No to 'humanitarian intervention' in Syria!

Beware "humanitarian intervention!"  Nevertheless, there are significant differences between Syria today and, say, Bosnia-Kosovo in the 1990s. To name a few:

• There was a united, democratic Europe on the borders of the Balkans ready and eager to contain the war;

• Bosnia and Kosovo were separate ethnic-religious enclaves that could be (almost) cleanly separated from Serbia (former Yugoslavia);

• There was UN Security Council resolution 1244 (among others) for Kosovo and dozens of UNSC resolutions for Bosnia & Herzegovina and the Former Yugoslavia that authorized international military action against Serbia, a sovereign state, that had not declared war on the U.S.-NATO;

• Russia was sympathetic to the Serbs but not openly arming and training them and threatening to up the ante;

• There was no al-Qaeda or foreign terrorist presence in the Balkans that couldn't wait to take U.S. arms and use them against us.

Beyond that, Cohen is an unreformed neocon moron who covers it up with a bleeding-heart liberal veneer.  He asks, "Does he [Obama] care that he has let this crisis [in Syria] get out of hand?"  That rhetorical accusation reeks of U.S. arrogance!  As if the U.S. President carries the responsibility of the world on his shoulders, even when U.S. strategic interests aren't at risk!

Even worse, Cohen is a dirty hypocrite. He goes further;

The operative philosophy is that you do what you can when you can. The United States has the muscle. There are few grander causes than the saving of human life.

Oh really?  Is that why Cohen urged on our war of choice in Iraq, (and before that supported the deadly decade-long embargo of Iraq), to savehuman lives?!?  In 2011, Cohen admitted he was wrong to cheer on the Iraq invasion; he said he supported it out of emotion.  Well Cohen is wrong again, he just doesn't realize it yet.  Good thing we don't make war on the advice of hot-headed pundits tapping away on their Macs in their safe, cozy offices.

I'll say it again: Obama's decision to arm the rebels is wrong.  It's another Obama half-measure meant to kind of please everybody.  But at least he's not sending them rockets and heavy artillery that will wind up in the hands of terrorists!

Obama’s increasingly muddled Syria policy

By Richard Cohen

June 18, 2013 | Washington Post

URL: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/richard-cohen-obamas-increasingly-muddled-syria-policy/2013/06/17/6be2a17e-d77b-11e2-a016-92547bf094cc_story.html

Can there be good 'humanitarian wars'?

This essay reminds me of college, when the only mildly activist thing I ever did besides attend a Free Tibet concert was to organize a teach-in on campus on the Kosovo war. I was about to graduate, this was the only U.S. war that had happened in my college years, and there was no discussion about it. So I organized it.

Most of the members of the faculty panel were against the war, by design, because at the time everybody seemed for it, even on a conservative Southern campus. I guess even I was, what did I know? But nobody seemed to care one way or another about a real war and it irked me. It was during exam week and there were more elderly townsfolk in attendance than students. It was just assumed that intervention was the only right thing to do. Why debate it?

Just like a decade later when invading Afghanistan and Iraq seemed like the only right thing to do.... And now Libya. And where next?

UPDATE (08.22.2011): Fred Kaplan got pretty worked up by this op-ed so he published a rebuttal entitled "It's Not What We Ought To Do, But What We Can Do" whose central tenet -- that would-be interveners should tread carefully -- may just be restating n+1's injunction to inject a little political reality into the concept of human rights. Regarding rights, in general, I'm for them, but I recognize that God-given though they may be, ahem!, they depend on states and governments to protect them, not God. So rights without strong state-policemen are like lambs without shepherds: sooner or later some will be lost or devoured; and even the loving shepherd may let a few lambs go once in a while to stay and protect the rest.

A Solution From Hell

The perils of humanitarian intervention

By the editors of n+1 magazine

August 17, 2011 | Slate

To read the complete version, click here to purchase n+1 in print.

The current age is uncommonly preoccupied with human rights. The story of how we got here can be traced from various points, whether from the Enlightenment and its great American spokesman Thomas Jefferson, or from the interventions and non-interventions following the European upheavals of 1848, or from the founding of the United Nations after World War II and the Holocaust, or from 1977, the year when post-'60s dismay, Jimmy Carter, and the Cold War intersected to place a commitment to "human rights" at the center of Western consciousness. Whichever way, for whatever reason, or for half a dozen reasons, human rights have at least rhetorically come to the fore of American and European foreign policy, with the result that it is now possible for the U.S. to wage war for humanitarian purposes in campaigns that seem otherwise irrelevant to the national interest. In this telling of the story of the "rights revolution," as the philosopher and Iraq war proponent Michael Ignatieff has called it, the end of the Cold War has opened up new vistas for the enforcement of human rights across the globe.

There is another way to tell the story, however. In this telling, the march of rights took a wrong turn as early as 1948, when the U.N. adopted its Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The U.N. Charter had established state sovereignty as the basis for international law. This meant that weaker states would be protected against stronger states by the international community—and for all its flaws, the U.N. was instrumental in helping postwar, post-colonial states get on their feet. At the same time, the Universal Declaration promoted the principle of human rights in general, independent of sovereignty. Writing in the wake of World War II and the founding of the U.N., Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism echoed Edmund Burke's famous critique of the French revolutionaries' Declaration of the Rights of Man. "The calamity of the rightless," wrote Arendt, "is not that they are deprived of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or of equality before the law and freedom of opinion—formulas which were designed to solve problems within given communities—but that they no longer belong to any community whatsoever. Their plight is not that they are not equal before the law, but that no law exists for them." Surveying the history of refugees and other stateless people over the prior 30 years, Arendt found that "not only did the loss of national rights in all instances entail the loss of human rights; the restoration of human rights, as the recent example of the State of Israel proves, has been achieved so far only through the restoration of national rights." There could be no rights without belonging to a sovereign jurisdiction; the U.N., by enshrining sovereignty on the one hand and "universal rights" on the other, had tried to solve the problems revealed in the interwar period, but ended up simply restating them.

