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Chomsky on 'New Interventionism'





Al-Ahram Weekly Al-Ahram Weekly
2 - 8 September 1999
Issue No. 445 [INLINE]
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM
______________________________________________________________________


Enlightened humanists
and smart missiles

The NATO war in Yugoslavia has been hailed as the harbinger of a
new, moral world order, in which "enlightened" states bring
disorderly miscreants to heel. In the following article, excerpted
from the first chapter of his soon to be published book, The New
Military Humanism: Lessons From Kosovo,* Noam Chomsky finds
something crass and considerably more familiar in the motives and
actions of the self-described bearers of enlightenment
______________________________________________________________

Chomsky Noam Chomsky

The crisis in Kosovo has excited passion and visionary exaltation
of a kind rarely witnessed. The events have been portrayed as "a
landmark in international relations," opening the gates to a stage
of world history with no precedent, a new epoch of moral rectitude
under the guiding hand of an "idealistic New World bent on ending
inhumanity." This New Humanism, timed fortuitously with a new
millennium, will displace the crass and narrow interest politics of
a mean-spirited past. Novel conceptions of world order are being
forged, interlaced with inspirational lessons about human affairs
and global society.

If the picture is true, if it has even a particle of truth, then
remarkable prospects lie before us. Material and intellectual
resources surely are at hand to overcome terrible tragedies at
little cost, with only a modicum of good will. It takes little
imagination or knowledge to compile a wish list of tasks to be
undertaken that should confer enormous benefits on suffering
people. In particular, crimes of the nature and scale of Kosovo are
all too easily found, and many could be overcome, at least
significantly alleviated, with a fraction of the effort and zeal
expended in the cause that has consumed the Western powers and
their intellectual cultures in early 1999.

If the high-minded spirit of the liberation of Kosovo has even
shreds of authenticity, if at last leaders are acting "in the name
of principles and values" that are truly humane, as Vaclav Havel
confidently proclaimed, then there will be exciting opportunities
to place critically important issues on the agenda of practical and
immediate action. And even if reality turns out to fall short of
the flattering self-portrait, the effort still has the merit of
directing attention to what should be undertaken by those who
regard the fine words as something more than cynical opportunism.

***

On March 24, US-led NATO forces launched cruise missiles and bombs
at targets throughout the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY),
"plunging America into a military conflict that President Clinton
said was necessary to stop ethnic cleansing and bring stability to
Eastern Europe," lead stories in the press reported. By bombing the
FRY, Clinton informed the nation, "we are upholding our values,
protecting our interests and advancing the cause of peace." "We
cannot respond to such tragedies everywhere," he said, "but when
ethnic conflict turns into ethnic cleansing where we can make a
difference, we must try, and that is clearly the case in Kosovo."
"Had we faltered" in what the heading of his speech calls "A Just
and Necessary War," "the result would have been a moral and
strategic disaster. The Albanian Kosovars would have become a
people without a homeland, living in difficult conditions in some
of the poorest countries in Europe," a fate that the United States
cannot tolerate for suffering people.

Clinton's European allies agreed. Under the heading "A New
Generation Draws the Line," British Prime Minister Tony Blair
declared that this is a new kind of war in which we are fighting
"for values," for "a new internationalism where the brutal
repression of whole ethnic groups will no longer be tolerated,"
"for a world where those responsible for such crimes have nowhere
to hide."

"The New Interventionism" was hailed by intellectual opinion and
legal scholars who proclaimed a new era in world affairs in which
the "enlightened states" will at last be able to use force where
they "believe it is just," discarding the "restrictive old rules"
and obeying "modern notions of justice" that they fashion. "The
crisis in Kosovo illustrates America's new willingness to do what
it thinks is right -- international law not withstanding," wrote
University of California law professor Michael Glennon in Foreign
Affairs. Now freed from the shackles of the Cold War and
old-fashioned constraints of world order, the enlightened states
can dedicate themselves with full vigour to the mission of
upholding human rights and bringing justice and freedom to
suffering people everywhere, by force if necessary.

