All About U.S. – the corruption of humanitarianism.
Part 1 – “Straight Power Concepts”
In 1948, George Kennan, head of the U.S. State Department, laid out the ground rules for post war foreign policy in a top-secret internal document:
“We will have to dispense with all sentimentality and daydreaming and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We should cease to talk about vague and unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards and democratisation. The day is not far off when we will have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are hampered by idealistic slogans the better.” (Report by the Policy Planning Staff, Feb 24,1948)
That day has now come. Kennan’s reference to human rights, democracy and living standards as ‘unreal objectives’ is a stark reminder that all that matters for the US is realpolitik. The key consideration for humanitarian intervention is not disinterested devotion to the alleviation of human suffering. It is a careful calculation of whether action is in the national interest and likely to succeed.
The unwavering objective of US foreign policy is overwhelming, unchallengeable raw power – total supremacy in perpetuity. This is achieved by a mix of military force, political influence, coercive diplomacy and economic pressure.
Realpolitik dictates decisions that are hardheaded, not soft hearted. Because interventions are costly, a careful analysis of likely benefits is essential. The inevitable corollary is that, while human rights may be universal, their implementation or protection will only ever be selective – the essential criteria are that interventions should be perceived as successful and serve the national interest.
When war first broke out in Bosnia in the summer of 1992 Secretary of State, James Baker, famously declared “We don’t have a dog in this fight”. It was a US election year and domestic opinion was 70% opposed to any costly foreign adventures, as was Congress and the Pentagon.
But the geopolitical landscape was undergoing rapid transformation – a major shift in the tectonic plates underpinning the balance of international power. The sudden collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 deprived NATO of its entire raison d’être, Germany had just reunited and in early 1992 the Maastricht Treaty created a newly united Europe.
All three developments were potentially major threats to the US and its global ability to project its power and influence. So, from the American perspective, the eruption of a violent civil war in the heart of Europe with widely reported crimes against humanity offered rich political, economic and strategic pickings.
America could look good by cleaning up the mess the Europeans were in over Yugoslavia. The US saw an opportunity to demonstrate its leadership of the West by fulfilling the declared purpose of the United Nations ‘to maintain or restore peace and security’.
It was plainly illegal, of course, contravening both the UN and NATO Charters which forbid interference in the sovereign territory of a member state, but where there’s a will there’s a way. As with the Iraq invasion of 2003, intervention was based on a false premise – in this case widespread media reports of genocide which were grossly exaggerated and inaccurate.
To this day there has been no hard evidence of 7-8,000 Moslem men being massacred at Srebrenica – that figure only ever related to the number of names of those reported missing by relatives to the International Committee of the Red Cross.
The vast majority of the population were transported or made their way to safety in Tuzla. Of the bodies recovered, blast injuries to around 1,000 clearly indicate death in the course of military combat.
Extreme measures have been taken to prevent anyone ever independently reviewing the primary forensic evidence held by either Croatia or Bosnia. Both countries have passed laws prohibiting any outside scrutiny. And contemporary US spy satellite pictures allegedly proving the existence of mass burial sites were instantly sealed from public scrutiny for fifty years after brief disclosure to a late-night session of the UN Security Council. Such secrecy can only arouse suspicion.
Part 2 – What’s in it for the U.S.?
What remains incontrovertible is the fact that the breakup of Yugoslavia offered the US a wide range of opportunities and strategic assets. The cut price acquisition of valuable business and industry, access to rich mineral resources and the chance to establish Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo, the biggest military base outside America, right in the heart of Europe.
The unilateral declarations of independence from Yugoslavia by Slovenia and Croatia in 1991, the ensuing civil war and widespread reports of ethnic cleansing all provided the perfect context and pretext for intervention. A humanitarian mission would repurpose NATO and reassert American leadership of Europe.
The Clinton White House was quick to seize the opportunities presented by breaking up a stable socialist economy into mini client states that could be quickly privatised and made politically and economically dependent. It would entail the illegal deployment of NATO, an exclusively defensive body, in a war of aggression – the ultimate crime – for the first time in its history, but it advanced all the US strategic and economic aims.
