IS NATO'S WAR JUST?: Does war over Kosovo satisfy just-war criteria ?
Russett, Bruce
IS NATO'S WAR JUST? Questions about Kosovo Bruce Russell The war between NATO and Serbia is, for the peoples of Kosovo, Serbia, Albania, Macedonia, and Montenegro, a devastating tragedy. On...
...Agreement rarely comes easily in international politics...
...The same policy has been followed in Yugoslavia...
...The following is an outline of what appears to have happened: Intelligence estimates of whether a threat to bomb Serbia would bring capitulation were inconsistent and flip-flopping...
...NATO's choice of a military strategy that could not stop ethnic cleansing weighs into the balance of proportionality...
...The administration has taken extreme care not to risk American airplanes and their fliers...
...But we can at least try to clarify our thinking...
...We cannot go back to the beginning of bombing, or to the months of botched preparation and the hubris of coercive diplomacy...
...It makes an extraordinary statement about reluctance to take casualties, casualties that would be necessary to achieve what is proclaimed as NATO's central war aim...
...A democratic government always tries to minimize casualties on its own side (Stalin and Mao Zedong had far fewer compunctions), and does so by substituting expensive equipment for manpower...
...NATO most certainly has not been able to stop him...
...Without a tough peacekeeping force to protect them...
...Catholic bishops' 1983 pastoral letter, The Challenge of Peace...
...He had perfected the techniques and shown his willingness in Bosnia...
...The KLA is a guerrilla organization...
...The classic guerrilla strategy includes terror to force the population to support it, and terror to provoke terrorist counBruce Russett is Dean Acheson Professor of International Relations at Yale...
...This 100-to-l ratio is conservative, and could well be 1,000-to-l...
...They are implicitly making a domestic political calculation to raise the risk of not achieving their war aims so as to lower the risk of being punished for the deaths of their soldiers...
...Since the signing of the genocide convention in 1948 (the United States did not ratify the convention until 1988), governments have a legal right, and by some interpretations an obligation, to intervene in another country to prevent "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, or religious group...
...In the Bosnian conflict, Milosevic behaved like the classic bully: retreating when confronted with the use or credible threat of force, attacking further in response to concessions...
...That is, in extreme form, the way democracies fight wars...
...Wishful thinking ruled, without contingency planning...
...NATO will not shoot a bunch of schoolchildren in reprisal for a guerrilla attack...
...George Tenet, director of the CIA, testified before Congress in February that the Serbs would conduct a major spring offensive in Kosovo, resulting in huge refugee flows...
...The address is Box 17090, Baltimore, MD 21203...
...Take some hypothetical but not implausible numbers: Suppose that conducting such a campaign might have resulted in the death of as many as fifty American airmen...
...They had a lot of practice against the Nazis, who responded with a ruthless oppression that NATO will not match...
...Though Vietnam seared this lesson into the minds of American lead14 ers, the phenomenon is far more general...
...Some analysts estimate that already the bombing has destroyed material equivalent to more than a year's worth of the Yugoslavian gross national product...
...Slobodan Milosevic, the prime mover of terror, is not alone as a terrorist...
...So here we are, trying to muddle through...
...let's start with the first, trying to apply the customary criteria to an extremely complicated situation and not expecting simple answers...
...If the term genocide is not to become so meaningless as to insult the victims of true genocide—Armenians, Jews in the Holocaust, Cambodians—this has to mean more than forcing people to move from their homes...
...Bosnia was a separate country, not an integral and historic part of Serbia...
...So NATO members decided on their own to do it...
...If there is no oil in the spring there will be no crops in the fall...
...The just-war principles are designed to make the resort to war difficult, but not impossible...
...Tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians have died, not as immediate subjects for international television, but over time...
...Conversely, Serbian military authorities have deliberately put military installations close to civilians, so as to discourage bombing...
...These war casualties have to be included on the scales for deciding what is proportional to the good achieved or evil prevented...
...since the air strikes began, the NATO air force has had to be continually augmented, more than doubled...
...So, maybe what was begun did not adequately meet the criteria for a just war...
...As for responsibility, individually we can do something for the refugees...
...Such words may seem to make an unambiguous case for characterizing it as an unjust war...
...I am asking Commonweal to donate my fee for this article to Catholic Relief Services, earmarked for Kosovo...
...Second, whether or not the initial decision qualifies, what about decisions now to continue the war...
...First, does the decision to initiate the NATO bombing campaign qualify as a just war...
...No serious plans were made for the use of ground troops as enforcers...
