The Kosovo Precedent
J-Lo, who I like to keep on hand to make me look mainstream, has gone and written a second post before I got around to responding to his first, but I'm gonna take them in order and write about Kosovo. If legitimacy and the U.N. is so great, then what about Kosovo? The question, of course, can be read both ways -- as a challenge form the hawks and from the non-interventionists.
It's a tough question for the liberal internationalist because generally speaking I would like to have my cake and eat it too here. Kosovo mostly accomplished good things, but the process -- moving in without Security Council authorization -- isn't something I can strictly speaking approve of. And yet, I think some important things were accomplished there. How can the contradiction be resolved? Some thoughts:
One is that Kosovo illustrates, in part, the familiar idea that Security Council reform would be desirable. There probably ought to be a broader range of permanent members and the members shouldn't have a unilateral veto power. The U.N. needs to work through a fairly broad consensus model, but it is problematic for a handful of countries to be able to stand in the way of action that's broadly supported around the world.
Another is to simply recognize that things change over time. The 1990s were an uncertain period in international relations, and considering Russian weakness at the time, and the fact that the United States wasn't engaged in any major undertaking elsewhere, it was something we were able to get away with. In the present environment, I don't think that would work. In particular, in the wake of Iraq, it's necessary to commit ourselves more firmly to liberal order than we were before. One of the costs of doing something incredibly stupid is that we have less wiggle room than we might have in the absence of the screw-up.
But at long last if the Gods of logic say to me that I can't both defend Kosovo in retrospect and attack adventurism in the future, I say to heck with it. I think one major problem with the Democratic side during the pre-war debate over Iraq is that so many leading politicians, practitioners, and pundits coming out of the 1990s were personally invested in Kosovo in a way that made it difficult for them to concede that, yes, there was something a bit dodgy about what went down there. Something that, in context and all things considered, was perhaps the right thing to do but not something that constituted a great model for forward-looking policy. I think you see this pathology on display especially in the rhetoric of Tony Blair and a lot of "liberal hawk" writers who got very excited about a brave new era of humanitarian warfare and wound up blundering into Iraq. Iraq was, clearly, far too high a price to pay purely to defend the honor of the architects of NATO's Balkan policies in the 1990s.
Conversely, however, I think the apostles of a restrained foreign policty of various stripes do their cause a disservice by insisting that everyone who's backed any intervention anywhere is really just a neocon wolf in sheep's clothing. If nothing else, there's a commonsense difference between the scale of the fiasco in Iraq and the much more modest scale of the undertaking in Kosovo, whether you think it was for good or for ill.
. . . model for forward-looking policy.
Give it up! There are NO models!
April 22, 2008 3:50 PM | Reply | Permalink
Ellen is right here--the desire to find some kind of universal principle that can guide us through the messy reality of deciding when or when not to go to war is hopeless. And even if such a principle were possible to define, the actual and highly emotional rough-and-tumble of political debate during periods of crisis would overwhelm any rational principle we were supposed to be following. Slogans would win the day as they always do and our leaders--fearful of losing the next election--would lurch along with the populace's emotions.
If there are any principles we could follow, they are this: war should always be a last resort and any war that's not an act of defense against an actual attack on our soil should be viewed with great suspicion.
That said, the process of deciding when we go to war is probably more important than the principles we try to follow. The biggest problem with Iraq 2 was the lack of solid debate prior to the war. This problem is exacerbated by two problems: first, there's a huge standing military at the beck and call of the President which he can call into action pretty much at his will (and without any obstacles like the need to call up soldiers via a draft); second, Congress prefers to stay out of the war decision for political expediency (the cost of being wrong is too high) and therefore has shirked its solemn responsibility to declare war. The Iraq resolution wasn't a declaration of war but rather a nearly unconditional transfer of the power to decide whether we go to war to the president. This is a very bad trend. In the absence of the kind of universal principles Matt would like to find, the process of debating and deciding when to go to war needs to be thorough, comprehensive, and public. Handing the decision to the President and his advisers to make in secret with or without duly careful consideration is an unmitigated disaster. The consequence is Iraq 2.
