by Edward S. Herman
September 1, 2003 In its issue of July 14, 2003, The Nation Magazine ran a
"forum" on "humanitarian intervention," in which "twelve leading thinkers
from around the world" were invited to discuss that subject. The character
and limits of the selection of participants by the editors, and the
associated assumptions, omissions, mythical history, and pro-imperialist
biases of a fair number of these leading thinkers, are a regrettable
indication of the sorry state of liberal-left critical thought in this
country. The most notable mis-selections of participants are David Rieff,
Mary Kaldor, Samantha Power, Richard Falk and Carl Tham. Rieff and Power are
New York Times, Wall Street Journal, New Republic, and mainstream media
favorites, who, over the years, have accepted without question this
country's self-appointed role as humanitarian intervener, while criticizing
various flaws, usually a failure to act with sufficient celerity and force.
Neither is a scholar or expert in the areas surveyed; both are activists who
support a more aggressive and polished imperialism. Mary Kaldor came to the
fore in the field of humanitarian intervention as a supporter of the Kosovo
war, and she, like Forum contributor Richard Falk (also on The Nation's
editorial board), was a member of the Independent International Commission
on Kosovo (IICK), a European government-funded NGO that was part of the
pro-Kosovo war support base. Carl Tham, Swedish ambassador to Germany, and
co-chairman with Richard Goldstone of the IICK, is also a contributor to the
Forum. Samantha Power was a "consultant" to the International Crisis Group,
another government and foundation-supported NGO, whose board includes George
Soros, Mortimer Zuckerman, General Wesley Clark, and former U.S. officials
Richard Allen, Kenneth Adelman, and Morton Abramowitz (Power's first
"boss"). All of this set of Forum participants supported the Kosovo war as
valid "humanitarian intervention," and they continue to defend that position
with alleged facts that are untrue along with mainstream myths. As
interesting as the mis-selections are the writers ignored by The Nation's
editors. Robert Hayden, the author of Blueprints for a House Divided: The
Constitutional Logic of the Yugoslav Conflict (1999) and numerous
enlightening papers on what he calls "humanrightsism," more knowledgeable
about the Balkans than the four named above, and a serious critic of
humanitarian intervention, is missing. David Chandler, author of an
outstanding book on the Bosnian intervention, and a very good recent book,
> From Kosovo to Kabul: Human Rights and International Intervention, is
absent. Michael Mandel, the distinguished Canadian lawyer who has
specialized in the Tribunal and is in press with a book on How America Gets
Away With Murder: Illegal Wars, Collateral Damage and Crimes Against
Humanity, is missing. Denis Halliday, a former UN official deeply involved
in human rights issues in Iraq, finds no place in the Forum. Noam Chomsky,
who has written extensively on human rights issues is absent. Most dramatic,
Diana Johnstone, who has even written for The Nation on the Balkans, and
whose book on the Balkans wars, Fools' Crusade (2002), is an outstanding
work, vastly more scholarly than the writings of Rieff and Power, and
presenting a convincing anti-imperialist analysis, is also left out. None of
the other contributors to the Forum is an expert on the Balkans, and only
two of them, Eric Rouleau and Stephen Zunes mention the area explicitly.
(Rouleau, Zunes, Stephen Holmes, Zia Mian, and Mahmood Mamdani, have
articles of merit in this Forum). As the real left has been marginalized and
establishment lies and myths on the Balkan wars have become more entrenched
in the country at large, important left positions can no longer even be
presented for discussion in a purported liberal/left and anti-imperialist
journal. (This is also true of In These Times and The Progressive, neither
of which has reviewed Johnstone's book; and in the case of ITT, their
Contributing Editor and specialist on the Balkans, Paul Hockenos, is a
former OSCE administrator in NATO-occupied Bosnia, who displaced Johnstone
in coverage of this area, and offers NATO-supportive analyses [see my Open
Letter on Hockenos to ITT, http://www.zmag.org/openhermanitt.htm].) As
revealing as anything on the bias of the Forum participants is the fact that
not one of the twelve ever mentions the 1991-2003 UN sanctions against Iraq
as a human rights issue and source of a human rights catastrophe. Power
refers to a "savage genocide in 1988, killing more than 100,000 Kurds"
carried out by Saddam Hussein -- but the 500,000 Iraqi children killed by
sanctions that Madeleine Albright said was regrettable but "worth it," and
the million plus total, do not qualify as genocide or even deserve mention
(nor does Power mention the unwavering U.S. support for Saddam Hussein at
the time of the 1988 killings of Kurds). John and Karl Mueller, writing in
Foreign Affairs, claimed that the sanctions were responsible for more
civilian deaths than all the weapons of mass destruction in human history,
including Hiroshima-Nagasaki ("Sanctions of Mass Destruction," May/June
1999). And Thomas Nagy and Joy Gordon have shown that these effects on
civilians were a result of very careful and knowing U.S. and British policy
actions (Nagy, "The Secret Behind the Sanctions: How the U.S. Intentionally
Destroyed Iraq's Water Supply," The Progressive, Aug. 10, 2001; Gordon,
"Economic Sanctions as Weapons of Mass Destruction," Harpers, Nov. 2002).
