Humanitarian Imperialism

Humanitarian Imperialism
The New Doctrine of Imperial Right
Noam Chomsky
http://monthlyrevie w.org/080908chom sky.php

Noam Chomsky is an Institute Professor of Linguistics at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His most recent books are
Interventions (City Lights, 2007), Failed States (Metropolitan
Books, 2007), and Inside Lebanon: Journey to a Shattered Land with
Noam and Carol Chomsky (Monthly Review Press, 2007). This essay is
adapted from the introduction to Jean Bricmont, „Humanitärer"
Imperialismus (Berlin: Kai Homilius, forthcoming) . An English
edition, Humanitarian Imperialism: Using Human Rights to Sell War,
is available from Monthly Review Press.

Jean Bricmont's concept "humanitarian imperialism" succinctly
captures a dilemma that has faced Western leaders and the Western
intellectual community since the collapse of the Soviet Union. From
the origins of the Cold War, there was a reflexive justification for
every resort to force and terror, subversion and economic
strangulation: the acts were undertaken in defense against what John
F. Kennedy called "the monolithic and ruthless conspiracy" based in
the Kremlin (or sometimes in Beijing), a force of unmitigated evil
dedicated to extending its brutal sway over the entire world. The
formula covered just about every imaginable case of intervention, no
matter what the facts might be. But with the Soviet Union gone,
either the policies would have to change, or new justifications
would have to be devised. It became clear very quickly which course
would be followed, casting new light on what had come before, and on
the institutional basis of policy.

The end of the Cold War unleashed an impressive flow of rhetoric
assuring the world that the West would now be free to pursue its
traditional dedication to freedom, democracy, justice, and human
rights unhampered by superpower rivalry, though there were some—
called "realists" in international relations theory—who warned that
in "granting idealism a near exclusive hold on our foreign policy,"
we may be going too far and might harm our interests.1 Such notions
as "humanitarian intervention" and "the responsibility to protect"
soon came to be salient features of Western discourse on policy,
commonly described as establishing a "new norm" in international
affairs.

The millennium ended with an extraordinary display of self-
congratulation on the part of Western intellectuals, awe-struck at
the sight of the "idealistic new world bent on ending inhumanity,"
which had entered a "noble phase" in its foreign policy with
a "saintly glow" as for the first time in history a state is
dedicated to "principles and values," acting from "altruism"
and "moral fervor" alone as the leader of the "enlightened states,"
hence free to use force where its leaders "believe it to be just"—
only a small sample of a deluge from respected liberal voices.2

Several questions immediately come to mind. First, how does the self-
image conform to the historical record prior to the end of the Cold
War? If it does not, then what reason would there be to expect a
sudden dedication to "granting idealism a near exclusive hold on our
foreign policy," or any hold at all? And how in fact did policies
change with the superpower enemy gone? A prior question is whether
such considerations should even arise.

There are two views about the significance of the historical record.
The attitude of those who celebrate the "emerging norms" is
expressed clearly by one of their most distinguished
scholar/advocates, international relations professor Thomas Weiss:
critical examination of the record, he writes, is nothing more
than "sound-bites and invectives about Washington's historically
evil foreign policy," hence "easy to ignore."3

A conflicting stance is that policy decisions substantially flow
from institutional structures, and since these remain stable,
examination of the record provides valuable insight into
the "emerging norms" and the contemporary world. That is the stance
that Bricmont adopts in his study of "the ideology of human rights,"
and that I will adopt here.
There is no space for a review of the record, but just to
illustrate, let us keep to the Kennedy administration, the left-
liberal extreme of the political spectrum, with an unusually large
component of liberal intellectuals in policy-making positions.
During these years, the standard formula was invoked to justify the
invasion of South Vietnam in 1962, laying the basis for one of the
great crimes of the twentieth century.

By then the U.S.-imposed client regime could no longer control the
indigenous resistance evoked by massive state terror, which had
killed tens of thousands of people. Kennedy therefore sent the U.S.
Air Force to begin regular bombing of South Vietnam, authorized
napalm and chemical warfare to destroy crops and ground cover, and
initiated the programs that drove millions of South Vietnamese
peasants to urban slums or to camps where they were surrounded by
barbed wire to "protect" them from the South Vietnamese resistance
forces that they were supporting, as Washington knew. All in defense
against the two Great Satans, Russia and China, or the "Sino-Soviet
axis."4

In the traditional domains of U.S. power, the same formula led to
Kennedy's shift of the mission of the Latin American military
from "hemispheric defense"—a holdover from the Second World War—
to "internal security." The consequences were immediate. In the
words of Charles Maechling—who led U.S. counterinsurgency and
internal defense planning through the Kennedy and early Johnson
years—U.S. policy shifted from toleration "of the rapacity and
cruelty of the Latin American military" to "direct complicity" in
their crimes, to U.S. support for "the methods of Heinrich Himmler's
extermination squads."

One critical case was the Kennedy administration' s preparation of
the military coup in Brazil to overthrow the mildly social
democratic Goulart government. The planned coup took place shortly
after Kennedy's assassination, establishing the first of a series of
vicious National Security States and setting off a plague of
repression throughout the continent that lasted through Reagan's
terrorist wars that devastated Central America in the 1980s. With
the same justification, Kennedy's 1962 military mission to Colombia
advised the government to resort to "paramilitary, sabotage and/or
terrorist activities against known communist proponents," actions
that "should be backed by the United States." In the Latin American
context, the phrase "known communist proponents" referred to labor
leaders, priests organizing peasants, human rights activists, in
fact anyone committed to social change in violent and repressive
societies.

These principles were quickly incorporated into the training and
practices of the military. The respected president of the Colombian
Permanent Committee for Human Rights, former Minister of Foreign
Affairs Alfredo Vásquez Carrizosa, wrote that the Kennedy
administration "took great pains to transform our regular armies
into counterinsurgency brigades, accepting the new strategy of the
death squads," ushering in

what is known in Latin America as the National Security Doctrine,…
not defense against an external enemy, but a way to make the
military establishment the masters of the game [with] the right to
combat the internal enemy, as set forth in the Brazilian doctrine,
the Argentine doctrine, the Uruguayan doctrine, and the Colombian
doctrine: it is the right to fight and to exterminate social
workers, trade unionists, men and women who are not supportive of
the establishment, and who are assumed to be communist extremists.
And this could mean anyone, including human rights activists such as
myself.

In 2002, an Amnesty International mission to protect human rights
defenders worldwide began with a visit to Colombia, chosen because
of its extreme record of state-backed violence against these
courageous activists, as well as labor leaders, more of whom were
killed in Colombia than in the rest of the world combined, not to
speak of campesinos, indigenous people, and Afro-Colombians, the
most tragic victims. As a member of the delegation, I was able to
meet with a group of human rights activists in Vásquez Carrizosa's
heavily guarded home in Bogotá, hearing their painful reports and
later taking testimonials in the field, a shattering experience.

The same formula sufficed for the campaign of subversion and
violence that placed newly independent Guyana under the rule of the
cruel dictator Forbes Burnham. It was also invoked to justify
Kennedy's campaigns against Cuba after the failed Bay of Pigs
invasion. In his biography of Robert Kennedy, the eminent liberal
historian and Kennedy advisor Arthur Schlesinger writes that the
task of bringing "the terrors of the earth" to Cuba was assigned by
the president to his brother, Robert Kennedy, who took it as his
highest priority. The terrorist campaign continued at least through
the 1990s, though in later years the U.S. government did not carry
out the terrorist operations itself but only provided support for
them and a haven for terrorists and their commanders, among them the
notorious Orlando Bosch and joining him recently, Luis Posada
Carilles. Commentators have been polite enough not to remind us of
the Bush Doctrine: "those who harbor terrorists are as guilty as the
terrorists themselves" and must be treated accordingly, by bombing
and invasion; a doctrine that has "unilaterally revoked the
sovereignty of states that provide sanctuary to terrorists," Harvard
international affairs specialist Graham Allison observes, and
has "already become a de facto rule of international relations"—with
the usual exceptions.

