Kosovo and Iraq
In the midst of an interview in Democratiya, Paul Berman offers up a pleasingly specific version of the incompetence dodge. He's expanding on the view expressed in his book that had Berman, rather than Bush, been in charge during the Iraq war he would have done things differently and better: "We could have presented a human rights case to the world, instead of trying to deceive people about weapons and conspiracies - and we would have ended up with more allies, or, at least, with allies who understood the mission. We could have applied the lessons of Kosovo, which would have meant dispatching a suitable number of soldiers." As he further explains:
A better intervention was unquestionably possible. Before the war I was arguing to continue in the path of the Kosovo intervention: marshalling the right arguments, doing the diplomacy, assembling the right allies, making adequate plans, recognising what sort of occupation was going to be necessary. Kosovo was not brilliant by any means, but neither was it a total catastrophe. I made those arguments as an observer reading the newspapers. Now we have books like Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq, by Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor, the present and past military correspondents of The New York Times. Trainor is a retired Marine Corps Lt General. It turns out top generals were arguing for precisely that kind of thing – for drawing on the Kosovo model. The criticisms of outside observers like me turn out to have run parallel to criticisms made inside the armed forces.
I think it behooves people to get much clearer than this as to what the Kosovo model was a model for. For one thing, who would "the right allies" have been in Iraq? In Kosovo, in lieu of the UN we had the support of the relevant regional organization, NATO. But was President Berman really going to get, say, the Arab League to support the invasion and occupation of Iraq in order to rebuild it as a democracy? That seems very unlikely. And it seems equally unlikely that NATO would have any particular legitimacy in Iraq.
But the problem, really, is deeper. People sometimes seem to forget that during the Kosovo War we didn't march on Belgrade. Instead, international forces just occupied the province of Kosovo after having made war on Serbia. Since the troops were there in order to secure de facto independence for Kosovo it's no surprise that it was relatively easy to prevent the emergence of resistance.
What we've tried to do in Iraq is preside over a multiethnic polity and crease peace there. Kosovo does, of course, have a Serbian minority population but as Jeremy Kahn points out the UN forces aren't very effective in safeguarding it from violence and intimidation organized by Kosovar Albanians.
We say we succeeded in Kosovo primarily because our main goal was simply to get Milosevic's forces out of the province and we accomplished that. The equivalent thing to do in Iraq would have been to identify a geographical region where the local majority ethnic group was an oppressed minority in Iraq as a whole and use threats of force to make Saddam Hussein withdraw his military from that region. Which, when you think about it, is exactly what we did many years before the invasion in creating the autonomous Kurdistan region. That was the "Kosovo model" years before the Kosovo War ever took place.
Nothing about the Iraq War resembled the Kosovo situation -- not on the level of implementation, but on the level of goals for the mission.
J. McCutchen "JmacSF"
San Francisco. CA
Reality based?
Not even close
June 19, 2006 11:34 AM | Reply | Permalink
There's not much to add to Matt's nifty lancing of the neoconish boil that is Paul Berman.
Milosevic held Kosovo like a wolf by the ears. He couldn't give up the myth of the "Field of Black Birds," and he couldn't stem the tide of Albanian immigration. He had tried for a decade to induce Serbs to colonize the province, and his efforts had proved unsuccessful. Serbia's sovereignty in Kosovo would likely have collapsed in the not too distant future whatever NATO had chosen to do in 1999.
June 19, 2006 11:54 AM | Reply | Permalink
I wonder how many more festering neoconish boils there are out there. Lancing the putrid growths, though necessary, is getting tiresome.
June 19, 2006 12:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
Actually, I think what Berman is looking for would be a Gulf War I where we get Saddam out of Power. After all, the real ending of Kosovo was Slobo getting thown out and put on trial. That's what realy did stop the carnage in the Balkins. Given the examples of Kosovo and Gulf War I its not completely outlandish that the Liberal Hawkish war that Berman was thinking of could sweep Saddam from power. That's not what we got, but I wouldn't dismiss the possiblity out of hand.
Berman is no neoconish boil. We should should be able to do something more about genocide than watch. I may not agree with him on everything, but he is a man of the left and no neocon.
June 19, 2006 1:24 PM | Reply | Permalink
Talk about tiresome. President Berman undoubtedly could have done a better job in Iraq. The first step in Iraq might have been waiting until Afghanistan was more stable. As that war was continuing a building of troop levels consistent more with the original Pentagon plan could have been done.