One other point: much of the discussion about foreign policy after Iraq seems to center on when we should or should not go to war and how we should decide. That, of course, is an important discussion and one brought pressingly to the forefront because of the disaster of Iraq. War, however, should be at the back end of our foreign policy, not in the forefront--something we come to only when everything else doesn't work. While I understand Matt's interest in war policy, I'd suggest he concentrate more on the issue of governance of nations in an increasingly global and interconnected world. While war will probably never go away and will therefore continue to occupy our thoughts, the real issue for the next generation is how the nation-state model of government that exists today needs to be modified--or maybe transformed into something completely different--to allow us to govern not just international political conflicts, but also international corporations (that increasingly operate in the space between national laws) and to allow us to handle issues that can be solved only on a global level (the environment, workers' rights, trade, energy policy, etc.). The question for the future is: How do we create some kind of democratic (or truly representative) governing body that can manage the affairs of the world while protect the rights and liberties of local communities and individuals? That's the real question for the future.
April 23, 2008 7:04 AM | Reply | Permalink
Absolutely, Kosovo and Iraq are on different scales.
But I am concerned that we never dealt with the ethical problems around our Kosovo intervention and there's a lot more than going around the UN that needs to be dealt with. There are innocent civilian deaths caused by our decision to bomb from afar, for one. There's the issue of holding Serbian civilians responsible for Milosevic and the issue of whether or not there was any "good" side...
April 22, 2008 3:58 PM | Reply | Permalink
Mathew for you to say that "Kosovo mostly accomplished good things," probably means you have not really followed that story any deeper than what was presented on the front pages of US newspapers in the 1990s.
However you should realize the full story is out there now, take a little time and see for yourself. Here is a start: http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/robert_skidelsky/2008/04/the_kosovo_effect.html
By Robert Skidelsky, house of Lords in 1999.
Basically what was happening in Kosovo before our invasion was something like this. Rugova lead a nonviolent movement against Serb domination of the province for decades but in about 1996 the KLA got impatient and started to assasinate policeman (espececially ethnic Albanians who were cops). By 1999 they had killed about 500. The Serbs responded with counter insurgency tactics. By the time that the US attacked about 5000 people had been killed on both sides, maybe 4000 Albanians. This was presented as genocide in the west. The forced removal of Albanian citizens was not a factor. That happened after the US started bombing.
In short the Kosovo genocide was Clinton's WMD story -- good to rally support for war but one big lie nevertheless. Just because he was a Democrat and the Sainted Wesley Clark led our forces is no reason to excuse that lie.
Given that it was another war based on a lie, could you maybe explain what were some of the good things to come out of it? I will be happy to list the bad to things that have resulted.
April 22, 2008 4:03 PM | Reply | Permalink
Excerpts from my speech to hundreds of fellow-citizens in my West Coast city at an anti-war rally May 8, 1999:
As a historian, my preliminary judgement is that the Clintonians stumbled into this war, they are fools rather than butchers in this particular case -- even though they are butchers (applause), supporting wars in Mexico and Colombia and Sudan and Indonesia ...
Madeline, the daughter of World War II, is obsessed with Munich and she drew a line in the sand and dared a bully to step over it, without quite realizing how much s. she'd stepped into (laughter).
Now I'm no friend of Serbian nationalism ... it's pretty much macho and revengeful ... and doesn't seem to help anybody in the region. However the wise person might refrain from getting into feuds with people who EXPECT their feuds to last for generations and centuries. Milosevic is almost certainly a medium-sized monster, but Milosevic is not the reason we are opposing this war -- the lies of Clinton and Bush and Reagan and Carter and Ford and Lyndon Johnson and yes, even the lies of John F. Kennedy and the corruption and non-democracy they represent right here at home are why we are against this rotten war! (applause).
End excerpt.
I'm going to repeat what I said in an earlier Matt. Y thread of this book club discussion -- and what I've said several times over the last year in TPM discussions, if any of those were still available -- we need to begin to build a political organization uniting all people who oppose America's imperial foreign policies for any reason.
I firmly believe that 50 years of these imperialist foreign policies are linked to the degeneration of small-d democracy at all levels of govt. here at home, and I'd like to revive another challenge I threw out in that 1999 speech "Which branch of government is most corrupt? Think about it, which branch of government, executive, legislative, or judicial is most corrupt, that's a really tough question (laughter). "
We need 1 million people to join together in a non-charitable political organization (but with a charitable arm especially to gather worldwide funds for educational purposes) which will focus on electing candidates and influencing office-holders to move away from the imperialistic foreign policies (and imperialist foreign economic policies) that are killing our future.
The simple message: We are spending more money on defense THAN ALL OTHER NATIONS COMBINED; why aren't we more secure than all other nations combined? Because it's the wrong model. We need an actual defense force, fine, actually focused on real threats to our territory ... in other words about 10% of what the Pentagon and intell. agencies are wasting out money on now. Our best security lies in creating a world based on the ideal we once held for ourselves: the rule of law, not the rule of men.