Internal documents of the Kennedy-Johnson years reveal that a
leading concern in the case of Cuba was its "successful defiance" of
U.S. policies tracing back to the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which
declared (but could not yet implement) U.S. control over the
hemisphere. It was feared that Cuba's "successful defiance,"
particularly if accompanied by successful independent development,
might encourage others suffering from comparable conditions to
pursue a similar path, the rational version of the domino theory
that is a persistent feature of policy formation. For that reason,
the documentary record reveals, it was necessary to punish the
civilian population severely until they overthrew the offending
government.

This is a bare sample of a few years of intervention under the most
liberal U.S. administration, justified to the public in defensive
terms. The broader record is much the same. With similar pretexts,
the Russian dictatorship justified its harsh control of its Eastern
European dungeon.

The reasons for intervention, subversion, terror, and repression are
not obscure. They are summarized accurately by Patrice McSherry in
the most careful scholarly study of Operation Condor, the
international terrorist operation established with U.S. backing in
Pinochet's Chile: "the Latin American militaries, normally acting
with the support of the U.S. government, overthrew civilian
governments and destroyed other centers of democratic power in their
societies (parties, unions, universities, and constitutionalist
sectors of the armed forces) precisely when the class orientation of
the state was about to change or was in the process of change,
shifting state power to non-elite social sectors...Preventin g such
transformations of the state was a key objective of Latin American
elites, and U.S. officials considered it a vital national security
interest as well."5

It is easy to demonstrate that what are termed "national security
interests" have only an incidental relation to the security of the
nation, though they have a very close relation to the interests of
dominant sectors within the imperial state, and to the general state
interest of ensuring obedience.

The United States is an unusually open society. Hence there is no
difficulty documenting the leading principles of global strategy
since the Second World War. Even before the United States entered
the war, high-level planners and analysts concluded that in the
postwar world the United States should seek "to hold unquestioned
power," acting to ensure the "limitation of any exercise of
sovereignty" by states that might interfere with its global designs.
They recognized further that "the foremost requirement" to secure
these ends was "the rapid fulfillment of a program of complete
rearmament," then as now a central component of "an integrated
policy to achieve military and economic supremacy for the United
States." At the time, these ambitions were limited to "the non-
German world," which was to be organized under the U.S. aegis as
a "Grand Area," including the Western hemisphere, the former British
Empire, and the Far East. As Russia beat back the Nazi armies after
Stalingrad, and it became increasingly clear that Germany would be
defeated, the plans were extended to include as much of Eurasia as
possible.

A more extreme version of the largely invariant grand strategy is
that no challenge can be tolerated to the "power, position, and
prestige of the United States," so the American Society of
International Law was instructed by the prominent liberal statesman
Dean Acheson, one of the main architects of the postwar world. He
was speaking in 1963, shortly after the missile crisis brought the
world to the brink of nuclear war. There are few basic changes in
the guiding conceptions as we proceed to the Bush II doctrine, which
elicited unusual mainstream protest, not because of its basic
content, but because of its brazen style and arrogance, as was
pointed out by Clinton's secretary of state Madeleine Albright, who
was well aware of Clinton's similar doctrine.

The collapse of the "monolithic and ruthless conspiracy" led to a
change of tactics, but not fundamental policy. That was clearly
understood by policy analysts. Dimitri Simes, senior associate at
the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, observed that
Gorbachev's initiatives would "liberate American foreign policy from
the straightjacket imposed by superpower hostility."6 He identified
three major components of "liberation. " First, the United States
would be able to shift NATO costs to its European competitors, one
way to avert the traditional concern that Europe might seek an
independent path. Second, the United States can end "the
manipulation of America by third world nations." The manipulation of
the rich by the undeserving poor has always been a serious problem,
particularly acute with regard to Latin America, which in the
preceding five years had transferred some $150 billion to the
industrial West in addition to $100 billion of capital flight,
amounting to twenty-five times the total value of the Alliance for
Progress and fifteen times the Marshall Plan.

This huge hemorrhage is part of a complicated system whereby Western
banks and Latin American elites enrich themselves at the expense of
the general population of Latin America, who are then saddled with
the "debt crisis" that results from these manipulations.

But thanks to Gorbachev's capitulation the United States can now
resist "unwarranted third world demands for assistance" and take a
stronger stand when confronting "defiant third world debtors."

The third and most significant component of "liberation, " Simes
continues, is that the decline in the "Soviet threat...makes
military power more useful as a United States foreign policy
instrument…against those who contemplate challenging important
American interests." America's hands will now be "untied" and
Washington can benefit from "greater reliance on military force in a
crisis."

The Bush I administration, then in office, at once made clear its
understanding of the end of the Soviet threat. A few months after
the fall of the Berlin Wall, the administration released a new
National Security Strategy. On the domestic front, it called for
strengthening "the defense industrial base," creating incentives "to
invest in new facilities and equipment as well as in research and
development. " The phase "defense industrial base" is a euphemism
referring to the high-tech economy, which relies crucially on the
dynamic state sector to socialize cost and risk and eventually
privatize profit—sometimes decades later, as in the case of
computers and the Internet. The government understands well that the
U.S. economy is remote from the free market model that is hailed in
doctrine and imposed on those who are too weak to resist, a
traditional theme of economic history, recently reviewed
insightfully by international economist Ha-Joon Chang.7

In the international domain, the Bush I National Security Strategy
recognized that "the more likely demands for the use of our military
forces may not involve the Soviet Union and may be in the Third
World, where new capabilities and approaches may be required." The
United States must concentrate attention on "lower-order threats
like terrorism, subversion, insurgency, and drug trafficking [which]
are menacing the United States, its citizenry, and its interests in
new ways." "Forces will have to accommodate to the austere
environment, immature basing structure, and significant ranges often
encountered in the Third World." "Training and research and
development" will have to be "better attuned to the needs of low-
intensity conflict," crucially, counterinsurgency in the third
world. With the Soviet Union gone from the scene, the world "has now
evolved from a `weapon rich environment' [Russia] to a `target rich
environment' [the South]." The United States will face "increasingly
capable Third World Threats," military planners elaborated.

Consequently, the National Security Strategy explained, the United
States must maintain a huge military system and the ability to
project power quickly worldwide, with primary reliance on nuclear
weapons, which, Clinton planners explained, "cast a shadow over any
crisis or conflict" and permit free use of conventional forces. The
reason is no longer the vanished Soviet threat, but rather "the
growing technological sophistication of Third World conflicts." That
is particularly true in the Middle East, where the "threats to our
interests" that have required direct military engagement "could not
be laid at the Kremlin's door," contrary to decades of pretense, no
longer useful with the Soviet Union gone. In reality, the "threat to
our interests" had always been indigenous nationalism. The fact was
sometimes acknowledged, as when Robert Komer, the architect of
President Carter's Rapid Deployment Force (later Central Command),
aimed primarily at the Middle East, testified before Congress in
1980 that its most likely role was not to resist a (highly
implausible) Soviet attack, but to deal with indigenous and regional
unrest, in particular, the "radical nationalism" that has always
been a primary concern, worldwide.

The term "radical" falls into the same category as "known Communist
proponent." It does not mean radical. Rather, it means not under our
control. Thus Iraq at the time was not radical. On the contrary,
Saddam continued to be a favored friend and ally well after he had
carried out his most horrendous atrocities (Halabja, al-Anfal, and
others) and after the end of the war with Iran, for which he had
received substantial support from the Reagan administration, among
others. In keeping with these warm relations, in 1989 President Bush
invited Iraqi nuclear engineers to the United States for advanced
training in nuclear weapons development, and in early 1990, sent a
high-level Senatorial delegation to Iraq to convey his personal
greetings to his friend Saddam. The delegation was led by Senate
majority leader Bob Dole, later Republican presidential candidate,
and included other prominent Senators. They brought Bush's personal
greetings, advised Saddam that he should disregard criticisms he
might hear from some segments of the irresponsible American press,
and assured him that the government would do what it could to end
these unfortunate practices.