The contradiction in the U.N. founding documents between inviolable human rights and inviolable state sovereignty remained essentially obscured throughout the Cold War, when neither the Americans nor the Soviets could seriously claim to believe in either. Even when the U.S. championed human rights under Carter, it retained its priorities: Forced to choose between socialists (or just serious land reformers) and human rights abusers, the U.S. always sided with the abusers. Suddenly in 1991, the choice became unnecessary. You no longer had to decide between leftists and rightists, since everywhere you looked there were only capitalists. And by the end of the Cold War, aerial weapons systems had advanced to the point where the military could conduct basically gratuitous wars, with little risk to soldiers' lives, at comparatively low cost—and without raining explosives indiscriminately on foreign populations. The new precision-guided weaponry offered the hope of truly distinguishing the good guys from the bad guys, as long as they stayed far enough apart.

In the '90s, the language of human rights came into its own. The people of Kuwait, when a U.S.-led, U.N.-approved coalition drove Iraq out of their country, were the citizens of a sovereign state invaded by Saddam Hussein—but not so the Iraqi Kurds, who were Saddam's own citizens when he invaded their lands. Nevertheless the U.S., Britain, and France established a no-fly zone to protect the Iraqi Kurds from their internationally recognized head of state. Likewise, the Tutsis of Rwanda and the Albanians in Yugoslav Kosovo were victims of the state in which they lived, and their rights, insofar as they had any, could only be defended by an international community. In one case those rights were defended, in the other they were not. What were the U.S.'s principles, and what was its practice, when it came to human rights? Neither seemed clear, and the debate about them was equally confusing and confused.

The only people who seemed consistent about intervention were too far right or left to get much of a hearing. Throughout the 1990s, the right opposed intervention from a "realist" perspective, arguing that it was not in the national interest to go on humanitarian adventures abroad. The left, which was in the process of forming a powerful movement against the "structural adjustment" policies of the giant international financial institutions, and also promoting a humane globalization (carelessly labeled "anti-globalization" by the mainstream press), opposed the interventions on anti-imperialist grounds. In the end, neither view had much effect, as a strong hawkish core emerged: Bob Dole, the Republican leader in the Senate and 1996 presidential candidate, was a strong proponent of intervention in Bosnia; so too, eventually, was Bill Clinton. Among respectable pundits, the right-leaning hawks were neoconservative, the left-leaning hawks neoliberal. If there was a real distinction it was in their attitudes toward international institutions like the U.N. Neoconservatives loathed the U.N.; neoliberals liked it. But it was the Kosovo intervention, which most egregiously circumvented international institutions (in the name of a good cause), that was the final Clinton intervention. Thus at the end of the '90s neoconservatives and neoliberals had reached the same place, disdainful of seeking "multilateral" permission for their wars.

Perhaps the liberals would soon have returned to their more traditional interest in international institutions; perhaps the conservatives would have gotten out of the human rights business altogether; perhaps not. In any case the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 altered—or scrambled—people's thinking. The next American war was an unusual operation: a mission to overthrow a government (the Taliban) that almost nobody recognized as legitimate, in order to deprive a belligerent non-state actor (al-Qaida) of a staging ground. Realists on the left—few remained on the right—argued for a narrowly defined police action to root out al-Qaida. Supporters of all-out war, soon the only respectable position, invoked the liberation of Afghan women as a bonus legitimation. And a year and a half later came Iraq. The war was sold to the public under many pretexts, but for liberal hawks the dominant reason to invade was Saddam Hussein's former crimes (and potential future crimes) against his people. There was no question that from a humanitarian perspective a world without Saddam would be a better world. And we were going to take him out.

In retrospect, it's easy to see that the argument over humanitarian intervention that should have taken place in the years after Kosovo was replaced and muddled by an argument over the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war. In 2000–01, a high-powered international commission convened to discuss what the international community should do in the event of a human rights crisis in a failing state; one of their recommendations was that the concept of "humanitarian intervention" be scrapped, as being needlessly prejudicial (like "pro-life"), and replaced with the more capacious, less necessarily violent "responsibility to protect." The group's report was humane and intelligent, though not without problems; it was also presented before the U.N. Security Council in December 2001, at which point it had been "OBE," as they say in Washington—overtaken by events. The same happened with Samantha Power's "A Problem From Hell": America and the Age of Genocide, the summa theologica of liberal interventionist historiography, which was published in 2002. The book immediately became part of the debate over Iraq, with George W. Bush famously scribbling NOMW ("not on my watch") in a memo outlining its arguments. Not long after, he launched Operation Iraqi Freedom.

The argument over pre-emptive war was decided, resoundingly, against, though not because Stephen Holmes wrote essays in the London Review of Books or Jacques Rancière contributed an elegant elaboration of Hannah Arendt's argument about rights in the South Atlantic Quarterly (subscription required). The argument was decided by the 126,000 or so Iraqis killed during the U.S. invasion and in the civil war that followed. No one will be invading a terrible but stable regime to hang its leader anytime soon; at least we won't. Now, in 2011, we are bringing the troops gradually home from Afghanistan and Iraq, the results mixed. Neither war was waged for human rights, and it seems clear that humanitarianism shouldn't have been part of the discussion, not in the way it was. How humanitarian is it to unleash one civil war and reignite another?