As Thomas Friedman, foreign policy analyst of the New York Times, observed: ‘The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist.’ Balkan expert and journalist, Diana Johnstone, was also quick to spot that the New World Order, proclaimed by President Bush senior in 1991, was ‘essentially a new economic order with a military arm’. (Johnstone, ‘NATO and the New World Order’, Degraded Capability, Pluto Press, 2000)
The 1990s became known as the decade of humanitarian interventions as numerous states entered conditions of severe political turmoil and civil unrest. These included Iraqi ‘no fly zones’, Libya, Somalia, Sierra Leone, Bosnia, East Timor, and Kosovo. For some advocates the definition of humanitarian intervention became so broad it even included the Iraq War of 2003.
The first rule is surely – do no harm. Yet so called peacekeeping operations often cause deaths as well as saving lives. In Bosnia lightly armed UN peacekeepers were themselves taken hostage and proved incapable of controlling violence or enforcing so called ‘demilitarised zones.’ Many nominally safe areas were awash with weapons. And there was danger in the air.
It was widely predicted in military circles that NATO bombing would only accelerate the flight of refugees from Kosovo and exacerbate violent reprisals on the ground, thereby provoking the very humanitarian disaster it sought to prevent. Suddenly at least a quarter of a million refugees were on the move – but then no one is going to sit still while they’re being bombed.
Another major problem is that humanitarian missions by outsiders with ulterior motives rarely inspire the trust, confidence and co-operation of local people.
The intervention in Yugoslavia demonstrated the toxic effects and unintended consequences of combining high ideals with base self-interest. Bombarding civilians from fifteen thousand feet, targeting schools, homes, hospitals, bridges and factories with cluster bombs is hard to reconcile with playing the Good Samaritan.
About a thousand innocent civilians died on the ground in Yugoslavia but not a single NATO airman. Colin Powell, chair of the Joint Chiefs of staff, was happy for the US to be what he called ‘the bully in the block’.
For the world’s sole superpower globalisation was the way ahead. The spread of capitalism and growth of privatisation was the preferred route to progress. Western ideals became the window dressing for geo-strategic interest.
In 1992 the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace proudly announced – ‘American ideals and self-interest merge when the United States supports the spread of democracy around the globe’.
The reality generally fails to match the rhetoric. The US has a long history of subverting democracy, forcing regime change and and sponsoring right-wing dictatorships. Nicaragua, Guatemala, Greece, Haiti, Indonesia,Libya, Panama, Grenada, Cuba, Brazil, Turkey, El Salvador, Dominican Republic, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria – the list is endless.
For many years there has been a strong correlation between US foreign aid and dictatorships – most aid going to those countries with the worst human rights records – eg Colombia and Turkey – because they tend to offer the best business opportunities.
After the breakup of the Soviet Union in December 1991, the US was confronted by a choice – it could either seize the opportunity to nurture co-operative relations and develop multilateral structures to help guide the global realignment or it could consolidate its power and pursue a strategy of unilateralism and global dominance. Washington chose the latter.
Within four days of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, General Colin Powell, presented his new Strategic Defense Plan for the post-Cold War era. A key feature was the use of ‘overwhelming force’ to quickly defeat enemies, a concept that came to be known as the Powell Doctrine.
In early 1992 he told the House Armed Services Committee that the US required ‘sufficient power…to deter any challenger from ever dreaming of challenging us on the world stage… I want to be the bully on the block…. there is no future in trying to challenge the armed forces of the United States’.
The Defense Planning Guidance document stated while the US could not become the world’s policeman ‘we will retain the pre-eminent responsibility for addressing selectively those wrongs which threaten not only our interests but those of our allies or friends’.
It was essential to create ‘the sense that the world order is essentially backed by the US’ which must position itself ‘to act independently when collective action cannot be orchestrated.’(‘Drafting a Plan for Global Dominance’, David Armstrong, 2002)
A new theme to emerge was the concept of taking preemptive military action – a reminder of the ancient maxim of Thucydides that the strong do as they wish while the weak suffer as they must.
By January 2002 – after 9/11 – George W Bush had labelled Iraq, Iran and North Korea an ‘axis of evil’ and warned ‘if we wait for threats to fully materialise, we will have waited too long’.