A few months later Saddam invaded Kuwait, disregarding orders, or
perhaps misunderstanding ambiguous signals from the State
Department. That was a real crime, and he instantly switched from
respected friend to evil incarnate.

It is instructive to consider the reaction to Saddam's invasion of
Kuwait, both the rhetorical outrage and the military response, a
devastating blow to Iraqi civilian society that left the tyranny
firmly in place. The events and their interpretation reveal a good
deal about the continuities of policy after the collapse of the
Soviet Union and about the intellectual and moral culture that
sustains policy decisions.

Saddam's invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 was the second case of
post-Cold War aggression. The first was Bush's invasion of Panama a
few weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall, in November 1989. The
Panama invasion was scarcely more than a footnote to a long and
sordid history, but it differed from earlier exercises in some
respects.

A basic difference was explained by Elliott Abrams, then a high
official responsible for Near East and North African Affairs, now
charged with "promoting democracy" under Bush II, particularly in
the Middle East. Echoing Simes, Abrams observed that "developments
in Moscow have lessened the prospect for a small operation to
escalate into a superpower conflict."8 The resort to force, as in
Panama, was more feasible than before, thanks to the disappearance
of the Soviet deterrent. Similar reasoning applied to the reaction
to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. With the Soviet deterrent in place,
the United States and Britain would have been unlikely to risk
placing huge forces in the desert and carrying out the military
operations in the manner they did.

The goal of the Panama invasion was to kidnap Manuel Noriega, a
petty thug who was brought to Florida and sentenced for
narcotrafficking and other crimes that were mostly committed when he
was on the CIA payroll. But he had become disobedient—for example,
failing to support Washington's terrorist war against Nicaragua with
sufficient enthusiasm—so he had to go. The Soviet threat could no
longer be invoked in the standard fashion, so the action was
depicted as defense of the United States from Hispanic
narcotrafficking, which was overwhelmingly in the domain of
Washington's Colombian allies. While presiding over the invasion,
President Bush announced new loans to Iraq to achieve the "goal of
increasing U.S. exports and put us in a better position to deal with
Iraq regarding its human rights record"—so the State Department
replied to the few inquiries from Congress, apparently without
irony. The media wisely chose silence.

Victorious aggressors do not investigate their crimes, so the toll
of Bush's Panama invasion is not known with any precision. It
appears, however, that it was considerably more deadly than Saddam's
invasion of Kuwait a few months later. According to Panamanian human
rights groups, the U.S. bombing of the El Chorillo slums and other
civilian targets killed several thousand poor people, far more than
the estimated toll of the invasion of Kuwait. The matter is of no
interest in the West, but Panamanians have not forgotten. In
December 2007, Panama once again declared a Day of Mourning to
commemorate the U.S. invasion; it scarcely merited a flicker of an
eyelid in the United States.

Also gone from history is the fact that Washington's greatest fear
when Saddam invaded Kuwait was that he would imitate the U.S.
invasion of Panama. Colin Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff, warned that Saddam "will withdraw, [putting] his puppet
in. Everyone in the Arab world will be happy." In contrast, when
Washington partially withdrew from Panama after putting its puppet
in, Latin Americans were far from happy.

The invasion aroused great anger throughout the region, so much so
that the new regime was expelled from the Group of Eight Latin
American democracies as a country under military occupation.
Washington was well aware, Latin American scholar Stephen Ropp
observed, "that removing the mantle of United States protection
would quickly result in a civilian or military overthrow of Endara
and his supporters"—that is, the regime of bankers, businessmen, and
narcotraffickers installed by Bush's invasion.

Even that government's own Human Rights Commission charged four
years later that the right to self-determination and sovereignty of
the Panamanian people continues to be violated by the "state of
occupation by a foreign army." Fear that Saddam would mimic the
invasion of Panama appears to be the main reason why Washington
blocked diplomacy and insisted on war, with almost complete media
cooperation—and, as is often the case, in violation of public
opinion, which on the eve of the invasion, overwhelmingly supported
a regional conference to settle the confrontation along with other
outstanding Middle East issues. That was essentially Saddam's
proposal at the time, though only those who read fringe dissident
publications or conducted their own research projects could have
been aware of that.

Washington's concern for human rights in Iraq was dramatically
revealed, once again, shortly after the invasion, when Bush
authorized Saddam to crush a Shi'ite rebellion in the South that
would probably have overthrown him. Official reasoning was outlined
by Thomas Friedman, then chief diplomatic correspondent of the New
York Times. Washington hoped for "the best of all worlds," Friedman
explained: "an iron-fisted Iraqi junta without Saddam Hussein" that
would restore the status quo ante when Saddam's "iron fist...held
Iraq together, much to the satisfaction of the American allies
Turkey and Saudi Arabia"—and, of course, the boss in Washington. But
this happy outcome proved unfeasible, so the masters of the region
had to settle for second best: the same "iron fist" they had been
fortifying all along. Veteran Times Middle East correspondent Alan
Cowell added that the rebels failed because "very few people outside
Iraq wanted them to win": The United States and "its Arab coalition
partners" came to "a strikingly unanimous view [that] whatever the
sins of the Iraqi leader, he offered the West and the region a
better hope for his country's stability than did those who have
suffered his repression."

The term "stability" is used here in its standard technical meaning:
subordination to Washington's will. There is no contradiction, for
example, when liberal commentator James Chace, former editor of
Foreign Affairs, explains that the United States sought
to "destabilize a freely elected Marxist government in Chile"
because "we were determined to seek stability" (under the Pinochet
dictatorship) .

With the Soviet pretext gone, the record of criminal intervention
continued much as before. One useful index is military aid. As is
well known in scholarship, U.S. aid "has tended to flow
disproportionately to Latin American governments which torture their
citizens,... to the hemisphere's relatively egregious violators of
fundamental human rights." That includes military aid, is
independent of need, and runs through the Carter period.9 More wide-
ranging studies by economist Edward Herman found a similar
correlation worldwide, also suggesting a plausible explanation. He
found that aid, not surprisingly, is correlated with improvement in
the investment climate.

Such improvement is often achieved by murdering priests and union
leaders, massacring peasants trying to organize, blowing up the
independent press, and so on. The result is a secondary correlation
between aid and egregious violation of human rights. It would be
wrong, then, to conclude that U.S. leaders (like their counterparts
elsewhere) prefer torture; rather, it has little weight in
comparison with more important values. These studies precede the
Reagan years, when the questions were not worth posing because the
correlations were so overwhelmingly obvious.

The pattern continued after the Cold War. Outside of Israel and
Egypt, a separate category, the leading recipient of U.S. aid as the
Cold War ended was El Salvador, which, along with Guatemala, was the
site of the most extreme terrorist violence of the horrifying Reagan
years in Central America, almost entirely attributable to the state
terrorist forces armed and trained by Washington, as subsequent
Truth Commissions documented. Washington was barred by Congress from
providing aid directly to the Guatemalan murderers. They were
effusively lauded by Reagan, but he had to turn to an international
terror network of proxy states to fill the gap.
In El Salvador, however, the United States could carry out the
terrorist war unhampered by such annoyances.

One prime target was the Catholic Church, which had committed a
grave sin: it began to take the Gospels seriously and adopted "the
preferential option for the poor." It therefore had to be destroyed
by U.S.-backed violence, with strong Vatican support. The decade
opened with the 1980 assassination of Archbishop Romero while saying
mass, a few days after he had sent a letter to President Carter
pleading with him to cut off aid to the murderous junta, aid
that "will surely increase injustice here and sharpen the repression
that has been unleashed against the people's organizations fighting
to defend their most fundamental human rights."

