Happy Tenth Anniversary Dayton Accords!
Damn, sometimes we sure are good.
Whatever our differences about the the current military operation, at least we can all look back on our actions in the former Yugoslavia and agree that we did a damn fine thing there.
Damn, sometimes we sure are good.
Whatever our differences about the the current military operation, at least we can all look back on our actions in the former Yugoslavia and agree that we did a damn fine thing there.
posted by Winston Smith at
5:21 PM
30 Comments:
Ah, we remember it all so well, don't we? Clinton lied (exaggerated? misled? made an honest mistake?) about 100,000 "missing" victims of Milosevic, et al. But it was a good war, because Milo was unmistakably bad. The actual bodies were never found, though, although I'm sure we looked hard. Where were the Women & Men Deceased (WMDs) we were promised?
Now, although he lacked UN authorization (or even an act of his own Congress), Bill Clinton did what he thought was right, and I'm cool with that because the bad guys had it coming and no innocent dictators were framed. Even though by some accounts the NATO bombing got a bit too indiscriminate for my taste, some felt the price was, um, "worth it."
What's done was done. As Stan from South Park might say, what have we learned from all this?
"Julian Lindley-French of the Geneva Center for Security Policy in Switzerland says that Dayton offered a two-phased approach to resolving the Bosnia conflict."
"It recognizes that conflicts of this variety have a short-term and a longer-term component," Lindley-French says. "The short-term is simply to end the hostilities and to end the threat with the threat of credible external coercion. But in the longer term, what it said was, 'Look, we are here, we are here to stay, and we are going to invest in you, and we are going to invest in you to help you reach a regional political settlement in which all parties who have influence or interest in this conflict feel that there is something to invest in.' That was the very strong message of Dayton 10 years ago."
Yah, that's about it. One does not create peace from whole cloth. One invests in it and holds on, even when its stock price goes up and down.
Ah, Tom, I'd hoped nobody--least of all you--would politicize this. It's the kind of think only one of those nuts more obsessed with running down Clinton than saving lives would do...it's beneath you, bro.
And why would someone with your knowledge of international affairs ignore the obvious asymmetries? Clinton's war WAS truly moral. He did it to stop genocide and he did so. He didn't do it for half-baked or crackpot reasons, he didn't make up intelligence, he didn't do it to stop an imaginary threat, he didn't make up a new term for the weapons he would ultimatley fail to find, he did it for moral reasons--to save lives--and he made no bones about it.
For that, the boys on your side of the aisle savaged him. DeLay actually asked why we were getting involved in a war when there was no oil at issue. In short, humanitarian reasons weren't a tawdry stalking horse for national interest.
And it didn't go perfectly--in part because Republicans *began* by resisting (as they did with every action Clinton took, including bombing al Qaeda). We had to run a high-altitude war to keep the Republicans from freaking out even more than they already were.
And the UN wasn't on our side, but they were wrong about it, and careful diplomacy brought them on board. We didn't tell them to f*ck off, and we didn't alienate them.
But that's because the Clinton administration was good and honest and principled and intelligent and skilled at diplomacy and treated our allies like adults.
This must really really eat you guys up. Clinton was simply a better man and a better president than your bozo, and he ran a truly humanitarian war and it worked.
If somebody on my side were to derived such a great American success, how long do you think it would be before his patriotism was questioned, or before he was accused of not supporting the troops.
Seriously, man. This is way--way--beneath you.
Er, *deride* such a success...
I've just been checking the facts of Clinton's critics on the right and far-left and found a different story than is commonly reported. The accounts of "genocide" that led us to war were heavily exaggerated, and there were a lot of civilian casualties from willy-nilly bombing.
Such things would never be overlooked for Bush, but are just fine for St. Bill.
I know it stings, Tom, but facts is facts.
Check out some of Tom DeLay's quotes while your at it...
And--c'mon--you can't type with a straight keyboard that Bush is held to a higher standard than Clinton. There was a well-funded movement to impeach Clinton *before he ever got into office*. Scandals were fabricated left and right...he was accused of rape, drug-running, murder...
Bush had to screw things up in the most astounding possible manner before people would even consider criticizing him.
Yes, very different standards indeed...
All I'm saying is that the Yugoslavia enterprise looks a little different upon further review. Remember, I was very warm & fuzzy about it before I looked behind the Conventional Wisdom, which I invite folks to do for themselves.