Paradoxically these military doctrines often provoke just the kind of factionalism and rivalry the US says it seeks to end.
Richard Holbrooke, the chief negotiator at the Dayton peace talks to end the Bosnian war, declared the former Yugoslavia ‘the greatest collective security failure of the West since the 1930s’, citing five major factors that helped explain the mess.
‘First, a misreading of Balkan history; second, the end of the Cold War; third, the behaviour of the Yugoslav leaders themselves; fourth, the inadequate American response to the crisis; and finally, the mistaken belief of the Europeans that they could handle their first post-Cold War challenge on their own.’ (To End a War, Richard Holbrooke, Random House,1998)
It was in fact mainly American hubris which translated the crisis into a tragedy. Holbrooke’s account of the peace negotiations is a shocking revelation of the US role as a fundamentally dishonest broker in the conflict and lays bare the full extent of diplomatic duplicity.
It documents how the Americans shamelessly armed the Croatians enabling their ethnic cleansing of Serbs from the Krajina and encouraged the Bosnian Muslims to conquer as much territory as possible before the ceasefire took effect, and a peace plan was agreed for Sarajevo.
Throughout the Bosnian conflict the US had advocated the so-called policy of ‘lift and strike’ – lifting the arms embargo on the Croats and Muslims and using NATO planes to strike the Serbs.
Americans also trained and armed the Kosovo Liberation Army, a body of Albanian thugs and criminals condemned by the State Department as a terrorist organisation. The KLA consistently contrived attacks to provoke the maximum armed reaction which would then be used as evidence of Serb aggression.
The highly suspicious ‘atrocity’ at the village of Racak was used to trigger NATO’s devastating 78-day Kosovo bombing campaign. American diplomat William Walker had attended the scene, instantly declaring it to be a Serb massacre. This was highly unlikely as the Serb troops involved were being filmed by a TV crew at the time.
Despite huge pressure the Finnish pathologist subsequently appointed by the EU to investigate the deaths refused to use of the word ‘massacre’. Ten of the dead males were reportedly wearing military boots.
Posing as a peacemaker in an armed conflict in which one is also an active participant is never a good look. Peace and stability require trust and credibility. The US stance inevitably inflamed feelings and exacerbated already heightened ethnic tensions. And there was no shortage of propaganda in the Balkan media to pour yet more fuel on the flames.
Typical of this were the remarks of Warren Zimmermann, former US Ambassador to Yugoslavia, in his memoirs:
‘Those who argue that ancient Balkan hostilities account for the violence that overtook and destroyed Yugoslavia forget the power of television in the hands of officially provoked racism…. Yugoslavia may have a violent history, but it isn’t unique. What we witnessed was violence provoking nationalism from the top down inculcated primarily through the medium of television… Many people in the Balkans may be weak or even bigoted, but in Yugoslavia it is their leaders who have been criminal… the virus of television spread ethnic hatred like an epidemic throughout Yugoslavia… An entire generation of Serbs, Croats and Muslims were aroused by television images to hate their neighbours.’ (‘Origins of a Catastrophe’, Warren Zimmermann,1995)
For Serbs to be told to remove their ‘army of occupation’ from Kosovo elevated ignorance/arrogance to new heights. It is difficult to ‘occupy’ a region that is constitutionally part of your own country.
Part 3 Dayton and beyond
The Bosnia intervention was a serious misjudgment and set an appalling precedent. Despite the presence of 60,000 troops, a third of them American, the restoration of peace was glacial. IFOR, the Implementation Force, and its successor SFOR, the Stabilisation Force, although given specific authority by Dayton to help maintain law and order, prevent arson and arrest wanted war criminals, always maintained they had no obligation to do so. The military were totally risk averse – terrified of mission creep and desperate to avoid troop losses.
Richard Holbrooke was so concerned about slow progress and ‘the reluctance of NATO to go beyond a relatively narrow interpretation of its mission’ that he wrote to Clinton of his fears that ‘…. basic issues of American leadership that seemed settled in the public’s eye after Dayton will re-emerge. Having reasserted American leadership in Europe, it would be a tragedy if we let it slip away again….’
