Statecraft. Margaret Thatcher

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СКАЧАТЬ return of Aristide. The operation, code-named ‘Operation Restore Democracy’ and hailed by President Clinton as a ‘victory for freedom around the world’, was unfortunately in truth much less than either. Aristide was no democrat, but rather an extreme left-wing authoritarian, and Haiti has since made little progress under him or his chosen successor towards legality, honesty or stability. America has spent $3 billion in Haiti but the place is still plagued by ignorance, poverty and corruption, and is an active centre of drug-trafficking. The best one can say of the intervention in Haiti is that it was a modestly useful venture in US immigration control.

      Since Haiti, it has been the situation in the Balkans that has dominated debate about the means, scale and objectives of international intervention. Sixty thousand US and European troops were deployed in Bosnia in the wake of the 1995 Dayton agreement and, despite Congress’s misgivings and the present administration’s evident impatience, there has so far been no large-scale withdrawal.

      On top of the continuing commitment to enforce and maintain the peace in Bosnia came the NATO operation in Kosovo in spring 1999. That campaign signified three important further developments in the conduct of interventions.

      First, military action was taken without clear authorisation by the UN Security Council. Admittedly, several earlier UN resolutions, which talked of the need to act to prevent a destabilising catastrophe, could be used to provide a degree of legal cover.* Kosovo was, however, different in that no attempt was made to gain UN Security Council authority for the use of ‘all necessary means’ (i.e. force) before the operation. In this regard, it marked a major departure from the approach adopted in the Gulf in 1990. Similarly, NATO, which had hitherto been considered a defensive alliance without an ability to act ‘out of area’, was the organisation in whose name the war was conducted. Thus there was a quite different legal and institutional framework for intervention to that in the Gulf.

      Secondly, and consequently, the Kosovo campaign was described and justified from the outset as a ‘humanitarian intervention’. There was, of course, at one level a rather disingenuous reason for this: emphasis upon humanitarianism rather than the use of force avoided awkward questions about the need for explicit UN authorisation (which was not, in fact, forthcoming because of Russian and Chinese obstruction). Moreover, the notion of a humanitarian tragedy leading to a threat to international peace and stability, and thus to legitimate international intervention in a sovereign state’s affairs, had been evoked already in recent years in Somalia, Haiti and Bosnia. But coercive humanitarian intervention, which had hitherto been a novel doctrine of uncertain scope and fuzzy legality, now began to be declared the basis of a revived if undeclared New World Order.

      Above all, the doctrine was warmly embraced and loudly proclaimed by such enthusiasts for assertive internationalism as Britain’s Prime Minister, Tony Blair. In his speech to the Economic Club of Chicago in April 1999, Mr Blair claimed to be ‘witnessing the beginnings of a new doctrine of international community’. He noted that ‘we cannot refuse to participate in global markets if we want to prosper’ – which is true. He added that ‘we cannot ignore new ideas in other countries if we want to innovate’ – which is not strictly true at all, though an unexceptionable piece of flannel. But his final thought, that ‘we cannot turn our backs on conflicts and the violation of human rights within other countries if we want still to be secure’, is patently an oversimplification.

      We may believe that it is right to intervene to stop suffering inflicted by rulers on their subjects, or by one ethnic group on another: I am sure that it sometimes was, and is. And we may believe that we should be prepared to intervene in order to preserve our security, or in defence of an ally: I am convinced that we have to show resolution in doing so. But to pretend that the two objectives are always, or even usually, identical is humbug. The danger of swallowing it is even greater for America as a superpower with global interests than for a medium-sized military power like Britain. This doctrine of ‘international community’ à la Blair is a prescription for strategic muddle, military overstretch and ultimately, in the wake of inevitable failure, for an American retreat from global responsibility.

      The third and last feature of the Kosovo operation that I want to mention here does indeed directly concern America’s capability to launch and carry through successful interventions: this was the degree of reliance upon advanced military technology, not just as a source of superiority over the enemy but also as a means of avoiding NATO casualties. Rightly or wrongly, most leading US politicians judged that American public opinion was not prepared to face the risk, let alone the reality, of losses in Kosovo.

      This may not, in fact, have been true. And if it was true it may have reflected poor leadership, or uncertainty about the declared (and undeclared) war aims. Or again it may, paradoxically, have been the effect of the enormous importance of television coverage in modern crises. By making so vivid the suffering of people in distant lands, television greatly increases pressure for intervention. But at the same time, by dramatising even more the grieving of the families of servicemen who are lost, it undermines national resolve to fight and to risk casualties.

      America’s commitment to the world’s security is so extensive, and the sacrifices it makes so considerable, that it ill behoves America’s allies to complain about reluctance by American families to sustain losses in other people’s wars. But American leaders should recognise that this reputation, however unjustified, has given encouragement to America’s enemies. This is all the more poignant when, as in Kosovo, the refusal to risk the loss of allied aircraft, and so to envisage operations below fifteen thousand feet, dented our effectiveness in preventing the ethnic cleansing of a civilian population we were committed to protect.

      By contrast, the technological dominance of America, which had been such a factor in the Gulf, was by the time of Kosovo eight years later still more evident. In the Kosovo operation, however, it was less America’s superiority over the Yugoslav army, which actually proved quite adept at protecting itself, but rather America’s superiority over her NATO allies that was now most remarkable. The facts here speak eloquently for themselves.

      Although all nineteen members of NATO made some contribution to the operation, that of the United States was overwhelmingly dominant. America paid for 80 per cent of the cost – Britain and France made up most of the rest. The US supplied 650 of the 927 aircraft that took part in the air campaign. The US flew two-thirds of the strike missions. Almost every precision-guided missile (PGM) was launched from an American aircraft. The US was alone in contributing long-range bombers, which dropped about half the bombs and missiles used in the campaign.

      The cause of this imbalance was not generally, with the notable exception of the Greeks, any lack of commitment by the rest of NATO, and certainly not by Britain. The problem was rather that America’s allies had neither the quantity nor, above all, the quality of weaponry required to be effective partners of the US. Thus while the British flew more than a thousand strike missions, three-quarters of the munitions we dropped were unguided. When poor visibility interfered with PGMs that relied on laser-designation or optical guidance, only the Americans had the technology (in the form of the Joint Direct Attack Munition) which allowed them to attack targets in all weathers. Finally, it was US intelligence which identified nearly all of the bombing targets in Serbia and Kosovo.

      Is Kosovo, then, the shape of things to come? In one respect, at least, it should not be. We should be extremely wary of the doctrine of humanitarian interventionism as the main, let alone the only, justification for the use of force. There is, after all, a far more traditional alternative. Sovereign states have a right of self-defence which precedes the United Nations Charter and is not dependent on it, or on votes in international forums. Other states have a right to come to the aid of countries which are the victims of aggression. That is what military alliances like NATO are about. The habit of ubiquitous interventionism, combining pinprick strikes by precision weapons with pious invocations of high principle, would lead us into endless difficulties. Interventions must be limited in number СКАЧАТЬ