...Catholic Bishops' Pastoral Letter, The Challenge of Peace, in 1983...
...If we continue, how do we do it...
...failure is an orphan...
...On a much lower level, it is even a tragedy for the peoples and governments of the NATO countries...
...Only a few months ago the State Department harshly characterized the Kosovo Liberation Army as "terrorist...
...People die from poverty...
...if so, it will remind us more of Vietnam than the Gulf War...
...The Serbs have the terrain, the motivation, and an army trained and equipped from the cold war years to resist any occupier, from east or west...
...The analogy to fighting World War II is just too facile...
...Milosevic knew from Iraq's Saddam Hussein what bombing could and could not do...
...Ethnic cleansing as practiced by Slobodan Milosevic probably is...
...It did, however, give him an incentive to do it thoroughly, 13 Some analysts estimate that already the bombing has destroyed material equivalent to more than a year's worth of the Yugoslavian gross national product...
...Not to mention, of course, its extreme aversion to a land war, where numerous American casualties would be certain...
...If bombing is a failure, do we have a right, or maybe an obligation, to continue the war on the ground by a strategy that gives better prospect of success...
...The real problem is the ethnic cleansing...
...Nonetheless, the military warned that no bombing campaign was likely to break Milosevic's will or capacity...
...Preventing or halting genocide provides the strongest motive...
...almost everyone involved is holding someone else responsible...
...There seems to be a lot of blame to go round, with professional incompetence or inattention from bottom to top...
...Democratic leaders who start wars that incur too many casualties are thrown out of office by the electorate, even if the wars are not actually lost...
...What were the vital interests that led us to the use of force...
...But even in the unlikely event that no civilians are killed directly when these targets are hit, the consequences for the civilian economy are dreadful...
...It is a test of strength—of power, will, and skill— that would not often be undertaken if both sides knew what the outcome would be...
...These two questions must be considered separately...
...teraction by the government...
...The Bosnian bombing was backed up by ground forces, but virtually no one in Washington was prepared to mount a Kosovo offensive with ground troops...
...Save for the occasional profiteer or war hero, everyone will lose...
...The $6 billion the administration has asked of Congress for the war is only a down payment...
...He did not cave in to the threat of bombing, nor to its extended actuality...
...This war, fought to prevent a humanitarian disaster among the Kosovar people who are being defended, confronts especially poignant difficulties...
...COMPETENT AUTHORITY M Nonintervention in the internal affairs of sovereign countries is a fundamental principle of international law...
...On this basis some analysts expected the threat of bombing, or perhaps a brief actual bombing campaign, to produce capitulation again...
...Karl von Clausewitz, the great strategist, talked about uncertainty and "the fog of war...
...To resettle the rest—whether in Kosovo or elsewhere—will cost many billions of dollars...
...but also suppose that it might have saved the lives of a "mere" five thousand Kosovar refugees...
...Preventing humanitarian disaster provides a better reason, better the more probable the disaster is...
...Relief for the refugees has been totally improvised, without prior preparation...
...Whatever their limitations, the traditional Christian standards for a just war, normative for Catholics who do not hold to an absolute renunciation of violence, present the best place to begin...
...NATO began with high marks in this respect, reflecting the enormous change in American strategic doctrine that was impelled by the reception of the U.S...
...But after six weeks of war, only two American or other allied soldiers had died—in a training accident...
...Arguably there was a special interest, for a Christian world facing Islamic fundamentalism, in intervening to prevent slaughter of a Muslim population...
...And in a war that still continues, it is not enough to debate the balance of blame...
...People die from poverty...
...hundreds of Yugoslavs have died as a result...
...Milosevic would happily rub his hands, and say that creation of a Kosovo populated exclusively by Serbs was well worth the price...
...Troubling questions arise from the way the war is being fought to avoid casualties to NATO...
...The United Nations Charter permits the Security Council to override the principle of nonintervention in case of a "threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression...
...Success has a thousand parents...
...Reasonable chance of success, like all the other criteria, cannot be applied in black-and-white terms, requiring that it always be observed to perfection...
...REASONABLE CHANCE OF SUCCESS ¦ Here is a bottom line: Was the decision to fight this war, in this way, taken under conditions where it could reasonably be expected to achieve its goals...
...I am inclined to that overall judgment, but not unambiguously...
...But should a reasonable person have regarded bombing as having a "reasonable chance" to succeed...