The very concept of humanitarian bombing, both oxymoronic and moronic, certainly remains challenging. Six weeks into the Kosovo bombing campaign, Vaclav Havel, president of the Czech Republic, eloquently sought to justify the purpose of NATO’s intervention:
‘This war places human rights above the rights of the State…. although it has no direct mandate from the UN, it did not happen as an act of aggression or out of disrespect for international law. It happened, on the contrary, out of respect for a law which ranks higher than the law which protects the sovereignty of states. The alliance has acted out of response for human rights as both conscience and international laws dictate.’
He went on to claim it was the first time that states had waged war ‘in the name of principles and values’ rather than their national interest. Sadly, he was wrong on all counts. His idealist perspective took no account of the facts that the intervention was clearly motivated by significant national interests and was both aggressive and disrespectful of international law.
It was also manipulative, deliberate and planned. The illegal bombing, conducted without the authorisation of the UN Security Council, followed intense lobbying by Madeleine Albright. In August 1995, during the temporary absence of UN Secretary General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Kofi Annan, his deputy, gave Americans what Holbooke calls ‘a big break.’
Annan instructed UN civilian officials and military commanders to relinquish for a limited period of time their authority to veto air strikes over Bosnia. For the first time in the war, the decision on the air strikes was solely in the hands of NATO – primarily two American officers, NATO’s Supreme Commander, General George Joulwan, and Admiral Leighton Smith, Commander of NATO’s southern forces and all US naval forces in Europe.’ (To End a War, Holbrooke)
Instead of calling a NATO Council meeting, Secretary General, Willy Claes, then simply informed the commanders that it was their decision to bomb whenever they thought it appropriate. The direction of travel was always plain, and NATO did its master’s bidding.
Whether conducting the war or negotiating the peace, it was always the US calling the shots. Henry Kissinger would repeatedly condemn the 1999 proposed Rambouillet agreement for Peace and Self-government in Kosovo as merely ‘an excuse to start bombing.’ The secret last-minute demand for 30,000 NATO peacekeeping troops to have unhindered right of passage on Yugoslav territory and immunity from Yugoslav law – effectively an army of occupation – was something no sovereign state could or would ever have accepted.
But NATO’s commission of the ultimate war crime of aggression was promptly covered up by another illegal act – the action of the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY). Created by the UN Security Council in 1993, this ad hoc rogue court had swiftly demonised and condemned the Serbs as genocidal killers while resolutely ignoring Allied war crimes. Now it became turbocharged, indicting Karadzic, Mladic and many other Bosnian Serbs for war crimes and genocide without having gathered even a shred of evidence to support their charges.
And how could they defend the indefensible? The International Goldstone Commission later convened to investigate the NATO intervention came up with the tortuous formula that the bombing had been ‘illegal but legitimate’. This was definitely moronic.
Bill Clinton and Tony Blair may have presented as humanitarian heroes at home but their intervention actually amounted to little more than imperial style military opportunism, at a huge cost in lives and massive collateral damage.
Four out of every five victims of the war in Bosnia were non-combatants, innocent civilians. Between 80% and 87.5% of the victims of the Kosovo conflict are estimated to have died during or in the aftermath of Operation Allied Force.
The KLA took advantage of the power vacuum created by the NATO intervention to carry out revenge killings, and abductions against Serbs, Bosnians, Roma and other minorities (The Conversation – 22/3/19). Britain’s Foreign Secretary later confirmed that, two months before the NATO bombing, the KLA were responsible for more deaths than the Yugoslav security forces.
Although Vaclav Havel was naïve about humanitarian intervention, he had a point. The notion that human rights should take precedence over sovereign rights is powerfully appealing to anyone with a proper concern for the welfare of their fellow man. Those who wield power should be held accountable for its abuse. With power comes responsibility and sovereignty itself should not become a shield of impunity. But nations and peoples also have a right to determine their own destinies and run their own affairs.
Since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, which ended the Thirty Years’ War in Europe, the principle of non-interference in the territorial integrity of a sovereign state has been sacrosanct in international law. It is widely regarded as a principle crucial to due process and the administration of justice. The power to prosecute criminals is one of the key attributes of state sovereignty. The supranational imposition of justice destroys the link between a sovereign power and its people abolishing ties of history, tradition, language and culture.