The enlightened states are the United States and its British
associate, perhaps also others who enlist in their crusades for
justice and human rights. Their mission is resisted, Glennon notes,
only by "the defiant, the indolent, and the miscreant," the
"disorderly" elements of the world. The rank of enlightenment is
apparently conferred by definition. One will search in vain for
credible attempts to provide evidence or argument for the critical
distinction between enlightened and disorderly, surely not from
history. The history is in any event deemed irrelevant by the
familiar doctrine of "change of course," which holds that, yes, in
the past we have erred out of naivete or faulty information, but
now we are returning to the traditional path of righteousness.
There is, accordingly, no purpose in asking what might be learned
from old, musty stories about the past, even though the
decision-making structure and its institutional base remain intact
and unchanged.

On June 3, NATO and Serbia reached a peace accord. The United
States triumphantly declared victory, though not yet peace: The
iron fist remains poised until the victors determine that their
interpretation of the peace accord has been imposed. A broad
consensus was articulated by New York Times global analyst Thomas
Friedman: "From the start the Kosovo problem has been about how we
should react when bad things happen in unimportant places." The
enlightened states have opened a new millennium by providing an
answer to this critical question of the modern era, pursuing the
moral principle that, in Friedman's words, "once the refugee
evictions began, ignoring Kosovo would be wrong ... and therefore
using a huge air war for a limited objective was the only thing
that made sense."

***

While even a casual inspection of the chronology suffices to refute
Friedman's own (and conventional) answer to his rhetorical
question, a credible answer appears in the same journal on the same
day, though only obliquely. Reporting from Ankara, correspondent
Stephen Kinzer writes that "Turkey's best-known human rights
advocate [Akin Birdal] entered prison" to serve his sentence for
having "urged the state to reach a peaceful settlement with Kurdish
rebels." Looking beyond the sporadic and generally uninformative or
misleading news reports and commentary, we discover that the
sentencing of the courageous president of the Human Rights
Association of Turkey is only one episode of a campaign of
intimidation and harassment of human rights advocates who are
investigating and reporting horrendous atrocities and calling for
peaceful resolution of a conflict that has been marked by one of
the most savage campaigns of ethnic cleansing and state terror of
the '90s. The campaign has proceeded with mounting fury thanks to
the active participation of the United States, "upholding our
values, protecting our interests, and advancing the cause of peace"
(in the president's words), in a way that is all too familiar to
those who do not prefer "intentional ignorance."

These events, continuing right now and taking place within NATO and
under European jurisdiction, provide a rather striking illustration
-- far from the only one -- of the answer given by the enlightened
states to the question of "how we should react when bad things
happen in unimportant places": We should react by helping to
escalate the atrocities, a mission accomplished in Kosovo as well.
Such elements of the real world of today raise some rather serious
questions about the New Humanism.

In the Balkans war of 1999, these questions remain out of sight --
within the "enlightened states," at least. Elsewhere, they are
readily perceived, over a broad spectrum. To select several remote
points for illustration, Amos Gilboa, a prominent Israeli
commentator on military and strategic affairs, sees the enlightened
states as "a danger to the world." He describes their new rules of
the game as a reversion to the colonial era, with the resort to
force "cloaked in moralistic righteousness" as the rich and
powerful do "what seems to them to be justified."... At a very
different point on the spectrum, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a Western
idol when he is saying the right things, offers a succinct
definition of the New Humanism: "The aggressors have kicked aside
the UN, opening a new era where might is right." They and many
others like them throughout the world might agree with an
observation by the prominent and influential -- though little
celebrated -- radical pacifist A.J. Muste:

"The problem after a war is with the victor. He thinks he has just
proved that war and violence pay. Who will now teach him a lesson?"

***

The larger issues highlighted by the most recent of the wars of
Yugoslav secession came into focus with the fading of the Cold War.
Central among these is the claimed right of intervention on the
part of states or alliances on humanitarian grounds, which extends
the scope of legitimated use of force. There is general agreement
on the timing, but the conclusions about "humanitarian
intervention" are phrased in different ways, reflecting the
evaluation of the intent and likely consequences of the emerging
norms of justified intervention.

The enlarged options are of two kinds: those carried out under UN
auspices and in conformity with the UN Charter, which is agreed to
be the foundation of international law in the post-World War II
period; and those carried out unilaterally, with no Security
Council authorisation, by states or alliances (the United States
and NATO for example, or the Warsaw Pact in earlier years). If
sufficiently powerful, arrogant and internally well-disciplined,
such alliances may designate themselves "the international
community." Questions arise about the first category, but that is
not our topic here. Rather, we are concerned with the states or
alliances that do not seek or are not granted authorisation from
the international community, but use force because "they believe it
to be just." In practice, that reduces to "America's new
willingness to do what it thinks is right," apart from operations
in "unimportant countries" of no concern to the reigning global
superpower (for example, peacekeeping interventions of the West
African states, which received retroactive authorisation from the
United Nations).