In Libya, we find ourselves faced with a more classic, '90s-style intervention. The background could not be more stark: A courageous rebellion against a brutal and unbalanced 40-year dictatorship was inspired by the nearby uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia. Unlike the dictators of those countries, Muammar Qaddafi gave no thought to stepping down. The rebels armed themselves and began to march toward Tripoli, capturing several towns on the way. They carried Kalashnikovs and RPGs. Qaddafi's days were numbered! But his army had jets, and tanks, and heavy artillery. Once it began a counteroffensive, the rebels proved powerless. They retreated and retreated, until Qaddafi's forces reached the outskirts of Benghazi, the largest city in the Libyan east and the heart of the rebellion. Qaddafi took to the radio. "It's over," he told the rebels. "We are coming tonight. Prepare yourselves. We will find you in your closets. We will show no mercy and no pity." People on the ground began to predict the massacre of Benghazi. They even used the word genocide, if only to disclaim it: "Not a slaughter amounting to genocide," clarified the New York Review of Books, "but almost certainly a bloodbath." (And what was the exact word these exquisite splitters of hairs had in mind for the killing resulting from NATO bombardment?) The New Yorker's understated Jon Lee Anderson was in Benghazi as Qaddafi's army approached. He had been watching the hapless rebels for weeks, growing increasingly alarmed at their inadequate arms and training. Now artillery could be heard on the edge of town; in the city's lone functioning Internet cafe the young people updated their Facebook profiles. Social media weren't going to help them now. "The war was finally coming to Benghazi," Anderson wrote.

And then it didn't. NATO jets swooped in, forcing Qaddafi's army back. Benghazi was saved. Nor was it a unilateral mission. The Arab League had sought the intervention; none other than Lebanon, home of Hezbollah (still furious at Qaddafi for the "disappearing" of a Lebanese Shiite chief in the late '70s), sponsored the resolution in the U.N. Security Council. The White House had the finesse to "lead from behind," as they put it. And the rebels, having taken several cities in the first weeks of the uprising, had established what international law calls "belligerent rights"—they were a force that could claim some legitimacy both inside and outside the country. Many of the arguments that should have given pause to American policymakers before the Iraq war, and to some extent during the Kosovo bombing, were moot here. This intervention was U.N.-approved, and seemed to emerge from a genuine concern for the casualties that would have ensued had Qaddafi's forces been allowed to proceed into Benghazi. (A more realpolitik consideration was to place the U.S., belatedly, on the side of the Arab Spring; we would be less resented as the old enabler of Mubarak if we were also the new foe of Qaddafi.) Ryan Lizza's New Yorker article describing the days leading up to Obama's decision for war singled out Samantha Power, senior director for multilateral affairs on Obama's National Security Council, as one of the motors for the intervention. America was finally choosing values over money.
And yet somehow it gave one a toothache—like the toothache Vronsky had at the end of Anna Karenina, when he went off to Belgrade to humanitarianly aid the Orthodox Christians in their uprising against the Turks. Wars waged by the U.S. are inevitably imperialist; that is part of the toothache. But are they also irredeemably so? Can the local good—the protection of these people or that city—never outweigh the global problem that human rights are, at best, invoked inconsistently and hypocritically, and at worst to excuse any and every war?

Humanitarian warfare, clearly bad in principle, often looks good from the standpoint of a particular people at a particular moment, when they are threatened with death. And so the temperamental opponent of intervention can come to feel that while in general he opposes this kind of thing, well, in this case he guesses he supports it—and in that case too, and the next one. He can come to feel like somebody who has principles only for the sake of suspending them. This was the real cause of the toothache—it was déjà vu all over again. In general, you reject humanitarian war—but have you ever met one you didn't initially like? For liberals or leftists who neither automatically support nor automatically oppose all interventions, the Libya war has prompted something paradoxical: mixed feelings in especially pure form. Here the humanitarian motive for intervening has seemed more genuine and decisive than in any prior case. And the chances of doing real good looked favorable. Yet we've got to stop doing these things!
What has been the result? NATO almost immediately expanded the concept of "civilian protection" granted in the U.N. resolution to include regime change—what safety could there be for the rebels if Qaddafi stayed in power?

Again, it was hard to argue: Qaddafi was a maniac and a murderer. But Qaddafi held on. One of his residences was bombed, killing a son and several grandchildren, and still he held on. The rebels, while increasing in number and confidence, did not suddenly transform themselves into a well-armed, well-trained fighting force, and militarily a stalemate ensued. Here we were again: An idea that on the face of it was reasonable, and in a certain way "humane," was leading to further deaths, further damage to a country's infrastructure, and a political situation in which the rebels, emboldened by the NATO jets (and, eventually, attack helicopters), refused to negotiate until Qaddafi was gone. Meanwhile the International Criminal Court, the pride and joy of the liberal interventionists, filed suit against Qaddafi for crimes against humanity, thereby putting him beyond the pale. How could you negotiate with someone with nothing to lose? So a nonmilitary solution to a conflict that, Obama said, would be a matter of "days, not weeks," is, as of this writing, further away than ever, even after five months of bombing.