But this catastrophe failed to impress Samantha Power, and is not discussed
elsewhere in the Nation Forum on humanitarian intervention. Power explicitly
raises the question of how we decide when civilian deaths reach "a worthy
threshold" that would justify humanitarian intervention. Clearly 500,000
children or a million overall do not qualify for her -- at least when the
United States is the dispenser of death -- and this genocidal process
escapes Richard Falk as well when he speaks of the 1990s as "undoubtedly the
golden age of humanitarian intervention." Kaldor, who mentions the Kosovo
war as "resolving a humanitarian crisis," never suggests that there had been
a crisis in Iraq caused by the sanctions regime, and one that could have
been terminated by a simple decision on the part of U.S. and British
officials that killing 500,000 children was not "worth it." The fact that
Power and the others in the Forum who discuss Saddam's abuses don't even
mention the deaths by sanctions is testimonial to an overwhelming and
internalized bias, and an indignation and benevolence channeled in accord
with establishment priorities. Falk and Kaldor do condemn the Bush invasion
of Iraq, a military venture in which the establishment itself was split.
Their condemnation is based in good part on "the abandonment of legal
restraints on the use of international law, the heart and soul of the UN
Charter" (Falk), and because it was "neither legal nor legitimate" (Kaldor).
But their own support of the Kosovo war and war on Afghanistan (Falk,
although vacillating here), both wars carried out in violation of the UN
Charter, badly undercuts their present stress on legality. Forum participant
Stephen Holmes says that "liberals have implicitly licensed our
government...to throw evidentiary doubts to the winds and unleash lethal
force on the basis of hearsay testimony and circumstantial evidence." Kaldor
cites approvingly the IICK classic that the Kosovo war was "illegal but
legitimate" -- legitimate "because it resolved a humanitarian crisis" and
had widespread support within the international community. But this notion
of legitimacy that overrides the law overthrows the rule of law,
substituting criteria that are vague and subject to management by propaganda
machines that know how to use straightforward lies as well as "hearsay
testimony and circumstantial evidence" (the incubator babies killed in
Kuwait, and Saddam's imports of uranium from Nigeria were both effectively
rebutted only after they had done their job in facilitating war). Was there
a "humanitarian crisis" in Kosovo in early 1999 that justified military
force? Was it more severe than the crises in the Kurdish areas of Turkey, or
East Timor, or Palestine in the same time frame? There were some 2,000
killed in Kosovo in the year before the bombing war -- on all sides, with
the KLA contributing its fair share (the British even alleging KLA
responsibility for a majority of killings before January 15, 1999) -- but an
agreement of October 1998 led to a withdrawal of most Serb forces, the
introduction of over a thousand monitors, and greatly reduced conflict. A
problem, however, was that not only were no restrictions imposed on the KLA
as well as the Serbs, it was also belatedly disclosed that at this very time
the U.S. was arming and training the KLA (see, e.g., Tom Walker and Aidan
Laverty, "CIA aided Kosovo guerilla army," Sunday Times [London], March 12,
2000), and the KLA knew that it had a good chance of bringing in NATO arms
by provocations. Many more Kurds were killed by the Turkish army in the
1990s than the Serb toll of Albanians killed in Kosovo (even including those
killed by the Serbs in the 78-day bombing war). Many more than 2,000 East
Timorese were killed by Indonesian forces and paramilitaries in 1999 as
Indonesia fought the UN-sponsored election process. Over 2,000 Palestinians
have been killed by the Israeli armed forces in Intifada II, and over a
thousand were killed in the suicide-bomber-free Intifada I, as the
Palestinians resisted a genuine ethnic-cleansing process taking place in
violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention and numerous UN Security Council
resolutions. But none of the Forum participants mentions the Turkish, East
Timorese or Palestine cases, although half of them cite the Kosovo case as
demonstrating a proper humanitarian intervention (and Zunes, Falk and
Rouleau have written extensively on Palestine in their other writings). The
explanation of this double standard is obvious. In the Kosovo case, the
United States was eager to go to war, and its half-baked and badly
compromised claims of a humanitarian crisis were therefore seized upon by
cruise missile leftists (CMLs) as well as the mainstream media. In the cases
of Turkey, East Timor and Palestine, the victimization received active U.S.