And neither am I saying the enterprise was bad. Neither do I necessarily accept that DeLay's opposition was partisan and therefore unprincipled. Reversing the colors makes for an interesting episto-check, is all.
Such things would never be overlooked for Bush, but are just fine for St. Bill.
More proof that belief is most often chosen, not derived from observation.
The hagiography has all been about Duhbya and all from the right. We on the left speak freely of Bubba's flaws, even when we contrast their lack of enormity with Duhbya's outsourcing of conscience to a convenient and merely alleged relationship with God.
The parallelism tvd devoutly wishes for doesn't exist on any measure. The public reason for going was the real reason. Democrats really did rally to the President in time of war, while the Republicans undercut him immediately at every turn. There were genocidal massacres numbering in the tens of thousands, not to mention concentration camps with thousands of inmates and millions more civilians at risk of internment or death. NATO was on board in their own back yard. Etc.
Oops, lost my parallelism in there...
You all are smart enough to figure it out.
Agreed, LL, except for the epistemological point about belief. Belief is sometimes chosen, but not most often.
Most of our beliefs are about (as Russell (?) put it) "medium-sized dry goods"...rocks and trees and pencils. These beliefs force themselves on us.
When we get farther away from experience--into the realm of politics and religion, e.g., we have more doxastic control.
I can choose to dwell on anti-Bush evidence or dismiss it...I have some indirect control, but only the most loony of us has any very direct control over his beliefs about what's in front of him.
I hate that it's degenerated this far, but I just don't understand the Cult of W.
Liberals never worshipped Clinton...we always just had a kind of suspicious respect for him. Are conservatives just more easily sucked into cults of personality? Does this have anything to do with a propensity to religiosity?
And when you start psychologizing about those with whom you disagree, you better check yourself. It's the classic move of the True Believer...
So no more from me right now on this.
Just questioning the conventional wisdom. I myself have not formed an opinion, but am re-examining the history. As for belief and obsession, what can I say? If you're sure about these things, then read no further.
"Indeed, in its May 1999 report on ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, the State Department conceded that "in late March 1999 [after the NATO bombing began], Serbian forces dramatically increased the scope and pace of their efforts, moving away from selective targeting of towns and regions suspected of KLA sympathies toward a sustained and systematic effort to ethnically cleanse the entire province of Kosovo."
Not only did the forced removal of civilians result from the NATO bombing, but administration claims of mass killings--made to rally popular support for the war--turn out to have been exaggerated. Clinton defended the intervention on the grounds that the Yugoslavs had slaughtered "tens of thousands." Secretary of Defense William Cohen termed it a "horrific slaughter."
The numbers we now have tend to disprove those claims. To date, according to U.N. reports, forensic specialists working under U.N. auspices have exhumed 2,108 bodies. It is far from certain that all of these victims perished as a result of Yugoslav atrocities; some may have been combatants, others may have been civilians caught in the cross-fire between the Yugoslav army and the KLA. Still others may have been civilians killed by NATO bombs. In the end, the number of civilians believed killed by the Yugoslav army in Kosovo is certain to have been far less than the Clinton administration and NATO claimed.
O.k., I was wrong about tens of thousands. Later research than tvd's reference shows more on the order of 10,000 singular.
And, yes, the KLA was/is no picnic.
We did have the example of the kind of genocidal threat the Serbian authorities could pose in ethnically cleansing Bosnia, among other regions.
On the other hand, the brutal quagmire that Schwarz and Layne wrote about has not come to pass - in Kosovo.
Ah, the threat.
The point is that the numbers were nowhere near what Clinton represented when he "sold us the war."
I don't know where you get the 10,000 figure, LL, but it likely includes the putative 7-8000 in the Srebrenica massacre of 1995, four years before our Bosnian incursion.
Now, I realize I'm getting folks angry making links to the Iraq war, but so be it. Clinton's Yugoslavian adventure has vanished down the memory sinkhole (I have to look it all up myself), and the parallel criticisms and condemnations of Clinton and Bush are just too striking for me to not find them remarkable, as in worthy of remark.
It appears that arguing there was no current Yugoslavian genocide in 1998 would be as fair and accurate as criticizing Bush that Saddam wasn't killing too many people of late, just a manageable number in the low thousands.
