Maybe some more European governments can be sucked into the next "coalition of the willing". But this is not the point.
The question is whether we can hope for a major foreign policy change under a new administration. Mr. Prather does not seem to believe that real multilateralism is possible, given that the interests of certain security council members more often than not conflict with those of the US.
Maybe he is wrong -- but what would be the requirements for real change? Mr Habermas, widely noted and eminent liberal voice in Germany throughout the last 35 years (rumor has it that he coached our current foreign minister before the latter took office), published some observations and suggestions in this respect a year or so ago.
Since the translation is in the public domain, and the German original is publicly available at a German government site (state of Thueringen, see below), I guess it is ok to quote a lengthy excerpt here (emphasis mine):
______________________________________________________________
Translation of: "Was bedeutet der Denkmalsturz?" in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 17 April, 2003, p. 33; translation by habhamaf;
http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/a-list/2003w19/msg00001.htm PDF with scan of article in German:
http://www.thueringen.de/tkm/akt2003/rundbrief/rundbrief07b.pdf ______________________________________________________________
What does the felling of the monument mean?
by Jürgen Habermas
Let us not close our eyes before this revolution in world affairs: the normative authority of America lies shattered
(...)
On the face of it everything is clear-cut. An illegal war remains an offence against international law even if it leads to consequences which are normatively desirable. But is that the end of the story? Undesirable consequences can negate a good intention. Couldn't perhaps favorable consequences unfold, retrospectively, a legitimating influence? The mass graves, the subterranean cells and the reports of the tortured leaves no doubt about the criminal nature of the regime; and the liberation of a tormented population from a barbaric regime is a high good, the highest under the politically desirable goods. In this respect the Iraqis pronounce, whether they celebrate, loot, suffer apathetically or demonstrate against the occupiers, a judgment upon the moral nature of the war.
With us (in Germany) two kinds of reactions have become apparent in the political sphere.
The pragmatists believe in the normative power of the factual and place their faith in a practical judgment which, with an eye on the limitations which politics imposes on the realization of morality, pays its respects to the fruits of victory. In their eyes carping about the justification of the war is fruitless, since this has now become a historical fact.
The others, whether capitulating before the power of the factual out of opportunism or out of conviction, brush what they hold to be the dogma of international law aside with the argument that the latter - full of post-heroic squeamishness against the risks and costs of military force - refuses to acknowledge political freedom as the true good.
Both of these reactions are off the mark, since they give in to an affect against the ostensible abstractions of a 'bloodless moralism' without clarifying for themselves just what it is that the neo-conservatives in Washington are offering as an alternative to the domesticization of state force by international law.
For the neo-conservatives confront the morality of international law not with realism or with the pathos of freedom but with a quite revolutionary perspective: when international law fails then the politically successful hegemonic enforcement of a liberal world order is morally justifiable even when it seeks recourse to means which are indefensible in the light of such international law.
(...)
But global power ambition is not an end in itself for the new ideologues. What distinguishes the neo-conservatives from the school of the 'realists' is the vision of an American world political order which has jumped the reformist rails of the UN policies on human rights. It does not betray the liberal goals, but it does break the civilizing bounds which the charter of the United Nations placed with good reason upon the process of goal-realization.
The world organization is certainly not yet in a position, today, to force deviant member states into offering their citizens a democratic and rule-of-law based order.
And the highly selectively pursued human rights policies are subject to the proviso of implementability: the veto-power Russia needs not fear an armed intervention in Chechnya. Saddam Hussein's use of nerve gas against his own Kurdish population is but one of many instances in the scandalous chronicle of the failure of the community of nations, which looks the other way even in cases of genocide.
All the more important is hence the core function of peace-keeping, on which the existence of the United Nations is based - i.e. the enforcement of the ban on wars of aggression, with which, after World War II, the jus ad bellum was abolished and the sovereignty of individual states curtailed. With that, classical international law had at least taken one decisive step in the direction of a cosmopolitan legal order.
The United States - which for half a century could claim to be a pacemaker on this road - has, with the Iraq war, not only destroyed this reputation and given up the role of a guarantor power in international law; with its violation thereof she sets future superpowers a disastrous example.
Let's not kid ourselves: America's normative authority lies shattered.
(...)
The comparison with the intervention in Kosovo also offers no exoneration. It is true that an authorization by the Security Council in this case was not reached either. But the retrospectively obtained legitimation could be based upon three circumstances: on the prevention - as it seemed at the time - of an ethnic cleansing in the process of taking place, on the imperative - covered by international law - of emergency assistance holding erga omnes for this case, as well as the incontrovertibly democratic and constitutional character of all the member states of the ad hoc military alliance.
Today the normative controversy is dividing the West itself.