support by arms supply and diplomacy, and in consequence CMLs look the other
way. They find it impossible to say that the United States actually
sponsored and underwrote ethnic cleansing, as in the Turkish and Palestine
cases, that it supported and protected a genocide, as in the case of
Indonesia in East Timor, or that it has directly engaged in policies that
would be called genocide if done by an enemy state (the Vietnam war, the
Iraq sanctions). In her book, "A Problem From Hell": America and the Age of
Genocide, Samantha Power never found the United States supporting,
protecting, or engaging in genocide -- its only defect is that it does not
always oppose genocide as energetically as it should. Here again, as with
the travesties of Claire Sterling and Paul Berman, proper thoughts override
blatant bias, numerous errors and sheer incompetence. Only Eric Rouleau and
Stephen Zunes among the contributors to the Forum suggest that peaceable
options had been neglected in the resort to war in Kosovo (several who might
have agreed with them don't address this question). Many CMLs, including
David Rieff and Samantha Power were long-time campaigners for a NATO war in
the Balkans, working on the basis of a mythical history of the struggles
there that rationalized their uncompromisingly pro-war stance (for an
analysis of many of these myths -- it was all the fault of the demon; the
U.S. and other NATO powers were just innocents, coming in belatedly to bring
justice; the honest Tribunal; Srebrenica's 7-8,000 murdered--see my
"Propaganda System Number One," Z Magazine, Sept. 2001; my review of
Johnstone's Fools' Crusade [http://www.monthlyreview.org/0203herman.htm]; or
best of all, especially for Srebrenica, Johnstone's book itself). Forum
contributor Carl Tham asserts that "all diplomatic efforts had failed in an
emerging human rights catastrophe," and Falk and Kaldor simply dodge the
question while approving the war. But Tham makes a gross misstatement of
fact, as he repeats the same major error made in the IICK's volume, The
Kosovo Report. In reality, the United States was eager to go to war and had
been preparing the ground militarily and politically for a year before it
began bombing on March 24, 1999. At Rambouillet the aim was to get the KLA
to sign on to an agreement that was designed to assure Serb rejection. The
United States had helped arm the KLA, and the KLA correctly understood that
the United States was going to serve as its military arm (and the two worked
in close coordination during the 78-day war). Neither the United States nor
any members of the EU had made any constructive negotiating or peace-making
suggestions for the prior several years as the conflict intensified, and as
noted, the United States sabotaged the possibility of peace by aiding and
encouraging the KLA and imposing no restraints on its military actions from
October 1998 to March 24, 1999. The Serb Parliament's last minute compromise
proposals that would have granted a great deal of autonomy to Kosovo, and
would have allowed a large international monitoring group to be stationed in
Kosovo, were ignored (and have yet to be mentioned in the mainstream media).
Interestingly, it was in The Nation itself (June 14, 1999) that George
Kenney reported the admission by a U.S. official that the United States had
"raised the bar" in their negotiating offers to guarantee Serb rejection
(requiring the NATO occupation of ALL of Yugoslavia) because the Serbs
"needed a little bombing to see reason." That piece was published before the
complete liberal collapse into the consensus view that it was the demon who
was entirely at fault, so that any failure in negotiations must be to his
account, and the contrary view is barely audible in the Forum. This evidence
also demonstrates that Richard Falk's opening Forum sentence, proclaiming
that the 1990s were the "golden age" of humanitarian "diplomacy" is nonsense
-- as in the case of the inspections charade and maneuvering leading up to
the 2003 invasion of Iraq, there was only fake diplomacy and real
aggression. Canadian OSCE observer Rollie Keith stated in 1999 that NATO's
war "turned an internal humanitarian problem into a disaster," and UN
Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in Yugoslavia, Jiri Dienstbier,
contended in 2000 that the war "has not solved any human problems, but only
multiplied the existing problems." The State Department, OSCE, KVM monitors,
NATO, UN and the British Parliamentary inquiry have all documented the same
conclusion -- that the NATO war turned a serious problem into a disaster.
But for Richard Falk and Mary Kaldor the Kosovo war was a humanitarian
success that "rescued the Albanian Kosovars from the menace of Serb ethnic
cleansing" (Falk) and "resolved a humanitarian crisis" (Kaldor). The other
CML's also express no reservations based on postwar developments in Kosovo.
