The Danger of Good Intentions

...Simple charity had come full circle...

...But modem industrial warfare may well be leading us, with each technological advance, a step closer to our own annihilation...

...Even criminals and thugs thrive in the newly lawless atmosphere...

...He respects soldiers like General Wesley K. Clark, who was instrumental in bringing about the U.S.' belated Kosovo intervention...

...Rieff makes his case in an at times emotional and complex text that interweaves history, analyses, asides, and much insider jousting...

...He leads us from early Western notions of simple "charity" and "service" to the emergence of the scrupulously nonpartisan International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in 1863...

...Is it useful to rail against the rapidly changing power relationships of our day because a less complicated humanitarianism tends not to be feasible any longer...

...To unravel that contradiction, Hedges distills the harsh lessons he has learned on the front lines into a loosely structured, starkly illuminating anatomy of war...

...each demonizes the other and reduces its enemies to objects...

...War can only be sustained, Hedges affirms, by imbuing events with meanings they do not have...

...The story broadens as the inadequacies of Third World development efforts become apparent...

...to the Cold War, when aid organizations like the International Rescue Committee came to be seen as the humanitarian arm of America's anti-Soviet struggle...

...to its highly controversial maintenance of the posture in World War II, when it remained silent about the Nazi horrors it was uncovering, including the gas chambers...

...Challenging the nationalist line is characteristically branded as unpatriotic...

...Hedges' title...

...Nationalism, of course, is the usual catalyst...

...in Bosnia, they were the essential detonators and main beneficiaries...

...Chris Hedges, a New York Times war correspondent, and David Rieff, a deeply dedicated humanitarian, also speak in their respective books from beyond the mediadelimited cocoon that defines "reality" for most of us...

...But once the myth is pricked, as happened in Vietnam, visions clear and the war is deflated...

...These qualities may not always triumph or avert massive damage, but they can at least help expose the myths and keep us human, as the author's most moving stories demonstrate...

...All this leads Rieff to reluctantly line up against those who want contemporary humanitarianism to lead the way to a universe based on shared standards of decency...

...In a future that he expects to be as bad or worse than the present, plain vanilla humanitarianism, "mere charity" without grand objectives should be honor enough, he maintains, as Bertholt Brecht suggests in the sober poem that provides the book's title: A few people have a bed for the night, For a night the wind is kept from them The snow meant for them falls on the roadway But it won't change the world It won Ì improve relations among men It will not shorten the age of exploitation...

...Human rights endeavors are now highly regarded and not easily shunted aside, as the Bush Administration's uphill struggle against the fledgling International Criminal Court has made clear...

...Many then looked to "humanitariamsm" to fill the vacuum...

...367 pp...

...It focuses on the humanitarian organizations' compromised roles in Kosovo and Afghanistan -where, by welcoming the use of force to open the way for relief, the humanitarians became sponsors of the violence their efforts were intended to heal...

...He says his new book, A Bed for the Night, was "begun in despair and completed...

...Overall in the 20th century, he further notes, besides the 43 million military personnel who were killed, 62 million civilians perished in wars and murderous repressions...

...Frequently this has involved risking his life, particularly during the mindlessly ferocious fighting in Bosnia and Kosovo...

...That brings him to the final section of his book titled "The Death of a Good Idea...

...Hedges is distressed by what he perceives to be an inclination in this country to portray all Muslims as having violent tendencies...

...In the former Yugoslavia, for instance, it was Slobodan Milosevic's TV propaganda, much more than the famous "ancient hatreds," that unleashed battles between its ethnic groups...

...On the other hand...

...26.00...

...and "ideology" proves to be no saving grace either...

...Further complicating matters is the fact that most humanitarian outfits have compromised their independence-not only from the media, whose coverage is vital for raising funds, but from various governments and the UN, who make them witting or unwitting partners in their wars and other causes by providing access to crisis situations, economic assistance and logistical support...

...Reviewed by George Jaeger Former U.S...

...One of them, for instance, tells of a Serb mother in a hostile Muslim enclave whose baby was saved by Feizic, a toothless Muslim peasant...

...wish he had probed more deeply into the circumstances that justify war, a pressing moral issue as the U.S...

...In victory or defeat, when the miasmas of "mythic reality" dissipate, yesterday's causes become less relevant or urgent...

...In sum, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning is actually a pained, personal testament and prophetic warning...

...The impersonal Jap, Kraut, Vietcong, or Serb again becomes an individual, and the exhilarating addiction to war slowly wears off...

...Bernard Kouchner's founding of Médecins sans Frontières in 1971 marked a fundamental rejection of the ICRC's neutrality notions: doctors and their support staff were free to report such events as the presumed Biafran genocide...

...Rieff traces those high hopes through the co-options, compromises and bloody betrayals of Bosnia and Rwanda...

...Largely benign in periods of peace, the creation myths of a nation are stoked for war through absurd exaggerations and distortions, then amplified and propagated by the government, the cinema and media, dramatic performances, schools, etc...

...In other ways, too, life gradually returns to "normal," but there is no escaping what Plato said: "Only the dead have seen the end of war...