Aid soon flowed, paving the way for "a war of extermination and
genocide against a defenseless civilian population," as the
aftermath was described by Archbishop Romero's successor. The decade
ended when the elite Atlacatl Brigade, armed and trained by
Washington, blew out the brains of six leading Latin American
intellectuals, Jesuit priests, after compiling a bloody record of
the usual victims. None of this enters elite Western consciousness,
by virtue of "wrong agency."

By the time Clinton took over, a political settlement had been
reached in El Salvador, so it lost its position as leading recipient
of U.S. military aid. It was replaced by Turkey, then conducting
some of the worst atrocities of the 1990s, targeting its harshly
oppressed Kurdish population. Tens of thousands were killed, 3,500
towns and villages were destroyed, huge numbers of refugees fled
(three million, according to analyses by Kurdish human rights
organizations) , large areas were laid waste, dissidents were
imprisoned, hideous torture and other atrocities were standard fare.
Clinton provided 80 percent of the needed arms, including high-tech
equipment used for savage crimes. In the single year 1997, Clinton
sent more military aid to Turkey than in the entire Cold War period
combined before the counterinsurgency campaign began. Media and
commentary remained silent, with the rarest of exceptions.

By 1999, state terror had largely achieved its goals, so Turkey was
replaced as leading recipient of military aid by Colombia, which had
by far the worst human rights record in the hemisphere, as the
programs of coordinated state-paramilitary terror inaugurated by
Kennedy took a shocking toll.

Meanwhile other major atrocities continued to receive full support.
One of the most extreme was the sanctions against Iraqi civilians
after the large-scale demolition of Iraq in the bombing of 1991,
which also destroyed power stations and sewage and water facilities,
effectively a form of biological warfare. The horrific impact of the
U.S.-UK sanctions, formally implemented by the UN, aroused so much
public concern that in 1996 a humane modification was introduced:
the "oil for food" program, which permitted Iraq to use profits from
oil exports for the needs of its suffering people.

The first director of the program, the distinguished international
diplomat Denis Halliday, resigned in protest after two years,
declaring the program to be "genocidal." He was replaced by another
distinguished international diplomat, Hans von Sponeck, who resigned
two years later, charging that the program violated the Genocide
Convention. Von Sponeck's resignation was followed immediately by
that of Jutta Burghardt, in charge of the UN Food Program, who
joined the declaration of protest by Halliday and von Sponeck.

To mention only one figure, "During the years when the sanctions
were imposed, from 1990 to 2003, there was a sharp increase in
mortality from 56 per thousand children under five years of age in
the early 1990s to 131 per thousand under five years of age at the
beginning of the new century," and "everyone can easily understand
that this was due to the economic sanctions" (von Sponeck).
Massacres of that scale are rare, and to acknowledge this one would
be doctrinally difficult. Accordingly, great efforts were made to
shift the blame to UN incompetence, "the largest fraud ever recorded
in history" (Wall Street Journal). The fraudulent "fraud" was
quickly exposed; it turned out that Washington and U.S. business
were the major culprits. But the charges were too valuable to be
allowed to vanish.

Halliday and von Sponeck had numerous investigators all over Iraq,
which enabled them to know more about the country than any other
Westerners. They were barred from the U.S. media during the buildup
to the war. The Clinton administration also prevented von Sponeck
from informing the UN Security Council, which was technically
responsible, about the effects of the sanctions on the
population. "This man in Baghdad is paid to work, not to speak,"
State Department spokesman James Rubin explained. U.S.-UK media
evidently agree. Von Sponeck's carefully documented account of the
impact of the U.S.-UK sanctions was published in 2006, to resounding
silence.10

The sanctions devastated the civilian society, killing hundreds of
thousands of people while strengthening the tyrant, compelling the
population to rely on him for survival, and probably saving him from
the fate of other mass murderers and torturers who were supported to
the end of their bloody rule by the United States, the United
Kingdom, and their allies: Ceauºescu, Suharto, Mobutu, Marcos, and a
rogues gallery of others, to which new names are regularly added.
The studied refusal to give Iraqis an opportunity to take their fate
into their own hands by releasing the stranglehold of the sanctions,
as Halliday and von Sponeck recommended, eliminates whatever thin
shred of justification for the invasion may be concocted by
apologists for state violence.

Also continuing without change through the 1990s was strong U.S.-UK
support for General Suharto of Indonesia—"our kind of guy," the
Clinton administration happily announced when he was welcomed in
Washington. Suharto had been a particular favorite of the West ever
since he took power in 1965, presiding over a "staggering mass
slaughter" that was "a gleam of light in Asia," the New York Times
reported, while praising Washington for keeping its crucial role
hidden so as not to embarrass the "Indonesian moderates" who took
over.

The general reaction in the West was unconcealed euphoria after the
mass slaughter, which the CIA compared to the crimes of Hitler,
Stalin, and Mao. Suharto opened the country's wealth to Western
exploitation, compiled one of the worst human rights records in the
world, and also won the world record for corruption, far surpassing
Mobutu and other Western favorites. On the side, he invaded the
former Portuguese colony of East Timor in 1975, carrying out one of
the worst crimes of the late twentieth century, leaving perhaps one-
quarter of the population dead and the country ravaged.

From the first moment, he benefitted from decisive U.S. diplomatic
and military support, joined by Britain as atrocities peaked in
1978, while other Western powers also sought to gain what they could
by backing virtual genocide in East Timor. The U.S.-UK flow of arms
and training of the most vicious counterinsurgency units continued
without change through 1999 as Indonesian atrocities escalated once
again, far beyond anything in Kosovo at the same time before the
NATO bombing. Australia, which had the most detailed information on
the atrocities, also participated actively in training the most
murderous elite units.

In April 1999, there was a series of particularly brutal massacres,
as in Liquica, where at least sixty people were murdered when they
took refuge in a church. The United States reacted at once. Admiral
Dennis Blair, U.S. Pacific commander, met with Indonesian army chief
General Wiranto, who supervised the atrocities, assuring him of U.S.
support and assistance and proposing a new U.S. training mission,
one of several such contacts at the time. Highly credible church
sources estimated that 3,000–5,000 were murdered from February
through July.

In August 1999, in a UN-run referendum, the population voted
overwhelmingly for independence, a remarkable act of courage. The
Indonesian army and its paramilitary associates reacted by
destroying the capital city of Dili and driving hundreds of
thousands of the survivors into the hills. The United States and
Britain were unimpressed. Washington lauded "the value of the years
of training given to Indonesia's future military leaders in the
United States and the millions of dollars in military aid for
Indonesia," the press reported, urging more of the same for
Indonesia and throughout the world. A senior diplomat in Jakarta
explained succinctly that "Indonesia matters and East Timor
doesn't." While the remnants of Dili were smoldering and the
expelled population were starving in the hills, Defense Secretary
William Cohen, on September 9, reiterated the official U.S. position
that occupied East Timor "is the responsibility of the Government of
Indonesia, and we don't want to take that responsibility away from
them."

A few days later, under intense international and domestic pressure
(much of it from influential right-wing Catholics), Clinton quietly
informed the Indonesian generals that the game was over, and they
instantly withdrew, allowing an Australian-led UN peace-keeping
force to enter the country unopposed. The lesson is crystal clear.
To end the aggression and virtual genocide of the preceding quarter-
century there was no need to bomb Jakarta, to impose sanctions, or
in fact to do anything except to stop participating actively in the
crimes. The lesson, however, cannot be drawn, for evident doctrinal
reasons. Amazingly, the events have been reconstructed as a
remarkable success of humanitarian intervention in September 1999,
evidence of the enthralling "emerging norms" inaugurated by
the "enlightened states." One can only wonder whether a totalitarian
state could achieve anything comparable.

