WSWS

A sharp exposé of US “humanitarian intervention” in the former Yugoslavia—but some false conclusions

Professor David N. Gibbs is to be commended for writing the first full-length academic exposé of the “widely accepted consensus” that the Western powers intervened reluctantly in the Yugoslav conflict of the 1990s.

In First Do No Harm: Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia, Gibbs refutes as well the claim that the great powers acted only after pressure was exerted by former “anti-establishment” intellectuals, such as Samantha Power, Christopher Hitchens, Michael Ignatieff, and Todd Gitlin.

Power, for example, has written, “US policymakers did almost nothing to deter the crime [genocide in Yugoslavia]. Because America’s ‘national interests’ were not considered imperiled by mere genocide, senior US officials did not give genocide the moral attention it warranted.... The key question...is: Why does the United States stand so idly by?”

Gibbs, associate professor of political science at the University of Arizona, systematically debunks the notion that the Western powers were motivated primarily by humanitarian concerns, rather than “power politics,” and that human rights conditions were improved in the region as a result. He marshals a large body of evidence to support his thesis that so-called humanitarian intervention was a “classic act of power politics,” “perfectly consistent” with the geostrategic interests of the US and other key states, as well as “private interest groups” within those states.

The author outlines his quite correct “basic argument” that “during the post-Cold War period, the US was seeking to reaffirm and then strengthen its position of worldwide dominance.

“US policy makers resolved to take advantage of the new opportunities offered by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991: They sought to use this circumstance to establish a new order of unilateral US hegemony with no challengers, and to perpetuate this dominance as far into the future as possible.”

This perspective found expression in the Pentagon’s 1992 Defense Planning Guidance (DPG), authored by then-Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Paul Wolfowitz and other neo-conservatives, outlining a policy of unilateralism and pre-emptive military action to prevent any other nation from rising to superpower status and thus threatening US access to oil and other resources. Many of the main elements of the DPG were incorporated into the US National Security Strategy, published in 2002 and known popularly as the “Bush Doctrine.”

Gibbs argues that a “closely related” US objective was to find a new role for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), considered “a key instrument of US hegemony.” However, this unilateralist US vision “collided” with the ambitions of the European Union (EU), particularly a newly “assertive” re-united Germany, which was seeking to become “a major international actor, independent of the US.”

Thus, Gibbs concludes, Yugoslavia became the “principal arena” in which the US and EU sought to “showcase” their “respective capabilities” and “power positions.”

He reminds his readers that it was Germany that first intervened in the Balkans region, not the US, which was still preoccupied with the collapse of the Soviet Union and Operation Desert Storm in Iraq. First Do No Harm presents new evidence revealing that the Germans encouraged Slovenia and Croatia, months before the civil war broke out, to secede from the Yugoslav federation.

The initial “quiescence” of Washington in the Balkans region, Professor Gibbs argues, was seen as a sign of weakness. But, he explains, the Republican administration of George H. W. Bush, contrary to the claims of most studies, began actively intervening in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where war broke out in April 1992. US officials encouraged Bosnian leaders such as Ilija Izetbegovic to secede, undermining the European-brokered Lisbon peace agreement and sparking off “one of the most visible and important conflicts of the post-1945 era.”

The Clinton administration, coming to power in January 1993, faced the same dilemma as its Republican predecessor—how to use the Yugoslav conflict to reaffirm US power and offset Europe’s quest for an independent role, without getting embroiled in a “Vietnam-style quagmire,” involving large numbers of ground troops. The US continued to block EU peace plans and supplied Bosnian Croat and Muslim forces with military equipment in a large-scale covert operation.

Clinton invoked Serbian human rights violations—going so far as to compare them to the Holocaust—to justify “Operation Storm,” involving 100,000 Croatian troops backed by aircraft and artillery against Serb targets in the fall of 1995, which resulted in “probably the largest single act of ethnic expulsion of the entire war,” Gibbs notes.