From one perspective, the extended scope of intervention has always
been legitimate, indeed meritorious, but was obstructed during the
Cold War because "the defiant, the indolent, and the miscreant" who
resist the mission were then able to rely for support on the
Communist powers, dedicated to subversion and insurrection as they
sought to conquer the world. With the Cold War over, the
"disorderly" can no longer impede the good works of the enlightened
states, and the New Humanism can therefore flourish under their
wise and just leadership.

From a contrasting perspective, "the new interventionism" is
replaying an old record. It is an updated variant of traditional
practices that were impeded in a bipolar world system that allowed
some space for nonalignment -- a concept that effectively vanishes
when one of the two poles disappears. The Soviet Union, and to some
extent China, set limits on the actions of the Western powers in
their traditional domains -- not only by virtue of the military
deterrent, but also because of their occasional willingness,
however opportunistic, to lend support to targets of Western
subversion and aggression. With the Soviet deterrent in decline,
the Cold War victors are more free to exercise their will under the
cloak of good intentions but in pursuit of interests that have a
very familiar ring outside the realm of enlightenment.

The self-described bearers of enlightenment happen to be the rich
and powerful, the inheritors of the colonial and neocolonial
systems of global dominion: they are the North, the First World.
The disorderly miscreants who defy them have been at the other end
of the stick: they are the South, the Third World. The division is
not sharp and clear; nothing is in the dominion of human affairs.
But the tendencies are hard to miss, and they suggest some of the
reasons for the difference of perspective in interpretation of the
emerging norms of justified intervention.

The conflict of interpretation is difficult to resolve if history
is declared irrelevant and the present scene is glimpsed only
through the filters established by the enlightened states, which
transmit the evil deeds of official enemies while blocking unwanted
images. To take the most obvious current illustration, atrocities
pass through unhindered, even magnified, if they are attributable
to Belgrade, but not if they trace back to Ankara and Washington.

If we hope to understand anything about the world, we should ask
why decisions on forceful intervention are made one way or another
by the states with the power to exercise their judgment and will.
At the 1993 American Academy Conference on Emerging Norms of
Humanitarian Intervention, one of the most distinguished figures in
the academic discipline of international relations, Ernest Haas,
raised a simple and cogent question, which has since received a
clear and instructive answer. He observed that NATO was then
intervening in Iraq and Bosnia to protect Kurds and Muslims, and
asked: "Will NATO take the same interventionist view if and when
Turkey begins to lean more heavily on its Kurdish insurgents?" The
question poses a clear test of the New Humanism: Is it guided by
power interests, or by humanitarian concern? Is the resort to force
undertaken "in the name of principles and values," as professed? Or
are we witnessing something crass and more familiar?

The test was a good one, and the answer was not long in coming. As
Haas raised the question, Turkey was leaning much more heavily on
the Kurdish population of the Southeast while rejecting offers of
peaceful settlement that would permit cultural and linguistic
rights. Very shortly the operation escalated to extremes of ethnic
cleansing and state terror. NATO took a very definite
"interventionist view," in particular NATO's leader, which
intervened decisively to escalate the atrocities.

The implications concerning the larger issues seem rather clear,
particularly when we compare this "interventionist view" to the one
adopted for the Kosovo crisis, a lesser one on moral grounds, not
only for reasons of scale (crucially and dramatically, prior to the
decision to bomb the FRY) but also because it is outside the bounds
and jurisdiction of the NATO powers and their institutions, unlike
Turkey, which is squarely within. The two cases differ sharply on a
different dimension, however: Serbia is one of those disorderly
miscreants that impede the institution of the US-dominated global
system, while Turkey is a loyal client state that contributes
substantially to this project. Again, the factors that drive policy
do not seem hard to discern, and the North-South divisions over the
larger issues and their interpretation seem to fall into place as
well.

***

Even a cursory examination shows that the proclamations of the New
Humanism are at best highly dubious. The narrowest focus, on the
NATO intervention in Kosovo alone, suffices to undermine the lofty
pronouncements. A broader look at the contemporary world powerfully
reinforces the conclusion, and brings forth with stark clarity "the
values" that are actually being upheld. If we deviate further from
the marching orders that issue from Washington and London and allow
the past to enter the discussion, we quickly discover that the new
generation is the old generation, and that the "new
internationalism" replays old and unpleasant records. The actions
of distinguished forebears, as well as the justifications offered
and their merits, should also give us pause.

