During the run-up to Gulf War II, many people argued that we shouldn’t go to war without multilateral support — support from a broad range of foreign countries, either directly or as translated into support from the Security Council.
There are, I think, three possible reasons for this position. One is purely pragmatic: if we don’t have much foreign support, the theory goes, our task will be too hard, either because we won’t have material help, or because the lack of foreign support will undermine our credibility with the Iraqis or their neighbors. A second relates to legitimacy: certain kinds of actions, the theory goes, are only morally or legally legitimate if we have support from certain foreign bodies, or perhaps from a certain range of foreign countries. A third relates to foreign support being probative of the need for the war: if we don’t fully trust our government’s judgment, then we might consider other countries’ judgment as evidence of whether the war is practically and morally justified.
Naturally, each of these possible reasons has its own supporting arguments and its own counterarguments, and the strength of each argument may vary from situation to situation. (Most obviously, the pragmatic argument turns on just how much we think we’ll need the foreign help.)
I mention this because the recent revelations that some prominent foreign figures and organizations (most notably, in Russia and Indonesia, though apparently in some measure in France as well) were bribed by the Iraqis — if these revelations are accurate, of course — substantially undermine the forcefulness of second and the third reasons. If indeed foreign opposition, or a blocking vote in the Security Council, may often be influenced by bribes (as seems quite plausible, if the revelations are indeed accurate), then it becomes much less plausible to argue that it’s inherently illegitimate to go to war without Security Council support. Likewise, while we might take disinterested advice as evidence of what’s the right thing to do, advice that we think might likely be influenced by bribes doesn’t seem terribly probative.
None of this, of course, is dispositive: There’s no evidence, for instance, that German opposition was swayed by this, and as I understand it the evidence with regard to the French is quite weak, since the people being bribed weren’t that influential. On the other hand, there are of course other factors that undermine the probativeness / legitimacy reasons, such as the possibility that foreign action is influenced by their own national self-interest or hostility (quite legitimate on its own, but not much of an argument for influencing our actions). But the revelations of these sorts of bribes should, I think, lead to some skepticism about the probativeness / legitimacy arguments for insisting on multilateral support.
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