The threat of his returning to killing at his previous clip (300,000 in his mass graves) is waved away, although I do not understand why. Neither do I discount Clinton's (and once again Tony Blair's) conviction that Milosevic had mutated into something other than his monstrous self.
Well, you see where I'm going with this; you are smart enough. (No sarcasm.) Clinton and Blair may avoided a brutal quagmire and saved a million people, easy. The metrics are off, but history does not reveal its alternatives.
Thanks for listening.
Tom, you make good points, and thanks for the info.
Several thoughts on this:
1. Perhaps wrongly, I'm not inclined to blame someone much for exaggerating the scope of mass murder in order to stop mass murder. 3,000 people dead is bad enough for me.
2. It's unclear whether Clinton was lying or getting bad intel. In Bush's case, it's *fairly* clear that it was some of both.
3. Clinton didn't fabricate a lie about national defense to achieve his end. He did make one vague reference that I heard to making America safer by making the world safer.
4. The mass murders just looked like they were going to get worse. In Rwanda Clinton waited and waited hoping that things would peter out. It was the worst mistake of his presidency.
5. Yes, the KLA sucked, but that doesn't seem to matter much.
6. Yes, things got worse right after we started taking action. But that was just the dam breaking, and it would have broken anyway.
7. I'm absolutely with you, though, on Saddam's brutality and the moral untenability of continued sanctions. IF THAT HAD BEEN OUR REASON FOR GOING TO WAR, I WOULD HAVE SUPPORTED IT. Saddam is evil and ought to die. Furthermore, WE HELPED HIM GET SO POWERFUL. It was our mess, we should have cleaned it up during Gulf War Episode I. I'm absolutely with on the moral case against Saddam, and cannot in any way agree with liberals who dismiss it.
7'. With this caveat: I would never have beeen in favor of invading Iraq when and how we did. It was the worst possible time. That was one time in which considerations of national security SHOULD have taken precedence over our moral obligations to others. We should have finished the job in Afghanistan, destroyed al Q and OBL, and THEN gone on to make the world a better place.
7''. And, evil though he is, Saddam was just about the dumbest target we could have picked to exercise our new-found moral conscience. The money invested in Iraq could have been used to transform much of sub-Saharan Africa. Point being: you go for the low-hanging fruit first. There are lots worse tyrants than Saddam much more easily picked off.
Re: the 'regime change' and Saddam's brutality as a reason to go to war, I seem to recall that prior to the Kosovo war Milosevic was indicted for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
As I learned from Wesley Clark's book, this indictment, symbolic as it seemed to many, was instrumental in garnering the NATO imprimatur for the war. The careful diplomacy involved in gaining this indictment and NATO approval for the bombing campaign (unanimity among NATO members is necessary) stands in stark contrast to the way the Bush administration steamrolled into war in Iraq.
Read Clark's book and you realize that if ever there was a case where all avenues of peaceful coercion were exhausted before going to war, that was it.
Perhaps wrongly, I'm not inclined to blame someone much for exaggerating the scope of mass murder in order to stop mass murder. 3,000 people dead is bad enough for me.
Well, that opens up a big Kantian door.
As for national security, why was Clinton diddling with Bosnia when a) more people were dying in Iraq either by Saddam's or our hand (or both) and b) Saddam had pushed out the weapons inspectors with few consequences?
"On Jan. 29, 2001, The [Washington] Post editorialized that "of all the booby traps left behind by the Clinton administration, none is more dangerous -- or more urgent -- than the situation in Iraq. Over the last year, Mr. Clinton and his team quietly avoided dealing with, or calling attention to, the almost complete unraveling of a decade's efforts to isolate the regime of Saddam Hussein and prevent it from rebuilding its weapons of mass destruction. That leaves President Bush to confront a dismaying panorama in the Persian Gulf," including "intelligence photos that show the reconstruction of factories long suspected of producing chemical and biological weapons."
I understand the moralizing about motivations, but there's more to the presidency than such abstract judgments.
Matt Y. tackles this uber-interventionist/ uber-realist false dichotomy:
http://yglesias.tpmcafe.com/story/2005/11/23/102218/67
The original Human Rights Watch essay was linked on this very site awhile back, Mr. Carroll.
I object to it because Human Rights Watch apparently doesn't consider freedom a human right, or any war fought in its interest as humanitarian.
