Just and unjust wars: a diplomat's perspective - International Justice, War Crimes, and Terrorism: The U.S. Record

Social Research, Winter, 2002 by Richard Holbrooke

We have much more responsibility, when we intervene, than just war-fighting. Let me address briefly two important recent cases: Bosnia and Afghanistan (Kosovo fits within the rubric of Bosnia here). In neither Bosnia nor Kosovo did the United States have ground troops in combat. Troops went in only after air power succeeded. And that in itself needs to be emphasized, because prior to the successful use of air power in Bosnia, in September 1995, and the use of air power again in Kosovo in 1999, it was widely believed by almost everyone, except the United States Air Force and some Navy pilots, that air power could never succeed on its own merits. In his 1995 memoirs, which came out the same month as the air attacks took place in Bosnia, General Colin Powell, now the country's secretary of state, flatly stated that air power would not work in Bosnia. Of course he was wrong, and he was gracious enough to admit it afterward.

In Bosnia, an American-led NATO intervention stopped a war. The kind of action that ultimately succeeded was opposed both by liberals and conservatives on various grounds: "we shouldn't intervene," "it doesn't matter," "we won't be able to succeed," "not our problem," "Bosnia is not a nation," "it's not really a genocide." The combination was hard to overcome. It took the massacre at Srebrenica, where 7,700 people were slaughtered by the Bosnian Serbs, before we could get a consensus to act, and even then the House of Representatives voted three to one to oppose the United States military deployment after the Dayton accords that ended the fighting were reached. I mention this because you need domestic support for action. But this was the House of Representatives under the control of Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. It did not support us, but President Clinton went ahead anyway--in an act of some courage, which has not been adequately recognized by his critics.

Now let us consider Afghanistan. As Professor Walzer said at the conference, all of us support what has happened in Afghanistan since September 11. There is no question that the military action in Afghanistan was morally justified, that it is a just war, and, I might add on a more practical basis, that it will succeed militarily. But there are two questions that I want to raise. The first is: What would the public or Washington have said, prior to September 11, 2001, about the kind of action we are now taking in Afghanistan?

On a moral basis, the case should have been the same before or after September 11. Everyone knew how odious the Taliban were, not only in their treatment of women and in their destruction of their own artistic heritage, but in what they were doing to the country. We also knew Al Qaeda was there, and how dangerous it was. In fact, in August 1998 the United States had bombed Al Qaeda camps and missed bin Laden by just a couple of hours in the one explicit attempt to target him. But I am sure that had the Clinton or Bush administration, before September 11, sought to create a national consensus that a preemptive military action against the Taliban and bin Laden was justified and necessary--whether this had been done on humanitarian grounds, moral grounds, political grounds, or strategic grounds--there would have been no support for it in Washington. Congress would surely have opposed it. If there was so much opposition over Bosnia, which was in the heart of Europe, and in which an active genocide was taking place, it is clear that there would have been virtually no support for preventive war in Afghanistan before September 11.