The Lessons of A 'War
of Values'
The fighting in Kosovo has ended, but the
debate over why NATO fought—to defend humanitarian
principles—is just getting started
By Michael
Elliott
"It is a worse truth than we had dared
dream of," said Bill Clinton in Cologne last Friday, at
the end of a week marked by numbing discoveries of atrocities
in Kosovo. In the wake of the horror, it is natural to
conclude that Kosovo was a just war; that NATO was right to
fight against those who were capable of such barbarity. When
he heard what the troops had found last week, Clinton himself
said to aides that if NATO had not intervened, "We
wouldn't have been able to sleep at night." Those of us
who were uneasy about a war in which no NATO country had a
pressing national interest at stake will now be expected to
admit that we were wrong. The abiding sentiment is that
expressed by British Prime Minister Tony Blair in Cologne,
proud that the West was "prepared to stand up for the
values of civilization and justice." But the debate over
"humanitarian" wars—wars, in Blair's phrase, not
of interests but values—has only just begun. At Clinton's
request, the National Security Council is looking at the
circumstances in which one can or should fight such wars. The
NSC is studying the Rwandan genocide of 1994—which haunts
Clinton—to see if anything could have been done to stop the
killing. That is the right thing to do; if we want no more
Kosovos, an honest assessment of the risks and benefits of
humanitarian intervention is vital.
In today's world, "wars of values"
are the only wars that many nations will ever be asked to
fight. There is, for example, no conceivable military threat
to the national interest of the Netherlands or Canada. If such
nations are to have armed forces at all, their primary mission
is bound to be humanitarian. Increasingly, the great world
wars of this century—wars in which national survival was
genuinely at stake—look like aberrations rather than the
norm.
But humanitarian wars raise at least three
troubling questions. First, whose human rights are worth
waging a war to defend? The New York Times editorial page last
week argued that such intervention "should be confined to
cases where violence is extreme and threatens to engulf
neighboring nations and where democratic nations have the
means... to respond." Extraordinarily, the Times then
continued: "The combination will be rare outside
Europe." But if that is the conclusion, then the premises
must be wrong. Human rights are human rights, whatever the
color, ethnicity or religion of the human beings involved.
Rwandans, Chechens and Timorese have no less right to be
protected from oppressive governments than Kosovar Albanians.
It is not worth going to war for any doctrine that implies the
opposite.
Yet the universality of human rights raises
a second question. If the rich world thinks it is right to
intervene anywhere to protect the oppressed, how does it
protect itself from the charge of imperialism? We have been
here before: part of the justification for the French and
British colonial wars of the last century was to bring
European "light" to African and Asian
"darkness." To put it mildly, such generosity was
not much welcomed by its supposed beneficiaries. How can we
now avoid that trap? Here Kosovo provides a useful lesson.
During the war the German and other governments insisted, at
every turn, that anything that NATO did or might do needed the
sanction of international law. In practice, that will usually
mean that no humanitarian war should be waged without explicit
backing from the United Nations.
Third: how should we wage a humanitarian
war? One answer: not like Kosovo. We will never have a true
audit of the atrocities; never know how many Kosovars would
have been killed by Serbs if NATO had never started bombing.
But it is plain that the slow, uncertain start of the air
campaign extended the Serbs' killing time. NATO's lack of
preparation can now be measured in dead children. The
implication of this truth is genuinely unsettling. If an evil
government is prepared to kill those it does not like, then it
must be stopped from doing so early and quickly. (Cologne is a
good place to relearn that old lesson; while appeasers in the
rest of the world did nothing, the city cheered Hitler's
troops when they reoccupied the Rhineland in 1936.) Kosovar
lives would have been saved if, in the first days of the war,
NATO had bombed Serbia as hard as it later did, while massing
troops in preparation for an all-out invasion. Humanitarian
wars, it seems, must be waged by blitzkrieg.
Yet in the case of Kosovo, such a war might
have killed thousands of Serbs. They would not have been
butchered and raped, not mown down by their neighbors—but in
the rubble and twisted girders of their bombed homes, they
would have died, just the same. As the studies of Kosovo
begin, it is worth remembering the oldest truth of all:
whatever adjective you stick in front of it, war is terrible.
Some wars are necessary; some wars are just. No war is good.
With John Barry in Washington and Debra
Rosenberg with Clinton
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