All this could simply be regretted as a well-intentioned plan not working well enough. But that issue of abrogated sovereignty cuts both ways—the American people are supposed to be sovereign, too. The Obama White House's attitude in this has been telling. Not only has Obama failed to seek congressional approval; his lawyers filed a laughable legal brief that argued that America was not even at war. As congressional Republicans correctly pointed out, the administration could not be serious! What could explain this fealty to the letter of international law, and utter contempt for the president's duty to get his wars through Congress?

The answer, it seems to us, can be found in the work of the humanitarian hawks; they have turned the world into a morality play, a ceaseless battle of good versus evil. In Power and the Idealists, his ambivalent farewell to the moralism of the generation of 1968, Paul Berman traced this worldview to the 1960s student left. Born too late to fight Nazis the way their parents did, idealistic young leftists in the prosperous countries of the West looked for Nazis where they could: in university administrations, in American carpet bombers, in the colonialist Israeli state. Even as they grew older and wiser, the hunt for Nazis continued, and continued; in 1999, it led them into Kosovo, and in 2003 it led some of them into the catastrophic invasion of Iraq. Berman was the most perceptive analyst of the humanitarian hawk mindset; Samantha Power was its most compelling exemplar.

There are only three kinds of people in her A Problem From Hell: evildoers (Hitler, Pol Pot, Milosevic); saints (Raphael Lemkin, Jan Karski, George McGovern, Peter Galbraith); and cowards (everyone else). You're either with Power or with Pol Pot. The word evil is sprinkled liberally throughout the text (35 appearances), as are slaughter (65), mass murder (25), bloodbath (13), and massacre (99). The function of these words—as well as the word genocide, to whose propagation the book is partly devoted—is to place the evil people beyond the pale of politics, of negotiation, of human intercourse. Would you shake hands with a mass murderer? With the invocation of the word genocide, we move into some other sphere of human relations. Thought, strategy, negotiation shut down; there is only right and wrong, only fight or flight. Which is precisely, in fact, the point.

A politics this morally coercive may explain why a president who is a former law professor, and who came to power with the mandate to restore the rule of law, would so brazenly ignore the Constitution. But a politics this morally coercive is not a politics at all.

What has happened to human rights in the last 20 years is a hijacking, of the sort Napoleon managed with the Declaration of the Rights of Man when he turned Europe into a bloodbath, as Power would put it, under its banner. The search around the globe for genocides to eradicate is the ultimate rights perversion, for it reduces human rights to the right not to be brutally murdered in a particular way that fits the definition of genocide given in the Genocide Convention. This cannot be anyone's idea of a robust human rights. If human rights are to be reclaimed they need first of all to be restored to the realm of politics. Not the realm of morality, which is always and ever a discussion of good versus evil, but politics, a discussion and argument over competing legitimate aims—e.g., the aim of honoring sovereignty and not waging war, versus the aim of protecting the defenseless and ensuring their rights. Morally, it would clearly be better to be a democracy liberated by George W. Bush than a tyranny under Saddam Hussein. Politically, it may be better to bide your time under Saddam than be plunged into a civil war that will kill 100,000 or twice that many. A political rather than moral discussion of human rights might even lead us to acknowledge that a mass murderer like Muammar Qaddafi or George W. Bush has a legitimate constituency whose rights must also be kept in mind.

Meantime the historical record grows long enough for us to ask: Has there ever been a truly successful, truly humanitarian humanitarian intervention? Not of the Vietnamese in Cambodia, who deposed the Khmer Rouge for their own reasons (the Khmer kept crossing the border, and also murdered their entire Vietnamese population), and then replaced them with Hun Sen, who has been ruling Cambodia with an iron fist for more than 30 years. Not the Indian intervention in Bangladesh, under whose cover the Indian government arrested all student protesters in India. And not NATO in Kosovo, which, while it stopped Milosevic and ensured the safety of Kosovo, could not make it a viable state (it is now a failing state likely to be swallowed by Albania), and also led to the ethnic cleansing of the Serb population. Too bad for the Serbs, to be sure; but the creation of a safe space for the expulsion of a civilian population cannot be what anyone had in mind when they launched the planes. That there has never been a successful humanitarian intervention does not mean that there cannot be one in the future. But the evidence is piling up.