I also find their position nuanced to the point of inertia: only in cases of unceasing and indiscriminate killing, and then only if the remedy works.
By the time an intervention is "correctly" planned and executed, everybody's already dead. By HRW's definition, although the Japanese had murdered 300-500,000 people in the Rape of Nanking, if the killing had slowed to a trickle, intervention would no longer be humanitarian.
Balderdash.
"I object to it because Human Rights Watch apparently doesn't consider freedom a human right, or any war fought in its interest as humanitarian."
Actually, their nuance is considerably more nuanced than you give it credit for. They don't advocate intervention short of those conditions because the near certainty of horrendous consequences of war don't outweigh the far from certain putative remedy of war.
They also recommend the use of any and all other means to achieve the end before resorting to war. Far from not believing freedom to be a human right, they actually believe the right to remain alive to be a greater right than any right to freedom, democracy and such, as admirable and inherently human we believe those rights to be.
And am I to presume that you would have advocated the US fully mobilizing against the Japanese in 1937?
P.S:
I would add that I might disagree with the belief that intervention is necessarily unwarranted solely for "freedom"; my distinction is for cases where the oppressed have specifically taken it upon themselves to rid their population of the tyrant's yoke and have even requested outside intervention.
But short of that, I think it's their own decision to make (cf Ceacescu, Palavi, Sukarno, Marcos among others).
There's also the matter of Yglesias' point I alluded to earlier. Humanitarian motives are admirable, but there's nothing wrong with considering the disastrous consequences for our own population, which our leader has actually pledged to do his utmost to protect.
Of course. Wisdom and prudence are admired by all but the most implacable of moralists.
The Iraqis asked for our help against Saddam after Gulf War I, after we urged them to revolt. To our shame and rue today we abandoned them (Iraqis are still unsure if we won't abandon them again). That Saddam ruthlessly slaughtered so many rebels could account for the perception that the Iraqis didn't and don't want our help in freeing themselves. So much for the Scowcroft "realists" and their legacy.
What I did not make clear is that by the actual, not inflated, numbers given by Clinton in justification of the Kosovo intervention, by HRW's own standards, the incursion was not humanitarian. Interesting.
The US in 1937 was in no military shape to oppose Japan, altho to their credit, Americans volunteered for the Fighting Tigers.
And yes, had the US been in a position to oppose or punish the Rape of Nanking, we certainly should have. The Japanese grew in strength and audacity, and once again, as it goes with well-evidenced enemies of humanity, it's pay me now or pay me later.
"What I did not make clear is that by the actual, not inflated, numbers given by Clinton in justification of the Kosovo intervention, by HRW's own standards, the incursion was not humanitarian. Interesting."
Okay, so what do you suppose the motivation was? Some great national interest of the US? And do you have a reason to doubt that the ongoing mass slaughter was going to end? As opposed to Saddam, who hadn't done a damn thing in ten years?
As for the Rape of Nanking, your choice of words is very telling: to "punish". That we can't be the world's policeman should be abundantly clear to us now. Especially when acting as such results in extremely damaging blowback.
And the one example of the axis powers as a burgeoning evil has served as fodder for all types of imagined "gathering threats" that actually gathered only in the fevered imaginations of foreign policy hawks, from the feared "domino effect" to the dreaded Sandinistas. Neither Hitler nor Tojo had been subjected to no-fly zones and sanctions similar to those that contained Saddam. Remember Saddam's response when we bombed the $hit out of him after he refused inspectors access to some sites?... Crickets. Remember the Committee on the Present Danger and Plan B? That Hitler and Tojo were permitted too much leeway is now used as justification for, as Jonah Goldberg said (paraphrasing), "every once in a while throwing some two-bit dictator against the wall just to show them we can do it".
Well, that's just what we did, based on trumped up threats, threats which only months before Colin Powell himself had admitted were really no threat at all. In fact, the treatment of Saddam was conspicuously NOT to ignore him. Now, because of an awful fit of misjudgment, the terrorism well has been filled to overflowing, and BOTH Afghanistand and Iraq are on their way to being terrorist training grounds. Bravo.
And shame on Bush I for encouraging that uprising when he never intended to support it. However, one idiotic statement doesn't justify an even more idiotic strategic error later on.
See, you guys aren't even listening ot each other anymore.
