[Here is one of the rare ringing denunciations of the bombing from the liberal position, precisely and concisely put by a leading scholar of the European nation-state.]
Michael
A Shameful Debacle Rogers Brubaker
Abridged version of talk to UCLA forum on the Crisis in the Balkans, April 21, 1999
The United States' involvement in Kosovo has been the greatest and most shameful American foreign-policy debacle since the Vietnam War. Intervening on ostensibly humanitarian grounds, we turned a humanitarian crisis into a humanitarian catastrophe. Claiming to preserve the "credibility" of NATO, we gravely damaged, and perhaps destroyed, that credibility. Seeking to quench the fires of ethnic conflict, we poured fuel on the flames. Acting in the name of stability, we further destabilized the entire region. Seeking to undermine Slobodan Milosevic, we galvanized support for him. And rather than degrading the military capabilities of his regime, we degraded only ourselves.
These consequences were foreseeable. Yet clothing ourselves in the rhetoric of moral absolutes, we failed in the most elementary duty of responsible politics: to be guided by systematic consideration of the probable and possible consequences of one's conduct.
How could this happen? Could it have been averted? Why was the gulf between intention and result so spectacular, and so tragic? These questions do not have simple answers. But in part, the debacle flowed from a series of misconceptions.
First was the misconception that massive ethnic cleansing, and by some accounts even genocide, were being carried out in Kosovo before the bombing began. This abuses the term "genocide" and stretches the term "ethnic cleansing." Using these deeply loaded terms to describe what was happening on the ground before our intervention is a way of emphasizing the continuity between what happened before and after March 24, and of conveniently absolving ourselves of responsibility for the ensuing catastrophe.
Was ethnic cleansing occurring before the bombing? If we use the term to designate any forcible displacement or killing of ethnically distinct civilian populations, then the Serb counterinsurgency campaign certainly involved that. But if ethnic cleansing means an attempt to alter the overall ethnic demography of a political unit, then this was not happening before the bombing began. Many Kosovo Albanians -- a few hundred thousand -- had been displaced by the Serb counterinsurgency campaign, but few had left Kosovo. Some 30,000 Albanians fled Kosovo before the bombing, while, as of this writing, after a month of bombing, more than 600,000 have fled the province, with tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands more seeking to flee.
I certainly don't condone the brutal Serb counterinsurgency campaign. And of course there can be no excuse for the ghastly atrocities perpetrated by Serb military, paramilitary and police forces against Albanian civilians once the bombing began. The refugees must be allowed to return under suitable international protection. But the exculpatory "continuity thesis" that absolves NATO of responsibility for the humanitarian catastrophe of the last months is inadmissible.
It is important to remember that there has been war in Kosovo since early 1998 between the Kosovo Liberation Army and the Serb regime. The war followed a classic spiral of escalation. Attacks by an initially small, ill-equipped, ragtag KLA force against Serb policemen and other targets provoked brutal reprisals, the brunt of which were borne by civilians. This generated greater support for the KLA among both Kosovo and diaspora Albanians, bolstering KLA recruitment and funding (much of the latter coming from the diaspora). This enabled the KLA to mount a more serious challenge to the regime, which in turn generated more brutal reprisals, and so on.
This spiraling war involved a great deal of brutality, most, but certainly not all, of it on the Serb side. Among other things, it involved regime efforts to create buffer zones cleared of civilians. And many Kosovo Albanian civilians were killed by Serb forces. This is a very nasty business, but it is not clear that it should be described under the heading of ethnic cleansing. Insurgencies and counterinsurgencies -- of which there are many in the world today -- are dirty and dangerous things. They invariably involve the killing of civilians. They are deeply morally ambiguous, in part because insurgents often pursue what the French call a politique du pire, carrying out attacks designed precisely to provoke massive and brutal retaliation, since the more massive and brutal the reprisals, the greater their own legitimacy. The second misconception was that we had no choice but to intervene as we did. In fact we backed ourselves into a corner through diplomacy of staggering ineptitude. The Rambouillet agreement offered the Serbs nothing except humiliation, and showed a complete insensitivity to core national myths and elements of sovereignty. It was not only everyday control in Kosovo that Serbs were asked to give up, but key elements of sovereignty throughout Yugoslavia as well. Equally important, Rambouillet was forced on the Albanian side as well. In desperation, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright persuaded Albanians to sign the agreement so that NATO would be able to bomb Serbia. What could be more senseless than bombing one party to force it to sign an agreement that is unacceptable to the other party as well!
