Turkey’s recent incursion into Northern Iraq and Colombia’s assassination of FARC members across the Ecuadorian border represent but the latest example of a precedent established by the United States’ 2001 invasion of Afghanistan that is challenging the concept of state sovereignty and raising questions about the future stability of the Islamic World.

On September 11, 2001, as the twin towers disappeared in a cloud of smoke and debris, the war on drugs fell to the side forgotten and a newly polarized world emerged from the dust, wielding banners proclaiming war on terrorism.

In this new war, traditional enmities were quickly put aside and dictators once again breathed easy as the weight of democratic pressure lifted from their shoulders, the lingo of a new war allowing them to label opposition as terrorists and clamp down further on the rights of their citizens.

Individual rights however, were not the only ones to be subsumed in the post-9/11 world. Already wilting under the forces of globalization, states suddenly found their sovereignty challenged on a new front. The war on terror gathered steam and national boundaries — long the core of international relations — evaporated, as states friendly to the US used the rhetoric of the new war to pursue terrorist groups across neighboring borders.

Less than one month after the dust had cleared — with broad international backing for his argument that state supporters of terrorism forfeited their right to sovereignty — George Bush invaded Afghanistan, the first US invasion of another sovereign territory since the 1994 invasion of Haiti. Seventeen months later, US troops entered Iraq, signaling a broad expansion of the war on terror, fracturing international support and generating shockwaves across the Middle East and broader Islamic World.

The foundation of modern international politics — the nation state — was first laid out in the treaty of Westphalia, which put an end to Europe’s religious wars of the seventeenth century. At its core, sovereignty is the notion that a state has sole authority over its land and people and is guaranteed the right of non-intervention in its internal affairs by outside powers.

As the United Nations (UN) emerged mid-twentieth century to manage relationships between states, the notion of state sovereignty was enshrined in its charter. The twentieth century also exposed the major flaw of this state-based international system: How to respond to the increasingly intra- rather than interstate nature of conflict, where, in many cases, it was the state itself that was the biggest threat to its own citizens.

With international conventions such as the Human Rights Charter and Genocide Convention codifying the notion of universal human rights and a state’s responsibility toward protecting its citizens — states found their sovereignty limited — constrained at least on paper from conducting actions such as genocide, slavery, torture and violence, regardless of national security arguments.

The general consensus (in North America and Europe at least) was that when a state could not protect its population — or was in fact the perpetrator of violence — it gave up the right to non-intervention. One of the rare instances of clear-cut enforcement of international law (which allows states to respond in self defense) was the US-led multinational force, responding to the 1990 invasion of Kuwait by Iraq.

Despite this, the argument for non-involvement and state sovereignty proved very resilient. Governments had shown a lack of desire to intervene directly in the affairs of other states without that state’s permission, even in cases of extreme violations such as the Rwandan genocide of 1994 and the ongoing case of Sudan. In the latter, the US-led international community has decried the actions of the Sudanese government as genocide, and UN Security Council (UNSC) Resolution 1706 passed authorizing a UN peacekeeping mission; that same community continues to negotiate for acceptance of the Sudanese government before UN peacekeeping operations are rolled out.

Turkey has argued that their invasion of Iraq is justified by US precedent. (Associated Press)

George H.W. Bush’s foreign policy started budding with the fall of the Berlin Wall, driven by a small group at the core of the neoconservative movement: Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Lewis Libby and Eric Edelman, the most prominent. With a more aggressive approach to the world that called for ‘expanding’ and ‘shaping’ the ‘zone of democracy’ to ensure continued US dominance, the neocons muscled aside then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell and pitched their vision of the future to H.W. Bush.

The election of Bill Clinton stalled the neocon movement for eight years, as the administration fell back on a Cold War-esque policy of containment and control of rogue states and weapons of mass destruction (WMD) proliferation, through economic sanctions and diplomacy. Even when the US had international backing for intervention, such as the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, it proved reluctant to do so, preferring to bomb from a distance rather than risk US casualties.

With the election of Bush W. Bush, the neocon camp came back into power and policy took on a more aggressive air. Terrorism, however, came in second to concerns about WMD, with state supporters of terrorism approached through the same containment lens.

