"Compassionate Killing"

[Carl Remick]

[From the current Utne Reader]

Compassionate Killing
Can war be fought for humanitarian reasons?

By Kevin Kelley, Utne Reader

Somalia 1992 . . . Haiti 1994 . . . Bosnia 1996 . . . Kosovo 1999 . . .

The "humanitarian" military campaign has become a distinctive feature of 
U.S. foreign policy in recent years. But is it really humanitarian?

Not at all, writes Noam Chomsky in his new book, The New Military Humanism 
(Common Courage Press). Indeed, the scholar-activist finds scant evidence in 
human history of wars fought out of a sense of compassion. "The category of 
genuine humanitarian intervention might turn out to be literally null, if 
investigation is unencumbered by intentional ignorance," Chomsky writes. 
That assessment is in keeping with his suggestion elsewhere in the book that 
the term "moral state" is oxymoronic.

The United States, with its long record of aggression, epitomizes the 
hypocrisy of nations that have instigated wars under altruistic pretexts, he 
argues, noting that the recent instances of "humanitarian war" in East 
Africa, the Caribbean, and the Balkans are of a type with decidedly 
nonhumanitarian U.S. interventions in Southeast Asia and Central America.

And in Kosovo, several factors, none of them humanitarian, motivated a 
military campaign that had the very effect--mass expulsion of Kosovar 
Albanians--that it was supposed to prevent, Chomsky says. He cites the 
recurrent need to stimulate military spending, "the basis for U.S. 
preeminence in computers," as one major motive for the war.

In placing Kosovo on a continuum that includes El Salvador, Nicaragua, and 
Vietnam, Chomsky rejects what he terms "the doctrine of 'change of course.'" 
In all essential respects, the United States' global behavior is the same in 
the post-Soviet era as during the Cold War, he contends. U.S. interest in 
defending its unjust share of wealth has not changed, so why should we 
assume its modus operandi is now somehow nobler? The only difference in 
today's one-superpower world is that the United States has many more 
opportunities for low-risk intervention.

Every instance of American military intervention since the collapse of the 
Soviet Union has been utterly self-interested, in Chomsky's view. Thus, the 
1992 Marine landing in Somalia, allegedly to rescue thousands from 
starvation, was actually an elaborate effort to showcase U.S. military 
capabilities. Operation Restore Hope may also have taken as many Somali 
lives (between 7,000 and 10,000, the CIA estimated) as it saved (10,000 to 
25,000, according to the U.S. Refugee Policy Group).

The 1994 occupation of Haiti did restore the elected government of 
Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Chomsky acknowledges, but only after Washington had 
facilitated his overthrow by "a murderous military regime." What's more, the 
United States forced Aristide to accept "an extremely harsh version" of its 
Third World economic regimen as the price for his return to power.

Charles Krauthammer, writing in The National Interest (Fall 1999), argues 
that the Somalia and Haiti interventions, as well as the 1996 U.S.-led 
occupation of Bosnia, were "quintessentially humanitarian endeavors in which 
an American national interest is hard to find."

But Krauthammer is no fan of humanitarian wars, calling them "fool's 
errands." Somalia has returned to chaos; Haiti is once again in the grip of 
a "violent, unstable, squalid dictatorship"; precariously partitioned Bosnia 
looks more and more like a quagmire; and Kosovo presents a similar prospect 
of "endless occupation of a murderous neighborhood" of the most marginal 
strategic importance to the United States.

The problem, says Krauthammer, is that humanitarian war is fought in 
accordance with an "iron law" that is also its "central contradiction." A 
war can be waged for purposes other than pure national self-interest only 
"with sustained political support at home," he reasons. But the American 
public will remain supportive only "if the war is bloodless."

By definition, wars cannot be bloodless, he says. As soon as U.S. soldiers 
start dying, political support for humanitarian interventions will be 
quickly withdrawn, as happened in Somalia. Even a mounting non-American 
death toll eventually will make this type of war impossible to prosecute, 
Krauthammer says. That's what threatened to happen as U.S. bombs killed more 
and more Serbian and Kosovar civilians.

And, he adds, the need to prevent casualties--especially American 
casualties--requires that humanitarian war be fought with potentially 
calamitous means, such as high-altitude bombing. The ensuing "collateral 
damage" contradicts the very concept of humanitarian war.

"Humanitarian warfare has no future," he writes. "It is an idea whose time 
has come, and gone."

Chomsky, on the other hand, thinks humanitarian intervention may become more 
frequent in a unipolar world with no effective check on U.S. military power. 
International law will matter not at all, Chomsky predicts, pointing to 
Washington's cavalier dismissal of World Court opinions and the United 
Nations Charter.

"Defiance of international law and solemn obligations has become entirely 
open, even widely lauded in the West," he writes. Rampant lawlessness on the 
part of the world's leading nuclear power is perversely depicted, Chomsky 
adds, as a " 'new internationalism' that heralds a wonderful new age, unique 
in human history."

[end]

Carl

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