Limited Liability Multilateralism: The American Military, Armed Intervention, and IOs Stefano Recchia Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2011 © 2011 Stefano Recchia All rights reserved ABSTRACT Limited Liability Multilateralism: The American Military, Armed Intervention, and IOs Stefano Recchia Under what conditions and for what reasons do American leaders seek the endorsement of relevant international organizations (IOs) such as the UN or NATO for prospective military interventions? My central hypothesis is that U.S. government efforts to obtain IO approval for prospective interventions are frequently the result of significant bureaucratic deliberations and bargaining between hawkish policy leaders who emphasize the likely positive payoffs of a prompt use of force, on the one side, and skeptical officials—with the top military brass and war veterans in senior policy positions at the forefront—who highlight its potential downsides and long-term costs, on the other. The military leaders—the chairman and vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), the regional combatant commanders, and senior planners on the Joint Staff in Washington—are generally skeptical of humanitarian and other ―idealist‖ interventions that aim to change the domestic politics of foreign countries; they naturally tend to consider all the potential downsides of intervention, given their operational focus; and they usually worry more than activist civilian policy officials about public and congressional support for protracted engagements. Assuming that the military leaders are not merely stooges of the civilian leadership, they are at first likely to altogether resist a prospective intervention, when they believe that no vital American interests are at stake and fear an open-ended deployment of U.S. troops. Given the military‘s professional expertise and their standing in American society, they come close to holding a de facto veto over prospective interventions they clearly oppose. I hypothesize that confronted with such great initial reluctance or opposition on the part of the military brass, civilian advocates of intervention from other government agencies will seek inter alia to obtain an advance endorsement from relevant IOs, so as to lock in international support and thereby reassure the military and their bureaucratic allies that the long-term costs to the United States in terms of postwar peacekeeping and stabilization will be limited. That, in turn, can be expected to help forge a winning bureaucratic coalition in Washington and persuade the president to authorize military action. United States multilateralism for military interventions is thus often a genuine policy resultant— the outcome of sustained bureaucratic deliberations and bargaining—and it may not actually reflect the initial preferences of any particular government agency or senior official. Table of Contents List of Tables and Figures iv Acronyms v Introduction 1 Chapter I: The Value of Multilateral Legitimacy for U.S. Military Interventions 25 1. Norm internalization and the logic of appropriateness 27 2. Reducing the risk of ―soft balancing‖ by other states 39 3. Increasing domestic support among the American public 55 4. Policy benefits: Burden sharing in combat and post-combat 67 Chapter II: A Bureaucratic Politics Theory of U.S. Multilateralism 85 1. Foreign-policy decision making as a bureaucratic political game 88 2. Understanding the U.S. military‘s bureaucratic interests and concerns 91 3. The military as flag-bearers of limited liability 98 4. Sources of the military‘s bureaucratic leverage 111 5. How bureaucratic bargaining steers U.S. policy toward multilateralism 123 6. Understanding post-cold war U.S. unilateral interventions 144 i Chapter III: Haiti, 1993-94: Securing a UN handoff before going in 155 1. Origins and evolution of the Haitian crisis 157 2. The costs of U.S. multilateralism on Haiti 167 3. U.S. multilateralism as the result of bureaucratic politics 175 4. The importance of domestic political factors: public opinion and Congress 195 5. Alternative explanations of U.S. multilateralism in Haiti 206 Chapter IV: Bosnia, 1992-95: We did not want to ―own‖ it 222 1. Limiting U.S. liability by staying out of it, 1992-93 224 2. The costs of U.S. multilateralism on Bosnia 228 3. The U.S. military insisting on multilateral consensus, 1993-95 237 4. Endgame: NATO air strikes and a NATO-led stabilization force 251 5. Understanding the military‘s bureaucratic political influence 267 6. Testing alternative explanations for U.S. multilateralism on Bosnia 272 Chapter V: Kosovo, 1998-99: Europe‘s buy-in through NATO reassures the JCS 284 1. Background to the crisis 286 2. The costs of U.S. multilateralism over Kosovo 289 3. The military‘s pushback against U.S. unilateral intervention 301 4. How bureaucratic bargaining drove Washington‘s policy toward NATO 315 5. June 1999: A U.S.