The British record was even more grotesque. The Labor government
continued to deliver Hawk jets to Indonesia as late as September 23,
1999, two weeks after the European Union had imposed an embargo,
three days after the Australian peace-keeping force had landed, well
after it had been revealed that these aircraft had been deployed
over East Timor once again, this time as part of the pre-referendum
intimidation operation. Under New Labour, Britain became the leading
supplier of arms to Indonesia, over the strong protests of Amnesty
International, Indonesian dissidents, and Timorese victims. The
reasons were explained by Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, the author
of the new "ethical foreign policy."

The arms shipments were appropriate because "the government is
committed to the maintenance of a strong defence industry, which is
a strategic part of our industrial base," as in the United States
and elsewhere. For similar reasons, Prime Minister Tony Blair later
approved the sale of spare parts to Zimbabwe for British Hawk
fighter jets being used by Mugabe in a civil war that cost tens of
thousands of lives. Nonetheless, the new ethical policy was an
improvement over Thatcher, whose defense procurement minister Alan
Clark had announced that "My responsibility is to my own people. I
don't really fill my mind much with what one set of foreigners is
doing to another."11

It is against this background, barely sampled here, that the chorus
of admired Western intellectuals praised themselves and
their "enlightened states" for opening an inspiring new era of
humanitarian intervention, guided by the "responsibility to
protect," now solely dedicated to "principles and values," acting
from "altruism" and "moral fervor" alone under the leadership of
the "idealistic new world bent on ending inhumanity," now in
a "noble phase" of its foreign policy with a "saintly glow."

The chorus of self-adulation also devised a new literary genre,
castigating the West for its failure to respond adequately to the
crimes of others (while scrupulously avoiding any reference to its
own crimes). It was lauded as courageous and daring. Few allowed
themselves to perceive that comparable work would have been warmly
welcomed in the Kremlin, pre-Perestroika.

The most prominent example was the lavishly praised Pulitzer Prize-
winning work "A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide,
by Samantha Power, of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the
Kennedy School at Harvard University. It is unfair to say that Power
avoids all U.S. crimes. A scattering are casually mentioned, but
explained away as derivative of other concerns.

Power does bring up one clear case: East Timor, where, she writes,
Washington "looked away"—namely, by authorizing the invasion;
immediately providing Indonesia with new counterinsurgency
equipment; rendering the UN "utterly ineffective" in any effort to
stop the aggression and slaughter, as UN ambassador Daniel Patrick
Moynihan proudly recalled in his memoir of his UN service; and then
continuing to provide decisive diplomatic and military support for
the next quarter-century, in the manner briefly indicated.

Summarizing, after the fall of the Soviet Union, policies continued
with little more than tactical modification. But new pretexts were
needed. The new norm of humanitarian intervention fit the
requirements very well. It was only necessary to put aside the
shameful record of earlier crimes as somehow irrelevant to the
understanding of societies and cultures that had scarcely changed,
and to disguise the fact that these crimes continued much as before.
This is a difficulty that arises frequently, even if not as
dramatically as it did after the collapse of the routine pretext for
crimes. The standard reaction is to abide by a maxim of
Tacitus: "Crime once exposed has no refuge but audacity." One does
not deny the crimes of past and present; it would be a grave error
to open that door. Rather, the past must be effaced and the present
ignored as we march on to a glorious new future. That is,
regrettably, a fair rendition of leading features of the
intellectual culture in the post-Soviet era.

Nevertheless, it was imperative to find, or least to contrive, a few
examples to illustrate the new magnificence. Some of the choices
were truly astonishing. One, regularly invoked, is the humanitarian
intervention of mid-September 1999 to rescue the East Timorese. The
term "audacity" does not begin to capture this exercise, but it
proceeded with little difficulty, testifying once again to what Hans
Morgenthau, the founder of realist international relations theory,
once called "our conformist subservience to those in power." There
is no need to waste time on this achievement.

A few other examples were tried, also impressive in their audacity.
One favorite was Clinton's military intervention in Haiti in 1995,
which did in fact bring an end to the horrendous reign of terror
that was unleashed when a military coup overthrew the first
democratically elected president of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide,
in 1991, a few months after he took office. To sustain the self-
image, however, it has been necessary to suppress some inconvenient
facts.

The Bush I administration devoted substantial effort to undermine
the hated Aristide regime and prepare the grounds for the
anticipated military coup. It then instantly turned to support for
the military junta and its wealthy supporters, violating the OAS
embargo—or as the New York Times preferred to describe the
facts, "fine tuning" the embargo to exempt U.S. businesses, for the
benefit of the Haitian people. Trade with the junta increased under
Clinton, who also illegally authorized Texaco to supply oil to the
junta. Texaco was a natural choice. It was Texaco that supplied oil
to the Franco regime in the late 1930s, violating the embargo and
U.S. law, while Washington pretended that it did not know what was
being reported in the left press—later conceding quietly that it of
course knew all along.

By 1995, Washington felt that the torture of Haitians had proceeded
long enough, and Clinton sent the Marines in to topple the junta and
restore the elected government—but on conditions that were sure to
destroy what was left of the Haitian economy. The restored
government was compelled to accept a harsh neoliberal program, with
no barriers to U.S. export and investment. Haitian rice farmers are
quite efficient, but cannot compete with highly subsidized U.S.
agribusiness, leading to the anticipated collapse. One small
successful business in Haiti produced chicken parts. But Americans
do not like dark meat, so the huge U.S. conglomerates that produce
chicken parts wanted to dump them on others. They tried Mexico and
Canada, but those are functioning societies that could prevent the
illegal dumping. Haiti had been compelled to be defenseless, so even
that small industry was destroyed. The story continues, declining to
still further ugliness, unnecessary to review here.12

In brief, Haiti falls into the familiar pattern, a particularly
disgraceful illustration in light of the way that Haitians have been
tortured, first by France and then by the United States, in part in
punishment for having dared to be the first free country of free men
in the hemisphere.

Other attempts at self-justification fared no better, until, at
last, Kosovo came to the rescue in 1999, opening the floodgates. The
torrent of self-congratulatory rhetoric became an uncontrollable
deluge.

The Kosovo case is, plainly, of great significance in sustaining the
self-glorification that reached a crescendo at the end of the
millennium, and in justifying the Western claim of a right of
unilateral intervention. Not surprisingly, then, there is a strict
Party Line on NATO's bombing of Kosovo.

The doctrine was articulated with eloquence by Vaclav Havel, as the
bombing ended. The leading U.S. intellectual journal, the left-
liberal New York Review of Books, turned to Havel for "a reasoned
explanation" of why the NATO bombing must be supported, publishing
his address to the Canadian Parliament, "Kosovo and the End of the
Nation-State" (June 10, 1999). For Havel, the Review observed, "the
war in Yugoslavia is a landmark in international relations: the
first time that the human rights of a people—the Kosovo Albanians—
have unequivocally come first." Havel's address opened by stressing
the extraordinary significance and import of the Kosovo
intervention.

It shows that we may at last be entering an era of true
enlightenment that will witness "the end of the nation-state, " which
will no longer be "the culmination of every national community's
history and its highest earthly value," as has always been true in
the past. The "enlightened efforts of generations of democrats, the
terrible experience of two world wars,...and the evolution of
civilization have finally brought humanity to the recognition that
human beings are more important than the state," so the Kosovo
intervention reveals.

Havel's "reasoned explanation" of why the bombing was just reads as
follows: "there is one thing that no reasonable person can deny:
this is probably the first war that has not been waged in the name
of `national interests,' but rather in the name of principles and
values… [NATO] is fighting out of concern for the fate of others. It
is fighting because no decent person can stand by and watch the
systematic state-directed murder of other people....The alliance has
acted out of respect for human rights, as both conscience and legal
documents dictate. This is an important precedent for the future. It
has been clearly said that it is simply not permissible to murder
people, to drive them from their homes, to torture them, and to
confiscate their property."

