is less powerful now than it was, say, six years ago?

I don't think we're less powerful than we were six years ago. We're less powerful in the Western world or the industrialized, democratic world than we were during the Truman and Eisenhower years.

But, you know, just in terms of raw resources we're even more powerful. US military spending, for example, now equals that of almost all other countries on the earth put together. If I'm not mistaken, we represented about 20 per cent of the world GDP in 1980 and we're at 29 per cent today. So by those objective measurements the United States is far and away the most powerful country in the world. The question is what can we do with that power? And the answer is not nearly as much as the major powers could do with their superiority in the good old days gone by.

When were those good old days?

Well, I think they lasted more or less up till after World War II, until there was the widespread creation of other nation states. The ability of these nation states to resist was far greater than what major powers faced in years gone by. Also, if you had serious disputes then -- namely throughout history -- they could be resolved by military force. And now the constraints on that are much greater.

How do you think the US should be responding to the rise of China? Do you see China as a threat to US power in any sense?

Of course they're competition for US power -- in some sense a threat to US power, but that's life. And they're playing the game now from a position of relative inferiority to us and they're playing it better. They're getting more out of their limited power than we are out of our maximum power.

And why is that?

Because I think they have a better sense of how to deal with nation states, real political enemies.

Other nation states?

Yes, other nation states. We still go by the laws of command. We tell them to do this or do that, not recognizing the obvious: there will be resistance to such commands. They're not like the good old maharajas and tribal chieftains who you could send off to Oxford or make an economic deal with and then run the country. It's a very different beast now. The cost of overcoming the leadership in these nation states is very high, and their incentive to resist us is very high. So you've got to approach them in a different way. That's really what I'm writing about. I think it's the central question in US foreign policy today.

But since America was never an imperial power in that sense, with maharajas and tribal chiefs and so on, where did they learn this kind of exercise of power?

Well, we did it early on. Basically we conquered a third of our country -- Texas, Southern California, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada -- in a war with Mexico. And we invented, created, and bullied them into a war, and beat them. We never like to talk about it but we did it. We did the same with the Spanish at the end of the 1800s. We precipitated a war with them. We took away their little goodies here and there, all the while proclaiming that we were for freedom and independence. But all that said, we're mainly better than the other major powers throughout history. We weren't quite as aggressive and we weren't quite as greedy.

Although of course there are people who argue that the country was built on genocide-

Well, of course. It was built on the genocide of the Indians. There's no question about it. It was built on the backs of the African slaves. And Americans who preach our eternal goodness seem to forget these things. Other nations don't.

So you're not actually lamenting the fact that the ability to exercise power of this kind has been lost?

Yes, I do lament it. Because basically we've passed our genocidal phase and our expansionist phase and we are relatively the most benign of the major powers!

Today?

Yes. And I would say for the 20th century, too.

Well, many people have suggested that one of the biggest casualties of the Bush administrations -- both of them -- has been America's standing in the world. Public opinion surveys around the world seem to corroborate this. Do you agree? And if so, what are some of the steps that the next president can take to rectify this?

There's no question we've lost standing in the world and that in many places we're not considered the good guy anymore. We're certainly not considered as good a guy as we consider ourselves! Most Americans understand this has become a problem. There are some neo-cons and others who think it's not a problem and that everyone still really loves us; they're in la-la land.

It's a problem, and it's a problem because when you have people in many countries around the world thinking that China is a better force for peace than the United States, it means that it gets progressively harder for our government, for government in Washington, to gain the cooperation of their political leadership because it's bad politics for them to work with us, given the attitudes of their people about us. So we pay a real price.

When Bush departs a lot of the problem will go away just with his return to Crawford, Texas. No next president can be as woeful a symbol of American values as George Bush.

The next president, I think, will start with some goodwill and if the next administration has any sense of how to talk to people who are quite intelligent and better informed than many American people, then we'll begin to fix the problem. I don't think there's an inherent problem with the United States. I think there is an inherent problem of our thinking our values are universal because they aren't anymore. Again, I think there was a time after World War II where we stood for things that were generally shared by most of the colonies, soon to be nations, of the world. They did believe in freedom and independence and tolerance and democracy. I think a lot of it got warped and sidetracked and there's much less consensus on universal values today.

Also there's dissonance, essentially, on what constitutes economic justice, which is a big part of what you consider human freedom. That's why a lot of the world started to turn anti-United States under Clinton, who was an advocate of globalization. Everyone thought the world loved Clinton but they identified Clinton with globalization, and properly so, and considered that a form of economic injustice. There's also a difference in terms of political justice because it's simply true that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. And in most cases people we regard as terrorists are regarded as freedom fighters in many parts of the world. So the days of being able to attain universal values, I think, are gone.

Which party do you think would be best up for the task ahead?

I think it's less a matter of party and more a matter of the individual in the White House. I think Democrats are more sensitive to the views of others around the world than a lot of the Republicans are. But it's not just a matter of sensitivity. It's a matter of understanding the complexities of life and there I think the parties are more or less on a par!