Neo-Conned! Again

by D Liam O'Huallachain

  To add just one last example that is very timely and significant, consider “just-war theory,” now undergoing a vigorous revival in the context of the “normative revolution” proclaimed in the 1990s. There has been debate about whether the invasion of Iraq satisfies the conditions for just war, but virtually none about the bombing of Serbia in 1999 or the invasion of Afghanistan, taken to be such clear cases that discussion is superfluous. Let us take a quick look at these, not asking whether the attacks were right or wrong, but considering the nature of the arguments.

  The harshest criticism of the Serbia bombing anywhere near the mainstream is that it was “illegal but legitimate,” the conclusion of the International Independent Commission of Inquiry headed by Justice Richard Goldstone. “It was illegal because it did not receive approval from the UN Security Council,” the Commission determined, “but it was legitimate because all diplomatic avenues had been exhausted and there was no other way to stop the killings and atrocities in Kosovo.”1 Justice Goldstone observed that the Charter may need revision in the light of the report and the judgments on which it is based. The NATO intervention, he explains, “is too important a precedent” for it to be regarded “an aberration.” Rather, “state sovereignty is being redefined in the face of globalization and the resolve by the majority of the peoples of the world that human rights have become the business of the international community.” He also stressed the need for “objective analysis of human rights abuses.”1

  The last comment is good advice. One question that an objective analysis might address is whether the majority of the peoples of the world accept the judgment of the enlightened states. In the case of the bombing of Serbia, review of the world press and official statements reveals little support for that conclusion, to put it rather mildly. In fact, the bombing was bitterly condemned outside the NATO countries, facts consistently ignored.2 Furthermore, it is hardly likely that the principled self-exemption of the enlightened states from the “universalization” that traces back to Nuremberg would gain the approval of much of the world's population. The new norm, it appears, fits the standard pattern.

  Another question that objective analysis might address is whether indeed “all diplomatic options had been exhausted.” That conclusion is not easy to maintain in the light of the fact that there were two options on the table when NATO decided to bomb – a NATO proposal and a Serbian proposal – and that after 78 days of bombing, a compromise was reached between them.3

  A third question is whether it is true that “there was no other way to stop the killings and atrocities in Kosovo,” clearly a crucial matter. In this case, objective analysis happens to be unusually easy. There is vast documentation available from impeccable Western sources: several compilations of the State Department released in justification of the war, detailed records of the OSCE, NATO, the UN, a British Parliamentary Inquiry, and other similar sources.

  There are several remarkable features of the unusually rich documentation. One is that the record is almost entirely ignored in the vast literature on the Kosovo war, including the scholarly literature.4 The second is that the substantive contents of the documentation are not only ignored, but consistently denied. I have reviewed the record elsewhere, and will not do so here, but what we discover, characteristically, is that the clear and explicit chronology is reversed. The Serbian atrocities are portrayed as the cause of the bombing, whereas it is uncontroversial that they followed it, virtually without exception, and were furthermore its anticipated consequence, as is also well documented from the highest NATO sources.

  The British government, the most hawkish element of the alliance, estimated that most of the atrocities were attributable not to the Serbian security forces, but to the KLA guerrillas attacking Serbia from Albania – with the intent, as they frankly explained, to elicit a disproportionate Serbian response that could be used to mobilize Western support for the bombing. The British government assessment was as of mid-January, but the documentary record indicates no substantial change until late March, when the bombing was announced and initiated. The Milosevic indictment, based on U.S. and U.K. intelligence, reveals the same pattern of events.