Stratfor: Kosovo set the stage for Georgia

Georgia and Kosovo: A Single Intertwined Crisis By George Friedman August 25, 2008 | Stratfor.com The Russo-Georgian war was rooted in broad geopolitical processes. In large part it was simply the result of the cyclical reassertion of Russian power. The Russian empire — czarist and Soviet — expanded to its borders in the 17th and 19th centuries. It collapsed in 1992. The Western powers wanted to make the disintegration permanent. It was inevitable that Russia would, in due course, want to reassert its claims. That it happened in Georgia was simply the result of circumstance. There is, however, another context within which to view this, the context of Russian perceptions of U.S. and European intentions and of U.S. and European perceptions of Russian capabilities. This context shaped the policies that led to the Russo-Georgian war. And those attitudes can only be understood if we trace the question of Kosovo, because the Russo-Georgian war was forged over the last decade over the Kosovo question. Yugoslavia broke up into its component republics in the early 1990s. The borders of the republics did not cohere to the distribution of nationalities. Many — Serbs, Croats, Bosnians and so on — found themselves citizens of republics where the majorities were not of their ethnicities and disliked the minorities intensely for historical reasons. Wars were fought between Croatia and Serbia (still calling itself Yugoslavia because Montenegro was part of it), Bosnia and Serbia and Bosnia and Croatia. Other countries in the region became involved as well. One conflict became particularly brutal. Bosnia had a large area dominated by Serbs. This region wanted to secede from Bosnia and rejoin Serbia. The Bosnians objected and an internal war in Bosnia took place, with the Serbian government involved. This war involved the single greatest bloodletting of the bloody Balkan wars, the mass murder by Serbs of Bosnians. Here we must pause and define some terms that are very casually thrown around. Genocide is the crime of trying to annihilate an entire people. War crimes are actions that violate the rules of war. If a soldier shoots a prisoner, he has committed a war crime. Then there is a class called "crimes against humanity." It is intended to denote those crimes that are too vast to be included in normal charges of murder or rape. They may not involve genocide, in that the annihilation of a race or nation is not at stake, but they may also go well beyond war crimes, which are much lesser offenses. The events in Bosnia were reasonably deemed crimes against humanity. They did not constitute genocide and they were more than war crimes. At the time, the Americans and Europeans did nothing about these crimes, which became an internal political issue as the magnitude of the Serbian crimes became clear. In this context, the Clinton administration helped negotiate the Dayton Accords, which were intended to end the Balkan wars and indeed managed to go quite far in achieving this. The Dayton Accords were built around the principle that there could be no adjustment in the borders of the former Yugoslav republics. Ethnic Serbs would live under Bosnian rule. The principle that existing borders were sacrosanct was embedded in the Dayton Accords. In the late 1990s, a crisis began to develop in the Serbian province of Kosovo. Over the years, Albanians had moved into the province in a broad migration. By 1997, the province was overwhelmingly Albanian, although it had not only been historically part of Serbia but also its historical foundation. Nevertheless, the Albanians showed significant intentions of moving toward either a separate state or unification with Albania. Serbia moved to resist this, increasing its military forces and indicating an intention to crush the Albanian resistance. There were many claims that the Serbians were repeating the crimes against humanity that were committed in Bosnia. The Americans and Europeans, burned by Bosnia, were eager to demonstrate their will. Arguing that something between crimes against humanity and genocide was under way — and citing reports that between 10,000 and 100,000 Kosovo Albanians were missing or had been killed — NATO launched a campaign designed to stop the killings. In fact, while some killings had taken place, the claims by NATO of the number already killed were false. NATO might have prevented mass murder in Kosovo. That is not provable. They did not, however, find that mass murder on the order of the numbers claimed had taken place. The war could be defended as a preventive measure, but the atmosphere under which the war was carried out overstated what had happened. The campaign was carried out without U.N. sanction because of Russian and Chinese opposition. The Russians were particularly opposed, arguing that major crimes were not being committed and that Serbia was an ally of Russia and that the air assault was not warranted by the evidence. The United States and other European powers disregarded the Russian position. Far more important, they established the precedent that U.N. sanction was not needed to launch a war (a precedent used by George W. Bush in Iraq). Rather — and this is the vital point — they argued that NATO support legitimized the war. This transformed NATO from a military alliance into a quasi-United Nations. What happened in Kosovo was that NATO took on the role of peacemaker, empowered to determine if intervention was necessary, allowed to make the military intervention, and empowered to determine the outcome. Conceptually, NATO was transformed from a military force into a regional multinational grouping with responsibility for maintenance of regional order, even within the borders of states that are not members. If the United Nations wouldn't support the action, the NATO Council was sufficient. Since Russia was not a member of NATO, and since Russia denied the urgency of war, and since Russia was overruled, the bombing campaign against Kosovo created a crisis in relations with Russia. The Russians saw the attack as a unilateral attack by an anti-Russian alliance on a Russian ally, without sound justification. Then-Russian President Boris Yeltsin was not prepared to make this into a major confrontation, nor was he in a position to. The Russians did not so much acquiesce as concede they had no options. The war did not go as well as history records. The bombing campaign did not force capitulation and NATO was not prepared to invade Kosovo. The air campaign continued inconclusively as the West turned to the Russians to negotiate an end. The Russians sent an envoy who negotiated an agreement consisting of three parts. First, the West would halt the bombing campaign. Second, Serbian army forces would withdraw and be replaced by a multinational force including Russian troops. Third, implicit in the agreement, the Russian troops would be there to guarantee Serbian interests and sovereignty. As soon as the agreement was signed, the Russians rushed troops to the Pristina airport to take up their duties in the multinational force — as they had in the Bosnian peacekeeping force. In part because of deliberate maneuvers and in part because no one took the Russians seriously, the Russians never played the role they believed had been negotiated. They were never seen as part of the peacekeeping operation or as part of the decision-making system over Kosovo. The Russians felt doubly betrayed, first by the war itself, then by the peace arrangements. The Kosovo war directly