Tom, I agree with you about humanitarian interventions in general--e.g. that we should have stopped the Rape of Nanking if we could have. So I think I may disagree with LC there, but I'm not sure.
On the other hand, Tom, I'm not sure why it matters that the Yugoslavia interventions were not humanitarian by the criteria of HRW, since I think you're right that the standards are questionable. It was obviously a humanitarian intervention even if it doesn't meet their criteria. Were you using that to prove that the HRW criteria are wrong? If so, I agree. If to prove that the Yugo. intervention wasn't humanitarian, your argument fails.
On the other hand, I don't see the relevance of the Post claim about Clinton in Iraq. They were wrong, as we now know. Clinton knocked the shit out of their "WMD"s and WMD infrastructure, right?
Saddam was killing more people, but there's no way Clinton could have stopped that. There is absolutely no way that he could have gotten Congressional or UN support for an invasion. And this is a really important point:
The Republicans would have savaged him if he'd have tried. You must admit that's true, Tom. Their humanitarian attitudes toward the people of Iraq didn't turn up until the WMDs didn't. He was savaged for Bosnia and Kosovo, savaged for attacking al Qaeda...the odds of him being able to invade Iraq are exactly zero. It simply was not an option for him, period.
You guys agree that it is to America's undying shame that Bush '41 encouraged the Kurds to rise up and then didn't support it...so there's something.
But LC has a good point about exhausting the other options in Yugo., SM being charged with war crimes already, etc. Clark DOES make that clear in _Waging Modern War_
But back again to Tom's point about freedom and LC's response: I agree with Tom there. Organizations like HRW seem to undervalue freedom. LC rightly points out that war is horrible, so SOME degree of tyranny MAY be better...I'm disinclined to agree, but what do I know? I've never been in a war nor subject to an oppressive govt.
But I think LC is dead wrong about one thing that I hear many liberals say:
That the oppressed people themselves are responsible for freeing themselves. That's wrong. That's like saying that a battered woman is responsible for defending herself against her 200 lb husband when I'm standing right there. If I've got the means to stop mass murder (or other violent crime), then I should use them. You can't say that it would have been wrong for us to stop the Holocaust because German Jews weren't rising up against Hitler. The world's only Mega-Giga-Super-Duper-power is in a better position to help out people like the Iraqis than people like the Iraqis themselves are, no?
That's all too fast, but I hope I got some points out. All may be wrong, needless to say.
"That the oppressed people themselves are responsible for freeing themselves. That's wrong. That's like saying that a battered woman is responsible for defending herself against her 200 lb husband when I'm standing right there."
Winston,
I don't disagree with you in principle, but I think that there is virtue in weighing perceived benefits vs. perceived costs. If my defense of the battered woman against her 200 lb. husband will result in the death of my whole family, would you still maintain that I have but one moral choice?
And that goes for the other side of the equation too (the bad/evil to be eradicated). Your example of Hitler and the Jews is one of extreme conditions, one that bears little if no resemblance to that of the Iraqi people. I don't think it's as enlightening to choose the most extreme example, since most cases fall somewhere inbetween.
Your earlier example of Darfur is much more akin to Hitler's Germany. I see no evidence of ongoing or imminent ethnic cleansing in Iraq. And as far as Jews not rising up against Hitler, have you ever heard of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising?
This is not to disparage your sentiment about SOME moral obligation to attempt to help the oppressed. But I find nothing wrong with a moral calculus that includes weighing the deleterious effects on our own and other nations' interests, the relative cost of intervention, and the degree of oppression.
After all, a certain poster upthread said:
"And, evil though he is, Saddam was just about the dumbest target we could have picked to exercise our new-found moral conscience. The money invested in Iraq could have been used to transform much of sub-Saharan Africa. Point being: you go for the low-hanging fruit first. There are lots worse tyrants than Saddam much more easily picked off."
And remember, allowing for unrequested interventions is opening the door to all kinds of circa 1939 "Polish liberation"s. This serves to underscore the importance of some broad base of worldwide support, as opposed to one nation arrogating to itself the right to judge when and where people want to be "liberated". After all, I don't recall huge outcries international outcries over Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor or Sierra Leone.
Unfortunately, inquiries into political philosophy or moral rectitude are most productive when contemporary issues are not on the table. Just when we need them the most...