...But Hedges' basic message-that war is a dangerously seductive drug and has to be handled with extraordinary care-remains crucially important as new illusions take us into their grip· David Rieff is also deeply disturbed by what he has witnessed as a journalist, human rights investigator and analyst of humanitarian undertakings in Bosnia, Abkhazia, Rwanda, Angola, Tajikistan, the Congo, Kosovo, the Sudan, and Afghanistan...

...UN relief agencies and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are therefore increasingly perceived as partisan facilitators rather than independent aid givers in often morally ambiguous conflicts...

...Ultimately, Hedges concludes, the only antidotes to war's inhumanity and self-destruction are humility, compassion and brave acts of love...

...In attempting to break the vicious cycle of misery and rescue, the movement has turned the once simple idea of helping people survive in a cruel world into a dysfunctional catchall for "the thwarted aspirations" of our age...

...War Is a Force Timi Gives Us Meaning, is awkward and somewhat misleading, but it would be a mistake to let that put you off...

...Utopias are fables, he says...

...The result is a collective addiction to the drug of war, an oversimplified mass belief and hyperexcitement that legitimizes destruction, slaughter and depravity...

...They are real people among whom the authors lived and worked, whose harsh fates, scarred psyches and too often ghastly deaths became an immanent part of their world landscape...

...As a war progresses, glorification of the nationalist myth often obliterates a country's culture and memory...

...Untold millions more were permanently injured, raped or otherwise marred...

...It is perhaps the most sweeping commentary to date on the rise, transformations and prospects of Western aid efforts...

...Those sobering numbers underlie Hedges' concern: "Our cultivated conventions and little lies of civility lull us into a refined and idealistic view of ourselves...

...These "mythic realities" are essential to suspending the normal rules of human behavior and justifying the may hem and personal sacrifices war entails...

...Defeats are turned into signposts to victory...

...Rieff's message is that independent humanitarian organizations are able to do many things well, but have overreached themselves in trying to resolve conflicts, advance social and economic justice, and serve as the principal advocates of international law and human rights: While those goals are worthy, he argues, they are hopelessly Utopian and fly in the face of harsh power realities...

...Some may complain that Hedges should have devoted more space to the roles governments, the UN, and especially the world's major powers must play to prevent and limit conflicts...

...Fair enough...

...diplomat and NATO Deputy Assistant Secretary General for Political Affairs In his well-known works on human mythology, Joseph Campbell wrote of the universal hero who descends into the horrors of the unknown and brings back new insights and important truths...

...For a while Vietnam purged us of a dangerous hubris, he writes, but "now, once again, the message is slipping away...

...Their Bosnians, Hutus, Palestinians, Iraqis, Sudanese, Yemenites, Kurds, Kosovars, Afghans, or Central Americans are not TV abstractions...

...Midsummer press reports of State Department invitations to NGOs to bid on contracts for humanitarian projects that are expected to materialize in the wake of the proposed Iraq war vividly illustrate the point...

...We have no choice but to keep on trying...

...and the list goes on...

...Wouldn't it be better to do what is possible, even if that involves scaling down ideals, than to limit oneself to the bleak austerities of Brechts "A Bed for the Night...

...in whatever state of mind that lies beyond despair...

...or regret that he does not go on to explore the arrogance being generated by current perceptions of American hegemony...

...Indeed, the first to be suppressed are usually not enemy voices, useful to the state as foils, but skeptics at home who raise awkward questions...

...And despite detesting war, he argues that where the industrial nations can save lives-notably in such places as Sri Lanka, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Rwanda, and Bosnia-they have a responsibility to take quick and effective action...

...The essays they have written, although quite different, both recall old verities and convey cautionary messages about war and our obligations to one another as human beings...

...Rieff himself raises these agonizing moral and practical questions again and again...

...The retrogressions notwithstanding, isn't it true that much has been accomplished...

...A member of the Times team that won a Pulitzer Prize this year for its examination of global terrorism, he has covered nearly every major conflict that has erupted since he received a Master of Divinity degree from Harvard in the 1980s...

...And yet, are we really dealing here with an either/or situation...

...Each side comes to see itself as the embodiment of absolute goodness...

...In addition, he is worried that 9/11 will lead us into new rounds of dangerously oversimplified rhetoric and myths "which can render us as blind and callous as some of those we battle...

...moves toward a posture of pre-emptive strikes...

...A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis By David Rieff Simon & Schuster...

...wars, genocides and famines continue to increase...

...In his Introduction Hedges cites the human cost of the past decade's seamless series of disasters: 2 million dead in Afghanistan, 1.5 million in Sudan, 800,000 in 90 days in Rwanda, 500,000 in Angola, 250,000 in Bosnia, 200,000 in Guatemala...

...The task would be easier if this book were more rigorously edited, and supplemented with hard data on what has been and might be accomplished...

...Defying his angry, war-ravaged Muslim community, he knocked shyly on the woman's door with milk in hand, not once but many times, and assured the child's survival...

...In the end their answers, despite his pessimism, rest with each reader...

...Throughout he illustrates it with intensely honest, often beautifully written accounts of his experiences, plus deeper reflections on their universality drawn from Homer, Plato, Shakespeare, and the moderns...

...Still, Hedges is neither devoid of hope nor a pacifist...

...The killing is thus made easy, but communication is impossible...

...In any event, the issues Rieff and Hedges raise need to be pursued...