David M Malone, since August 2006 Canada’s High Commissioner to India (and non-resident Ambassador to Nepal and Bhutan), also describes himself as an occasional scholar. His career has alternated between diplomatic service and stints in the academic, research and policy development worlds, most recently as President of the International Peace Academy (IPA) in New York, 1998-2004. IPA was founded as an independent institution in 1970 by an Indian, Gen. Indar Jit Rikhye, initially to develop peacekeeping doctrine and to design and implement training jointly for civilians and military staff destined for peacekeeping duties. Today IPA addresses a much broader range of issues. Its current President is Terje Roed Larsen, architect of the Oslo peace process.

During his years at IPA, Malone wrote on economic factors in civil wars, on the causes and prevention of conflict and, increasingly, on the workings of the UN Security Council. This led him to tackle perhaps the single toughest issue the Council has confronted over the past 25 years (beyond the smouldering disputes between Israel and some of its neighbours): the Council’s strategies and decisions to counter and manage Saddam Hussein’s aggression first against Iran (and some of Iraq’s own people with chemical and other weapons) and then against Kuwait and his subsequently growing defiance of Council decisions during the 1990s. Malone’s book, The International Struggle Over Iraq: Politics in the UN Security Council, 1980-2005, was published by Oxford University Press in 2006. OUP India produced an Indian run of the book, which hit the non-fiction best-seller list in India in November of that year.

In a special issue of the Diplomatist on Canada that appeared a couple of months ago, Malone discussed Indo-Canadian relations. Diplomatist Editor-in-Chief

Dr Sunil K Sukumaran recently sat down for a discussion with Malone on his life and views as an author.

Why this topic in particular?

When I briefly sat in the Security Council as a member of the Canadian Delegation in 1990, the UN was at grips with Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. Canada and Finland were the first co-chairs of the Iraq Sanctions Committee created at that time. Later, when I was President of the International Peace Academy (IPA) - a research and policy development institution independent from, but with excellent access to, the UN – in New York from 1998 to 2004, Iraq was the single most corrosive issue on the Security Council’s agenda. My own research at IPA addressed such issues as economic agendas in contemporary civil wars, the causes of violent conflict today (important to understanding how conflict might better be prevented) and the evolving multilateral institutional framework.

Because I had long maintained an interest in the Security Council, had written a book on the Council’s decisions relative to Haiti between 1990 and 1996 and had valuable and sustained access to Council ambassadors, the UN Secretary-General and others involved in the Iraq saga, towards the end of my time at IPA I decided to address the Council’s involvement with Iraq since 1980, starting then because my intuition was that the Iran-Iraq war would contain the seeds of much that followed –which turned out to be true.

I was fortunate because my Board chair, the admirable Rita Hauser (a crack US lawyer and leading philanthropist), was willing to grant me time off to get the book started and Nuffield College at Oxford University offered a base from which to start my research and writing.

What would you describe as your main conclusions?

There were conclusions on several levels, among which I’ll cite only a few:

• As sometimes articulated by Madeleine Albright, the US generally casts its policy preferences as multilateral where possible, unilateralist only when necessary. In fairness to the United States, to a greater or lesser degree that probably sums up the approach of other member of the Permanent Five also. But the shock of 9/11 was so great and the policy orientations of key advisers in Washington at that specific time were such that the multilateralist preference was submerged for some years. We see its re-emergence today.

• When tackling a country, particularly when contemplating regime change in a foreign country, the specificities of that society are important. The country’s anthropological, historical, geographical, sociological, economic and political features will all shape prospects of success or failure for international intervenors (leaving aside individual opinions on regime change as a policy goal). That there was very little attention to these particulars of Iraq when military action was contemplated against it in 2002-2003 is truly astonishing, not least as both the UK and USA harbour a number of accomplished experts on the country, such as Charles Tripp at the School of African and Oriental Studies in London. Their advice might profitably have been factored in to planning not least because Great Britain accrued painful experience of occupying Iraq in the 1920s. (In fact, Prime Minister Blair did meet with Tripp and several others, but there is little evidence that their exchange influenced subsequent policy).

• During the Cold War, the UN Security Council was seriously constrained by geo-strategic realities, and its decisions were generally cautious. With the end of the Cold War signalled in 1986-87 by President Gorbachev’s de facto resignation from the super-power confrontation, it became possible, indeed routine, for the Council to agree on more ambitious objectives and mandates. The first case in which this became the Council’s operative mode was in its effort to develop a strategy to end the Iran-Iraq war in 1987. (The parties to the conflict acquiesced in the Council’s strategy in 1988.) This did not represent, after an initial “era of euphoria” - the apex of which was the Council’s response to Iraq’s aggression against Kuwait in 1990 - a new directoire of great powers to dominate international relations jointly. Rather, since 1987, we have witnessed a greater willingness by the great powers to accommodate each other, alebit with some exceptions - the Middle East, Kosovo (briefly in 1999), Bosnia (where the split was between the USA and West European powers, 1992-95 and resolved in favour of the Americans at Dayton in late 1995) and, of course, Iraq increasingly as of 1996. Because the media reports diplomatic disagreements more than it does consensual management of crises, the tendency towards mutual accommodation is mostly overlooked. Of course, we see it again today on Iran, North Korea and, to a degree, on Sudan.

• The UN Security Council is the cockpit for much great power diplomacy, but the underpinnings of national positions are to be found elsewhere, very often in domestic politics. Thus, an excessively narrow focus on Security Council decision-making would distort reality. That said, much effort is expended in the capitals of relevant powers in reaching agreement on joint positions and actions ultimately refracted through Council decisions.