The Dayton Accords that ended the war, not substantially different in their content from the earlier EU-sponsored peace plans, Gibbs argues, allowed the US to put a diplomatic face on its actions. Even so, US dominance grew increasingly tenuous during the late 1990s, highlighted by the EU’s adoption of the euro as its official currency and the attempts by the European powers to establish an independent foreign and military policy. Once again, the US used Serb atrocities—this time against the American-backed Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which, Gibbs notes, committed their own share of horrors—to justify “humanitarian intervention” and launch a devastating bombing campaign against Serbia during the 1999 Kosovo war.

The author draws on new evidence, provided by former UK Defense Minister John Gilbert, to prove that the US-dictated peace terms at the Rambouillet Peace Conference in 1999 “forced [Yugoslav President] Slobodan Milosevic into a war” and provide a reason for American intervention.

The resulting exodus of approximately a quarter of a million people, or “disfavored groups,” satisfied the KLA’s desire to ethnically cleanse Kosovo, set a precedent for NATO going to war virtually at will, and once again established US dominance at the expense of the Europeans. According to Le Monde, the French bourgeois daily, the Kosovo war was widely considered “a European—and a United Nations—humiliation, as well as a success for NATO.”

In considering the domestic origins of the Yugoslav conflict, the author correctly exposes the claims made by writers on the right and “left” that the Serbs were solely responsible for the conflict and its consequences.

The Serbs, Gibbs explains, “were only one party to the breakup of Yugoslavia...other ethnic groups bear at least as much of the blame.” As for Milosevic, he was no better or worse than the other ex-Stalinist bureaucrats Franjo Tudjman in Croatia and Milan Kucan in Slovenia. The author observes correctly that each of these leaders rose to prominence due to the influence of the Western powers, which demanded structural adjustment policies, enforced by the IMF, resulting in a catastrophic decline in living standards, and making the population vulnerable to nationalist demagogy.

Gibbs asserts that “[t]he principal reason for the [Western] hostility toward Milosevic was that he advanced views and specific policies that were anticapitalist.” The author points out that Milosevic, a former favorite of the Western powers, used the Socialist Party as a vehicle for “his nationalism” at the same time that he used socialist and anti-capitalist phraseology to appeal to the masses and “hardline Communists” within the Yugoslav army.

At this point, Gibbs is politically at sea. Milosevic’s nationalism had nothing to do with “communism.”

In the 1980s, Washington looked upon Milosevic, a former head of Beobanka, one of Yugoslavia’s largest banks, and frequent visitor to Paris and New York, with favor to the extent that he cooperated with the IMF, initiated free market policies, and dismantled state industry in Yugoslavia.

Milosevic, however, defended the perspective of a federated Yugoslavia, because of Serbia’s dominant position within it, and saw the Western powers’ encouragement of national separatism as a threat to Serbian national interests. In 1988, for example, he helped initiate the so-called “Anti-Bureaucratic Revolution,” which blamed the 1974 Constitution for loosening Serbia’s control over its provinces (Kosovo, Montenegro, Vojvodina) and allowing other republics, primarily Slovenia and Croatia, to exploit Serbia’s natural resources.

Even in the aftermath of the Bosnian civil war, in 1995, the Western powers considered maintaining Milosevic as an ally in the Balkans. He became one of the prime guarantors of the Dayton Accords and worked closely with the US in its implementation. It was only when he resisted the further break-up of Serbia—due to America’s cultivation of the KLA—and rejected Washington’s demands during the Rambouillet talks that Milosevic was declared a war criminal.

Milosevic was targeted, not on account of his “anti-capitalism.” Like other former allies and “assets”—Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Bin Laden and the Taliban in Afghanistan—he had outlived his usefulness. The Serb leader had become an impediment to American plans for the Balkans, a strategic part of the Eurasian continent within striking distance of Russia, the former Soviet republics, the Middle East and the Caspian Sea—regions rich in oil, gas and other critical natural resources.