  The U.S. and UK, and commentators generally, cite the Racak massacre in mid-January as the decisive turning point, but that plainly cannot be taken seriously. First, even assuming the most extreme condemnations of the Racak massacre to be accurate, it scarcely changed the balance of atrocities. Second, much worse massacres were taking place at the same time elsewhere but aroused no concern, though some of the worst could have easily been terminated merely by withdrawing support. One notable case in early 1999 is East Timor, under Indonesian military occupation. The U.S. and U.K. continued to provide their military and diplomatic support for the occupiers, who had already slaughtered perhaps one-fourth of the population with unremitting and decisive U.S.-UK support, which continued until well after the Indonesian army virtually destroyed the country in a final paroxysm of violence in August-September 1999. That is only one of many such cases, but it alone more than suffices to dismiss the professions of horror about Racak.

  In Kosovo, Western estimates are that about 2000 were killed in the year prior to the invasion. If the British and other assessments are accurate, most of these were killed by the KLA guerrillas. One of the very few serious scholarly studies even to consider the matter estimates that 500 of the 2000 were killed by the Serbs. This is the careful and judicious study by Nicholas Wheeler, who supports the NATO bombing on the grounds that there would have been worse atrocities had NATO not bombed.1 The argument is that by bombing with the anticipation that it would lead to atrocities, NATO was preventing atrocities, maybe even a second Auschwitz, many claim. That such arguments are taken seriously, as they are, gives no slight insight into Western intellectual culture, particularly when we recall that there were diplomatic options and that the agreement reached after the bombing was a compromise between them (formally at least).

  Justice Goldstone appears to have reservations on this matter as well. He recognizes – as few do – that the NATO bombing was not undertaken to protect the Albanian population of Kosovo, and that its “direct result” was a “tremendous catastrophe” for the Kosovars – as was anticipated by the NATO command and the State Department, followed by another catastrophe particularly for Serbs and Roma under NATO-UN occupation. NATO commentators and supporters, Justice Goldstone continues, “have had to console themselves with the belief that 'Operation Horseshoe,' the Serb plan of ethnic cleansing directed against the Albanians in Kosovo, had been set in motion before the bombing began, and not in consequence of the bombing.” The word “belief” is appropriate: there is no evidence in the voluminous Western record of anything having been set in motion before the international monitors were withdrawn in preparation for the bombing, and very little in the few days before the bombing began; and “Operation Horseshoe” has since been exposed as an apparent intelligence fabrication, though it can hardly be in doubt that Serbia had contingency plans, at present unknown, for such actions in response to a NATO attack.

  It is difficult, then, to see how we can accept the conclusions of the International Commission, a serious and measured effort to deal with the issues, on the legitimacy of the bombing.

  The facts are not really controversial, as anyone interested can determine. I suppose that is why the voluminous Western documentary record is so scrupulously ignored. Whatever one's judgment about the bombing, not at issue here, the standard conclusion that it was an uncontroversial example of just war and the decisive demonstration of the “normative revolution” led by the “enlightened states” is, to say the least, rather startling – unless, of course, we return to the same principle: moral truisms must be cast to the flames, when applied to us.

  Let us turn to the second case, the war in Afghanistan, considered such a paradigm example of just war that there is scarcely even any discussion about it. The respected moral-political philosopher Jean Bethke Elshtain summarizes receiv
ed opinion fairly accurately when she writes approvingly that only absolute pacifists and outright lunatics doubt that this was uncontroversially a just war. Here, once again, factual questions arise. First, recall the war aims: to punish Afghans until the Taliban agree to hand over Osama bin Laden without evidence. Contrary to much subsequent commentary, overthrowing the Taliban regime was an afterthought, added after several weeks of bombing. Second, there is quite good evidence bearing on the belief that only lunatics or absolute pacifists did not join the chorus of approval. An international Gallup poll after the bombing was announced (but before it actually began) found very limited support for it, almost none if civilians were targeted, as they were from the first moment. And even that tepid support was based on the presupposition that the targets were known to have been responsible for the September 11 attacks. They were not. Eight months later, the head of the FBI testified to the Senate that after the most intensive international intelligence inquiry in history, the most that could be said was that the plot was “believed” to have been hatched in Afghanistan, while the attacks were planned and financed elsewhere. It follows that there was no detectable popular support for the bombing, contrary to confident standard claims, apart from a very few countries; and of course Western elites. Afghan opinion is harder to estimate, but we do know that after several weeks of bombing, leading anti-Taliban figures, including some of those most respected by the U.S. and President Karzai, were denouncing the bombing, calling for it to end, and charging the U.S. with bombing just to “show off its muscle” while undermining their efforts to overthrow the Taliban from within.

