WASHINGTON — While French and American diplomats and politicians argued this week over waging war on Iraq, French and American soldiers were working closely together in the Ivory Coast to save lives. The joint rescue mission in West Africa received a fraction of the attention paid to the ambassadorial disputes at the United Nations. But it may ultimately be more meaningful than the rancorous debates over Saddam Hussein’s ill-disguised intentions.
The small Ivory Coast operation brought about 650 foreign nationals out of harm’s way as rebel forces attacked the government. The cooperation it entailed was eclipsed here and abroad by scary headlines and politicians’ speeches about NATO and other alliances being torn apart over Iraq and over American unilateralism. But such fears are not the full story.
There is a galaxy of difference between using military force to overthrow Iraq’s dictator and using it to take a remote air base in Ivory Coast — as a French battalion did last weekend — and flying in C-5 transport aircraft, as the U.S. Air Force in Europe then did, to rescue school children and others.
But the little-noticed Ivory Coast operation is a useful reminder of the shared values and patterns of cooperation that Europeans and Americans have developed out of World War II and the Cold War. It also points to the kind of flexible command arrangements that could help stabilize NATO and overcome temptations of unilateralism on each side of the Atlantic.
In another century it was said that war was too important to be left to the generals. Today, peace is too fragile to be left to the politicians and diplomats. Abstract strategies of conflict avoidance and crisis resolution will fail if they are not anchored in realistic assessments of the crucial role that the threat or use of force still plays in global politics.
Iraq is the most obvious and urgent case in point. After nearly three decades of using war abroad and violence, on a massive scale, at home as basic tools of governing and self-aggrandizement, Saddam Hussein tells the world it must now turn away from the use of force against him. War, his propagandists say, is suddenly evil, immoral and too destructive to be justified. He toys with the United Nations on inspections that he intends to make meaningless.
It is not surprising that this moral monster does not want to be done unto as he has done to others. He knows the consequences of violence first-hand. But it is surprising that he has found diplomats, politicians, moralists and others in the West to make the case for him that the use of force can only bring greater disaster and suffering to Iraq and the world. They seem to reject out of hand the possibility that the intelligent use of military force to stop a mass murderer can create positive gains for the world.
History says otherwise, from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy to Taliban Afghanistan. Capitalism is frequently described as creative destruction. Peace could equally be said to be a set of values and a condition of security that emerge from measured and just wars. Stability is won at least as often by such campaigns as by diplomatic compromise and evasion.
Nor did the sparring over a U.N. resolution for inspections in Iraq keep pragmatic U.S. and French military officers from working smoothly together to rescue foreign nationals caught in the middle of the Ivory Coast turmoil. A French colonel and a U.S. lieutenant colonel ran the operation jointly without concern for past theological fights over national command arrangements between Paris and Washington and spirited out 250 Americans, 400 French and a small number of other nationalities.
Gen. Joseph Ralston, commander of U.S. forces in Europe, rushed about 75 Special Operations troops and five giant C-5s into the former French colony. They transited through Ghana, one of half-a-dozen transit hubs in Africa that Ralston has been able to set up over the past two years.
"This operation has been a model for cooperation between countries that want to get the most out of the military resources they have available and that have to move very quickly," Ralston said by telephone Tuesday. "The French forces showed flexibility and professionalism" in welcoming a small American force into an area that Paris previously made off-limits to outside powers.
This small burst of pragmatism in West Africa may quickly get lost in the windstorm of global concern about unilateralism, terrorism and Iraq. But it shows what can happen when old prejudices and pessimism are put aside and intelligent military professionals get to work on the problem.
Jim Hoagland can be reached at The Washington Post Writers Group, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, DC 20071-9200 or hoaglandj@washpost.com.
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