I dislike the cut & paste format, WS, as it takes on the nature of the courtroom rather than inquiry. But I do not intend to debate or disprove you, so please permit to indulge in the interest of comprehensiveness:
Were you using that to prove that the HRW criteria are wrong?
Yes, and it's my opinion they are artificially contrived, so as to deny Bush's adventure any moral cover, while endorsing Clinton's. That was my opinion when I first read them. My opinion, mind you, for the third time so there is no misunderstanding.
I am not opposed to Clinton's actions in principle. My objections are purely political, in that Clinton seemed to have chosen the least morally ambiguous course and plucked the lowest-hanging fruit, which I do not find necessarily morally admirable since Saddam was a greater threat to both us, his neighbors, and world peace in general.
There is absolutely no way that he could have gotten Congressional or UN support for an invasion...
The Republicans would have savaged him if he'd have tried.
The UN, sure. It is corrupt and impotent. You see Tom DeLay of the House when you think GOP. I think McCain and Dole of the senior and more serious chamber. They got Clinton's back on Yugoslavia, on this we should be able to agree.
You guys agree that it is to America's undying shame that Bush '41 encouraged the Kurds to rise up and then didn't support it...
Yes, and I just heard righty Frank Gaffney noting that the pro-democracy elements in Iraq are still gunshy about ending up on the losing side after yet another US abandonment. May Brent Scowcroft burn in hell.
Clark DOES make that clear in _Waging Modern War_
Gen. Clark must wait for another day. Often overlooked is that Russia has always seen Serbia as within its sphere of influence. We (and Clinton) got lucky that they chose not to fight over Yugoslavia. Gen. Clark almost sparked a major international incident by trying to stiff the Russians. We dodged a bullet.
That's like saying that a battered woman is responsible for defending herself against her 200 lb husband when I'm standing right there...You can't say that it would have been wrong for us to stop the Holocaust because German Jews weren't rising up against Hitler.
There is perhaps a distinction between freedom and genocide in there that introduces a moral or at least prudential problem. Politically speaking, there is a certain "consent of the governed" principle. Some peoples seem to like tyranny, as bizarre as that seems to us.
But yeah, you just don't stand by when you could do something. I think this is the major structural flaw of the UN as a moral or practical force, because in the end it values sovereignty over human rights, of a petty dictator to beat his wife as long as he does it in his own home.
There are a lot of wifebeaters out there in this cold cruel world, and they all get a vote. I do not acknowledge that some sort of "world consensus" acts morally.
Thanks for the thoughtful responses, LC and tvd. Dunno, maybe this deserves another post...
I find much to agree with and much to disagree with (for what either of those are worth) in both your responses.
For some reason two rather peripheral things stick out to me, one from each:
LC: I took it that the criterion was something like *widespread uprising*. Of course I know about the Warsaw Ghetto, but if a few people fighting is enough, then outside intervention will *always* be justified. Besides, just a technicality, I said 'German Jews'...but that's such a slimy, nit-picky defense that even I won't use it...
tvd: Re: Clark and the Pristina airfield. I couldn't disagree more. Clark tried to pull a smart move that would have out-Russianed the Russians. Seriously, if Bush pulled such a move, don't you think those on your side would applaud it as macho-y American goodness? Clark's plan has been widely praised. (Of course it was famously criticized by the aptly-named British officer Michael Jackson at the time...) It would have kept the Russians from landing and they would have had to attack us if they'd wanted to make an issue of it--which they never would have done. He merely aimed to do what they were going to do--occupy the airfield--but do it first. It was, in my humble merely-observer-of-the-military opinion, a brilliant move. Or would have been.
Re: Scowcroft burning in Hell: you know, sometimes that guy seems reasonable to me...how he could have made such horrific mistakes is stunning. Anyway, I'm with ya on that one, but sad about it.
Winston,
I certainly respect your opinion, as I do Tom's, but I think your position implies a substitution of your values for others'. Tom gets at this in his last comment when he said:
"There is perhaps a distinction between freedom and genocide in there that introduces a moral or at least prudential problem. Politically speaking, there is a certain "consent of the governed" principle. Some peoples seem to like tyranny, as bizarre as that seems to us."
I wouldn't characterize it as "lik[ing] tyranny", but more as "don't value enough whatever freedoms they lack to risk their lives for them".
