Noam Chomsky's A New Generation Draws the Line and Michel Feher's Powerless by Design

...The book's basic purpose is to repudiate the idea that Kosovo signified the dawning of a new era of human rights...

...Perhaps, instead, we must approach policy in a more pragmatic and instrumental way, supporting policies—such as the Kosovo War—when they seem on balance to have beneficial effects, in spite of the limitations of the governments that pursue these policies for their own reasons...

...If Chomsky's conclusions about Kosovo itself— as distinct from the rhetoric of Clinton or Blair—are typically tendentious, at times they are positively grotesque...

...It succeeded in removing Serbian troops...

...Blair—in a speech that furnishes the title of Noam Chomsky's book—declared that "the new generation draws the line" in defense of human rights...

...Although he supports liberal seriousness about human rights and global politics, he raises important questions about whether liberals are too complacent about globalization...

...Chomsky is a brilliant linguist and a crafty logician...

...Occasionally Chomsky must admit that the "official story" of U.S...

...To imagine otherwise is foolish and naïve...

...It is about the hypocrisy of the United States and the "West" more generally...

...Feher offers a sharp critique of the rhetorical strategies of "powerlessness" articulated by liberals and the antiwar left...

...It is a critique of U.S...

...He points out how the "anti-imperialist" left was drawn to a peculiar and weak combination of legalistic, pacifist, and isolationist arguments against intervention, and how these opponents of the war offered no real account of the atrocities taking place in the Balkans and of what might be justifiable to end these atrocities...

...One can only hope that it receives the attention it deserves, and not a moment too soon...

...and the left, rightly, denounced this policy for its callousness...

...The position is so politically tone-deaf that it is hard to avoid the conclusion that it seeks a powerlessness by design...

...Chomsky is at his best when detailing the inconsistencies of American public officials...

...Thus, in the context of disputing official U.S...

...IF THIS WAY OF thinking is supremely relevant to thinking about human rights interventionism, it is even more relevant in the wake of the September 11 al Qaeda attacks...

...The U.S...

...One is that both liberals and the antiwar left need to rethink their positions...

...His latest book is Democracy in Hard Times...

...Their protests are a call for abstention at a time in which liberal democracy has been attacked by what Christopher Hitchens has rightly called "crypto-fascist" fundamentalist forces...

...At the same time, the war generated sharp disagreements within the Western left— as did the Gulf War—between those who supported it as a form of opposition to a brutal dictatorship and defense of human rights and those who opposed it as another instance of American arrogance and imperialism...

...establishing a policy of reconstruction and liberalization...

...Like all wars, it was prosecuted by states that had their own economic and strategic interests...

...The problem of developing a serious position on global politics and economics, Feher argues, remains before us and demands our attention...

...Like all wars, it was bloody and destructive...

...The Indonesian brutality in East Timor and Turkey's oppression of the Kurds are thus at the heart of Chomsky's treatment of Kosovo, because what interests Chomsky is neither Kosovo nor human rights but the sincerity of the official U.S...

...and, finally, (4) because the "conclusion" that Milosevic might imminently undertake another round of "ethnic cleansing" was not, as Chomsky implies, a foolish bit of deductive logic but a political judgment made on the basis of a great deal of historical evidence...

...Fixated on the historic culpabilities of U. S. policy and on the hypocrisies and dirty hands of the current regime, antiwar activists have simDISSENT / Winter 2002 n 14 ply refused to come to terms with the seriousness of the attack, the depth of the fear and outrage experienced by their fellow citizens, and the evil of the terrorist fanatics who planned and perpetrated the attack...

...This is a brilliant point, and also a correct one...

...On Chomsky's view it is NATO, with its bombing, that caused the horrors of the Kosovo War that it was supposedly seeking to prevent...

...The response of the antiwar left to this military policy of national defense has been to reiterate the exact same set of legalistic, pacifist, and isolationist arguments made during the Kosovo War...

...In the book's second and driving chapter, he makes the point with reference to East Timor, where for more than thirty years the U.S.-supported Indonesian government occupied East Timor and brutalized and destroyed the East Timorese people...

...foreign policy does not exhaust contemporary history and that real issues are at stake here...

...Chomsky argues that no aspect of NATO policy the botched diplomacy at Rambouillet, the "virtual war" of aerial bombardment, the precipitation of hundreds of thousands of Kosovar refugees, and the civilian casualties in Kosovo and Serbia itself—can be seen as the simple expression of noble and liberatory intentions, and that in many ways the war was prosecuted in a morally callous way, as one would expect of a war motivated by considerations of power...

...Chomsky effectively demonstrates that this rhetoric was overblown and that its proponents cannot be seen as the consistent and virtuous partisans of human rights they claimed to be...