Matt sneers at the Bosnia model. What was interesting was that Europeans failed to deal with a crisis in their backyard as much as Arabs have in theirs. Nato was used because it was largely an American operation. It was one of the reasons why France started talking about setting up a European defense force, which seems to have gone nowhere.
As Welsey Clark pointed out it would have been in the intersts of many of Iraq's neighbors for the U.S. effort to succeed. There never seemed to be any effort to gather real allies. Cobra II makes it clear that Cheney and Rumsfeld wanted a theater to show what American power could do.
The idea that Iraq no plan, no effort could have succeeded in Iraq strikes me as ideologicaly based as Bush's own statements and as little based on facts as his.
Daniel A. Greenbaum
June 19, 2006 1:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
It's not a sneer. It's the acknowledgment that there are certain realities to be learned from Bosnia. Take for example, troop levels. The Bosnia experience, as Shinseki pointed out, gave us an idea of the kind of troop levels required to occupy Iraq. Several hundred thousand troops, as I recall. I get the impression from your post that you think we could actually field that many. We've implemented stop loss, and have troops on their third tour just trying to maintain what, 120,000? And where exactly in this little fantasy of "Iraq was doable" do we get the rest?
So the U.S. planned to go into Iraq, overthrow a totalitarian regime, and install a democratic government. Seeing as the countries surrounding Iraq are also totalitarian regimes, it seems to me that this wouldn't be in their interest at all.
June 19, 2006 2:26 PM | Reply | Permalink
Berman . . . is a man of the left . . . .
So were almost all of the leading neocons -- once.
June 19, 2006 2:33 PM | Reply | Permalink
While Bosnia was not politically controlled by Slobo's Serbia, Iraq's Shiites were controlled politically by Saddam's Iraq.
When Saddam was deposed this meant that unless the country was going to be broken up, *someone* was going to have to try to govern the Shiites and Sunnis under one roof without all hell breaking loose, and it was never clear who that someone was going to be, or if there was a someone who could be acceptable to both sides.
What needed to happen in Bosnia Herzegovina was that Slobo had to be kicked out and prevented from invading again, and a functioning government had to be set up. Bosnia is now governed by 2 first-order administrative divisions and 1 internationally supervised district-Brcko district (Brcko Distrikt), the Bosniak/Croat Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Federacija Bosna i Hercegovina) and the Bosnian Serb-led Republika Srpska. Brcko district is in northeastern Bosnia and is an administrative unit under the sovereignty of Bosnia and Herzegovina; the district remains under international supervision.
The current Government of Kosovo is formed by a coalition between the Ibrahim Rugova-led Democratic League of Kosovo and the Ramush Haradinaj-led Alliance for the Future of Kosovo. Not Slobo. Not Serbia.
If Slobo had remained in power then the danger of renewed aggression would have been greater than it presumably is now, and that would have affected the security requirements and commitments. But Bosnia and Kosovo are separate entities with their own governments.
If Bosnia Herzegovina, Kosovo and Serbia had all been part of one country with a single central government, that situation would have been more like Iraq in that changing regimes would likewise have left up in the air the matter of who, as in which individual, would be acceptable enough as a head of state to each of the various factions and groups to prevent mass atrocities or the breakout of civil war.
June 19, 2006 2:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
The most glaring irony is that in Yugoslavia and Kossovo, America fought alongside the forces of irridentism whereas in Iraq is fighting against them.
June 19, 2006 5:48 PM | Reply | Permalink
Wasn't there a country called Yugoslavia not so long ago - hosted the Winter Olympics is Sarejevo? Bosnia and Kosovo became separate entitites as a result of the civil war and Western intervention to prevent Serbian ethnic cleansing of Bosnia Muslims and Kosovars.
There were a lot of lessons to be learned from the Balkans for any mission in Iraq. The neocons and the Rummy/Cheney crew decided not to apply any of them. They were all too cautious, too multilateral, above all - too Clinton. But that doesn't mean they couldn't have worked.
Matt continues to play fast and lose with his various iterations of the "competance dodge" If you hold the most signicant blunders made by the Bush administration constant, then of course a better executed war would still have faced long odds. It might be fair to bludgeon liberal hawks like Berman for not recognizing that too many preconditions for success were being violated by Bush in the spring of 2003. It does not follow, however, that with a different set of leadership, the entire enterprise was a fool's errand.