This political organization will have to be ready to work with Democrats whenever possible, even Republicans and Libertarians too, yet also be ready with alternative ballot lines (created or taken over from existing small parties) to oppose liberal Dem. party imperialists as necessary. In many cases we should be ready to run both a D. party primary opponent and a general election 3rd party against the worst Senators, for example, with the Primary opponent playing all the games of promising to support the party nominee even tho he or she will still be a respected part of our organization that will field a 3rd party opponent too, and will also keep demonstrating against that Senator if he or she can beat us and stay in office. Organize now for 2012, 2016, and 2020 serious people !!! Let's not be at the mercy of personality-based candidates and the shallow, sold-out media any longer !!
April 22, 2008 5:05 PM | Reply | Permalink
Might it be apposite to note that Kosovo, like NATO, is in Europe?
Look. If the US decided to intervene somewhere in Latin America, and couldn't get UNSC endorsement, but it did get the endorsement of the Organization of American States and Brazil, Mexico and Colombia all contributed forces to the intervention, would anyone seriously have a problem with that?
Conversely, if the US wanted to intervene in Latin America and got the approval of NATO but not of any of the Latin American regional players, that would be a major problem.
April 23, 2008 1:17 AM | Reply | Permalink
"Kosovo mostly accomplished good things"?
It's been well established for almost a decade that the "genocide" was a lie; the mass graves simply did not exist, and what bodies were found were soldiers and irregulars. The man sent to investigate the graves under the OSCE's Kosovo Verification Mission, William Walker, was CIA. Rambouillet was one of history's great set-ups from the start. NATO made demands that it knew Belgrade would reject; the Brits have since admitted as much. If we really wanted a presence in Kosovo to stop the fighting between Serbs and Albanians -- as opposed to an opportunity to use our B2s and feel better for doing nothing in the Balkans when it actually mattered -- then we would have tabled UN deployment instead of NATO occupation, or limited the terms to the occupation to Kosovo, as opposed to the entirety of the FRY. And have we forgotten how damaging the bombing was to U.S.-Russian relations? Primakov was en route to Washington when the bombing started, turned around, and within days a change had been ordered to Russia's nuclear posture. Rightly or wrongly, stakes were suddenly very high. NATO-Russian relations have yet to fully recover from that illegal and unnecessary bombing. And have you forgotten about the Pristina airport disaster? "Kosovo mostly accomplished good things?" Are you joking?
April 23, 2008 1:33 AM | Reply | Permalink
The main problem with the Kosovo intervention is that the Russians and Serbians, despite being completely wrong, are never going to shut up.
"in about 1996 the KLA got impatient and started to assasinate policeman (espececially ethnic Albanians who were cops). By 1999 they had killed about 500. The Serbs responded with counter insurgency tactics." - syvanen
Ridiculous. "Counterinsurgency tactics" which lead to the slaughter of 50 civilians at a time, including women and children, are war crimes. The fact that the US is now engaged in similar "counterinsurgency tactics" in Iraq does not excuse anything. When initial NATO bombing against Serbian military units led Serb forces to quickly ethnically cleanse the entire population of the province, the game was up. To ignore what was going on there, you would have to be an ignoramus who had paid no attention to what had happened in Croatia and Bosnia throughout the 1990s. Syvanen argues "sure, Milosevic's Serbian regime practiced aggressive war and genocide in Croatia and Bosnia, but Kosovo was different." Absurd.
April 23, 2008 2:17 AM | Reply | Permalink
Hi Matthew!
Your post is logical and would be valid if the pretexts were true. I am sad to say that in the case of Kosovo the truth has not yet reached mainstream media, and probably never will.
The truth is that in 1999 NATO, for the first time in it's history, attacked a sovereign country that posed no threat whatsoever against any NATO country. In fact Yugoslavia (now Serbia) did not pose a threat against any country at all. That is why UNSC did not approve, the bombings violated international law in the most severe way. The pretext for the NATO aggression against Yugoslavia was "humanitarian intervention". This was pure manufactured propaganda. The numbers that have surfaced in the Hague tribunal (ICTY) is that before NATO started it's aggression around 1500 Kosovar Albanians and around 1000 Kosovar Serbs had died. These internal fightings was started by the _Albanian_ side with the KLA (albanian UCK) starting an Albanian uprising against the Serbs. The Serbs only hit back at KLA (which was then classified as a _terrorist_ organisation). This uprising was directly initiated by Madeleine Albright (secretary of state in the Clinton administration). The motive behind this is foggy to this day. Noam Chomsky quotes Strobe Talbot who was high up in the Clinton administration and Talbot said (in a foreword to a book by John Norris):
"the real purpose of the war had nothing to do with concern for the Kosovar Albanians, it was because Serbia [former Yugoslavia] was not carrying out the required social and economic reforms"
And as Chomsky puts it: "...meaning Serbia did not subordinate itself to the US run new world order program, so therefore had to be eliminated..."