While Gibbs’s book is quite valuable in its presentation of the history and nature of Western intervention in Yugoslavia, it suffers from certain methodological limitations. Though he discusses the social interests that actually motivate US policy—the motives that lie behind the rhetoric—a class analysis is not systematically worked through.

This comes out at the conclusion of the book, where the author calls for a new non-interventionist US foreign policy based on the criterion of “Do No Harm.” He states that advocates of “humanitarian intervention” should be asked to answer certain conditions, including demonstrating that the intervention will do more good than harm. This lends too much credibility to the proponents of “humanitarian intervention” in the political establishment, which his book is devoted to debunking.

Gibbs’s book demonstrates that Republican and Democratic administrations have followed virtually identical foreign policies, based on economic and geostrategic interests. It is not a question of conditioning humanitarian intervention, but exposing the real class interests that motivate US policy.

The coming to power of Barack Obama, as the expansion of the bloody war in Afghanistan and Pakistan and the political intervention in Iran demonstrate, is seen as an opportunity by powerful sections of the US ruling elite to continue the pursuit of global hegemony by somewhat more tactically agile means.

The eruption of US militarism was and remains an objective socio-historical process, the product, above all, of the historic decline of American capitalism and an attempt to counteract this decline through force of arms. It signals a new era of colonial-style wars of conquest and inter-imperialist rivalries that are bringing terrible suffering and which ultimately threaten the very survival of humanity.

Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2009

The authors also recommend:

What does Milosevic’s downfall portend?
[7 October 2000]

Marxism, Opportunism and the Balkan Crisis
[7 May 1994]

Our Emphasis.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jul2009/book-j13.shtml

par Camille Peugny

Si l'ascenseur social monte, il peut aussi descendre. Et dans les générations nées à partir des années 1960, ils sont de plus en plus nombreux à occuper une position moins élevée que celle de leurs parents, assure le sociologue Camille Peugny.

Ces "mobiles descendants" représentent aujourd'hui 25% des 35-39 ans, contre 18% il y a vingt ans. En cause: l'évolution de la structure des emplois qui n'a pas suivi celle des diplômes, marquée par la massification de l'enseignement supérieur.

Nombre d'entre eux sont donc victimes d'un double déclassement: scolaire, car ils ont un niveau de formation supérieur à celui requis pour l'emploi qu'ils occupent, et social, car ils n'ont pas maintenu la position de leurs parents, quand bien même ils ont un cursus scolaire plus brillant.

Camille Peugny distingue deux grands types de déclassés: les enfants de cadres, eux-mêmes originaires d'un milieu populaire, "en rébellion" contre cette société qui ne les a pas récompensés de leurs efforts; et ceux issus d'une lignée de cadres, que leur déclassement pousse dans une attitude de "retrait" de la compétition sociale.

Mais tous ont en commun la même expérience de la frustration, qui contribue à influencer leur positionnement politique. Camille Peugny y voit même un des facteurs explicatifs à la "droitisation" de la société. Mais sur ce dernier point, sa démonstration n'est guère convaincante. Le seul point faible de ce livre accessible et instructif.

HNN.US 4-13-09

Ms. Young is a professor of history at New York University. This excerpt originally appeared in Bombing Civilians: A Twentieth-Century History edited by Yuki Tanaka and Ms. Young.

 

Airpower embodies American technology at its most dashing. At regular intervals, the air force and allied technocrats claim that innovations in air technology herald an entirely new age of warfare. Korea and Vietnam were, so to speak, living laboratories for the development of new weapons: the 1,200-pound radio-guided Tarzon bomb (featured in Korean-era Movietone newsreels); white-phosphorous-enhanced napalm; cluster bombs (CBUs) carrying up to 700 bomblets, each bomblet containing 200 to 300 tiny steel balls or fiberglass fléchettes; delayed-fuse cluster bombs; airburst cluster bombs; toxic defoliants; varieties of nerve gas; sets of six B 52s, operating at altitudes too high to be heard on the ground, capable of delivering up to thirty tons of explosives each.