The issue of how to actually deal with terrorists though was confused by the lack of a comprehensive international agreement on what constituted terrorism. Even different sections of the US administrations were in disagreement; Syria was on the list of state supporters of terrorism, but was not considered a rogue state. Labels were politically based rather than on any agreed standards — Iraq was on the list prior to 1982 and its 1980-88 war with Iran, during which it received US backing and was taken off the list until 1990, when it was put back on.

Beyond classification there was also disagreement about the means of dealing with these states internationally. While the US favored threats and coercion, European policy leaned more towards incentives and negotiations.

What is important to note, however, is that pre-9/11 there was no consideration that a state’s sovereignty was called into question by its actions.

Before the dust of the Twin Towers had even cleared, US policy shifted to focus on the role of states supporting terrorist groups. “We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them,” said Bush on September 11, 2001.

Nine days later, on September 20, Bush made his ultimatum to Afghanistan: “Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”

States such as Pakistan and Libya were quick to condemn the attacks and jump over to the US side. Afghanistan, on the other hand, declined and the US invaded — the first action in the war on terror targeting not a terrorist group, but a state.

The attack was made with broad international support — including NATO enactment of Article V calling for mutual self defense of member states for the first time, several UNSC resolutions and declarations by regional bodies such as ASEAN and the European Union — signifying that not only did a state have the right to self defense against terrorist attacks, but that state sponsors of terrorism could be targeted; a building consensus that the right to non-intervention was forfeited by support of terrorism.

The US then made Iraq the focus of the war on terror, linking it with the issue of WMD proliferation and trying to bully UNSC members into supporting an invasion — resulting in a fragmentation of the post 9/11 consensus and hitting a minefield of opposition to two (re)emerging policies of the Bush administration.

The first policy that led to the decision to invade Iraq was formalized one week after 9/11. On September 18, even before lumping the world into the “us” and “them,” Bush said, “Senate Joint Resolution 23 recognizes the seriousness of the terrorist threat to our nation and the authority of the president under the Constitution to take action to deter and prevent [emphasis added] acts of terrorism against the United States.” In essence, it was a policy of pre-emption that was formalized in the National Security Strategy 2002.

This policy and the administration’s arguments against state supporters of terrorism was outlined by Richard Hass, currently president of the Council on Foreign Relations and then director of policy planning at the State Department, speaking to The New Yorker in early 2002. “What you’re seeing from this administration is the emergence of a new principle or body of ideas — I’m not sure it constitutes a doctrine — about what you might call the limits of sovereignty. Sovereignty entails obligations. One is not to massacre your own people. Another is not to support terrorism in any way. If a government fails to meet these obligations, then it forfeits some of the normal advantages of sovereignty, including the right to be left alone inside your own territory. Other governments, including the United States, gain the right to intervene. In the case of terrorism, this can even lead to a right of preventive, or preemptory, self defense. You essentially can act in anticipation if you have grounds to think it’s a question of when, and not if, you’re going to be attacked.”

The second and more ‘visionary’ policy of reshaping the world and the Middle East in particular — which had been under conceptual development since Cheney and Wolfowitz set up shop — found fertile ground with a ‘President at War’ and a shocked and angry US public struggling for answers and targets. On September 19, just eight days after 9/11, Bush told the public, “Let me say that, in terms of foreign policy and in terms of the world, this horrible strategy has provided us with an interesting opportunity. One of the opportunities is in the Middle East.”

Over the next three years, these policy strands converged, and by August 2006, Bush described his, by now, well-established doctrine: “The war we fight today is more than a military conflict; it is the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century.” He went on to outline the policy: “We realized that years of pursuing stability to promote peace had left us with neither. Instead, the lack of freedom in the Middle East made the region an incubator for terrorist movements [] We have ended the days of treating terrorism simply as a law enforcement matter [] We have made it clear to all nations, if you harbor terrorists, you are just as guilty as the terrorists; you’re an enemy of the United States, and you will be held to account. And third, we’ve launched a bold new agenda to defeat the ideology of the enemy by supporting the forces of freedom in the Middle East and beyond.”