effected the fall of Yeltsin and the rise of Vladimir Putin. The faction around Putin saw Yeltsin as an incompetent bungler who allowed Russia to be doubly betrayed. The Russian perception of the war directly led to the massive reversal in Russian policy we see today. The installation of Putin and Russian nationalists from the former KGB had a number of roots. But fundamentally it was rooted in the events in Kosovo. Most of all it was driven by the perception that NATO had now shifted from being a military alliance to seeing itself as a substitute for the United Nations, arbitrating regional politics. Russia had no vote or say in NATO decisions, so NATO's new role was seen as a direct challenge to Russian interests. Thus, the ongoing expansion of NATO into the former Soviet Union and the promise to include Ukraine and Georgia into NATO were seen in terms of the Kosovo war. From the Russian point of view, NATO expansion meant a further exclusion of Russia from decision-making, and implied that NATO reserved the right to repeat Kosovo if it felt that human rights or political issues required it. The United Nations was no longer the prime multinational peacekeeping entity. NATO assumed that role in the region and now it was going to expand all around Russia. Then came Kosovo's independence. Yugoslavia broke apart into its constituent entities, but the borders of its nations didn't change. Then, for the first time since World War II, the decision was made to change Serbia's borders, in opposition to Serbian and Russian wishes, with the authorizing body, in effect, being NATO. It was a decision avidly supported by the Americans. The initial attempt to resolve Kosovo's status was the round of negotiations led by former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari that officially began in February 2006 but had been in the works since 2005. This round of negotiations was actually started under U.S. urging and closely supervised from Washington. In charge of keeping Ahtisaari's negotiations running smoothly was Frank G. Wisner, a diplomat during the Clinton administration. Also very important to the U.S. effort was Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Daniel Fried, another leftover from the Clinton administration and a specialist in Soviet and Polish affairs. In the summer of 2007, when it was obvious that the negotiations were going nowhere, the Bush administration decided the talks were over and that it was time for independence. On June 10, 2007, Bush said that the end result of negotiations must be "certain independence." In July 2007, Daniel Fried said that independence was "inevitable" even if the talks failed. Finally, in September 2007, Condoleezza Rice put it succinctly: "There's going to be an independent Kosovo. We're dedicated to that." Europeans took cues from this line. How and when independence was brought about was really a European problem. The Americans set the debate and the Europeans implemented it. Among Europeans, the most enthusiastic about Kosovo independence were the British and the French. The British followed the American line while the French were led by their foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, who had also served as the U.N. Kosovo administrator. The Germans were more cautiously supportive. On Feb. 17, 2008, Kosovo declared independence and was recognized rapidly by a small number of European states and countries allied with the United States. Even before the declaration, the Europeans had created an administrative body to administer Kosovo. The Europeans, through the European Union, micromanaged the date of the declaration. On May 15, during a conference in Ekaterinburg, the foreign ministers of India, Russia and China made a joint statement regarding Kosovo. It was read by the Russian host minister, Sergei Lavrov, and it said: "In our statement, we recorded our fundamental position that the unilateral declaration of independence by Kosovo contradicts Resolution 1244. Russia, India and China encourage Belgrade and Pristina to resume talks within the framework of international law and hope they reach an agreement on all problems of that Serbian territory." The Europeans and Americans rejected this request as they had rejected all Russian arguments on Kosovo. The argument here was that the Kosovo situation was one of a kind because of atrocities that had been committed. The Russians argued that the level of atrocity was unclear and that, in any case, the government that committed them was long gone from Belgrade. More to the point, the Russians let it be clearly known that they would not accept the idea that Kosovo independence was a one-of-a-kind situation and that they would regard it, instead, as a new precedent for all to follow. The problem was not that the Europeans and the Americans didn't hear the Russians. The problem was that they simply didn't believe them — they didn't take the Russians seriously. They had heard the Russians say things for many years. They did not understand three things. First, that the Russians had reached the end of their rope. Second, that Russian military capability was not what it had been in 1999. Third, and most important, NATO, the Americans and the Europeans did not recognize that they were making political decisions that they could not support militarily. For the Russians, the transformation of NATO from a military alliance into a regional United Nations was the problem. The West argued that NATO was no longer just a military alliance but a political arbitrator for the region. If NATO does not like Serbian policies in Kosovo, it can — at its option and in opposition to U.N. rulings — intervene. It could intervene in Serbia and it intended to expand deep into the former Soviet Union. NATO thought that because it was now a political arbiter encouraging regimes to reform and not just a war-fighting system, Russian fears would actually be assuaged. To the contrary, it was Russia's worst nightmare. Compensating for all this was the fact that NATO had neglected its own military power. Now, Russia could do something about it. At the beginning of this discourse, we explained that the underlying issues behind the Russo-Georgian war went deep into geopolitics and that it could not be understood without understanding Kosovo. It wasn't everything, but it was the single most significant event behind all of this. The war of 1999 was the framework that created the war of 2008. The problem for NATO was that it was expanding its political reach and claims while contracting its military muscle. The Russians were expanding their military capability (after 1999 they had no place to go but up) and the West didn't notice. In 1999, the Americans and Europeans made political decisions backed by military force. In 2008, in Kosovo, they made political decisions without sufficient military force to stop a Russian response. Either they underestimated their adversary or — even more amazingly — they did not see the Russians as adversaries despite absolutely clear statements the Russians had made. No matter what warning the Russians gave, or what the history of the situation was, the West couldn't take the Russians seriously. It began in 1999 with war in Kosovo and it ended in 2008 with the independence of Kosovo. When we study the history of the coming period, the war in Kosovo will stand out as a turning point. Whatever the humanitarian justification and the apparent ease of victory, it set the stage for the rise of Putin and the current and future crises.