A usual mission consisted of six planes in formation, which together could devastate an area one half mile wide by three miles long. Older technologies were retrofitted: slow cargo planes (“Puff the Magic Dragon”) equipped with rapid-fire machine guns capable of firing 6,000 rounds a minute; World War I– era Skyraiders, carrying bomb loads of 7,500 pounds and fitted with four 20-millimeter cannon that together fired over 2,000 rounds per minute.

The statistics stun; they also provide distance. They are impossible to take in, as abstract as the planning responsible for producing them. In Korea over a three-year period, U.S./UN forces flew 1,040,708 sorties and dropped 386,037 tons of bombs and 32,357 tons of napalm. If one counts all types of airborne ordnance, including rockets and machine-gun ammunition, the total tonnage comes to 698,000. Throughout World War II, in all sectors, the United States dropped 2 million tons of bombs; for Indochina the total figure is 8 million tons, with an explosive power equivalent to 640 Hiroshima-size bombs. Three million tons were dropped on Laos, exceeding the total for Germany and Japan by both the U.S. and Great Britain.

For nine years, an average of one planeload of bombs fell on Laos every eight minutes. In addition, 150,000 acres of forest were destroyed through the chemical warfare known as defoliation. For South Vietnam, the figure is 19 million gallons of defoliant dropped on an area comprising 20 percent of South Vietnam—some 6 million acres. In an even briefer period, between 1969 and 1973, 539,129 tons of bombs were dropped in Cambodia, largely by B-52s, of which 257,465 tons fell in the last six months of the war (as compared to 160,771 tons on Japan from 1942–1945). The estimated toll of the dead, the majority civilian, is equally difficult to absorb: 2 to 3 million in Korea; 2 to 4 million in Vietnam.

To the policy makers, air war is abstract. They listen attentively for a response to the messages they send and discuss the possibility that many more may have to be sent. For those who deliver the messages, who actually drop the bombs, air war can be either abstract (in a high-flying B-29 or B-52, for example) or concrete. Often it is a combination. Let me offer an example that combines the abstract with the concrete. During the Korean War, one pilot confided to a reporter that napalm had become the most valued of all the weapons at his disposal. “The first couple of times I went in on a napalm strike,” Federic Champlin told E.J. Kahn,

I had kind of an empty feeling. I thought afterward, Well, maybe I shouldn’t have done it. Maybe those people I set afire were innocent civilians. But you get conditioned, especially after you’ve hit what looks like a civilian and the A-frame on his back lights up like a Roman candle—a sure enough sign that he’s been carrying ammunition. Normally speaking, I have no qualms about my job. Besides, we don’t generally use napalm on people we can see. We use it on hill positions, or buildings. And one thing about napalm is that when you’ve hit a village and have seen it go up in flames, you know that you’ve accomplished something. Nothing makes a pilot feel worse than to work over an area and not see that he’s accomplished anything.

A “hill position,” a “building” (in Vietnam, “hooches,” sometimes “structures”)—not people. For the man with the A-frame on his back, air war can only be concrete. In 1950, in the month of November alone, 3,300 tons of napalm were dropped on North Korean cities and towns, including the city of Kanggye, 65 percent of which was destroyed by incendiary bombs. In Korea, the British correspondent Reginald Thompson believed he was seeing a “new technique of machine warfare. The slightest resistance brought down a deluge of destruction, blotting out the area. Dive bombers, tanks and artillery blasted strong points, large or small, in town and hamlet, while the troops waited at the roadside as spectators until the way was cleared for them. . . .”