What could have been done? In the final days before the bombing started, our inept diplomacy left few options. But even so, it would have been better to do nothing rather than to unleash a humanitarian catastrophe in the name of preserving "credibility." Liberal interventionists argued that we could not simply stand by and let violence be perpetrated against innocent civilians, as we did in Bosnia. The specter of the shameful Western inaction at Srebenica shadowed debates about Kosovo. But we learned the wrong lesson. It is not always better to "do something" when faced with evil; it depends on what that something is. If it leads to an intensification of the evil, then it is far worse to salve our consciences by "doing something" than it would be to do nothing.
Earlier we had more -- and more attractive -- options. We could have done more to support Albanian Kosovar leader Ibrahim Rugova's nonviolent movement vis-*-vis the KLA. We could have done more to support the democratic forces in Serbia. We could have avoided the initial and tragically premature support for Slovenian and Croatian independence, which triggered the entire cascading process of violently reconfiguring Yugoslav space along homogeneously national lines that continues to work itself out with such terrible consequences today.
The third misconception was that bombing would force Milosevic to accept the Rambouillet settlement or, failing that, prevent Serb forces from attacking Albanians. But as we witnessed, bombing immediately consolidated support for Milosevic and gave him less incentive than ever to accept the Rambouillet terms. And far from preventing Serb forces from attacking Albanians, bombing -- and the withdrawal of Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe monitors just before the bombing began -- gave them the perfect opportunity to carry out attacks with impunity. This, too, was predictable.
The rules of the military engagement made an intensification of ethnic cleansing even more predictable. Particularly galling were the rules of engagement for the bombing runs, requiring pilots to bomb only from high altitudes. This unwillingness to expose NATO pilots to risk, while at the same time defending civilian casualties as inevitable byproducts of war, amounts to an unprecedented, and truly scandalous, doctrine: that casualties are inevitable in wartime, and must be regretfully tolerated, except on the attacking side. This commitment to risk-free warfare can only be described as obscene, given our readiness to expose both Serb and Albanian civilians to massive risks.
The idea that bombing -- especially high-altitude, no-risk bombing -- could stop ethnic cleansing rests on a complete misunderstanding of how ethnic cleansing is carried out. It doesn't require a sophisticated command and control apparatus. It doesn't require bridges over the Danube in Novi Sad. A few masked thugs with guns are sufficient to clean out a village. The idea that it could be stopped by high-altitude bombing was truly preposterous.
The fourth misconception: Even if our political and military objectives were not met, we at least could have the satisfaction of having done the morally right thing, fighting on the side of the angels against radical evil, standing up to ethnic cleansing and genocide in the name of human rights and national self-determination. This may be comforting, but it is not warranted. To use the black-and-white language of moral absolutes to make sense of, and justify violent intervention in, a complex and deeply morally ambiguous situation is catastrophic. In the famous terms of the great German theorist of politics Max Weber, to act according to an ethic of ultimate ends, an ethic of absolute conviction, is to be concerned only with the intrinsic rightness of the act, without regard to its consequences. Against this, what Weber calls an ethic of responsibility requires us to think through as seriously as possible the possible -- and probable -- consequences of our actions. To intervene violently in the name of stopping violence, without being guided by systematic consideration of these consequences, is deeply irresponsible. And our policy in Kosovo was irresponsible in just this sense. It is this that made our intervention not simply tragic, but shameful.