Moscow cites Kosovo to justify war, yet refuses Kosovo self-determination?

I may be wrong, but I've never heard official Moscow advocate self-determination for Abkhazia and S. Ossetia. If they did, then maybe it was only just recently, after the West granted Kosovo its independence from Serbia. My point is, you could argue that Russia's stance has been consistent: to quell separatist movements, as in Chechnya; and to make sure that "frozen" separatist movements stay frozen, as in Kosovo, Abkhazia, S. Ossetia, and Nagorno-Karabakh. Russia occupies both separatist regions of Georgia in the guise of "peace keepers." This state of affairs has seemed to please Russia so far, without their calling for Abkhazia and S. Ossetia's secession from Georgia. (This would undermine their credibility as impartial peace keepers, to say the least.)

Anyway, why do Abkhazians and S. Ossetians have an "undoubted right to self-determination," as this Professor says? What makes them so special? Russia itself has about 100 ethnic groups! Does each of them undoubtedly deserve self-determination? That's a recipe for chaos and Balkanization. In this regard I sympathize with Georgia. The main challenge of any state is to maintain its territorial integrity; and anybody who challenges that threatens the very life of the country. (Hence Abe Lincoln could not tolerate S. Carolina's secession, and war ensued). Unfortunately for Georgia, however, the threat from Russian invasion is bigger than S. Ossetia's secession.

Russian cynicism revealed in Caucasus strategy
Published: August 14 2008 03:00
From Prof William G. Clarence-Smith.

Sir, South Ossetians and Abkhazian Circassians have an undoubted right to self-determination, which the Georgian government has violently and wrongly denied them, but Russian cynicism in this conflict knows no bounds. If Moscow was really concerned with Ossetian and Circassian rights, it would allow its own populations in the Caucasus, including Ossetians and Circassians, the right to secede. Instead, Russia has recently fought one of the nastiest wars in modern history to prevent the Chechens of the north-western Caucasus from achieving independence. This follows centuries of colonial conquest and rule in the Caucasus, in the course of which the Russians deployed a shocking degree of brutality. Moscow also cites the example of Kosovo to justify its war against Georgia, and yet refuses Kosovo the right to self-determination.

William G. Clarence-Smith,

School of Oriental and African Studies,

London WC1H 0XG, UK

Georgia is to blame?

I figure everybody is getting the standard "Russia-is-bad" perspective from the Western media. Here is another point of view, with some merit.

As Jim Croce sang, "You don't tug on Superman's cape...". Right or wrong, Georgia should not have picked a fight it couldn't win, and it shouldn't have hoped that the U.S., the UN, or NATO would come to the rescue, thereby risking the start of WW III.

Georgia Caused This War
By Vadim Mukhanov
August 13, 2008 | The Moscow Times

The war in South Ossetia must be understood for what it really is -- Georgia's one-sided escalation of the conflict. This places full responsibility for the bloodshed on Georgia's side. Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili's decision to send in heavy equipment and artillery late Thursday led to large civilian casualties in South Ossetia.

In all likelihood, the opportunistic Saakashvili saw the opening day of the Olympics in Beijing on Friday as his best chance for a successful blitzkrieg against recalcitrant South Ossetia. He also wagered that Russia's reaction would not be fast or powerful enough to stop Georgian divisions from seizing a large part of the unrecognized republic under their control, or from forcing the civilian population to flee through the Roki Tunnel into neighboring North Ossetia.

Russia's response turned out to be timely and effective. It brought to a halt Georgia's wanton murder of civilians in South Ossetia and the bombing of its villages. The Georgian forces that had savagely destroyed Tskhinvali and surrounding towns were routed.

The main goal of Georgia's leadership is to join NATO and to become integrated into European political and economic organizations. Toward that end, Tbilisi regularly complained about the incompetence of Russian peacekeeping forces in the conflict zones between Georgia and its breakaway republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, requesting that those forces be replaced with international peacekeepers. Saakashvili probably thought that the departure of Russia's peacekeepers would enable him to make the leaders of the unrecognized republics more compliant and to bring Abkhazia and South Ossetia under Georgia's control.

Since he was unable to replace the Russian peacekeepers, Saakashvili opted to resolve the conflict by the simplest of means -- by force. Georgia's position is undeniably advantageous. Should it emerge victorious, Georgia would earn the honor and respect of the United States and the other NATO members. Should it lose and suffer a retaliatory strike by Russia, NATO will have great sympathy for Tbilisi. Thus, a tactical defeat could turn into a strategic victory if NATO decides at its December summit to grant Georgia membership. On the other hand, Georgia's recklessness may strengthen the position of NATO members, such as Germany, who are opposed to granting Tbilisi membership.

It was inevitable that this conflict, which had been simmering for years, would eventually erupt into open warfare. Moreover, since South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the other breakaway republic, are allies, the Abkhaz leadership understood clearly that if Georgia was successful in Tskhinvali, it would turn its war machine toward Sukhumi.

Georgia's disagreements with South Ossetia and Abkhazia escalated into open warfare, and this will mean an end to the peace initiatives for the breakaway republics that were proposed by Russia and the European Union. Incidentally, Russia's quick and decisive repelling of Georgia's aggression sent a clear signal to Azerbaijan, which -- not unlike Georgia -- has also considered using military force to resolve its Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. In the post-Soviet period, the key to subduing and managing such conflicts in the Caucasus has been for Russia to threaten the use of force against the side exhibiting excessive aggression.

Obviously, as Prime Minister Vladimir Putin correctly stated Saturday, there is now no chance of South Ossetia or Abkhazia ever being incorporated into Georgia. Thus, the likelihood of these regions receiving a Kosovo-like independence is greater than ever.

The past week's events have shown that Georgia, with its current leadership, is incapable of behaving responsibly, either domestically or in the international arena. With its $2 billion in foreign debt, Georgia is on the verge of bankruptcy. But instead of developing its domestic political and economic programs, Saakashvili's administration continues to send shock waves throughout the Caucasus.