...Then, later in the decade when, for complicated reasons, the United States and NATO abandoned this rhetoric in favor of the rhetoric of universal human rights and human rights interventionism and decided in fact to intervene against human rights abuses in Kosovo, the left did a volte-face and denounced intervention as imperialist...

...policy that is also a serious discussion of the Kosovo War...

...But it is a long step from the existence of plans and preparation to the conclusion that the plans will be implemented unless the planner is subjected to military attack...

...But, as Thomas Paine once said of Edmund Burke, nature has been kinder to him than he is to nature...

...He weaves together critical exegesis with discussion of Kosovo, diplomacy, and the war itself...

...But he is even more critical of its antiwar crit140 n DISSENT / Winter 2002 ics, who seemed unable to appreciate the significance of this shift, whatever its motives, and who simply could not bring themselves to take seriously the brutality of the Milosevic regime and the need to use force to oppose this regime's aggression...

...government responded to these terrorist attacks in the way any state, especially one that is democratically accountable, would respond—by striking back at the terror network and the state (Afghanistan) that has long harbored this network...

...My one quibble with his account is that in counterposing Clinton-Blair liberalism and the anti-imperialist left, he does not consider the admittedly marginal space of the democratic left, including Dissent, where a more nuanced position, less liable to the reversals of both Clinton and his antiwar opponents, could be found...

...NATO leaders— Tony Blair, Madeleine Albright, and Bill Clinton himself extolled the virtues of this unprecedented intervention...

...For him, all discussion serves this ultimate purpose...

...restoring the autonomy of Kosovo...

...These are all worthwhile results, eminently supportable by people serious about human rights, even if these results were secured by governments that did not have human rights as their primary concern...

...BOOKS foreign policy that he has made ever since the Vietnam War...

...CHOMSKY'S BOOK is not really about Kosovo, the Milosevic regime's policies of ethnic cleansing, or the difficult ethical and practical questions regarding how to stop these policies that confronted concerned citizens, human rights activists, and policy makers in the spring of 1999...

...Feher argues that we should "do away with the idea that the ultimate goal of political activism consists of being governed by the authentic representatives of one's own values and ideals...

...142 n DISSENT / Winter 2002...

...Feher's argument centers around the following irony: in the early 1990s the United States and NATO turned a blind eye to "ethnic cleansing" in Bosnia and Rwanda, claiming that such murderousness was deeply rooted in ethnic grievances and thus beyond political intervention...

...But it is worth mentioning that this idea offers a fine way to understand the Kosovo War and why it was worth supporting...

...And in the book's third and final chapter he makes the point in connection with the Kosovo War itself...

...And although he chastises the lack of seriousness of the antiwar left about global politics, he applauds the critical approach to capitalist globalization articulated by many of these activists...

...Its many ramifications are beyond the scope of this review...

...For seventy-eight days, its military forces led by the United States—bombed Serbia and Serbian forces in Kosovo to put an end to Slobodan Milosevic's brutal reign of terror in that province, to force the withdrawal of Serb troops from Kosovo, and to restore Kosovo's autonomy within the Yugoslavian Federation...

...It is only by recognizing that governments are not meant to represent them that nongovernmental activists will be able to give precedence to the prevention of what they deem intolerable over their stake in either redeeming or condemning the agencies that have the power to prevent it...

...The job of a serious left, he suggests, is to promote its values and to seek to influence politics, without imagining that it is possible to fully subject politics to these values...

...The war was fought to restrain an oppressive regime that was a severe human rights abuser...

...JEFFREY C. ISAAC teaches political science and directs the Center for the Study of Democracy and Public Life at Indiana University...

...In this instance—by no means the only oneChomsky, through his rhetoric and his use of DISSENT / Winter 2002 • 139 BOOKS innuendo, pursues two goals: to absolve himself of any implication that he is an apologist for Milosevic (whose evil supposedly "has scarcely been in doubt"), and to provide an exculpation for Milosevic, who is presented as merely an unfortunate and hapless leader of a small country, in possession of "strategic plans" [for national defense?], who is attacked by an arbitrary and overbearing imperial power that could have and should have done otherwise (for it is supposedly "a long step" to the conclusion that Milosevic might do evil...

...frame, and these examples demonstrate that this frame is not applied consistently and sincerely...

...States, in other words, even under the influence of the best governments, are interested in power...

...But he never seriously considers the principle, or what being serious about it might entail, or the range of those who may subscribe to it...

...Perhaps the left should abandon the idea that particular state policies should be supported only when they are "sincere" or "noble" or fully consistent with humane values or a "progressive" agenda (whatever that might be...

...For it is satisfied to mock politicians for their moralizing rather than to comment on the real problems of human rights and global politics...

...Feher is highly critical of the Clinton administration—and its liberal supporters—for the opportunism of its shift...

...For the proponents of this view, Feher's book is a powerful antidote...

...The war, for complex reasons, came to be defended in terms of human rights...

