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After a week of unconditional support from abroad, the Bush
administration confronted its first significant difficulties today
in building a broad international coalition to support using military
power and other means against a still-faceless terror network
rooted in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
A procession of world leaders was either on the way or on the
phone to Washington seeking to convince the White House that only
a multilateral approach based on consultation, hard evidence and
United Nations support would justify the use of military power
in response to the devastating attacks last week.
Today, President Jiang Zemin of China telephoned Prime Minister
Tony Blair of Britain and President Jacques Chirac of France as
each prepared for meetings with President Bush. He admonished
his Western counterparts to tell Mr. Bush that "any military
action against terrorism" should be based on "irrefutable
evidence and should aim at clear targets so as to avoid casualties
to innocent people," according to official news reports from
China.
Mr. Jiang also telephoned President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia,
and although the two leaders denounced "terrorism in all
its forms," they spoke just of cooperating with each other
and the United Nations to "develop a mechanism for fighting
terrorism," the reports said.
As the Bush administration sought through White House consultations
and overseas missions to strengthen the sinews of an antiterror
effort whose scale and objective remain unknown, a number of countries
began to calculate the potential cost of their taking part, and
to try to exact a price for it from the United States.
For a number of Middle Eastern countries, the price was straightforward.
The United States has to become more deeply involved in ending
the violence and in reinvigorating the Israeli-Palestinian peace
effort.
But it was clear that a convulsion in Israel, the West Bank
or Gaza could threaten Washington's efforts to maintain support
in moderate Arab countries, a problem that Mr. Bush's father faced
in the 1991 coalition that defeated Iraq in Kuwait.
"The people that we expect to work with closely in combating
terrorism," a spokesman for the State Department, Richard
A. Boucher, said, are "interested in the Israel- Palestinian
situation," and their attitudes toward America's war on terrorism
are "linked in people's minds" to America's commitment
to Arab-Israeli peace.
Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal of Saudi Arabia, is due to arrive
on Wednesday with a large contingent of Saudi intelligence officers
and their files on Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network.
But other potential American allies raised urgent economic and
political agendas that officials said Washington was beginning
to address. Pakistan, in exchange for whatever bases or rights
to fly in its air space that it provides, would like an agreement
to end 11 years of sanctions, to restore the flow of American
arms and to reduce a punishing debt load.
Russia, if it is called on, has a clear set of grievances over
NATO expansion toward its borders and criticism of its military
campaign in Chechnya. Foreign Minister Igor D. Ivanov arrives
on Wednesday. Administration officials said they were eager to
establish Moscow's price to open the northern corridor to Afghanistan
through Tajikistan, a former Soviet republic.
A number of Russian generals have questioned whether Russia
could join an American-led antiterror campaign whose operational
objectives remain unclear. One high- ranking military officer
told a newspaper, Vremya Novestei, that "fighting terrorists
is like trying to rid oneself of roaches in a block of flats."
"You do it in one flat," the officer said, "and
they go to another."
Nowhere was the sense of alarm over American plans more apparent
than in the warning of one of America's staunchest Middle East
allies, President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt. In remarks broadcast
on Monday night, he implored the United States not to undertake
military action that might kill innocent civilians, divide Christians
against Muslims and further inflame attitudes against American
policy in the region.
Mr. Mubarak, like Mr. Jiang, urged that "hard evidence"
be the basis for any military action and that "countries
not be punished" for the actions of "individuals."
He called on the United Nations to organize an international convention
against terrorism that would develop a common program of action
for all countries.
His remarks were echoed by other leaders in the region where
Washington has yet to establish a firm diplomatic beachhead in
dealing with intractable and volatile conflicts.
While Egypt and Jordan were both crucial allies in the 1991
coalition against President Saddam Hussein of Iraq, diplomats
from both countries said they did not expect to be called on to
provide bases or other direct military support. Both said they
were providing intelligence information on terrorist groups to
the Central Intelligence Agency under longstanding agreements.
Beneath the veneer of solidarity and support in Europe, misgivings
can be heard about how Mr. Bush plans to proceed. Germany has
repeatedly called for a multilateral approach to the problem and
warned against America's going it alone.
Speaking at the White House today, Mr. Chirac pointedly declined
to accept Mr. Bush's characterization of the fight against terrorism
as a war. "I don't know whether we should use the word `war,'
" the French leader said.
Diplomats noted that Mr. Bush sent a high-level State Department
envoy, John R. Bolton, to Moscow on Monday to push forward on
American missile defense plans, even though a decision by Mr.
Bush to withdraw unilaterally from the Antiballistic Missile Treaty
of 1972 would raise questions of a return to a "go it alone"
ethos in
international affairs.
President Bush's father last week seemed to be the first to
declare dead the sort of unilateralism that prevailed in the administration's
early months. He told a Boston audience, "Just as Pearl Harbor
awakened this country from the notion that we could somehow avoid
the call to duty and defend freedom in Europe and Asia in World
War II, so, too, should this most recent surprise attack erase
the concept in some quarters that America can somehow go it alone
in the fight against terrorism or in anything else for that matter."
No one has suggested, least of all the former president, that
his statement represented criticism of his son or the current
administration. But it seemed
an unmistakable effort by the father to assert that the son was
breaking with the recent past.
If policy is changing, nobody seems quite sure where it is heading.
Just what Mr. Bush, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Vice
President Dick Cheney meant when they indicated that harboring
terrorists would be a casus belli in the fight against terrorism
remained unclear.
In Moscow, an influential parliamentarian, Aleksei G. Arbatov,
said although the consensus there was "total moral support"
for the United States and the struggle against terrorism, there
also existed a strong humanitarian concern "not to resort
to massive strikes, to nonselective actions which are unjustified
from the moral point of view, to avenge the death of thousands
of innocent people with the deaths of tens of thousands of other
innocent people."
Karl Kaiser, a foreign policy expert in Germany, said the "experience
of the first months of the administration caused a great deal
of concern in Europe about unilateralism."
"However," Mr. Kaiser said, "something rather
extraordinary has happened, and the reaction of the administration
thus far, contrary to some fears that existed, was so different,
so cautious and stressing the need to act with others." As
a result, Mr. Kaiser suggested that at least for now "the
image of the cowboy shooting from the hip is gone."
See also:
Acts
of terror in the US
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