Noam Chomsky's The New Military Humanism

...The Czech president told the Canadian Parliament that "this is probably the first war that has not been waged in the name of 'national interests,' but rather in the name of principles and values...

...Chomsky is intent on challenging the claim that NATO acted in Kosovo to protect human rights by bringing to light inconvenient facts...

...There is a strong case to be made against the way the Kosovo issue was resolved...

...Some officials on some occasions said they were caught off guard...

...When Milosevic launched the war in Kosovo at the end of February 1998, it was rightly seen by human rights advocates, Western governments, and NATO as the renewal of a war, and the potential renewal of genocide, in which the fundamental issues remained constant: hegemony for Serbia and the perpetuation of rule by Milosevic...

...By telling us that "Havel had revealed the ethical standards that ground his insights and moral lessons ten years earlier, immediately after his fellow dissidents were brutally murdered in El Salvador, and the United States had invaded Panama, killing and destroying...

...Yet in deciding to intervene militarily in Kosovo, the United States, Britain, and other Western governments by-passed the Security Council because they feared a veto by Russia or China...

...To celebrate these grand events, Havel flew to Washington to address a joint session of Congress where he received a thunderous standing ovation for lauding 'the defender of freedom' that had armed and trained the murderers of the Jesuit intellectuals and tens of thousands of others...

...Yet that doesn't excuse the governments that sponsored the Rambouillet talks, the negotiators, or the media that covered the negotiations for failing to call attention to a provision of the agreement that intruded on the sovereignty of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in a manner that seems to go well beyond what was necessary to protect the Kosovar Albanians...

...In Yugoslavia, this provided a basis to denounce the intervention as a violation of international law...

...And it is inconceivable that the intervention would have taken place without it...

...This was paragraph 8 of Annex B, which provided that NATO personnel shall enjoy, together with their vehicles, vessels, aircraft, and equipment, free and unrestricted passage and unimpeded access throughout the FRY [Federal Republic of Yugoslavia] including associated airspace and territorial waters...

...and he launched a particularly devastating war in Bosnia in 1992...

...Secondarily, the bombing was undertaken to complete Washington's "substantial takeover of Europe" and to stimulate defense spending...

...Chomsky says that in "the massive US coverage of the war" he found "no report of those terms that was near accurate...

...Only in the distorted Manichean world of Noam Chomsky...

...The issue is also raised by Chomsky, though in less categorical terms and without the sneering tone that characterizes much of the rest of his book...

...Chomsky does not accept the possibility that anyone who disagrees with him could be ethically motivated...

...Of the 19 op-eds and editorials in The Washington Post and The New York Times in the two weeks preceding the bombings, the possibility of a bloody crackdown inside Kosovo was mentioned in just three one-line references...

...Concerns about human rights could not be the basis for NATO's bombing, according to Chomsky, because only some two thousand civilians were killed in Kosovo by Serb troops in the year prior to the bombing and only some two hundred thousand to three hundred thousand were forcibly displaced...

...In fact, when I learned about it from some of the materials emanating from Belgrade during the war, I was skeptical, imagining that this was misinformation disseminated by the Milosevic regime...

...Our thoughts were elsewhere...

...Henkin is concerned, as is Chomsky, that claims that humanitarian intervention is required may be made in circumstances that are "ambiguous, involving uncertainties of fact and motive...

...Atrocities reached genocidal proportions...

...he cemented his authority by unilaterally canceling their autonomy and the autonomy of another territory with a large population of non-Serbs, Vojvodina, precipitating the breakup of Yugoslavia...

...This supports their claim that they acted to stop ethnic cleansing...

...The omission was probably not as crucial as Chomsky believes...

...The last of these alone resulted in some two million refugees and two hundred thousand deaths, the great majority at the hands of forces DISSENT / Spring 2000 n III BOOKS created by Milosevic...

...The treaty does not restrict the duty to prevent this crime to actions authorized by the Security Council...

...ARYEH NEIER is president of the Open Society Institute and author of War Crimes: Brutality, Genocide, Terror and the Struggle for Justice...

...However that need is addressed, Chomsky is surely right to argue that "there is a heavy burden of proof to meet in undertaking the threat or use of force...

...Though I did no search of the literature, I did pay close attention to accounts of the Rambouillet negotiations in three daily newspapers and recall no discussion of this passage...

...One of the most outspoken proponents was Vaclav Havel...

...As it happens, Henkin addressed the specific question of the intervention in Kosovo in the October 1999 edition of the American Journal of International Law, which probably was published too late for Chomsky to take it into account in his book...

...112 n DISSENT / Spring 2000...

...It was NATO's occupation of Kosovo and the prospect that this would lead to the separation of the territory from Serbia that concerned them...

...he launched wars in 1991 against Slovenia and Croatia...

...Whatever one thinks of Chomsky's analysis of the rationale for the war, he does call attention to some inconvenient facts...

...The lesson of Kosovo, from Henkin's standpoint, is that there is a "compelling need to address the deficiencies in the law and practice of the UN Charter...

...I don't recall any of them saying that the reason they would not sign at Rambouillet was that the proposed agreement gave NATO free DISSENT / Spring 2000 n 109 BOOKS access to all of Yugoslavia...

...According to Chomsky, the real reasons for the twelve-week, spring 1999 bombing campaign in Kosovo and Serbia proper were conventional...

...Milosevic's spokespersons were interviewed frequently in that period on CNN and on other broadcast media...