Years later, another pilot, flying a small spotter plane to call in napalm strikes in South Vietnam, told Jonathan Schell how he identified the enemy: “If they run away.” He added: “Sometimes, when you see a field of people, it looks like just a bunch of farmers. Now, you see, the Vietnamese people—they’re not interested in the U.S. Air Force, and they don’t look at the planes going over them. But down in that field you’ll see one guy whose conical hat keeps bouncing up and down. He’s looking, because he wants to know where you’re going.” Then, Major Billings continued, “you make a couple of passes . . . and then, one of them makes a break for it—it’s the guy that was looking up at you—and he’s your V.C. So you look where he goes, and call in an air strike.” Once, Billings remembered, he “about ran a guy to death,” chasing him through the fields for an hour before calling in planes to finish the job. Schell thought this amounted to “sniping with bombs,” and Billings agreed.17 For Billings, the people themselves were concrete abstractions, ideas all too literally in the flesh.

In addition to the bombs that were dropped on Korea, there were those that were constantly contemplated but never used. On June 29, 1950, just four days after the war began, the possibility of using nuclear weapons in the event of Chinese intervention in the war was broached in the National Security Council. In June, as again when the subject came up in July at a State Department policy and planning staff meeting, the questions was not so much whether to use nuclear weapons but rather under what conditions they might be used: if there was overt Chinese and Soviet intervention; if their use were essential to victory; “if the bombs could be used without excessive destruction of noncombatants.”18 Talk of using the bomb increased dramatically after the Chinese entered the war in late October 1950, and President Truman’s casual reference to the possibility in a press conference brought a nervous Prime Minister Clement Atlee to Washington on the next plane. A joint communiqué, however, expressed only a sincere hope that “world conditions would never call for the use of the atomic bomb.”

General Douglas MacArthur thought the conditions were ripe in December 1950 and requested permission to drop a total of thirty-four bombs on a variety of targets. “I would have dropped 30 or so atomic bombs . . . strung across the neck of Manchuria,” he told an interviewer, and “spread behind us—from the Sea of Japan to the Yellow Sea—a belt of radioactive cobalt . . . it has an active life of between 60 and 120 years. For at least 60 years, there could have been no land invasion of Korea from the North.” MacArthur’s replacement, General Matthew Ridgway, requested thirtyeight atomic bombs. In the event, nuclear weapons were not used; the destruction of northern and central Korea had been accomplished with conventional weapons alone.

 

The cease-fire that ended the Korean War followed a crescendo of bombing, which was then taken as proof that airpower was as decisive in limited wars as it had been in total war. The cities and towns of central and northern Korea had been leveled. In what Bruce Cumings has called the “final act of this barbaric air war,” North Korea’s main irrigation dams were destroyed in the spring of 1953, shortly after the rice had been transplanted. “The subsequent floods scooped clean 27 miles of valley below. . . .

The Westerner can little conceive the awesome meaning which the loss of [rice] has for the Asian—starvation and slow death.” By 1952, according to a UN estimate, one out of nine men, women, and children in North Korea had been killed. In the South, 5,000,000 people had been displaced and 100,000 children were described as unaccompanied. “The countless ruined villages are the most terrible and universal mark of the war on the Korean landscape. To wipe out cover for North Korean vehicles and personnel, hundreds of thatch-roofed houses were burned by air-dropped jellied gasoline or artillery fire,” Walter Sullivan, former New York Times Korea correspondent, reported in The Nation. J. Donald Kingsley, head of the reconstruction agency, called Korea “the most devastated land and its people the most destitute in the history of modern warfare.”

Freda Kirchwey, in an essay for The Nation , tried to explain the general indifference of the American public to the destruction:

We were all hardened by the methods of mass-slaughter practiced first by the Germans and Japanese and then, in self-defense, adopted and developed to the pitch of perfection illustrated at Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the Western allies and, particularly, the Americans. We became accustomed to “area” bombing, “saturation” bombing, all the hideous forms of strategic air war aimed at wiping out not only military and industrial installations but whole populations. . . . A deep scar was left on the mind of Western man, and, again, particularly on the American mind, by the repression of pity and the attempt to off-load all responsibility onto the enemy.

