Igor Ivanov Addresses International Conference "Wars in the 21st Century (2000-2014)"

On February 27, 2014 RIAC President Igor Ivanov addressed the international conference "Wars in the 21st Century (2000-2014)" organized by UNESCO and UN University in Paris. Dr. Ivanov focused on analyzing the causes, consequences and lessons from the American-led coalition's intervention in Iraq in 2003 and general issues of strengthening global and regional security in the current global environment.

On February 27, 2014 RIAC President Igor Ivanov addressed the international conference "Wars in the 21st Century (2000-2014)" organized by UNESCO and UN University in Paris.

Dr. Ivanov focused on analyzing the causes, consequences and lessons from the American-led coalition's intervention in Iraq in 2003 and general issues of strengthening global and regional security in the current global environment.

Conference Program

Text of the speech by Igor Ivanov:

1.  Ladies and gentlemen! First of all, I would like to congratulate the United Nations University and UNESCO for the event that summoned all of us here today. Unfortunately, in the modern world of the XXI century wars do not belong only to history textbooks; military conflicts continue to erupt in many corners of our planet. And, of course, a thorough analysis of cases like Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and others remain an important task: nobody today can guarantee that such situations will not happen again in future.

All of the above mentioned conflicts have their own history, their evolution and dynamics. However, there is one very important aspect which unites all of them: inability of international community to prevent those conflicts, to avoid human deaths and destructions. The analysis of these conflicts is required not to play blame game, but to work out joint conclusions, which will let in future not to make the same errors over again.

2. Since the time of my presentation is quite limited, I will focus my presentation on the crisis in Iraq in which I was personally involved in many dimensions.

I would like to share with you some of my reflections around three questions. First, was the war in Iraq inevitable or was it rather a chain of mistakes and miscalculations? Second, what are the consequences of the Iraqi war for the country itself, for the regional and global stability? Third, can we avoid such wars in future, and if we can, then what the international community should do together in this regard?

3. The Iraqi war was one of the first major post-Cold war conflicts; therefore many observers link it to the end of the Cold war. Indeed, the collapse of the bi-polar international system did contribute to many regional instabilities, including such a complex and explosive region as the Middle East. But the roots of Middle East instability cannot be reduced to geopolitical factors; they are much deeper and they go to the fundamental political, social and economic transformation of the Arab world. The end of the Cold war unleashed powerful forces in the Middle East, but it did not produce them. External players have only very limited capacities to influence this historic transformation of the region. However, external players can at least assist this transformation to be as smooth, painless and orderly as possible. 

4. I happen to believe that after the Cold war we had a real chance to handle many Middle East problems in a constructive multilateral fashion. There was a broad consensus among major players on most important regional issues ranging from nuclear proliferation to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Acting together, we could have better prepared ourselves and the region for the coming Arab awakening. Unfortunately, this historic opportunity was missed and not only in that region. I do not imply that we should blame everything on the US policy, but I still believe that the Administration of George Bush ‘the junior’ has to take most of responsibility for the grim outcomes of the second Iraqi war. As we all now know, the US led intervention had resulted from either a mistake or from somebody not telling the truth. Our good friend Colin Powel speaks very frankly saying in one of his books: “None of us knew that much of the evidence was wrong. If we had known there were no WMD’s, there would have been no war”. In other words Americans started the war, without clear evidences of what they had publicly declared.

Moreover, the decision to launch the invasion was made by the George W. Bush administration in circumvention of the UN Security Council.

5. The results of the operation in Iraq have proved very grave indeed. First of all, for the people of Iraq. Hundreds of thousands have been killed; the death toll continues to climb up. As a result of the collapse of state institutions there was a massive upsurge of sectarian and communal violence; separatism is still a very real danger for the leadership in Bagdad. The country’s economy has not yet fully recovered; and acts of terrorism have become a daily occurrence. I do not want to be misunderstood – I have been in no way a champion or a supporter of the Saddam Hussein’s regime, but for many ordinary Iraqis the cure turned out to be worse than the illness. If we try to have an unbiased look at the scale of the human suffering in Iraq over the last ten years, we should conclude that the occupation regime in very many cases failed to meet any reasonable criteria of providing protection to the population of the country. In other words, it is hard to justify the war appealing to the concept of ‘responsibility to protect’.

6. But, of course, the negative outcomes of the second Iraq war were not limited to the country itself. Its regional implications were severe as well. The war had a profound detrimental impact on the Middle East at large, disrupting a very delicate regional balance of powers and feeding political extremism and terrorism. Saddam Hussein was at least capable of keeping Al Qaeda out of Iraq; the occupation regime was much less efficient in reaching this objective. Moreover, many of old animosities and rivalries between states of the region received a major boost. It’s hardly accidental that after the Iraqi war we stopped talking about the “comprehensive Middle East peace settlement”. It would not be an overstatement to argue that even the current tragic situation in Syria is not completely unrelated to the events in Iraq ten years ago.

7. I would venture to say that the second Iraq war had significant global implications as well. It produced a deep split between key global players, dividing the international community into two camps: those who supported the intervention and those who opposed it. It raised questions about the indispensable role of the UN Security Council in matters related to global and regional security. It also questioned some of the fundamental principles of international public law. Its impact on the international nonproliferation regime was clearly detrimental. In sum, the war became a major step back in our common attempts to move ahead to a new, stable and predictable global security system.

