[R-G] Chomsky: Humanitarian Imperialism: The New Doctrine of Imperial Right

[Anthony Fenton]

Humanitarian Imperialism
The New Doctrine of Imperial Right
By Noam Chomsky
http://www.monthlyreview.org/080908chomsky.php

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...Preventing 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: Ceauşescu, 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 Milošević'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  Milošević "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 Milošević 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).