Kirchwey thought that this repression explained the lack of protest “against the orgy of agony and destruction now in progress in Korea.” Nothing the North Koreans, Chinese, or Russians had done “excuses the terrible shambles created up and down the Korean peninsula by the American-led forces, by American planes raining down napalm and fire bombs, and by heavy land and naval artillery.” And now Korea, “blotted out in the name of collective security, blames the people who drop the fire bombs,” which might seem unfair to the military mind but was inevitable:

For a force which subordinates everything to the job of killing the enemy becomes an enemy itself. . . . And after a while plain horror displaces a sense of righteousness even among the defenders of righteousness, and thus the cause itself becomes hateful. This has happened in Korea. Soon, as we learn the facts, it will overtake us here in America.

“The American mind,” Kirchwey was certain, “mercurial and impulsive, tough and tender, is going to react against the horrors of mechanized warfare in Korea.”

The air force reached different conclusions. In 1957, a collection of essays was published whose title declared its thesis: Airpower: The Decisive Force in Korea. The authors of one of the essays in the collection describe an air operation they considered exceptionally successful. Late in 1952, a small group of air commanders set out to demonstrate the extent to which airpower alone could “occupy” territory. Their intention was to show the North Koreans that the United States could “exert an effective form of air pressure at any time or any place, could capture and air control any desired segment of his territory for was long as the military situation warranted.” The campaign began in January 1953.

For five days, twenty-four hours a day, “a devastating force walked the earth over a 2-by-4 mile target area” and for six days thereafter nothing in the area moved. After 2,292 combat sorties, “Air forces bought a piece of real estate 100 miles behind enemy lines and ruled it for 11 days.” But on the fourteenth day, “with typical Communist swiftness,” “hordes” of “Red laborers and soldiers” began repair work; six days after the attack, a bypass was in place and rail links had been restored. The bridges attacked had been rebuilt, as had the highways and rail links. Still, the report was certain, “in the gnarled steel and wrenched earth the Communists saw the specter of a new concept in war—air envelopment.” One might imagine that the Americans had a lesson to learn here: that bridges could be rebuilt; that a “curtain of fire” created by such raids could cost the enemy a week’s time, but not stop them. Instead, against the evidence, many in the air force concluded that had such airpower been applied earlier in the war, it would have ended earlier and on better terms.

In what turned out to be the final phase of the talks, President Eisenhower threatened to use nuclear weapons if the Chinese did not sign a cease-fire agreement. It has become part of the Eisenhower legend that this last threat broke the stalemate and, in Eisenhower’s words, gave the United States “an armistice on a single battleground,” though not “peace in the world.” In the event, as most authorities agree, the Chinese may not have even been aware of the threat, much less responded to it. Chinese acceptance of the concessions demanded at Panmunjom (all of them relating to the issue of repatriation of prisoners of war) was granted for reasons to do with Chinese, North Korean, and Soviet politics, not U.S. atomic flashing.

Nevertheless, in addition to the Republican Party, many senior officers in the air force were convinced of the value of such threats and the necessity, if it came to that, of acting on them.

Whatever the air force learned from the Korean War, what the politicians drew from it was more specific and could be boiled down to one dictum: fight the war, but avoid Chinese intervention. Unlike Freda Kirchwey, military and civilian policy makers (and, for that matter, the majority of the American public) never, to my knowledge, questioned the morality of either the ends or the means of fighting in Korea. The difficult question that faced administrations, from Kennedy through Nixon, was tactical: how to use military force in Southeast Asia without unduly upsetting the Chinese. President Kennedy’s solution was to concentrate on counterinsurgency, which, as it failed to achieve its end, devolved into a brutal ten-year bombing campaign in South Vietnam.

Copyright © 2009 by Marilyn B. Young. This excerpt originally appeared in Bombing Civilians: A Twentieth-Century History edited by Yuki Tanaka and Marilyn B. Young. Published by The New Press. Reprinted here with permission.  

http://hnn.us/articles/67717.html

Photos: The Wee