It seems that relations between Moscow and Tbilisi will be strained for the foreseeable future, and they could become openly adversarial should Georgia gain NATO membership. The Russia-Georgia war has already put a strain on relations with the West and particularly with the United States. Some of the sharpest statements against Russia have come from the White House as well as presidential candidate John McCain, and Russia's relations with the West will only worsen if a peaceful solution to the conflict is not found.

Vadim Mukhanov is a senior researcher at the Foreign Ministry's Caucasus Research Center at the Moscow State Institute for International Relations.

Kosovo, 'humanitarian hawks,' and Iraq

Kosovo and the Rise of the Humanitarian Hawks
Matthew Yglesias
February 21, 2008 | Prospect.org


With Kosovo's formal declaration of independence from Serbia on Monday, and the United States' decision to extend recognition to the planet's newest country, the time has come for a look back on the approximately 10 years of intense U.S. involvement in that conflict. Kosovo is a tiny, seemingly worthless patch of land lacking in all natural resources, but it plays a strangely large role in our foreign-policy debates. During arguments about the Iraq War, in particular, liberal hawks had a habit of wielding the poor Kosovar Albanians as a cudgel: If you supported Bill Clinton's 1999 bombing campaign, the argument went, then surely you could support a war against Saddam Hussein.

Then and now, many pro-Kosovo, anti-Iraq liberals could persuasively (Kenneth Roth's 2004 "War in Iraq: Not a Humanitarian Intervention" is my personal favorite) argue that various factors distinguish the two cases. Still, the argument was never about a strict Kosovo-implies-Iraq logic. Rather, first Bosnia and then Kosovo provided the impetus for an intellectually influential, humanitarian hawk movement aimed at advocating the use of military force to advance liberal values whose leaders, inspired by the success of Kosovo, saw Iraq as potentially continuing the momentum built up in the Balkans.

Today, there are few left-of-center defenders of the Iraq War as it actually exists, but there continues to be considerable concern about an "Iraq Syndrome" overreaction to the chaos that has followed the invasion. Kosovo, in this scheme, is supposed to be the "good war" that serves as a reminder of the positive potential of military force. Thus, even as center-left figures agree that the unilateralism of the Bush era must come to an end, there's a desperate search to find some new mechanism -- perhaps a Global NATO or perhaps a Concert of Democracies -- that could authorize a war that, like Kosovo, is fought neither in self-defense nor in defense of an ally nor with the approval of the U.N. Security Council.

In that light, it's worth taking full measure of how modest our accomplishments in Kosovo have been. The declaration of independence marks not the fulfillment of NATO's objectives in Kosovo, but something more like NATO accepting the fact that those objectives will not be achieved. Rather than a rights-respecting democratic government for an autonomous province, we have a ramshackle state dependent on external support dominated by a sectarian party and where the country's Serb minority rejects the legitimacy of the government and refuses to acknowledge the country's newfound independence. Our successful effort to halt and then reverse the ethnic cleansing of Kosovar Albanians was merely followed by a substantial counter-cleansing of Serbs. Human Rights Watch's memorandum on the occasion of Kosovo independence is a bleak reminder of what success has looked like:

Violence against minorities has been a persistent feature of Kosovo's post-war history. Minority communities, including Albanian-speaking Ashkali, were the primary target of the March 2004 riots in Kosovo. Today, with much of Kosovo's Albanian and Serb population separated geographically, there are fewer incidents. But security incidents continue in the remaining ethnically mixed areas, including physical assaults, theft, and violent property-related disputes. Acts of vandalism against Orthodox churches and monasteries continue, damaging confidence and undermining community relations.

Now that Kosovo is formally separate from Serbia, it seems overwhelmingly likely that protecting the rights of the country's geographically concentrated Serb minority will either require the indefinite presence of international troops or else a further round of secession in which Serb sections of Kosovo are carved out and allowed to re-integrate with Serbia. This still looks defensible compared to the alternative course of action of standing aside and letting Milosevic have his way with the province. But many hawks looked at Kosovo and saw not a boundary case for when the use of force might be legitimate, but a new baseline against which future interventions should be judged. If you were willing to use force against Milosevic, the thinking went, then why not Saddam? Why not Sudan? This line of thinking came to a bad end in Mesopotamia, but many harken back to the Balkans to try to make the case that Iraq should be considered an exception and not something that casts aspersions on the utility of unconstrained American power. In reality, Kosovo, though much less disastrous than Iraq, has, like Iraq, turned out to be more problematic than enthusiasts advertised and should, like Iraq, mostly inspire humility about what we can expect to achieve through force.

The truth, though disappointing from the point of view of journalism, is that the most promising humanitarian elements of foreign policy tend to be the boring ones. Timely and effective diplomacy can often avert humanitarian catastrophes before they break out at much lower cost than coercive force can end them once they've started. And the U.N.'s traditional peacekeeping operations, where parties to a conflict request third-party troops to help monitor and enforce a peace deal, have a solid track record of success but are perennially under-resourced by an indifferent United States. Greater commitment -- political, financial, and (when appropriate) military -- to these kinds of operations would bring much larger humanitarian benefits than would any hypothetic humanitarian wars.

Nevertheless, the debate in the United States remains oddly dominated by the specter of unilateral military coercion as a potential tool of humanitarianism, as if the only viable alternative to a callous indifference to the fate of foreigners is to have the Pentagon identify some "bad" foreigners and kill them. One doesn't need to regret the 1999 military operation itself to regret the ways in which hubristic overestimates of what's been achieved in the Balkans have fed into this mentality.