Intervention and its discontents - US intervention in Yugoslavian conflict - Cover Story

National Review, March 29, 1993 by Peter W. Rodman

I get nervous when liberals are so gung-ho about going to war. It's positively disconcerting to open up the New York Times and find two or three articles almost every day demanding military intervention in the former Yugoslavia, in the manner of a Hearst organ before the Spanish-American war. To be sure, the horrors of "ethnic cleansing" have provoked interventionist sentiments among worthy conservatives like Jeane Kirkpatrick and Patrick Glynn, not to mention Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. But these individuals have the track record of a certain seriousness about security matters, which has never been the strong suit of, say, Anthony Lewis.

How ought conservatives to think about this new post-Cold War interventionism, which has become the salient feature of our debate over not only Yugoslavia, but also Somalia and Iraq?

I see four issues here. One is the moral and humanitarian argument. Serb atrocities in Bosnia; Saddam Hussein's brutality against Kurds and other Iraqis; mass starvation threatened by the Somali civil war - these offend the conscience and make a powerful case. It is not wrong for Americans - indeed it is traditional - to ask whether there is anything we can do to end the suffering.

A second criterion is upholding international norms of conduct. Saddam Hussein and Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic have defied the civilized world, with varying degrees of impunity. This is a terrible precedent at a time when a new international system, held together by global cooperation, is struggling to be born. The world, alas, is full of other thugs whose calculations will be affected by how the world reacts to these challenges.

These two concerns have a powerful hold over our present debate, with good reason. But there are two other criteria that tend to be overlooked. One is the American strategic interest. I cannot imagine the American people sustaining a major military intervention - especially one that, unlike Somalia, involves many casualties - without some demonstrable relation to our national interest. Finally, there is the test of whether we have an effective military plan that promises a decisive result. Vietnam is a glaring reminder of the horrendous price we pay for carelessness in these two respects.

The good news, then, is the end of liberal guilt about the use of American power. The bad news is that it is still, in some circles, divorced from rigorous analysis of strategic or military realities. A whole new academic field is developing - that of "humanitarian intervention." Originating in the fertile minds of French Socialist intellectuals, it was much discussed at the United Nations in 1991. Since then, it has received methodical exposition in the work of the Overseas Development Council, the U.S. Institute of Peace, the Watson Institute at Brown University, and, most recently, a commission appointed by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Carnegie's July 1992 report, Changing Our Ways, hailed a "new principle of international relations" - namely, that respect for a nation's sovereignty was no longer justified if it was violating human rights on a large scale, or in other cases of "humanitarian crisis." The United States and the international community had not only a right to intervene, but a duty. Thus, some of the same folks who resisted action against Communist tyranny for three decades, warning against intervention in the internal affairs of other states, now tell us we are morally defective if we refrain.

What do those last two criteria, though, tell us about the current cases?

Desert Storm was archetypical of a case where the moral and legal arguments coincided with an urgent strategic interest. There was also an impressive military strategy (though unfortunately not carried through to a more conclusive outcome). Conceptually, that was an easy one.

In Somalia, the moral case was strong but the U.S. strategic interest was zero. Liberals loved our involvement there for that very reason; I supported it despite that. The saving grace, if you will, was a military plan that involved no military risk - the only risk being that we might accomplish no lasting benefit for the country. We may be lucky, however. The Mafia dons whose turf war got out of hand may have used our intervention as an opportunity for a truce. They had learned that open warfare is bad for business. Where Eliot Ness tried to break the Mafia, Robert Oakley in affect helped the dons broker a new deal to divide up the territory. If a local balance of forces can be restored, it may work out.

In Yugoslavia, the moral and legal arguments are very strong, but the dirty little secret is that our strategic interest is more potential than actual. If the conflict spread to Kosovo or Macedonia, and if Turkey or Greece or Bulgaria or others got sucked in, then we would have a geopolitical disaster. We have a large interest in deterring this. (We have more of a direct stake in Turkey, with its growing role in the Mideast and Central Asia, than we have in Yugoslavia.) Short of this, the striking fact of the Yugoslav horror is how well the European system has been insulated from it. Relations among the major powers in Europe have not been so benign in a century; there is no rush to choose sides for any grand face-off. It's not 1914. The real reason there has been no serious international intervention to stop the fighting is the implicit and universal recognition that this is the case.