I'm generally not inclined to take issue with my FP colleagues, but David Kenner's recent
posting on the WikiLeaks release of a
cable recounting Saddam Hussein's infamous meeting with U.S. ambassador April
Glaspie deserves a response.
In an article headlined "Why One U.S. Diplomat Didn't Cause
the Gulf War," Kenner argues that the new release shows that Glaspie should not
be blamed for the U.S. failure to make a clear deterrent warning to
Saddam. And that is what he accuses me and John Mearsheimer
(and the Washington Post) of doing. In
his words, "the Washington Post described her as ‘the
face of American incompetence in Iraq.' Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer piled on in
a 2003 article for Foreign Policy, arguing that Glaspie's
remarks unwittingly gave Iraq a green light to invade Kuwait."
I agree that the WikiLeaks release may exonerate Glaspie
for being personally responsible for
a diplomatic gaffe, but there are two problems with Kenner's version of
events.
First, we never accused Glaspie of diplomatic incompetence,
and we certainly didn't "pile on." Here's what we actually said in our 2003 piece:
In a now famous interview with the Iraqi leader,
U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie told Saddam, ‘[W]e have no opinion on the
Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait.' The U.S. State
Department had earlier told Saddam that Washington had ‘no special defense or security
commitments to Kuwait.' The United States may not have intended to give Iraq a
green light, but that is effectively what it did."
Notice that we offered no opinion on whether Glaspie was free-lancing,
mis-reading Saddam, or simply following orders from Washington. Our article was focused on the issue of
whether Saddam was deterrable, and the key issue that concerned us about the Glaspie meeting was whether she had
conveyed a clear deterrent threat to Saddam, or whether she might have unintentionally given him reason to think he could go ahead and absorb Kuwait
without facing a strong military response from the United States.
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