...Getting in JUST CAUSE ¦ NATO's purpose was to impose a "fair" political solution on the dispute, knowing that a failure to do so could produce ethnic cleansing, mass murder, and perhaps genocide for the Albanian population...
...meanwhile the journalistic inquiries are well underway...
...A land campaign may now be inevitable...
...KLA terror was not genocide...
...We are beginning to see the fingerpointing which accompanies failure...
...We don't, and can't, act militarily on humanitarian grounds everywhere...
...Arguably there was a special interest here, in trying to avoid a wider war in the Balkans...
...DISCRIMINATION Although inadvertent civilian casualties are likely in any major combat, it is never permissible to attack civilians deliberately...
...That's better than military action by a single country, but it does not carry the approval of the universal institution specifically authorized by the world to act...
...Certainly Milosevic bears direct moral and legal responsibility for these actions...
...15...
...The refugee columns hit by mistake are the least of it...
...PROPORTIONALITY This criterion has several aspects...
...Ultimately we will probably see a political inquiry into the muddle...
...It is hard to imagine the Western democracies ever again reverting to the deliberate population-targeting policies of World War II and the cold war—governments anticipate a vigorous condemnation from their own peoples...
...Yet, if we never reached agreement, we might at least reach a clearer understanding of how to weigh the positives and negatives the next time such a choice is presented...
...Will the people of Kosovo be better off if we stop...
...NATO has refrained, however, from attacking many military targets because there were too many civilians nearby...
...American aircraft were not allowed to conduct the kind of low-flying ground attacks that could seriously damage Serbian combat units and avoid civilians, because of the risk that planes would be shot down...
...Like it or not, this is now a major constraint on democracies fighting...
...Politics is always an uncertain business, and war is even more so...
...Merely imposing its own vision of a fair solution, in the case of a complex political conflict within a sovereign country, is dubious as a sufficient reason...
...Many potential targets fall into the gray area between a tank column and an apartment house...
...At what cost, to the Kosovars, to Serbians, to other countries in the region, and to ourselves...
...The initial NATO air forces were inadequate for a long or intense campaign...
...Serbian soldiers and Kosovar refugees die, but Americans and Western Europeans must not...
...We may not agree—but let's confront the tough issues, both to evaluate any settlement and to make better decisions the next time...
...He was principal consultant to the U.S...
...to create his own "final solution" to a centuries-old problem before NATO could stop him...
...Action against genocide makes an exception, and a right to prevent or halt lesser humanitarian crimes is emerging...
...Thousands of Kosovars may die from hunger and disease, despite the best efforts of relief organizations...
...Nor does reaching such a judgment provide an easy answer about what to do next...
...But China and Russia would not permit the Security Council to authorize a NATO military campaign...
...When the Western coalition bombs bridges, electrical plants, oil refineries, and mixed vehicle factories, one may accept as sincere the claim that these are facilities essential to the enemy's military machine, or owned by government leaders...
...One arises from the recognition that civilians do die from bombings, either when bombs hit an unintended target or when civilians are in the line of fire...
...Americans, and those of other democracies, are in the war and responsible not just for the consequences of what has happened so far, but for the consequences of stopping or continuing...
...Those who say they are "shocked, shocked" by this behavior in Kosovo are either knaves or fools...
...Neither side has clean hands...
...The policy of not targeting civilians deliberately, but rather focusing on military equipment, bases, troops, and industry, was made explicit and fairly rigorous in the air campaign against Iraq in 1991...
...As international law has evolved, a massive flow of refugees from ethnic cleansing qualifies...
...We could argue about that forever...
...If so, could we now simply stop the bombing, declare that Milosevic has paid a terrible price for his aggression, and go home...
...His program of ethnic cleansing would not have been so fast or overwhelming—as of early May, half the Albanian population of Kosovo had fled into neighboring countries, and hundreds of thousands more were homeless in their own country—but NATO's bombing did not cause it...
...But he responded differently in the Kosovo negotiations...
...Should that be required...
...Unless a failure in Kosovo makes us avert our eyes from every potential humanitarian disaster caused by dictatorships and ethnic hatreds, that choice will be presented to the world's superpower again...
...High-tech aircraft and guided missiles are extremely expensive...
...President Bill Clinton and other NATO leaders know it...
...Well before the bombing, Milosevic was known to be moving large units of troops and equipment into position to crush the KLA and to terrorize large portions of the Kosovo population into fleeing...
...In January, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright prepared a new proposal that demanded more of him than did Richard Holbrooke's October plan, which Milosevic had rejected...
Vol. 126 • May 1999 • No. 10