Let us begin by keeping to the rules and focusing attention on the
designated case: Serb atrocities in Kosovo, which are quite real
and often ghastly. We immediately discover that the bombing was not
undertaken in "response" to ethnic cleansing and to "reverse" it,
as leaders alleged. With full awareness of the likely consequences,
Clinton and Blair decided in favour of a war that led to a radical
escalation of ethnic cleansing along with other deleterious
effects.

In the year before the bombing, according to NATO sources, about
2,000 people had been killed in Kosovo and several hundred thousand
had become internal refugees. The humanitarian catastrophe was
overwhelmingly attributable to Yugoslavian police and military
forces, the main victims being ethnic Albanians, commonly assumed
to constitute about 90 per cent of the population.

Prior to the bombing, and for two days following its onset, the
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reported no
data on refugees, though many Kosovars -- Albanian and Serb -- had
been leaving the province for years, and entering as well,
sometimes as a consequence of the Balkan wars, sometimes for
economic and other reasons. After three days of bombing, UNHCR
reported on March 27 that 4,000 had fled Kosovo to Albania and
Macedonia, the two neighbouring countries. By April 5, the New York
Times reported that "more than 350,000 have left Kosovo since March
24," relying on UNHCR figures, while unknown numbers of Serbs fled
north to Serbia to escape the increased violence from the air and
on the ground.

After the war, it was reported that half the Serb population had
"moved out when the NATO bombing began." There have been varying
estimates of the number of refugees within Kosovo before that NATO
bombing. Cambridge University Law Professor Marc Weller, legal
adviser to the Kosovar Albanian delegation at the Rambouillet
Conference, reports that after the withdrawal of the international
monitors on March 19, "within a few days the number of displaced
had again risen to over 200,000." House Intelligence Committee
Chairman Porter Goss gave the estimate of 250,000 internally
displaced.

By the time of the peace accord on June 3, the UNHCR reported
671,500 refugees beyond the borders of the FRY, in addition to
70,000 in Montenegro and 75,000 who went to other countries. To
these we may add the unknown numbers displaced within Kosovo,
perhaps as many as 300,000 in the year before the bombing, far more
afterwards, with varying estimates; and according to the
Yugoslavian Red Cross, over a million displaced within Serbia after
the bombing, along with many who left Serbia.

The numbers reported from Kosovo are, unfortunately, all too
familiar. To mention only two cases that are prime illustrations of
"our values" in the '90s, the refugee total prior to the NATO
bombing is similar to the State Department estimate for Colombia in
the same year; and the UNHCR totals at the war's end are about the
same as the number of Palestinians who fled or were expelled in
1948, another policy issue that is very much alive today. In that
case, refugees numbered about 750,000, 85 per cent of the
population, with over 400 villages levelled, and ample violence.
The comparison was not overlooked in the Israeli press, where
Gideon Levi of Ha'aretz described Kosovo as Palestine 1948 with TV
cameras. Israeli Foreign Minister Ariel Sharon warned that if
"NATO's aggression" is "legitimised," the next step might be a call
for autonomy and links to the Palestinian Authority for Galilee.
Elsewhere, Ian Williams, a fervent supporter of the NATO bombing,
commented, "The Serbs could almost have studied Israeli tactics in
1948 in their village destruction campaign, except of course the
Palestinians had no NATO to back them up."

***

The distinction between worthy and unworthy victims is traditional,
as is its basis, remote from any moral principle apart from the
rights demanded by power and privilege. Washington simultaneously
rejects the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
(for unworthy victims, Palestinians and many others) and
passionately upholds them (for worthy victims, now Kosovo
Albanians). Though readily understood in terms of power interests,
the distinctions, when noticed at all, are portrayed as "double
standards" or "mistakes" in respectable commentary. Attention to
the facts reveals that there is a single standard, the one that
great powers typically observe, and that although plans may go awry
(aggressors have been defeated, etc.), the "mistakes" are
overwhelmingly tactical.