Stirring words, though a few qualifications might be appropriate: to
mention just one, it remains permissible, indeed obligatory, not
only to tolerate such actions but to contribute massively to them,
ensuring that they reach still greater peaks of fury—within NATO,
for example—and of course to conduct them on one's own, when that is
necessary.

Havel had been a particularly admired commentator on world affairs
since 1990, when he addressed a joint session of Congress
immediately after his fellow dissidents were brutally murdered in El
Salvador (and the United States had invaded Panama, killing and
destroying). He received a thunderous standing ovation for lauding
the "defender of freedom" that had armed and trained the murderers
of the six leading Jesuit intellectuals and tens of thousands of
others, praising it for having "understood the responsibility that
flowed" from power and urging it to continue to put "morality ahead
of politics"—as it had done throughout Reagan's terrorist wars in
Central America, in support for South Africa as it murdered some 1.5
million people in neighboring countries, and many other glorious
deeds. The backbone of our actions must be "responsibility, " Havel
instructed Congress: "responsibility to something higher than my
family, my country, my company, my success."

The performance was welcomed with rapture by liberal intellectuals.
Capturing the general awe and acclaim, the editors of the Washington
Post orated that Havel's praise for our nobility provided "stunning
evidence" that his country is "a prime source" of "the European
intellectual tradition" as his "voice of conscience"
spoke "compellingly of the responsibilities that large and small
powers owe each other." At the left-liberal extreme, Anthony Lewis
wrote that Havel's words remind us that "we live in a romantic age."
A decade later, still at the outer limits of dissidence, Lewis was
moved and persuaded by the argument that Havel had "eloquently
stated" on the bombing of Serbia, which he thought eliminated all
residual doubts about Washington's cause and signaled a "landmark in
international relations."

The Party Line has been guarded with vigilance. To cite a few
current examples, on the occasion of Kosovo's independence the Wall
Street Journal wrote that Serbian police and troops were "driven
from the province by the U.S.-led aerial bombing campaign of [1999],
designed to halt dictator Slobodan Miloševiæ's brutal attempt to
drive out the province's ethnic Albanian majority" (February 25,
2008). Francis Fukuyama urged in the New York Times (February 17,
2008) that "in the wake of the Iraq debacle," we must not forget the
important lesson of the 1990s "that strong countries like the United
States should use their power to defend human rights or promote
democracy": crucial evidence is that "ethnic cleansing against the
Albanians in Kosovo was stopped only through NATO bombing of Serbia
itself."

The editors of the liberal New Republic wrote that Miloševiæ "set
out to pacify [Kosovo] using his favored tools: mass expulsion,
systematic rape, and murder," but fortunately the West would not
tolerate the crime "and so, in March 1999, NATO began a bombing
campaign" to end the "slaughter and sadism." The "nightmare has a
happy ending for one simple reason: because the West used its
military might to save them" (March 12, 2008). The editors added
that "You would need to have the heart of a Kremlin functionary to
be unmoved by the scene that unfolded in Kosovo's capital Pristina,"
celebrating "a fitting and just epilogue to the last mass crime of
the twentieth century." In less exalted but conventional terms,
Samantha Power writes that "Serbia's atrocities had of course
provoked NATO action."

Citing examples is misleading, because the doctrine is held with
virtual unanimity, and considerable passion, or
perhaps "desperation" would be a more appropriate word. The
reference to "Kremlin functionaries" by the editors of the New
Republic is appropriate in ways they did not intend. The rare
efforts to adduce the uncontroversial and well-documented record
elicit impressive tantrums, when they are not simply ignored.

The record is unusually rich, and the facts presented in impeccable
Western sources are explicit, consistent, and extensively
documented. The sources include two major State Department
compilations released to justify the bombing and a rich array of
documents from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in
Europe (OSCE), NATO, the UN, and others. They also include a British
parliamentary inquiry. And, notably, the very instructive reports of
the monitors of the OSCE Kosovo Verification Mission established at
the time of the October cease-fire negotiated by U.S. Ambassador
Richard Holbrooke. The monitors reported regularly on the ground
from a few weeks later until March 19, when they were withdrawn
(over Serbian objections) in preparation for the March 24 bombing.

The documentary record is treated with what anthropologists
call "ritual avoidance." And there is a good reason. The evidence,
which is unequivocal, leaves the Party Line in tatters. The standard
claim that "Serbia's atrocities had of course provoked NATO action"
directly reverses the unequivocal facts: NATO's action provoked
Serbia's atrocities, exactly as anticipated. 13

Western documentation reveals that Kosovo was an ugly place prior to
the bombing—though not, unfortunately, by international standards.
Some 2,000 are reported to have been killed in the year before the
NATO bombing. Atrocities were distributed between the Kosovo
Liberation Army (KLA) guerrillas attacking from Albania and Federal
Republic of Yugoslav (FRY) security forces. An OSCE report
accurately summarizes the record: The "cycle of confrontation can be
generally described" as KLA attacks on Serb police and civilians, "a
disproportionate response by the FRY authorities, " and "renewed KLA
activity."

The British government, the most hawkish element in the alliance,
attributes most of the atrocities in the relevant period to the KLA,
which in 1998 had been condemned by the United States as
a "terrorist organization. " On March 24, as the bombing began,
British Defense Minister George Robertson, later NATO secretary-
general, informed the House of Commons that until mid-January
1999, "the [Kosovo Liberation Army] were responsible for more deaths
in Kosovo than the Serbian authorities had been." In citing
Robertson's testimony in A New Generation Draws the Line, I wrote
that he must be mistaken; given the distribution of force, the
judgment was simply not credible. The British parliamentary inquiry,
however, reveals that his judgment was confirmed by Foreign
Secretary Robin Cook, who told the House on January 18, 1999, that
the KLA "has committed more breaches of the ceasefire, and until
this weekend was responsible for more deaths than the [Yugoslav]
security forces."14

Robertson and Cook are referring to the Racak massacre of January
15, in which 45 people were reported killed. Western documentation
reveals no notable change in pattern from the Racak massacre until
the withdrawal of the Kosovo Verification Mission monitors on March
19. So even factoring that massacre in (and overlooking questions
about what happened), the conclusions of Robertson and Cook, if
generally valid in mid-January, remained so until the announcement
of the NATO bombing. One of the few serious scholarly studies even
to consider these matters, a careful and judicious study by Nicholas
Wheeler, estimates that Serbs were responsible for 500 of the 2,000
reported killed in the year before the bombing. For comparison,
Robert Hayden, a specialist on the Balkans who is director of the
Center for Russian and East European Studies of the University of
Pittsburgh, observes that "the casualties among Serb civilians in
the first three weeks of the war are higher than all of the
casualties on both sides in Kosovo in the three months that led up
to this war, and yet those three months were supposed to be a
humanitarian catastrophe. "15

U.S. intelligence reported that the KLA "intended to draw NATO into
its fight for independence by provoking Serb atrocities." The KLA
was arming and "taking very provocative steps in an effort to draw
the west into the crisis," hoping for a brutal Serb reaction,
Holbrooke commented. KLA leader Hashim Thaci, now prime minister of
Kosovo, informed BBC investigators that when the KLA killed Serb
policemen, "We knew we were endangering civilian lives, too, a great
number of lives," but the predictable Serb revenge made the actions
worthwhile. The top KLA military commander, Agim Ceku, boasted that
the KLA shared in the victory because "after all, the KLA brought
NATO to Kosovo" by carrying out attacks in order to elicit violent
retaliation.

So matters continued until NATO initiated the bombing, knowing that
it was "entirely predictable" that the FRY would respond on the
ground with violence, General Wesley Clark informed the press;
earlier he had informed the highest U.S. government officials that
the bombing would lead to major crimes, and that NATO could do
nothing to prevent them. The details conform to Clark's predictions.
The press reported that "The Serbs began attacking Kosovo Liberation
Army strongholds on March 19," when the monitors were withdrawn in
preparation for the bombing, "but their attack kicked into high gear
on March 24, the night NATO began bombing Yugoslavia." The number of
internally displaced, which had declined, rose again to 200,000
after the monitors were withdrawn. Prior to the bombing, and for two
days following its onset, the United Nations High Commissioner for
Refugees (UNHCR) reported no data on refugees. A week after the
bombing began, the UNHCR began to tabulate the daily flow.