Admittedly, a remarkable difference in the argumentative strategies between the continental European and the Anglo-Saxon powers had begun to manifest itself already then, in April of 1999. While the one side drew from the disaster of Srebrenica the lesson that military intervention was necessary to close the gap between efficacy and legitimacy which earlier missions had revealed - to make headway in the direction of a fully institutionalized world civil rights - the other side was content with the goal of spreading its own liberal order elsewhere in the world, by force if necessary. At the time I ascribed this to differences in the respective legal traditions - Kant's cosmopolitanism on the one hand, John Stuart Mill's liberal nationalism on the other.
But in the light of the hegemonic unilateralism which the policy theorists of the Bush Doctrine have been pursuing since 1991 - as Stefan Frühlich showed in this newspaper on 10th April - one could surmise, with hindsight, that the American delegation was already pursuing the negotiations of Rambouillet from this novel perspective.
(...)
This doctrine was developed long before the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers. The cleverly instrumentalized mass psychology of the shock of 11 September did however first of all create the climate within which this doctrine could find broad support - if in a somewhat modified version, that of the "War against Terrorism". That it should come to a head in the Bush Doctrine is something it owes to the definition of a novel phenomenon in the familiar concepts of conventional warfare. In the case of the Taliban regime there was indeed a causal connection between a terrorism difficult to pin down and an attackable 'rogue state'. According to this model it is possible to adapt the classical conduct of war between nations to deal with that treacherous danger posed by diffuse and globally operating (terror-)networks. Compared to the original version, this connection of hegemonic unilateralism with defense against an insidious danger mobilizes the additional argument of self-defense.
(...)
The Iraq war is a link in the chain of a global politics which justifies itself by claiming that it has replaced the unavailing Human Rights policies of a used-up world organization. The United States takes over as it were the mandate in which the United Nations failed. What's to be said against this?
Moral feelings can lead one astray, since they stick to individual scenes, to specific images. There's no way of avoiding the question of the justification of the war in general.
The decisive controversy revolves around the question whether justification in the light of international law can and should be replaced by the unilateral global politics of a self-empowering hegemon. (...)
Even if this hegemonic unilateralism were realizable it would still have side-effects which would, by its own criteria, be morally undesirable. The more that political power manifests itself in the dimensions of military, secret service and police, the more does it undermine itself - the politics of a globally operating civilizing power - by endangering its own mission of improving the world according to liberal ideas.
In the United States itself, the permanent regime of a "War President" is already undermining the foundations of the rule of law. Quite apart from the practiced or tolerated torture methods beyond its borders, the war regime is not only denying the prisoners of Guantnamo Bay the legal rights conferred on them by the Geneva Convention. It confers powers on the security services which encroach on the constitutional rights of its own citizens.
(...)
In 1991 the Americans liberated Kuwait - democratize it they did not. Most of all it is the superpower's presumptuous trusteeship which is criticized by its coalition partners, who are, for good normative reasons, unconvinced by the unilateral leadership claim.
There was a time when Liberal Nationalism felt itself justified in propagating the universal values of its own liberal order throughout the world, with military backing where needed. This self-righteousness does not become any more sufferable by it being ceded from the nation State to a hegemonic power.
It is the very universalistic core of democracy and human rights itself which forbids its universal propagation by fire and sword. The universalistic validity claim which the West associates with its 'political core values' - i.e. with the procedure of democratic self-determination and the vocabulary of human rights - may not be confused with the imperial demand that the political life-form and culture of a particular democracy--and be it the oldest--is to be exemplary for all other societies.
Of this order was the 'universalism' of those ancient empires which perceived the world beyond their borders - shimmering on a distant horizon - from the central perspectives of their own world-views.
The modern self-understanding is on the contrary marked by an egalitarian universalism which insists on the de-centering of each specific perspective; it requires the relativization of one's own interpretive perspective from the point of view of the autonomous Other.
It was American Pragmatism itself which made insight into that which was good and just to all parties concerned dependent upon a reciprocal acceptance of mutual perspectives.
The reason upon which modern rational law is based is not expressed in the validity of universal 'values' capable of being owned, exported, and distributed globally. 'Values' - including those for which one could expect global recognition - don't hang in the air; they become binding only in the normative order and practices of specific cultural forms of life.
When in Nasiriya thousands of Shiites demonstrate against Saddam and the American occupation, they bring to expression that non-Western cultures must appropriate the universalistic content of human rights from within their own resources and within an interpretation which can make a convincing connection to local experiences and interests.
For that reason, the multilateral formulation of a common purpose is not one option amongst others - especially not in international relations.
In its self-chosen isolation, even the good hegemon (presuming for itself trusteeship in the name of the common good) has no way of knowing whether the actions it claims to be in the interests of others is indeed equally good for all.
There is no meaningful alternative to the further cosmopolitan development of an international system of law in which the voices of all concerned are given an equal and reciprocal hearing. The world organization has not as yet suffered irreparable damage. Since the 'smaller' members did not buckle under to the bullying of the larger ones, it has even grown in stature and influence. The reputation of the world organization can be damaged only by its own actions: if it should seek to 'heal' by compromise what cannot be healed.
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