8. It also fueled anti-American sentiments in all corners of the world, put under question the whole idea of the US global leadership. The American society – like the European one – was deeply divided over the war, not to mention huge financial costs and the loss of lives of a couple of thousands of men and women in the coalition forces. On a personal note, I can tell you that after the war in Iraq it became much more difficult for me as foreign minister to convince the Russian public that we still needed to promote more cooperation between Moscow and Washington. To cut the long story short, there were no winners in this war – all of us ended as losers.

9. Was it possible to resolve the nuclear problem of Iraq in a non-military way? I am convinced that we had an alternative. Persistent efforts of the international community that lasted for years before the war resulted with building a unique system of international monitoring. The system was not only capable of eliminating all the components needed to produce nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. It was also capable of guaranteeing that Iraq would not get engaged in developing such weapons in future. International commissions headed by Mohamed ElBaradei and Hans Blix made this point very clear in their reports to the United Nations Security Council. In other words, the international community demonstrated that it had at its disposal legitimate instruments to assure political enforcement of the non-proliferation regime. In order to use these instruments we need political will exercised by major powers, consensus among them and respect to fundamental norms of international law. 

10. All what I’ve just said – are well-known facts. But it would not harm to get back to them from time to time. Not to look for scapegoats or to engage oneself in political demagogy, but to make sure that situations like what we’ve seen in Iraq will not happen in future in other places. Unfortunately, the dramatic events in Libya suggest that not everybody has learnt the right lessons from the tragedy in Iraq. At the same time, there are reasons to believe that changes for the better are still possible. For example, it would not be an over exaggeration to argue that the majority of the American public as well as of the US Congress deprived the Obama Administration of supporting a unilateral military action against Syria keeping in mind, along with other factors, all the harmful consequences of the Iraq gamble. The first steps in the political settlement of the Syrian crisis and the Iranian nuclear problem also suggest that that there is a growing understanding of the need to jointly develop a new system of international security that would match the challenges and threats of the XXI century. 

11. So, what do we need to do in order to prevent the world sliding down to a new Cold war as some of politicians already predict? How can we make the world safer, more secure and more stable for everybody? Of course, there are many ideas and proposals on what should be done to reach this goal. All of them can be considered and discussed. As far as I am concerned, I tend to believe that it would be a mistake to try to invent any new structures, which are not rooted in our history and in today’s practice. I am more than convinced that the international community already has at its disposal all the needed components to build a reliable system of global and regional security.

12. First and foremost, we have the United Nations to work with. UN remains and will remain an indispensable cornerstone of any international security system. However, the United Nations should reflect new realities and should meet the challenges and threats of the XXI century. Unfortunately, the UN reform, which was so actively discussed at the turn of the century, has not made a lot of progress. To make the United Nations more efficient and more productive we need, above all, change our attitudes to this institution. We can change UN only if its members – and, above all, great powers - will put their particularistic interests aside and commit themselves to working together in order to resolve pending security problems.

13. Naturally, UN cannot do it alone. An interconnected network of regional security institutions should shoulder the United Nations in building a new security regime. However, these regional institutions should seek to assist UN, not to replace it. When they start acting without a UN Security Council mandate (like it was the case with the NATO military action in former Yugoslavia) or interpret the UN mandate in an arbitrary self-serving way (the case of the operation in Libya), they undermine their own legitimacy and can, in the end of the day, generate new problems rather than produce lasting solutions to international crises.

14. The same approach, in my view, should be applied to ad hoc coalitions, which get together in order to address a specific security problem or a particular crisis situation. Their evident advantage is that an ad hoc coalition can be assembled very fast and each participating party can freely decide on the scale and on the format of its involvement in such a coalition. But ad hoc coalitions, like regional security institutions cannot and should not try to replace the United Nations in terms of the decision making. Without a clear and unambiguous UN Security Council mandate, ad hoc coalitions’ actions, no matter how benign and benevolent they might look, turn out to be detrimental to long term interests of international security.

15. Finally, we should not underestimate the role of bilateral agreements between major powers in promoting regional and global security. In the modern interdependent world security is indivisible: if bilateral relations are constructive, stable and predictable, their positive impact on the overall system of international security is also quite significant.

16. To sum up, the emerging system of international security can be compared to a pyramid with the United Nations and its Security Council at the very top of it. The second layer of the pyramid embraces major regional security organizations and integrationist institutions. At the third layer we have ad hoc coalitions and flexible international regimes to handle specific dimensions of international security. Finally, the bottom of the pyramid consists of multiple interlocking bilateral agreements, treaties and other arrangements between states. All layers are interconnected, and each of them is plays its own specific role without trying to replace or to undermine all others.

17. This structure can be successful only if there are fair, clear and universally accepted rules of the game to serve it. In other words, the role of international law is critical. Like in case with the United Nations, there are many critics of the contemporary system of international public law. And the criticism is in many cases absolutely justified. However, the imperfections of international law should not be an excuse to ignore it or to interpret it in a self-serving and biased way. I am convinced that only working together we can modernize international law and develop it further, so that would fully reflect the new realities and new challenges of the XXI century. 

18. All of us admire ancient Egyptian pyramids. Can our generation build a pyramid of international security to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war? That is the question.