In brief, it was well understood by the NATO leadership that the
bombing was not a response to the huge atrocities in Kosovo, but was
their cause, exactly as anticipated. Furthermore, at the time the
bombing was initiated, there were two diplomatic options on the
table: the proposal of NATO, and the proposal of the FRY (suppressed
in the West, virtually without exception). After 78 days of bombing,
a compromise was reached between them, suggesting that a peaceful
settlement might have been possible, avoiding the terrible crimes
that were the anticipated reaction to the NATO bombing.

The Miloševiæ indictment for war crimes in Kosovo, issued during the
NATO bombing, makes no pretense to the contrary. The indictment,
based on U.S.-UK intelligence, keeps to crimes committed during the
NATO bombing. There is only one exception: the Racak massacre in
January. "Senior officials in the Clinton administration were
revolted and outraged," Samantha Power writes, repeating the
conventional story. It is hardly credible that Clinton officials
were revolted or outraged, or even cared. Even putting aside their
past support for far worse crimes, it suffices to consider their
reaction to the massacres in East Timor shortly after, for example
in Liquica, a far worse crime than Racak, which led the same Clinton
officials to increase their participation in the ongoing slaughter.

Despite his conclusions on the distribution of killings, Wheeler
supports the NATO bombing on the grounds that there would have been
even worse atrocities had NATO not bombed. The argument is that by
bombing with the anticipation that it would lead to atrocities, NATO
was preventing atrocities. The fact that these are the strongest
arguments that can be contrived by serious analysts tells us a good
deal about the decision to bomb, particularly when we recall that
there were diplomatic options and that the agreement reached after
the bombing was a compromise between them.

Some have tried to support this line of argument by appealing to
Operation Horseshoe, an alleged Serbian plan to expel Kosovar
Albanians. The plan was unknown to the NATO command, as General
Clark attested, and is irrelevant on those grounds alone: the
criminal resort to violence cannot be justified by something
discovered afterwards. The plan was exposed as a probable
intelligence forgery, but that is of no relevance either. It is
almost certain Serbia had such contingency plans, just as other
states, including the United States, have hair-raising contingency
plans even for remote eventualities.

An even more astonishing effort to justify the NATO bombing is that
the decision was taken under the shadow of Srebrenica and other
atrocities of the early '90s. By that argument, it follows that NATO
should have been calling for the bombing of Indonesia, the United
States, and the United Kingdom, under the shadow of the vastly worse
atrocities they had carried out in East Timor and were escalating
again when the decision to bomb Serbia was taken—for the United
States and United Kingdom, only a small part of their criminal
record. A last desperate effort to grasp at some straw is that
Europe could not tolerate the pre-bombing atrocities right near its
borders—though NATO not only tolerated, but strongly supported far
worse atrocities right within NATO in the same years, as already
discussed.

Without running through the rest of the dismal record, it is hard to
think of a case where the justification for the resort to criminal
violence is so weak. But the pure justice and nobility of the
actions has become a doctrine of religious faith, understandably:
What else can justify the chorus of self-glorification that brought
the millennium to an end? What else can be adduced to support
the "emerging norms" that authorize the idealistic New World and its
allies to use force where their leaders "believe it to be just"?

Some have speculated on the actual reasons for the NATO bombing. The
highly regarded military historian Andrew Bacevich dismisses
humanitarian claims and alleges that along with the Bosnia
intervention, the bombing of Serbia was undertaken to ensure "the
cohesion of NATO and the credibility of American power" and "to
sustain American primacy" in Europe. Another respected analyst,
Michael Lind, writes that "a major strategic goal of the Kosovo war
was reassuring Germany so it would not develop a defense policy
independent of the U.S.-dominated NATO alliance." Neither author
presents any basis for the conclusions. 16

Evidence does exist however, from the highest level of the Clinton
administration. Strobe Talbott, who was responsible for diplomacy
during the war, wrote the foreword to a book on the warby his
associate John Norris. Talbott writes that those who want to
know "how events looked and felt at the time to those of us who were
involved" in the war should turn to Norris's account, written with
the "immediacy that can be provided only by someone who was an
eyewitness to much of the action, who interviewed at length and in
depth many of the participants while their memories were still
fresh, and who has had access to much of the diplomatic record."
Norris states that "it was Yugoslavia's resistance to the broader
trends of political and economic reform—not the plight of Kosovar
Albanians—that best explains NATO's war." That the motive for the
NATO bombing could not have been "the plight of Kosovar Albanians"
was already clear from the extensive Western documentary record. But
it is interesting to hear from the highest level that the real
reason for the bombing was that Yugoslavia was a lone holdout in
Europe to the political and economic programs of the Clinton
administration and its allies. Needless to say, this important
revelation also is excluded from the canon.17

Though the "new norm of humanitarian intervention" collapses on
examination, there is at least one residue: the "responsibility to
protect." Applauding the declaration of independence of Kosovo,
liberal commentator Roger Cohen writes that "at a deeper level, the
story of little Kosovo is the story of changing notions of
sovereignty and the prising open of the world" (International Herald
Tribune, February 20, 2008). The NATO bombing of Kosovo demonstrated
that "human rights transcended narrow claims of state sovereignty"
(quoting Thomas Weiss).

The achievement, Cohen continues, was ratified by the 2005 World
Summit, which adopted the "responsibility to protect," known as R2P,
which "formalized the notion that when a state proves unable or
unwilling to protect its people, and crimes against humanity are
perpetrated, the international community has an obligation to
intervene—if necessary, and as a last resort, with military force."
Accordingly, "an independent Kosovo, recognized by major Western
powers, is in effect the first major fruit of the ideas behind R2P."
Cohen concludes: "The prising open of the world is slow work, but
from Kosovo to Cuba it continues." The NATO bombing is vindicated,
and the "idealistic new world bent on ending inhumanity" really has
reached a "noble phase" in its foreign policy with a "saintly glow."
In the words of international law professor Michael Glennon, "The
crisis in Kosovo illustrates. ..America' s new willingness to do what
it thinks right—international law notwithstanding, " though a few
years later international law was brought into accord with the
stance of the "enlightened states" by adopting R2P.

Again, there is a slight problem: those annoying facts. The UN World
Summit of September 2005 explicitly rejected the claim of the NATO
powers that they have the right to use force in alleged protection
of human rights. Quite the contrary, the Summit reaffirmed "that the
relevant provisions of the Charter [which explicitly bar the NATO
actions] are sufficient to address the full range of threats to
international peace and security." The Summit also reaffirmed "the
authority of the Security Council to mandate coercive action to
maintain and restore international peace and security...acting in
accordance with the purposes and principles of the Charter," and the
role of the General Assembly in this regard "in accordance with the
relevant provisions of the Charter." Without Security Council
authorization, then, NATO has no more right to bomb Serbia than
Saddam Hussein had to "liberate" Kuwait. The Summit granted no
new "right of intervention" to individual states or regional
alliances, whether under humanitarian or other professed grounds.

The Summit endorsed the conclusions of a December 2004 high-level UN
Panel, which included many prominent Western figures. The Panel
reiterated the principles of the Charter concerning the use of
force: it can be lawfully deployed only when authorized by the
Security Council, or under Article 51, in defense against armed
attack until the Security Council acts. Any other resort to force is
a war crime, in fact the "supreme international crime" encompassing
all the evil that follows, in the words of the Nuremberg Tribunal.
The Panel concluded that "Article 51 needs neither extension nor
restriction of its long-understood scope,...it should be neither
rewritten nor reinterpreted. " Presumably with the Kosovo war in
mind, the Panel added that "For those impatient with such a
response, the answer must be that, in a world full of perceived
potential threats, the risk to the global order and the norm of
nonintervention on which it continues to be based is simply too
great for the legality of unilateral preventive action, as distinct
from collectively endorsed action, to be accepted. Allowing one to
so act is to allow all."