CMLs in general, following the official and media lead, and after their
intense and passionate concern over the plight of the Albanians, have
engaged in a remarkable eye aversion on developments in NATO-controlled
Kosovo. Falk ignores the fact that it was the war itself that produced the
worst Serb abuses against the Albanians and caused the latter maximum
hardship. Kaldor ignores the facts that, not only was the resolution of the
crisis costly to the Albanians, it created new humanitarian crises that
continue to this very day. President Bill Clinton had said that the war was
designed to help make Kosovo "a multiethnic, tolerant, inclusive democracy."
How dishonest and stupid to think that a war would help make for toleration,
and that a KLA-influenced or even KLA-dominated society would serve
multiethnicity! The war exacerbated hatred, and under NATO rule, Kosovo
suffered from what Swedish analyst Jan Oberg called "the largest ethnic
cleansing in the Balkans," with more than 2,000 dead or missing and over
330,000 non-Albanians driven out of Kosovo. Not only were a large fraction
of the Serbs made to flee, so were virtually all other non-Albanian ethnic
groups -- Jews, Turks, and Roma. The Roma had been treated relatively well
under Serb rule. But under NATO-Albanian governance, 75 percent of the Roma
had been driven out by the end of 2001, over 12,600 Roma homes had been
destroyed and the remaining Roma suffered a "pervasive and well-founded fear
for their personal safety" (Carol Bloom et al., The Current Plight of the
Kosovo Roma [Voice of Roma, 2002]. The CMLs are oblivious to this massive
and ecumenical ethnic cleansing under NATO auspices, or like Rieff dismiss
it as mere "vengeance." Under NATO rule the KLA was incorporated into an
official police force, although the cease-fire agreement of June 1999
required that it be disarmed. Under NATO-KLA rule, Kosovo has not only been
inhospitable to non-Albanians, it has been gangster-ridden, insecure even
for Albanians, and with growth concentrated heavily in the trade in drugs
and women. It has also been a base for KLA ambitions for a "Greater Albania"
that would take over chunks of southern Serbia, Macedonia and other Balkan
areas with Albanians. KLA-based destabilization efforts in these areas have
already caused further conflict. Serbia itself suffered enormously from the
NATO war: probably a thousand or more dead and thousands injured, extensive
economic destruction, deliberate bombing of chemical facilities that will
cause medical problems for many years, and an immense refugee problem. The
CMLs focus not on these disastrous conditions but on the fact that the demon
was removed by the Serbian people and that Serbia is now a "democracy." They
ignore the fact that Milosevic was overthrown in large measure by NATO
military power, sanctions and the resultant impoverishment, plus a massive
NATO investment in manipulating Yugoslav politics (an estimated $25 million
via the National Endowment for Democracy alone). The result has been a new
dependency, corruption as great or greater than ever, a media equally or
more biased in favor of the ruling clique, a rapid sell-out of national
assets to foreign corporations, implementation of a ruthless neoliberal and
antilabor policy, and more political prisoners today than under Milosevic's
rule. It is a broken, conflict-ridden, and poor society, its leaders in
thrall to the foreign powers that destroyed it -- traitors reaching out with
tin cups. This is a win for Clinton, Bush and NATO, but a loss for the
welfare, pride, independence and democratic prospects of the Serbian people.
David Rieff was given space in an earlier "humanitarian intervention" forum
in The Nation (May 8, 2000), in which he said essentially the same thing as
he says now: his main theme has been that we shouldn't kid ourselves with
the phrase "humanitarian intervention," because in fact it means "war."
Let's call things by their right names! Is it not bold to admit this, and to
note that European colonialists also claimed the best of intentions and a
"humanitarian imperative"? But then Rieff tells us that those old
colonialists really were genuine do-gooders! "In the nineteenth century, the
twin goals of imperialism were stamping out slavery and bettering health
through fighting disease and improving sanitation. Today the goal is
guaranteeing human rights, preventing genocide and bettering human health
through fighting disease and improving sanitation." No qualifications here,
and at least no differentiation between Clinton and Bush -- all these folks
have purely benevolent goals, so go for it, George! In the next stage of his
intellectual evolution perhaps Rieff will explain that the slave traders
were also simply trying to bring black savages into the protective custody
of white Christians. We can look for Rieff's further advances in apologetics
for imperialism in the next edition of a Nation Forum on "humanitarian
intervention."
Resources FOOLS' CRUSADE: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions, by Diana Johnstone (Book Excerpt) Diana Johnstone's "Fools' Crusade" - Book Review by Louis Proyect Diana Johnstone And The Demise Of 'Yugoslavism' - Book Review by Gilles d'Aymery The Balkans and Yugoslavia on Swans