  If we also adopt the truism that facts matter, some problems arise; but there is little fear of that.

  Next come the questions of just war. At once, the issue of universality arises. If the U.S. is unquestionably authorized to bomb another country to compel its leaders to turn over someone it suspects of involvement in a terrorist act, then, a fortiori, Cuba, Nicaragua, and a host of others are entitled to bomb the U.S. because there is no doubt of its involvement in very serious terrorist attacks against them: in the case of Cuba going back 45 years, extensively documented in impeccable sources, and not questioned; in the case of Nicaragua, even condemned by the World Court and the Security Council (in vetoed resolutions), after which the U.S. escalated the attack. This conclusion surely follows if we accept the principle of universality. The conclusion, of course, is utterly outrageous, and advocated by no one. We therefore conclude, once again, that the principle of universality has a crucial exception, and that rejection of elementary moral truisms is so deeply entrenched that even raising the question is considered an unspeakable abomination. That is yet another instructive comment on the reigning intellectual and moral culture, with its principled rejection of unacceptable platitudes.

  The Iraq war has been considered more controversial, so there is an extensive professional literature debating whether it satisfies international law and just-war criteria. One distinguished scholar, Michael Glennon of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, argues forthrightly that international law is simply “hot air” and should be abandoned, because state practice does not conform to it: meaning, the U.S. and its allies ignore it. A further defect of international law and the UN Charter, he argues, is that they limit the capacity of the U.S. to resort to force, and such resort is right and good because the U.S. leads the “enlightened states” (his phrase), apparently by definition: no evidence or argument is adduced, or considered necessary. Another respected scholar argues that the U.S. and U.K. were in fact acting in accord with the UN Charter, under a “communitarian interpretation” of its provisions: they were carrying out the will of the international community, in a mission implicitly delegated to them because they alone had the power to carry it out.1 It is apparently irrelevant that the international community vociferously objected, at an unprecedented level – quite evidently, if people are included within the international community, but even among elites.

  Others observe that law is a living instrument, its meaning determined by practice, and practice demonstrates that new norms have been established permitting “anticipatory self-defense,” another euphemism for aggression at will. The tacit assumption is that norms are established by the powerful, and that they alone have the right of anticipatory self-defense. No one, for example, would argue that Japan exercised this right when it bombed military bases in the U.S. colonies of Hawaii and the Philippines, even though the Japanese knew very well that B-17 Flying Fortresses were coming off the Boeing production lines, and were surely familiar with the very public discussions in the U.S. explaining how they could be used to incinerate Japan's wooden cities in a war of extermination, flying from Hawaiian and Philippine bases.2 Nor would anyone accord that right to any state today, apart from the self-declared enlightened states, which have the power to determine norms and to apply them selectively at will, basking in praise for their nobility, generosity, and messianic visions of righteousness.

  There is nothing particularly novel about any of this, apart from one aspect. The means of destruction that have been developed are by now so awesome, and the risks of deploying and using them so enormous, that a rational Martian observer would not rank the prospects for survival of this curious species very high, as long as contempt for elementary moral truisms remains so deeply entrenched among educated elites.

  1. Telford Taylor, Nuremberg and Vietnam: an American Tragedy (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970).

  1. Justice Richard Goldstone, “Kosovo: An Assessment in the Context of International Law,” Nineteenth Morgenthau Memorial Lecture, Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs, 2000.