There could hardly be a more explicit rejection of the stand of the
self-declared "enlightened states."

Both the Panel and the World Summit endorsed the position of the non-
Western world, which had firmly rejected "the so-called `right' of
humanitarian intervention" in the Declaration of the South Summit in
2000, surely with the recent NATO bombing of Serbia in mind. This
was the highest-level meeting ever held by the former non-aligned
movement, accounting for 80 percent of the world's population. It
was almost entirely ignored, and the rare and brief references to
their conclusions about humanitarian intervention elicited near
hysteria. Thus Cambridge University international relations lecturer
Brendan Simms, writing in the Times Higher Education Supplement (May
25, 2001), was infuriated by such "bizarre and uncritical reverence
for the pronouncements of the so-called `South Summit G-77'—in
Havana!—an improvident rabble in whose ranks murderers, torturers
and robbers are conspicuously represented"— so different from the
civilized folk who have been their benefactors for the past
centuries and can scarcely control their fury when there is a brief
allusion, without comment, to the perception of the world by the
traditional victims, a perception since strongly endorsed by the
high-level UN Panel and the UN World Summit in explicit
contradiction to the self-serving pronouncements of apologists for
Western resort to violence.

We might ask finally whether humanitarian intervention even exists.
There is no shortage of evidence that it does. The evidence falls
into two categories. The first is declarations of leaders. It is all
too easy to demonstrate that virtually every resort to force is
justified by elevated rhetoric about noble humanitarian intentions.
Japanese counterinsurgency documents eloquently proclaim Japan's
intention to create an "earthly paradise" in independent Manchukuo
and North China, where Japan is selflessly sacrificing blood and
treasure to defend the population from the "Chinese bandits" who
terrorize them.

Since these are internal documents, we have no reason to doubt the
sincerity of the mass murderers and torturers who produced them.
Perhaps we may even entertain the possibility that Japanese emperor
Hirohito was sincere in his surrender declaration in August 1945,
when he told his people that "We declared war on America and Britain
out of Our sincere desire to ensure Japan's self-preservation and
the stabilization of East Asia, it being far from Our thought either
to infringe upon the sovereignty of other nations or to embark upon
territorial aggrandizement. " Hitler's pronouncements were no less
noble when he dismembered Czechoslovakia, and were accepted at face
value by Western leaders. President Roosevelt's close confidant
Sumner Welles informed him that the Munich settlement "presented the
opportunity for the establishment by the nations of the world of a
new world order based upon justice and upon law," in which the
Nazi "moderates" would play a leading role. It would be hard to find
an exception to professions of virtuous intent, even among the worst
monsters.

The second category of evidence consists of military intervention
that had benign effects, whatever its motives: not quite
humanitarian intervention, but at least partially approaching it.
Here too there are illustrations. The most significant ones by far
during the post–Second World War era are in the 1970s: India's
invasion of East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), ending a huge massacre;
and Vietnam's invasion of Cambodia in December 1978, driving out the
Khmer Rouge just as their atrocities were peaking. But these two
cases are excluded from the canon on principled grounds. The
invasions were not carried out by the West, hence do not serve the
cause of establishing the West's right to use force in violation of
the UN Charter. Even more decisively, both interventions were
vigorously opposed by the "idealistic new world bent on ending
inhumanity." The United States sent an aircraft carrier to Indian
waters to threaten the miscreants. Washington supported a Chinese
invasion to punish Vietnam for the crime of ending Pol Pot's
atrocities, and along with Britain, immediately turned to diplomatic
and military support for the Khmer Rouge.

The State Department even explained to Congress why it was
supporting both the remnants of the Pol Pot regime (Democratic
Kampuchea) and the Indonesian aggressors who were engaged in crimes
in East Timor that were comparable to Pol Pot's. The reason for this
remarkable decision was that the "continuity" of Democratic
Kampuchea with the Khmer Rouge regime "unquestionably" makes
it "more representative of the Cambodian people than the Fretilin
[the East Timorese resistance] is of the Timorese people." The
explanation was not reported, and has been effaced from properly
sanitized history.

Perhaps a few genuine cases of humanitarian intervention can be
discovered. There is, however, good reason to take seriously the
stand of the "improvident rabble," reaffirmed by the authentic
international community at the highest level. The essential insight
was articulated by the unanimous vote of the International Court of
Justice in one of its earliest rulings, in 1949: "The Court can only
regard the alleged right of intervention as the manifestation of a
policy of force, such as has, in the past, given rise to most
serious abuses and such as cannot, whatever be the defects in
international organization, find a place in international law...;
from the nature of things, [intervention] would be reserved for the
most powerful states, and might easily lead to perverting the
administration of justice itself." The judgment does not bar "the
responsibility to protect," as long as it is interpreted in the
manner of the South, the high-level UN Panel, and the UN World
Summit.

Sixty years later, there is little reason to question the court's
judgment. The UN system doubtless suffers from severe defects. The
most critical defect is the overwhelming role of the leading
violators of Security Council resolutions. The most effective way to
violate them is to veto them, a privilege of the permanent members.
Since the UN fell out of its control forty years ago the United
States is far in the lead in vetoing resolutions on a wide range of
issues, its British ally is second, and no one else is even close.
Nevertheless, despite these and other serious defects of the UN
system, the current world order offers no preferable alternative
than to vest the "responsibility to protect" in the United Nations.
In the real world, the only alternative, as Bricmont eloquently
explains, is the "humanitarian imperialism" of the powerful states
that claim the right to use force because they "believe it to be
just," all too regularly and predictably "perverting the
administration of justice itself."

Notes
1. New York Times chief diplomatic correspondent Thomas Friedman,
quoting a high government official, January 12, 1992.
2. For more, and sources, see my New Military Humanism (Monroe,
ME: Common Courage, 1999).
3. Boston Review (February 1994).
4. For detailed examination of the role assigned to China in
the "virulence and pervasiveness of American visionary globalism
underlying Washington's strategic policy" in Asia, see James Peck,
Washington's China (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press,
2006).
5. McSherry, Predatory States (Boulder, CO: Rowman & Littlefield,
2005).
6. Simes, "If the Cold War Is Over, Then What?," New York Times,
December 27, 1988.
7. Ha-Joon Chang, Bad Samaritans (Random House, 2007).
8. Reporters' paraphrase; Stephen Kurkjian and Adam Pertman,
Boston Globe, January 5, 1990.
9. Lars Schoultz, Human Rights and United States Policy toward
Latin America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981).
10. Hans C. Von Sponeck, A Different Kind of War (New York:
Berghahn, 2006); Spokesman 96, 2007. On the oil for food program
fraud, see my Failed States (Metropolitan, 2006).
11. For a review of the miserable denouement, see my A New
Generation Draws the Line (Verso, 2000).
12. See Peter Hallward, Damming the Flood (New York: Verso, 2007),
for an expert and penetrating study of what followed, through the
2004 military coup that overthrew the elected government once again,
backed by the traditional torturers, France, and the United States;
and the resilience of the Haitian people as they sought to rise
again from the ruins.
13. A New Generation Draws the Line. On what was known at once, see
my New Military Humanism.
14. Robertson, New Generation, 106–7. Cook, House of Commons Session
1999-2000, Defence Committee Publications, Part II, 35.
15. Wheeler, Saving Strangers: Humanitarian Intervention and
International Society (Oxford, 2000). Hayden, interview with Doug
Henwood, WBAI, New York, reprinted in Henwood, Left Business
Observer #89, April 27, 1999.
16. Andrew J. Bacevich, American Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard,
2003); Michael Lind, National Interest (May–June 2007).
17. John Norris, Collision Course (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005).