-led ground invasion without NATO endorsement? 330 6. Testing alternative explanations of U.S. multilateralism 335 ii Chapter VI: Iraq, 1998-2003: The policy is regime change (on the cheap) 349 1. Prologue: the 1998 ―Desert Fox‖ airstrikes 352 2. The Bush administration, 2001-2003: Iraq as a vital threat 366 3. The hard-liners‘ rosy expectations and aversion to multilateralism 376 4. Powell‘s push for a UN-based approach and the silence of the JCS 385 5. The outcome: A half-hearted attempt at the United Nations 404 6. Could a second UN resolution have been obtained? 412 Conclusion 426 List of officials interviewed 434 Bibliography 441 iii List of Tables and Figures Figure 1: Causal pathway to multilateralism/ non-intervention (a first cut) 5 Figure 2: Causal pathways to U.S. unilateralism (a first cut) 6 Figure 3. Definition of intervention vs. war 11 Figure 4: Existing theories vs. my bureaucratic politics theory 16 Table 1: Discrete decisions on U.S. intervention analyzed in the dissertation 22 Table 2: Post-cold war U.S. military interventions 34 Table 3: The Effect of International Endorsement on U.S. Public Support 63 Figure 5: How the military can influence U.S. policy on armed intervention 123 Table 4: Post-cold war U.S. interventions: IO endorsement sought/ not sought 124 Figure 6: Causal pathways to U.S. multilateralism/ nonintervention 144 Figure 7: Hypothesized causal pathways to U.S. unilateralism 152 iv List of Acronyms AU African Union CARICOM Caribbean Community CENTCOM U.S. Central Command EUFOR European Union Force (Bosnia) IFOR NATO Implementation Force (Bosnia) INC Iraqi National Council IO International Organization JCS Joint Chiefs of Staff JS Joint Staff KLA Kosovo Liberation Army KFOR NATO Kosovo Force NAC North Atlantic Council NAM Non-Aligned Movement NIE National Intelligence Estimate NSC National Security Council OAS Organization of American States OPLAN Operation Plan OSD Office of the Secretary of Defense SACEUR Supreme Allied Commander Europe SC Security Council (United Nations) SCR UN Security Council Resolution SHAPE Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe UNMIH United Nations Mission in Haiti UNMOVIC United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission UNPROFOR United Nations Protection Force (Bosnia) UNSC United Nations Security Council UNSCOM United Nations Special Commission (Iraq) USA United States Army USAF United States Air Force USMC United States Marine Corps USN United States Navy v Introduction American leaders worked hard to obtain the explicit endorsement of relevant international organizations (IOs), such as the UN or NATO, for the 1991 Gulf War and subsequent military interventions in Somalia (1992), Haiti (1994), Bosnia (1995), Serbia (1999), Liberia (2003), and Libya (2011). At the same time, the United States made no such efforts, or only half-hearted efforts, to obtain explicit IO endorsement leading up to similar interventions in Panama (1989), Iraq from mid-1991 onward and culminating in the 2003 invasion, and for a number of counter-terrorism incursions over the last several years. The first goal of this dissertation is to explain this striking variation in post-cold war American efforts to obtain the endorsement of relevant IOs for military interventions. Put differently, I seek to answer the following question: Under what circumstances is the United States likely to engage in significant efforts to obtain an explicit IO endorsement before intervening militarily abroad, and when can the U.S. instead be expected to straightforwardly intervene on its own or with only ad-hoc coalitions of likeminded allies? Obtaining IO approval for armed interventions is typically costly to the United States: it requires protracted international negotiations and logrolling and can greatly reduce U.S. freedom of action. Therefore, American leaders can be expected to make meaningful efforts to obtain IO endorsement only if they anticipate significant positive payoffs. My argument, in a nutshell, is that U.S. efforts to obtain IO endorsement for military interventions are not only, and not even primarily, the result of norm internalization on the part of American leaders, or of Washington efforts to avert ―soft balancing‖ in other issue-areas and build up popular support for the use of 1 2 force.1 Instead, I hypothesize (Chapter I) that the United States usually seeks IO approval for prospective interventions primarily because of the expected benefits in terms of policy implementation. The endorsement of relevant IOs, obtained