...A NEW GENERATION DRAWS THE LINE: Kosovo, EAST TIMOR AND THE STANDARDS OF THE WEST by Noam Chomsky Verso, 2000 145 pp $23 POWERLESS BY DESIGN: THE AGE OF THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY by Michel Feher Duke University Press, 2000 167 pp $14.95 paper ON MARCH 24, 1999, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization undertook the first war in its history...

...As most readers of Dissent will recognize, in making these arguments, Chomsky reiterates the same critique of U.S...

...In the same manner, Chomsky cites authors with whom he clearly disagrees about other important matters— Samuel P. Huntington on the perils of a Wilsonian foreign policy, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn on Western arrogance toward the Slays, rightwing Israelis on how Serbia should no more be punished for its treatment of Kosovars than Israel should be punished for its displacement of Palestinians in 1948—because these authors make the only point that matters in his book: that American officials are insincere...

...Milosevic, it would seem, had little choice but to set his "plans" in motion once the bombs fell...

...138 n DISSENT / Winter 2002 For the latter group, the writings of Noam Chomsky served as a touchstone...

...arrogance and hypocrisy pure and simple...

...Furthermore, the war strengthened a growing global discourse and practice of human rights, helping to legitimate human rights activism and human rights conventions...

...Beyond his illuminating discussion of Kosovo, Feher draws two interesting broader political conclusions...

...The launching point of Chomsky's critique is the self-serving rhetoric of Clinton, Blair, & Co...

...assertions regarding the timing of the NATO intervention, and of questioning whether the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Kosovars was a cause or a consequence of the NATO bombing campaign, Chomsky avers "That Milosevic had plans `of truly evil proportions' for Kosovo has scarcely been in doubt...

...And this defense, although hypocritically trumpeted by public officials, was plausible...

...The war was unprecedented, the first time that a major military campaign was undertaken against a sovereign state in order to stop crimes against humanity within the territory of that state...

...The Chomskyan critique holds the state to an impossibly high standard...

...3) because in fact Milosevic had already demonstrated his willingness to implement such "evil" plans, in Bosnia in the early 1990s and in Kosovo in 1998, where it is beyond dispute that villages were razed and hundreds of thousands of Kosovars were driven from their homes at the point of a gun...

...But, most important, it is a critique of the Chomskyan, "anti-imperialist" position adopted by large segments of the left...

...2) because it absolves the Milosevic regime of all responsibility for a brutal and perhaps genocidal policy to describe this as merely a "strategic plan" prepared in response to the "credible threats" of a "reigning superpower," that is, the United States...

...The names may change, but the story remains the same—a tale of official U.S...

...In the book's first chapter, Chomsky makes this point by invoking the examples of Turkey, Colombia, Israel, and other places where the United States and NATO have not pursued a policy of human rights interventionism but have been complacent about or even supportive of human rights abuse...

...and it fueled a belated, but still significant, peacekeeping intervention in East Timor...

...It is also hardly in doubt that in March 1999, under constant and highly credible threats of bombing and invasion by the reigning superpower and the military alliance it dominates, Serbian military forces were preparing to carry out such plans in...

...MICHEL FEHER'S Powerless By Design is everything that Chomsky's book is not...

...and helping to weaken, and eventually to undermine, the Milosevic regime...

...This is a remarkably bizarre claim for a number of reasons: (1) because the "evil" of Milosevic's plans had very much been called into doubt by critics of the war, including Chomsky, who devoted all of their attention to challenging official NATO rationales and none to analyzing the history and record of the Milosevic regime, and who maintained that Milosevic was really beside the point, the point being American imperialism...

...These consequences of the war, on balance, were good, in spite of the fact that the states and alliances that secured them were not an unambiguous agency of good...

...One would be hard-pressed to imagine a position better suited to reproducing irrelevance, marginality, and powerlessness...

...In A New Generation Draws the Line, as in his 1999 The New Military Humanism, Chomsky offers a strident critique of the Kosovo War and of the idea of human rights interventionism that served as its principal rationale...

...foreign policy even as it was shifting and their lack of seriousness about the world or the changes taking place in it...

...Feher offers a careful critique of these critics, focusing much of his attention on the war coverage in the Nation (he rightly exempts Christopher Hitchens and Ian Williams...

...His book is a superb example of judicious and serious political argument...

...Chomsky's text is too clever, and thus it is not serious...

...What held these opponents together was their consistent opposition to U.S...

...Second, Feher argues that those on the left BOOKS need to rethink their relationship to the state...

...He notes in passing, for example, the principle—associated with the Clinton administration, but also with UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, and indeed with many human rights advocates— that "sovereignty may now be disregarded in the interest of defending human rights," and observes that "the proclaimed principle has merit, or would, if it were upheld in a way that honest people could take seriously...