...Journalist and human rights researcher Samantha Power made this point as the expulsions were underway (New Republic, April 26 and May 3, 1999): In the weeks before March 24, reporters, human rights monitors, congressmen, and analysts examined just about every issue except the fate of the ethnic Albanians on whose ostensible behalf NATO would intervene...

...One might ask, Did Havel, in the first flush of the triumph of the Velvet Revolution, really fly to Washington to celebrate the murder of the Jesuits in El Salvador...

...Yet the most serious flaw in Chomsky's argument lies not in his ad hominem attacks on Havel, Timothy Garton Ash, Elie Wiesel, and others who disagree with him, repugnant as these are, but in his systematic disregard of an inconvenient fact that undermines his argument...

...For this, Chomsky sets out to prove that Havel is virtually a war criminal...

...THE NEW MILITARY HUMANISM: LESSONS FROM Kosovo by Noam Chomsky Common Courage Press, 1999, 199 pp $15.95 FARLY IN Noam Chomsky's diatribe against NATO's military intervention in I Kosovo, he cites George Orwell's preface to Animal Farm...

...The governmental failure was more than matched by the failure of the punditocracy to focus on this question in the period leading up to the war...

...Chomsky's point, made particularly in a discussion of forced displacement in Colombia and of Turkish abuses against the Kurds, is that crimes comparable to or worse than those committed by Serbia in Kosovo are systematically tolerated by the United States and its allies...

...Chomsky quotes Louis Henkin (of whom he writes that "In the scholarly disciplines of international affairs and international law it would be hard to find more respected voices") as pointing out that "Even 'humanitarian intervention' can too readily be used as the occasion or pretext for aggression . . . . Human rights, I believe, will have to be vindicated, and other injustices remedied, by other, peaceful means, not by opening the door to aggression and destroying the principal advance in international law, the outlawing of war and the prohibition of force...

...Terrible things have occurred in Colombia and Turkey, and the United States may be properly denounced by Chomsky for its support for the governments responsible...

...Orwell discussed the way that "unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without any need for any official ban" by a "general tacit agreement that it wouldn't do to mention that particular fact...

...Chomsky could have acknowledged the history in ex-Yugoslavia that inspired the advocates of humanitarian intervention and still argued against NATO's bombing...

...The most significant, I believe, is a provision of the Rambouillet Peace Agreement that, he says, was unreported by the American media either in advance of March 24 when the bombing began or, indeed, while the war was underway...

...In this connection it should be noted that the 1948 Genocide Convention, a UN-sponsored treaty ratified by 129 governments (including Yugoslavia and all members of NATO), provides that "The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish (emphasis added...

...It seems important to him, therefore, to discredit moral leaders who supported the NATO bombing...

...ALTHOUGH THESE are important issues, Chomsky's discussion of them is almost obscured in the torrent of accusations he makes against the United States and its allies in the British government of Prime Minister Tony Blair for their sponsorship or neglect of abuses of human rights worldwide in the last half century...

...This shall include, but not be limited to, the right of bivouac, maneuver, billet, and utilization of any area or facilities as required for support, training and operations...

...As bad or worse took place in many other countries whose governments are backed by the United States...

...Incredibly, of the 120 Kosovo-related questions asked by reporters at State Department briefings in the three days preceding the bombing, only one related to the fate of the Kosovar Albanians, and it focused on those Albanians who might cross into neighboring countries...

...But it is an inconvenient fact for his thesis, and he does not mention it...

...Article 2 (4) of the charter states that "All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations," and other articles reserve to the Security Council the determination that there are threats to the common interest that warrant the use of force...

...It is inconceivable that Havel and other proponents of human rights would have supported NATO intervention in Kosovo were it not for this history...

...Henkin points out that "the principles of law, and the interpretation of the Charter that prohibit unilateral humanitarian intervention do not reflect a conclusion that the sovereignty of the target state stands higher in the scale of values of contemporary international society than the human rights of its inhabitants to be protected from genocide IO • DISSENT / Spring 2000 BOOKS and massive crimes against humanity...

...First and foremost, he argues, the purpose was to sustain NATO's status in the post-cold war era...

...Although Chomsky scores a few points, the case is not made in this book because he omits the main argument of those who differ with him and refuses to accept that they have any but the basest of motives...

...The Serb leader rose to power a dozen years before the Kosovo war by playing the card of nationalism and ethnic hatred against the Kosovar Albanians...

...An inconvenient fact that has received some attention, but not enough, is the apparent conflict between the provisions of the United Nations Charter respecting the use of force and military intervention to protect human rights...

...On the one hand, it has seemed important to Western leaders to stress that plans for the forcible expulsion of some eight hundred thousand Albanians were well underway before the bombing began...

...Another inconvenient fact Chomsky brings to light is the contradictory information on whether NATO leaders knew in advance that bombing would lead to a sharp intensification of Serb attacks on the Kosovar Albanians...

...That war was finally terminated by the November 1995 Dayton Peace Accords, which Milosevic accepted after, and as a direct consequence of, NATO bombing...

...But it is dishonest to argue that intervention in Kosovo was not justified by the toll in deaths and displacement in that territory without also pointing out that, after NATO sat by for more than three years before interfering decisively in Bosnia, many persons in and out of government were determined not to allow a repetition in Kosovo...

...On the other hand, they need to explain their unreadiness to cope with the crisis caused by the rapid expulsion of such vast numbers...

...What is left out, of course, is that Kosovo was one chapter—though perhaps not the last chapter—in a decade-long military campaign against non-Serbs by the government of President Slobodan Milosevic...

...I think he is right...

...Therefore, Chomsky argues, concerns about human rights could not be the basis for NATO's intervention in Kosovo...