The quote is from the following interview which explains it all:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEhgwdJldeU
I have followed the Kosovo conflict from day one, including the International Criminal Tribunal trials, and the Chomsky interview summarizes everything in a very condensed and correct way. The link is for part 1. Click on "related videos" for the other parts.
If you are going to talk about Kosovo, please get the facts straight first.
April 23, 2008 10:18 AM | Reply | Permalink
I most certainly did not concede that Serbia committed aggressive war and genocide in Bosnia and Croatia for the simple reason that it did not. Your passions run high but your understanding of that conflict is deficient. I suggest you do some reading and not rely just on your impressions based on reports from the mass media during the 90s'. We were bombarded with propaganda during the whole time, and the truth was hard to find.
April 23, 2008 3:32 PM | Reply | Permalink
Matt:
Methinks it is probably too late for you to see this, and I realize I am very late to this conversation.
In this post I think you've done an honest and searching job of trying to square the intervention in Kosovo with the liberal internationalist framework you are advancing.
The forceful comments in opposition to the Kosovo intervention made in earlier threads in this Book Club exchange have created doubt that had not been there in my mind as to whether the intervention there was a) the morally right thing to do b) morally justified c) on balance, wise given the precedent it created.
Some of the denizens maintain this was an internal conflict, a civil war of sorts, as if this is dispositive against the morality and wisdom of our intervention there.
But I think this cannot be the end of the matter. Genocide frequently, perhaps even usually, occurs within an "internal" context, in the sense of it occurring within the territorial boundaries of a sovereign state. (Think Rwanda). Advocates of a responsibility by the international community to intervene to stop genocide believe such a responsibility should override state sovereignty where the two conflict.
Why would the internal violence that characterized the US Civil War less actionable by outsiders than a situation in another country that meets the definition of genocide? Is bloodshed less consequential if it is defined around a non-genocidal internal dispute than a genocidally-defined one? Why?
From the standpoint of what I hope US policy will be I hope we will be aggressive in taking note of ongoing or imminent genocide but that we will apply a pragmatic standard in deciding whether to initiate international cooperation on intervening.
In particular, I would hope that our government would take into consideration the following factors, at a minimum:
i) the extent of the bloodshed
ii) whether the violence is broadly considered to meet the definition of genocide by key allies, by Russia and China in particular, and by the international community more broadly
iii) whether there is a practical, logistically doable, multilateral, time-limited, and affordable (financially, from a defense preparedness and readiness point of view, and in terms of our standing in the international community) to stop the genocide from occurring or spreading. This in turn would bring into play factors such as the recent history of internal civil conflict within the country, the feasibility of controlling influxes of arms to different factions as a way of preventing the conflict from erupting once the initial stages have been shut down by the international community, and the likely prospects of a government assuming power which is both committed to, and realistically capable of, preventing the violence from erupting again after the initial stage has been shut down, among other factors.
iv) the extent of other genocides going on around the world at the time, if there are any, and what we and the international community conclude about the legitimacy of any distinctions that might need to be satisfied if there is intervention in the case at hand but not others.
April 28, 2008 10:15 AM | Reply | Permalink
Iraq and Kosovo are distinguishable on other important grounds.
In Kosovo there was no oil and therefore no geopolitical reason for us to want to stay indefinitely, or any longer than necessary to stabilize the situation.
I'd like to thank the commenters in this thread for taking the time to push back on Matt's view that the intervention in Kosovo on balance did more good than harm for the situation there. They've raised considerations and arguments with which I was not familiar and challenged my thinking, which heretofore has taken Kosovo as on balance a moral exercise of US power, factoring in its problematic precedential status.
I hope Matt will respond directly in some visible way to these points. I am assuming he is following a method of induction in developing his particular liberal internationlist framework, one that would say Kosovo was at least justified within that framework whereas Iraq was not. So if Kosovo really was not on balance a desirable thing for us to have done then that changes the guideposts that he would (I would think) want to take into consideration in trying to articulate the principles that go with his version of liberal internationalism.
April 28, 2008 11:40 AM | Reply | Permalink