  2. Michael Georgy, “Iraqis want Saddam's old U.S. friends on trial,” Reuters, January 20, 2004.

  3. On this and other such operations, based in part on unpublished investigations of Newsweek Saigon bureau chief Kevin Buckley, see Chomsky and Edward Herman, The Political Economy of Human Rights (Boston: South End Press, 1979), Vol. I.

  1. Arnon Regular, Haaretz, May 24, 2003, based on minutes of a meeting between Bush and his hand-picked Palestinian Prime Minister, Mahmoud Abbas, provided by Abbas. See also Newsweek, “Bush and God,” March 10, 2003, with a cover story on the beliefs and direct line to God of the man with his finger on the button; “The Jesus Factor,” PBS Frontline documentary, on the “religious ideals” that Bush has brought to the White House, “relevant to the Bush messianic mission to graft democracy onto the rest of the world”; Sam Allis, “A Timely Look at How Faith Informs Bush Presidency,” Boston Globe, February 29, 2004; and White House aides report concern over Bush's “increasingly erratic behavior” as he “declares his decisions to be 'God's will'” (Doug Thompson, publisher, Capitol Hill Blue, June 4, 2004).

  1. “Another Intifada in the Making” and “Bloodier and Sadder,” Economist, April 17, 2004.

  2. Walter Pincus, “Skepticism About U.S. Deep, Iraq Poll Shows, Motive for Invasion Is Focus of Doubts,” Washington Post, November 12, 2003, and Richard Burkholder, “Gallup Poll of Baghdad: Gauging U.S. Intent,” Government & Public Affairs, October 28, 2003.

  1. Anton La Guardia, Diplomatic Editor, “Handover Still on Course As UN Waits for New Leader to Emerge,” Daily Telegraph, May 18, 2004.

  2. I.e., before he was nominated and confirmed as director of national intelligence.—Ed.

  3. Robbins, “Negroponte Has Tricky Mission: Modern Proconsul,” Wall Street Journal, April 27, 2004.

  1. See, inter alia, my Pirates and Emperors (1996; updated edition, Cambridge, Mass.: South End-Pluto, 2002). For a review of the first phase of the “war on terror,” see Alexander George, ed., Western State Terrorism (New York: Routledge, 1991).

  1. Cf. the interview with Jude Wanniski for a slightly differing perspective on the actions Dr. Chomsky is most likely referring to, on pp. 3–79 of the companion to the present volume, Neo-CONNED!—Ed.

  1. Zunes, “U.S. Policy Towards Syria and the Triumph of Neoconservatism,” Middle East
Policy, Spring, 2004.

  1. The Independent International Commission on Kosovo, “The Kosovo Report,” October 23, 2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), at http://www.palmecenter.se/print_uk.asp?Article_Id=873.

  1. Goldstone, loc. cit.

  2. For a review see my New Military Humanism (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1999).

  3. For details, see my A New Generation Draws the Line (New York: Verso, 2000), which also reviews how NATO instantly overturned the Security Council resolution it had initiated. Goldstone, loc. cit., recognizes that the resolution was a compromise, but does not go into the matter, which aroused no interest in the West.

  4. The only detailed reviews I know of are in my books cited in the two preceding notes, with some additions from the later British parliamentary inquiry in Hegemony or Survival.

  1. Nicholas Wheeler, Saving Strangers: Humanitarian Intervention and International Society (Oxford 2000).

  1. Carston Stahn, “Enforcement of the Collective Will after Iraq,” American Journal of International Law, Symposium, “Future Implications of the Iraq Conflict,” Vol. 97, January, 2003, pp. 804–23. For more on these matters, including Glennon's influential ideas and his rejection of other moral truisms, see my article and several others in Review of International Studies Vol. 29, No. 4, October, 2003, and my Hegemony or Survival (New York: Henry Holt, 2004).

  2. See Bruce Franklin, War Stars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).

  I'm pleased to be here at the American Enterprise Institute. I have some long-time friends here, as you know if you've studied the published wiring diagrams that purport to illuminate the anatomy of the neocon cabal.