The reason that I consider some indication of uprising on the part of an oppressed people necessary for intervention is because it provides something of an acid test that they are in favor of armed conflict (and therefore high risk of death) as a means to change their situation. If there's one thing history has taught us, it's that war is going to kill people by the thousands, many of them innocents. What gives us the right to determine that the cause is just enough for thousands of people to die when they have not given ample evidence that they consider it worth it themselves to die for that cause? Did you get the impression the South Vietnamese were wildly behind our cause?
I do like to think that inside every person beats a heart yearning to live in freedom and western style democracy. But do I really know that's true? I may believe such freedom is worth dying for, but I don't arrogate to myself the right to determine that for others.
The reason I make an exception for ongoing or imminent genocide is that the accidental victims of war will be no less dead after the military intervention than they would have been after the systematic slaughter. This is what makes Rwanda and Darfur such compelling cases, IMO.
You guys may disagree, but I think my position is defensible, and provides somewhat of a bright line in terms of threshold for intervention. It is close to the HRW one, but I don't think they sanction intervention where there is no ongoing or imminent genocide, but the populace has risen up against a tyrant and desires outside military help.
You make good points LC.
More thought required on my part.
Yes, I used "tyranny" as a lazy shorthand. I was thinking of Russia's 70% approval rates for Putin's neo-czarism, and the feelings of the Chinese who weren't among the 60 million who Mao killed. When a society finds itself in lifeboat conditions, those who don't get pitched overboard are amazingly amenable to all sorts of Draconian measures.
But there is always some portion of a population seeking freedom from Draco. A very sticky situation: Kim Jung-Il seems to have starved over a million of his people. Doing something about it is something that HRW, in its attempt to formulize, cannot contemplate.
And as previously noted per Darfur, etc., the bulk of mass death is usually over by the time moral outrage in the West reaches any critical mass and a cost/benefit analysis of the potential casualties is developed and approved by moral arbiters like HRW. If ever.
I read Gen. Clark's explanation of UK General Jackson and the airport incident (Jackson disobeyed Clark's order.) Clark indicated he was acting on the Clinton Administration's desire to freeze the Russians out. My point remains, that Clinton got lucky that the Russians decided not to fight for their traditional hegemony over Serbia.
It remains possible that Clinton/Blair killed as many as they saved. And had Russia decided to fight, even HRW would have to decree that the "humanitarian" intervention was anything but.
HRW has its forensic value, but its quest for moral perfection and certitude render it less than useless, an obstacle to any attempt at positive action. All it's good for in these cases is counting the bodies, and pontificating post hoc on whether it was worth it. That history does not reveal its alternatives is not an operative concept among metric-minded moralists.
(BTW, I do think that the essential mistake of Vietnam was in not offering freedom to the Vietnamese people, but only a choice of tyrannies. No surprise they chose one of their own instead of ours.
It is interesting and no doubt ironic that some on the right, perhaps not inaccurately, lay the blame on the Pol Pot genocide at least indirectly on the US withdrawal from Southeast Asia. There's so much to think about.)
Tom,
One thing I would wonder about re: Putin's approval is: to what extent has the availability of outside information increased over there, post USSR? I wonder about this because I wouldn't find approval ratings like that for the Soviet regimes surprising, due to the Pravda propaganda machine and monopoly on information; if you're only told the party line, you tend to believe it without any contravening information.
I'm not sure that can still explain such high ratings for someone like Putin, given the presumed greater availability of outside information via the internet.
Either that, or they really do just desire *stability* over all else or they feel Putin represents "Russian greatness" or something.
There's an article in the new Atlantic about Russia, and Garry Kasparov's opposition to Putin. Putin has gained a 70% vote in the past 2 elections (altho the 2nd was criticised by some in the West). Putin has just usurped the power to select regional governors from the electorate, but there's barely a whimper on the street. The problem with democracy is that it tends to drift (Yeltsin, Weimar), and authoritarianism starts to look good.
As far as greatness, perhaps. I wonder if Putin (and the people in their current mood) would accept losing their hegemony in Serbia today.
In the same issue, Atlantic looks at Kazakhistan, where the benevolent dictator seems quite popular, backing up your previous point. The fear is that Western democracy-mongers will upset the nation's stability. Certainly weird to our sensibilities, but it beats the lifeboat, I guess.
I'd say that "benevolent" dictatorships (Pinochet?) eventually become victims of their own success, tho. Once stability becomes a given, the people want more.
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