June 19, 2006 6:15 PM | Reply | Permalink
mhpine, you wrote: "Wasn't there a country called Yugoslavia not so long ago - hosted the Winter Olympics is Sarejevo? Bosnia and Kosovo became separate entitites as a result of the civil war and Western intervention to prevent Serbian ethnic cleansing of Bosnia Muslims and Kosovars."
Yes, there was. Tito died in 1980 and that is when things gradually began to unravel. The Sarejevo winter games were in 1984.
On this timeline http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/kosovo/etc/cron.html the breakup of the country of Yugoslavia began in 1991 when Slovenia and Croatia declared their independence. Bosnia declared its independence the following year. War broke out at that time. Ethnic cleansing spread in 1993. The NATO bombing came in 1994.
Kosovo, which had been a province since 1974, had its autonomy reduced in 1989 as a result of changes Milosevic helped engineer. In 1991 Kosovo declared independence although it earned little international recognition at that time. In May 1992 Kosovar Albanians elected Ibrahim Rugova president in unofficial elections. Rugova began creating a shadow government.
The point I was trying to make is that the various component parts of what had been Yugoslavia had become separate entities prior to the outside interventions.
The intervenors in Bosnia and Kosovo were not in the position, in the aftermath, of trying to put Humpy Dumpty back together again--to forge a single nation out of the various republics that had separated and declared independence.
By contrast, in Iraq, the US was essentially in a position, following Saddam's ouster, of having to find a way to keep together under one government two groups which had been held together under Saddam only through terror and had some good reasons to want to go their separate ways if the opportunity presented itself.
There should have been considerable grounds for skepticism, based on the history and the relationship between the Sunnis and Shiites at the time of the war, as to whether, and how, it was going to be possible for us or them to find a way to keep those groups living together under one roof. To understate the case, there appears to have been precious little skepticism within the Administration about the grounds for believing Chalabi was going to be the person who could pull that off.
Perhaps there is a case to be made, based on detailed knowledge of the key political players and dynamics there, that some other Administration might have been able to engineer such a transition. It seemed a formidable task, even at the time, regardless of who was trying to bring it about.
June 19, 2006 8:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
Well, its no big thing to say that a President Berman would have done a better job invading and occupying Iraq. Any number of people, my uncle, the little girl who lives down the road, the dogcatcher, someone plucked from a drunk tank, a syphilitic howler monkey (but not, thank you, a diseased spider monkey... a healthy spider monkey we can debate about) would have done a better job invading and occupying Iraq than your current bozo.
But let's get serious. Wouldn't it have been as huge a lie to claim that you were going in to stop human rights violations? You are well on the way to killing as many Iraqi's as Saddam had, and at a breakneck pace. America has brought back all of Saddam's old vices, including arbitrary suspension of media operations by shutting down newspapers while favouring certain outlets with money and access, torture, threats and intimidation against political leaders, arbitrary arrests and detentions, and as it turns out sexual violation of male and presumably female prisoners.
So what would the pitch have been? "We'll kill Iraqi's at 12 times Saddam's current rate, but we'll torture and rape at only 30% the current volume?" ROTFL.
Or maybe Berman's notion was that he was going to succeed? Well, anyone can pull a wish out of their butt.
June 19, 2006 10:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
We should should be able to do something more about genocide than watch.
What does that have to do with the Iraq war? In fact, Matt specifically supports military intervention in the case of ongoing or incipient genocide -- that's the standard articulated by the head of Human Rights Watch, which he cites approvingly.
"When God ariseth, and when he visiteth, what shall we answer!" - Rev. Benjamin Hancock
June 20, 2006 12:19 AM | Reply | Permalink
Trotskyites, in fact, if Justin is correct.
June 20, 2006 12:35 AM | Reply | Permalink
"totalitarian" is a term which should not be used for mere workaday dictatorships like Saudi Arabia or Syria, and certainly shouldn't be applied to the weird amalgam that is Iran.
Also, a majoritarian government in Iraq would seem to be very much in Iran's interest.
June 20, 2006 12:54 AM | Reply | Permalink
Re: Also, a majoritarian government in Iraq would seem to be very much in Iran's interest.
Not necessarily so. There's a lot of bad blood between Iraq and Iran and even a Shi'ite dominated government might turn quite anti-Iranian.
June 20, 2006 3:00 AM | Reply | Permalink
So if I was to need a word to broadly describe a number of states that had "centralized control by an autocratic leader or hierarchy", what would you suggest?
June 20, 2006 9:37 AM | Reply | Permalink