When "Diplomacy" Means War
By Norman Solomon
04/19/06 "HuffingtonPost" -- - One of the nation's leading
pollsters, Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center, wrote a few
weeks ago that among Americans "there is little potential
support for the use of force against Iran." This month the White
House has continued to emphasize that it is committed to seeking
a diplomatic solution. Yet the U.S. government is very likely to
launch a military attack on Iran within the next year. How can
that be?
In the run-up to war, appearances are often deceiving. Official
events may seem to be moving in one direction while policymakers
are actually headed in another. On their own timetable, White
House strategists implement a siege of public opinion that
relies on escalating media spin. One administration after
another has gone through the motions of staying on a diplomatic
track while laying down flagstones on a path to war.
Several days ago President Bush said that "the doctrine of
prevention is to work together to prevent the Iranians from
having a nuclear weapon" -- and he quickly added that "in this
case, it means diplomacy." On April 12 the Secretary of State,
Condoleezza Rice, urged the U.N. Security Council to take
"strong steps" in response to Iran's announcement of progress
toward enriching uranium. Bush and Rice were engaged in a
timeworn ritual that involves playacting diplomacy before taking
military action.
Seven years ago, President Clinton proclaimed that a U.S.-led
NATO air war on Yugoslavia was starting because all peaceful
avenues for dealing with the Serbian president, Slobodan
Milosevic, had reached dead ends. The Clinton administration and
the major U.S. media outlets failed to mention that Washington
had handed Milosevic a poison-pill ultimatum in the fine print
of the proposed Rambouillet accords -- with Appendix B
stipulating that NATO troops would have nearly unlimited run of
the entire Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
Recent decades of American history are filled with such faux
statesmanship: greasing the media wheels and political machinery
for military interventions in Southeast Asia, the Caribbean,
Central America and the Middle East. But the current
administration's eagerness to use "diplomacy" as a prop for
going to war has been unusually brazen.
On Jan. 31, 2003 -- five days before the ballyhooed speech by
then-Secretary of State Colin Powell to the U.N. Security
Council -- the president held a private Oval Office meeting with
Tony Blair. Summing up the discussion, which occurred nearly two
months before the invasion of Iraq, the British prime minister's
chief foreign policy adviser David Manning noted in a memo: "Our
diplomatic strategy had to be arranged around the military
planning." Meanwhile, President Bush and his top aides were
still telling the public that they were pursuing all diplomatic
channels in hopes of preventing war.
Pundits have often advised presidents to use diplomatic
maneuvers as virtual shams in order to legitimize the coming
warfare. Charles Krauthammer blew his stack in mid-November 1998
when U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan seemed to make progress
in averting a U.S. missile strike against Iraq. "It is perfectly
fine for an American president to mouth the usual pieties about
international consensus and some such," Krauthammer wrote in
Time magazine. "But when he starts believing them, he turns the
Oval Office over to Kofi Annan and friends."
In late summer 2002, with momentum quickening toward an Iraq
invasion, Newsweek foreign affairs columnist Fareed Zakaria
urged the Bush administration to recognize the public-relations
value of allowing U.N. weapons inspectors to spend some time in
Iraq. "Even if the inspections do not produce the perfect
crisis," he wrote optimistically, "Washington will still be
better off for having tried because it would be seen to have
made every effort to avoid war."
When reality can't hold a candle to perception, then reality is
apt to become imperceptible. And in matters of war and peace,
when powerful policy wonks in Washington effectively strive for
appearances to be deceiving, the result is a pantomime of
diplomacy that's scarcely like the real thing. When the actual
goal is war, the PR task is to make a show of leaving no
diplomatic stone unturned.
That kind of macabre ritual was underway on April 10 when the
White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, told reporters:
"The president has made it very clear that we're working with
the international community to find a diplomatic solution when
it comes to the Iranian regime and its pursuit of nuclear
weapons." The quote appeared the next morning in a New York
Times news article under a headline that must have pleased the
war planners at the White House: "Bush Insists on Diplomacy in
Confronting a Nuclear Iran."
Ambrose Bierce defined diplomacy as "the patriotic act of lying
for one's country." But there is nothing less patriotic than
lying to one's country -- especially when the result is a war
that could have been avoided if honesty had substituted for
mendacity.
Copyright © 2006 HuffingtonPost.com.
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