• While the ambassadors of the Permanent Five (P-5) and those of the elected Council members are often accomplished negotiators, they have proven themselves very poor managers of ambitious implementing machinery they have created in recent years to carry forward their decisions on counter-terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and, notably, Iraq. The Oil for Food (OFF) scandal points to shocking failure of Council oversight of the OFF program (which eventually extended to $ 64 billion worth of transactions). This angle was curiously muted in the Volcker Inquiry reports of 2005 which focused principally on mismanagement and fraud by the UN staff, many companies and some foreign officials. One of my conclusions is that if the Council can not learn better to oversee complex legal and regulatory machinery, it should avoid creating it.

• To a certain extent, the UN Secretary-General carries on his shoulders the aspirations of humanity. Kofi Annan did a tremendous job in his first term (1997-2001) in championing the humanitarian imperative, richly deserving the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize. But his second term largely unravelled around disagreements among member states on Iraq he could do little to bridge and which led to bitter recriminations, not least over the OFF program. Ten years is a very long time for a Secretary-General juggling so many global diplomatic, developmental and human rights challenges. I have come to favour a single term for the Secretary-General, which would offer the add-on benefit of freeing the incumbent from the need to curry favour with powerful member states in order to secure re-election.

Will the UN play more of a role in the future on Iraq?

After the deadlock in the Security Council in early 2003, the UN was essentially side-lined, although in May 2003 the Council did provide a mandate for the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) to restore order and help with Iraqi reconstruction. The UN’s alienation from the Iraq file was compounded by the bombing of UN headquarters that took so many lives, including that of UN Special Representative Sergio Vieira de Mello, a tremendous loss for the UN system. (A more personal loss for me in that same bombing was that of my close friend Rick Hooper, perhaps the UN’s most promising younger policy expert on the Middle East).

In remarks in Ottawa in May 2006, when asked this same question, senior UN negotiator Lakhdar Brahimi, who had helped the Coalition and various Iraqi communities with the formation of an interim government in Baghdad in 2004, answered that the UN and other international actors (most importantly neighbouring countries and perhaps the Arab League) could only play a meaningful role once the Coalition leadership realized it could not control events in the country. We may not be there quite yet.

It may also be that the UN’s role in imposing and then administering sanctions in Iraq would disqualify it from playing a major role in the eyes of many Iraqis. Recently, new UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon visited Baghdad an expressed the intention to expand the UN’s footprint in Iraq to the extent possible, building on existing UN humanitarian and developmental programs there. My own intuition is that the UN could provide a useful umbrella for diplomacy amongst interested countries and groups, and could, through Security Council decisions, impart a sense of international legitimacy to any positive outcome of such diplomacy. More than that may be hoping for too much at this late stage.

Did India play much of a role in the story?

First off, an Indian, Dilip Hiro, has been the most active chronicler of Iraq’s recent wars and is a useful source of information for any student of the file. The Indian government, like many others, only sat on the UN Security Council fitfully in the years I cover (1980-2005). Chinmaya Gharekhan, a distinguished Indian ambassador (and later UN Under-Secretary-General) who represented India on the Security Council in 1991-92, has written an excellent book about his experiences relevant to the Iraq saga and other files, The Horseshoe Table (Longman, 2006). India has a long history of outstanding representation at the UN (and within its Secretariat). During the years I document, several of its more recent ambassadors as well as Gharekhan, have performed superbly. Hamid Ansari, Kamalesh Sharma and Vijay Nambiar (now chief of staff to the UN’s new Secretary-General) spring to mind. Nitin Desai, the UN’s Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs until quite recently and now a senior fellow at ICRIER in New Delhi, was a towering figure in the intellectual development of the UN over many years. Rajendra K Pachauri, Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is the most respected figure at the UN on this sensitive and critical topic. And I could go on with respect to India’s influence and that of Indians within the UN system.

For India, as for other countries, it may not have been easy to develop a national view of what the appropriate response was to various episodes involving Iraq since 1980 as national principles underpinning foreign policy in most countries tend to compete and clash rather than conveniently reinforcing each other. Beyond that, a second challenges is always how to articulate a national position in a way as not to make a bad situation worse, for example in relation to events on the ground in Iraq since 2003. Given India’s desire for a permanent seat in the Council, an intriguing intellectual exercise for practitioners and students of Indian foreign policy might be to speculate on how India would have played its hand had it been a permanent member of the Council during this slowly-evolving crisis - obviously a far greater responsibility than that of commenting from the side-lines or serving as an elected Council member for only two of the past twenty years.

What next for you?

Being Canadian High Commissioner to India is the realization of my ultimate career aspiration and it’s very much a full-time job. India is experiencing dramatic growth and change while seeking to address enduring social policy challenges. Now could not be a more interesting time to live here. So my own scholarly life is not that much on my mind these days, particularly given all of the tremendously stimulating ideas and writing available in India on public policy that take up nearly all of my reading time.

That said, I just finished final revisions to an edited volume I am co-authoring with two friends - Preventing a Future Cycle of Conflict in Iraq - (a “vast project” as my French friends would say), which should be out in the USA and UK in a few months and in India later this year. Beyond that, with a couple of other friends I am finishing off that least glamorous of tasks, a text-book, The Law and Practice of the UN, that Oxford will be bringing out in 2008.

I have been very fortunate that former Indian research partners and new friends in the scholarly world here occasionally rope me into their own projects. I was particularly honoured to be able to address the vastly successful 50th anniversary Indian Law Institute conference in Delhi in November 2006 on some new trends in Security Council decision-making and am delighted to be publishing soon in the Indian Journal of International Law on some salient legal dimension of the Iraq case.

I am struck by the extraordinary variety and depth of commentary, scholarly writing and policy-oriented research that India offers to itself and the world. For someone like me, there could be no more happy an intellectual environment.