Colin James: Distilling an ethic for the jungle that is foreign policy

No weapons of mass destruction have been found and time is getting on. Not a good look for George W. Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard who gave such arms as their top reason for invading Iraq.

Weapons may yet be found. But the United States has moved the target: the evidence will come from "the scientists, not the sand dunes", academic and former US presidential adviser Richard Allen, still influential in Washington, told the Otago University foreign policy school on Sunday. The issue is capability to produce, not actual existence.

Maybe - but was it ethical to build a case around the weapons, suggesting a large and imminent threat?

This question is pertinent: "the ethics of foreign policy" was the foreign policy school's topic.

New York Times columnist Tom Friedman is interesting on the point. The real, unstated reason for the invasion, this well-connected journalist wrote, was to show the Arab-Muslim world that Americans would fight to defend the open society. Iraq was targeted because Saddam Hussein was "vulnerable, deserved it and was in the midst of that world", Friedman wrote.

Neighbouring governments have got the message: don't harbour, tolerate or even tacitly encourage terrorists.

That sounds like naked power politics. Allen demurs.

The new terrorism is stateless and the Islamist version is fuelled by "religious schools that teach hatred of the West and promote violence and terror as a means of wiping the world clean of Jews and Western culture and influence", he said.

"Soft diplomacy" won't counter this. "Only if we begin to think in these [Islamist] terms - within the concept of irreconcilability - will we begin to grasp the dimensions of this larger conflict."

This is the basis of Bush's "war on terror" launched after September 11, 2001. It is a "long-term project".

Iraq, on this reading, was an incident in this long war. Its object: change the regime. Its ethic: the defence of democratic values.

The latter has had some resonance in New Zealand. It was a driver in Helen Clark's rapid commitment of troops to Afghanistan. She is a warrior on terror. Her difference with Bush on Iraq was over means and targets.

But was she right? Can the ethic of multilateralism, reliance on the United Nations, work against the new terrorists?

Barry Cooper, of Calgary University, told the foreign policy school that the new terrorists know they are doing wrong - killing innocents - but do it for some fantasised greater good or apocalypse which is, in fact, unattainable.

They cannot be reasoned with. They may be alongside, for example, a freedom-fighting movement but they do not share those more rational combatants' realisable aims and ability to compromise.

And, being stateless and networked rather than hierarchical, decapitating their leadership does not necessarily disable them.

Hence Allen's aggressive message: "The United States will not sit passively by as the capacity to traffic in such weapons grows."

But is the response commensurate with the threat? And does it warrant the damage to the rule of international law the unilateral invasion may have caused?

No, says Campbell Craig, an American teaching at Canterbury University. Islamic terrorism is "not fundamentally threatening to United States civilisation".

So, adjust Allen's "democratic values". Michael Smith, of the University of Virginia, noted to the foreign policy school that the US's justification had shifted since the war from weapons of mass destruction to the humanitarian value of having removed a nasty dictator.

This opens up a different can of ethical worms. At the foreign policy school was Nick Wheeler, of Wales University, who advised the Canadian-sponsored international commission which developed the notion of states' "responsibility to protect" their citizens, failing which, other states might (ought to?) responsibly intervene.

But no national leaders, including Clark, invoked that doctrine for Iraq. Why? It strikes at the centuries-old convention of inviolable nation-state sovereignty.

This convention turns foreign affairs into the pursuit of self-interest - realism, rather than ethics. As the dominant superpower the US can - and now intends to - enforce its self-interest.

For a small country like New Zealand, Craig (whose paper was on realism) suggested a realist response to such an American policy was to work through diplomacy and the UN to uphold international law. (He did not suggest Australia's realist alternative: line up with the US.)

Now turn this around. In the South Pacific, New Zealand is a big country. It is about to send police and troops to the Solomon Islands. Isn't that a bit like Iraq?

No. It is at the request of the legal Solomons Government, has UN officials' and Commonwealth officials' endorsement and is contingent on regional Pacific governments' approval.

So it is ethical in law and on humanitarian grounds. And, you might say, it discharges the "responsibility to protect".

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