The effects of this new ‘freedom agenda,’ as Bush labeled it, are well known in the region. Five years on and the chaos of Iraq is felt across the entire world, while the promised pressure on the region’s dictators has proved to be an illusion, most likely due to the realization that after decades of benevolent ignorance of the lack of democracy, the only viable opposition groups are the Islamists that the US wants to see disappear.

While Iraq and the restriction of freedoms in the Middle East receive much attention, relatively little mention is made about US allies undertaking pre-emptive, or defensive actions under the aegis of the war on terror.

Then-UN Secretary General Kofi Annan was quick to grasp this possibility in his impromptu and impassioned speech at a news conference on July 31, 2003. “If we are going to make preventive action, or war, part of our response to these new threats, what are the rules? Who decides? Under what circumstances? Did what happened in Iraq constitute an exception? A precedent others can exploit? What are the rules?”

Since Afghanistan, and despite strong international reactions against the intervention in Iraq, several countries have undertaken military operations in neighboring states in the pursuit of terrorist organizations.

First was the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006 in response to Hizb’Allah attacks that resulted in the death of eight and capture of two Israeli soldiers. Ethiopia invaded Somalia the same year to prevent the Council of Islamic Courts from expanding its control of the country. In February 2008 Turkey conducted an extended bombing campaign and incursion into Northern Iraq against the PKK; while most recently, the Colombian military assassinated FARC members in Ecuadorian territory. While each conflict has its own unique background — Colombia’s surgical strike differs greatly from the targeting of civilian infrastructure in Israel’s campaign — there are several common threads.

Firstly, the states are fighting armed groups, labeled as terrorist organizations by the US, that are based in another country. Secondly, they are acting unilaterally, outside the scope of a UN-mandated or multilateral force. Thirdly, the states in question are basing their actions on the argument that the country hosting the terrorist organization is either unable or unwilling to deal with the groups themselves — a ‘state within a state’. A fourth and critical factor is that the incursions have been conducted with the support of the US in the form of military intelligence. In Ecuador for example, cell phones tapped by the FBI and US Drug Enforcement Administration were used to hone in on the FARC fighters.

What is also common is the questionable success of the operations. Except for the assassination of specific FARC members, the military actions by all parties appear to have achieved little beyond destabilizing the regions involved. Turkey pulled its troops out of Iraq with limited casualties on both sides, resuming its bombing campaign of the well hidden PKK, while both Hizb’Allah and Israel claimed victory in Lebanon.

As battles fought in the war on terror, they are a failure, leaving Bush with nothing more substantial than a hope that something will change. “Hopefully, over time, Hizb’Allah will disarm,” said Bush in August 2006 following the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon. “You can’t have a democracy with an armed political party willing to bomb its neighbor without the consent of its government [] And so the reality is, in order for Lebanon to succeed — and we want Lebanon’s democracy to succeed — [] the Lebanese government is eventually going to have to deal with Hizb’Allah.”

Unilateral action is not the answer. Beyond the questionable success of military operations so far and — despite the Washington spin — what is clearly a catastrophe in Iraq, further incursions of this nature will only further destabilize the Islamic world, providing richer ground for the activities of terrorists.

The entire war on terror is really a misnomer; you cannot have a war against a concept. The real issue, however, is how to deal with the actions of non-state groups in a system built to manage conflict between states.

To address this, clear diplomatic efforts are needed. The US must try to revive the pre-Iraq consensus regarding state supporters of terrorism and solidify this into international agreements that allow terrorist groups and their supporters to be dealt with through international mechanisms. Certainly, this is slower than the ‘shock and awe’ of military action, but, with even the easy target of Afghanistan having turned into a protracted conflict, long-term strategies are needed.

Beyond this, the US administration must give more than lip service to the ‘freedom agenda.’ Rather than letting any dictator waving a flag with the slogan ‘war on terror’ act as they like in their own country, the US must put the pressure back on. In the long run, it will be democratic, prosperous societies that win the war, not the US military.

As the Bush presidency nears its end, the world waits with bated breath, wondering if a new president will bring about a better future or will Bush leave us with a parting shot at his latest targets in Syria or Iran. State sovereignty in the end may prove more resilient than the war on terror, but the mirage of peace in the Middle East may be much less so.  et