***

Continuing with Kosovo, refugees reported that immediately after
the bombing began, the terror reached the capital city of Pristina,
mostly spared before, and provided credible accounts of large-scale
destruction of villages, brutal atrocities and a radical increase
in the generation of refugees, perhaps an effort to expel the
Albanian population. Similar reports, generally quite credible,
were prominently featured throughout the media, in extensive and
horrifying detail, the usual practice in the case of worthy victims
under attack by official enemies.

One index of the effects of "the huge air war" was offered by
Robert Hayden, director of the Centre for Russian and East European
Studies of the University of Pittsburgh: "The casualties among Serb
civilians in the first three weeks of the war are higher than all
of the casualties on both sides in Kosovo in the three months that
led up to this war, and yet those three months were supposed to be
a humanitarian catastrophe." Admittedly, casualties among Serb
civilians amount to little in the context of the jingoist hysteria
that was whipped up for a war against the Serbs. But the toll from
the bombing among Albanians in the first three weeks, estimated at
the time in the hundreds though presumably much higher, was surely
far beyond that of the preceding three months and probably the
preceding years.

On March 27, US NATO Commanding General Wesley Clark announced that
it was "entirely predictable" that Serb terror and violence would
intensify after the bombing. On the same day, State Department
spokesman James Rubin said, "The United States is extremely alarmed
by reports of an escalating pattern of Serbian attacks on Kosovar
Albanian civilians," now attributed in large part to paramilitary
forces. Shortly after, Clark reported again that he was not
surprised by the sharp escalation of Serb terror after the bombing:
"The military authorities fully anticipated the vicious approach
that Milosevic would adopt, as well as the terrible efficiency with
which he would carry it out."

Clark's phrase "entirely predictable" is an overstatement. Nothing
in human affairs is "entirely predictable," surely not the effects
of extreme violence. But what happened at once was highly likely.
"Enemies often react when shot at," observed Carnes Lord, a former
Bush administration national security adviser. "Though Western
officials continue to deny it, there can be little doubt that the
bombing campaign has provided both motive and opportunity for a
wider and more savage Serbian operation than what was first
envisioned."

***

The outcome was not unanticipated in Washington. House Intelligence
Committee Chair Porter Goss informed the media that "Our
intelligence community warned us months and days before [the
bombing] that we would have a virtual explosion of refugees,...
that the Serb resolve would increase, that the conflict would
spread, and that there would be ethnic cleansing." As far back as
1992, European monitors in Macedonia had "predicted a sudden,
massive influx of ethnic Albanian refugees if hostilities spread
into Kosovo."

The reasons for these expectations are clear enough. People "react
when shot at" not by garlanding the attackers with flowers, and not
where the attacker is strong -- but where they are strong: in this
case, on the ground, not by sending jet planes to bomb Washington
and London. It takes no particular genius to reach these
conclusions, nor access to secret intelligence. The overt NATO
threat of direct invasion made the brutal reaction even more
likely, again for reasons that could hardly have escaped Clinton
and Blair.

The threat of bombing presumably had already led to an increase in
atrocities, though evidence is slight. The withdrawal of
international monitors on March 19 in preparation for the bombing
presumably had the same consequence, again predictably. "The
monitors were widely seen as the only remaining brake on Yugoslav
troops," The Washington Post observed in a retrospective account;
and releasing the brake, it must have been assumed, would lead to
disaster. Other accounts agree. A subsequent detailed retrospective
in the New York Times concluded, "The Serbs began attacking the
Kosovo Liberation Army strongholds on March 19, but their attack
kicked into high gear on March 24, the night NATO began bombing in
Yugoslavia." It would take a heavy dose of intentional ignorance to
interpret the facts as mere coincidence.

Serbia officially opposed the withdrawal of the monitors. That
resolution in the National Assembly was not reported by the
mainstream media, which also did not publish the terms of the
Rambouillet Agreement, though the latter was identified throughout
the war as right and just. It was "the peace process," emphasis on
"the," a term used reflexively to refer to Washington's stand
whatever it may be (often efforts to undermine diplomacy), a
practice that has been particularly instructive with regard to the
Middle East and Central America.

The bombing was undertaken five days after the withdrawal of the
monitors with the rational expectation that "the result" would be
atrocities and ethnic cleansing, and a "sudden, massive" flight and
expulsion of Albanians. That indeed happened, even if the scale may
have come as a surprise to some, though the commanding general
apparently expected nothing less.
______________________________________________________________

* The New Military Humanism: Lessons From Kosovo is to be published
by Common Courage Press. This excerpt is printed here by special
permission from the author.

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