The 1948 Genocide Convention requires national not international authorities to prosecute people suspected of genocide, yet this provision was summarily deleted by executive fiat when the ICTY was set up. The tribunal unilaterally rewrote an important treaty of international law which had been drawn up in the immediate aftermath of Nuremberg and the Second World War.
According to the UN’s 1949 Draft Declaration of the Rights and Duties of States:
‘Every State has the duty to refrain from resorting to war as an instrument of national policy, and to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of another State, or in any other manner inconsistent with international law and order.’
Executive bodies like the UN Security Council which are composed of governments do not have the the right to strike down laws and treaties. This contradicts the very principle of the rule of law which requires that governments be constrained by the law, not be the authors or arbiters of it.
Part 4 – The Curse of Unilateralism
Humanitarianism and the ending of impunity are invariably the slogans adopted to justify any intervention. Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia and Hitler’s occupation of parts of Czechoslovakia were accompanied by lofty rhetoric about the solemn responsibility to protect suffering populations. Big powers are only too happy to hold others to standards they themselves refuse to adopt.
There’s no better way to disguise hypocrisy than the pretence of taking humanitarian action. The United States, China, India and Russia all refuse to be bound by international courts. As the celebrated historian of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon, pointed out – great powers are universal tyrants.
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, NATO has emerged as the only world power claiming for itself the right to intervene militarily anywhere in the world at will and seek justification later from the United Nations.
NATO has proclaimed itself the guardian of global energy supplies and protector of the world’s shipping lanes. Since the Second World War, and increasingly since the end of the Cold War, impetus has been gathering not only to intervene in conflicts but to take sides. This has invariably resulted in regime change, with one side being demonised, removed from power and punished for their ‘crimes’. In the modern age it seems that enemies must be made to pay.
Western foreign policy has been increasingly dominated by what the academic and author, John Laughland, calls the punishment ethic:
‘According to the traditional laws of war, an enemy is not a criminal: a soldier in uniform, and some categories of irregular fighters, are exempt from the normal criminal law, according to the old tradition that they are iustus hostis, justified enemies with a right to fight. A captured soldier is not usually tried for murder.’
(Speech at Rhodes Forum, 2014 on “Preventing World War through Global Solidarity – 100 years on”)
International law has regularly been abused to conveniently remove those of whom the great powers disapprove. This is tyranny, not democracy – a fundamental denial of the human rights enshrined in the US Constitution:
‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”. Intervention at will is a clear abnegation of those rights.
In 1949 the International Court of Justice, ruling in the Corfu Channel case, determined that it ‘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 organisation, 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 same conclusion was drawn in 2004 by the high-level UN Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change. The Panel adopted the view of the ICJ and the Non-aligned Movement, concluding 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’.
In an attempt to balance the competing claims of sovereignty and humanitarian intervention, the international community has attempted to reframe the debate. Since 2005, the right to intervene has been referred to as ‘the responsibility to protect’ (R2P) – a concept intended to strengthen rather than undermine sovereignty. States are encouraged and offered assistance to put their own house in order rather than just sending in the Marines.
An important consideration is to include as many players as possible in order to constrain the bullies. Where a state is unable or unwilling to stop crimes against humanity there may be a case for intervention and, in extremis, regime change, but military intervention is very much a last resort, not the first option.
Experience shows that effective humanitarian intervention is a very rare event and to stand any chance of success must meet a set of strict criteria. First, unambiguous evidence of crimes against humanity is required. Then, a clearly defined objective, adequate resources and intimate understanding of the local culture and history. None of this was the case in Bosnia or Kosovo – which is why the unintended consequences were so horrendous.
The fog of war and the smokescreen of propaganda are always hard to penetrate at the time, but hindsight does lend a degree of clarity. More than 20 years on Kosovo is still fighting for international recognition. Bosnia is now the fifth poorest country in Europe and, according to the UN, losing population faster than other country in the world – it predicts a staggering 50% reduction by 2070. (UN ‘World Population Outlook, 2022) And NATO troops are still on the ground, proof, if it were still needed, that it’s a good deal easier to start a war than build a stable and prosperous peace.