Celebrating 90 Years - Foreign Policy Association

who arrived a few days after I did, the Coalition
Provisional Authority did develop a plan. We
started the transition to Iraqi-led governance, but
we started too late. The murder of U.N. Representative
Sergio de Mello was a big blow. We
faced a violent insurgency, fueled from Syria and
Iran, that gave us and the Iraqi people five painful
years.
We deployed overwhelming military force
to overthrow Saddam. In retrospect, that was
the easy bit. Afterward, we needed a plan and
the resources, both civilian and military, to help
a new and better stability emerge quickly. As
the pottery store notice says, “If you break it, you
own it.” Iraq was, and is, partly our responsibility
until it can stand on its own feet again.
I think the recent progress in Basra and
Baghdad is welcome. Coalition efforts and a
newly confident Iraqi government and army show
that stabilizing Iraq is possible, even though it
has been longer and more painful than any of us
envisaged.
I am telling you this because foreign policy
happens in real life, in clashes of hard interests
and ambitions, not in measured policy documents
or angry op-ed articles. Secondly, I am
telling you this because my experiences shape
my approach at the United Nations. When I was
in South Africa, we had no Internet. We communicated
with family and friends by letter that took
ten days to deliver. We could afford one brief
phone call home per month. Victims of armed
conflict found it even more difficult to communicate
to the world.
We deployed overwhelming mili-
tary force to overthrow Saddam.
In retrospect, that was the easy
bit. Afterward, we needed a plan
and the resources, both civilian
and military, to help a new and
better stability emerge quickly.
If you break it, you own it.
The situation is different now. Victims
have a voice. Last summer I was in eastern
Congo, driving along a mud track past shacks
and stunning poverty. Yet every few hundred
yards in Bukavu and Goma, there was someone
selling cell phone cards. When the genocide
took place in Rwanda in 1994, news took time
to filter out. Today, we would be listening to
telephone calls in real time from people screaming
for help as killers approach their village. This
change creates a new sense of global community
and global responsibility. If you walk down the
road in New York or Washington and see a brutal
man flogging his child, you think it is right to
intervene or at least to call the police. Is it really
so different now at the international level?
The moral case for intervention can quickly
be lost if the intervention is not seen as legitimate.
FOREIGN POLICY ASSOCIATION | 95
MEETINGS: PRESENTATION BY SIR JOHN SAWERS