The myth of ‘humanitarian’ war

The attempt by the authors of last year’s US/UK aggression against Iraq to retroactively repackage their venture as a “humanitarian” war seems almost complete. Both Bush and Blair now say in public, “Well, we may have gotten it wrong about the WMDs and Saddam’s relationship with al-Qaeda… But at least the Iraqi people are now better off than they were under Saddam.”
(Unca Dick Cheney is not, of course, even willing to concede the opening premise there. But he is not, formally at least, the president.)
This business of–whether retroactively or pro-actively–pinning a ‘humanitarian’ label on a war has undergone a bit of a revival in recent years. Remember Kosovo, 1999? Remember Bosnia, before then?
But trying to claim that any war can be ‘humanitarian’ is fundamentally dishonest. No war is ‘humanitarian’, ever. War sucks. War kills people; and by design it is a blatant attack on their most basic human rights–their rights to life, to physical security, to the pre-conditions of material and mental wellbeing. To pretend that any war serves ‘humanitarian’ aims is fundamentally to ignore those most evident facts about war–facts that too many Americans seem to have forgotten, if indeed they ever knew them.
Interlude for a seldom-pondered fact here. Almost no governments have ever launched military adventures far from their own borders without citing ‘humanitarian’ war aims… Nearly all the distant imperial conquests undertaken by European powers in past centuries were cloaked in great clouds of ‘humanitarian’ rhetoric… Perhaps this is connected to the fact that no government ever invites its people to mobilize for an ‘unjust’ or even ‘unjustified’ war? Every government, after all, likes to present itself as good, not greedy, overbearing, and grasping.
Anyway, I want to write something here about the sad history of ‘humanitarian’ war in the present era. And primarily about the kinds of outcomes we have seen, and continue to see, from the west’s most ‘humanitarian’ war in recent history, that in Kosovo…

That one shocked me, I’ll admit. There were so many of my friends and colleagues from the human-rights movement, yelling and screaming for that war to begin. The Boston-based organization Physicians for Human Rights even got into giving “military” advice, arguing vociferously for the launching a ground war, and not just an air war… They did all that without giving any recognition at all that war itself is a huge assault on people’s human rights.
Yes, the situation of the majority of Kosovars who are ethnic Albanians was bad in early 1999. But many different steps were being taken to try to manage and improve their situation. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe had 120 or so rights monitors working in the province. International negotiations over the situation were continuing at Rambouillet, near Paris…
The trouble was, many people in the Clinton administration never gave those talks a decent chance to succeed. Even the BBC’s diplomatic correspondent, Barnaby Mason, judged that it looked as though the talks were ‘designed to fail’. The militants of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) had boycotted the talks all along. Meanwhile, the five western negotiators there argued for a peace agreement that would give NATO forces freedom of movement not only inside Kosovo, but also in (the rest of) Serbia. It would have been hard indeed for any Serbian leader to swallow that…
And so the OSCE monitors were pulled out and the war began. And guess what, in its opening hours a combination of ‘push’ from the Yugoslav/Serb forces and fear on behalf of the Kosovar Albanians propelled 90 percent of the Kosovar Albanians out of their homes, fleeing on roads leading south and west.
Any hurried mass flight of people from their homes like that is a human-rights disaster. People die and fall sick on those roads. The fixed property they leave behind gets destroyed, and their food stocks stolen. Shelter and sanitation during the exodus are non-existent. The very old, the very young, and the sick are the ones who die first.
I’ve seen a number of mass flights of communities fleeing warfare. It is the opposite of a ‘humanitarian’ phenomenon.
On that occasion, the pictures of the mass flight of Kosovars were used to (retroactively) “justify” the decision to go to war. What kind of weird logic is that? It’s true, prior to NATO’s launching of the war there had been some expulsions of Kosovars by Serb/Yugoslav forces. But nothing on anything near that same massive scale as what happened once the war had started. And prior to March 1999, the OSCE monitors had even been able to repatriate some of the earlier expellees from their homes.
Once the NATO bombing started, though, and the OSCE monitors had been pulled out– all bets were off. And the Serb/Yugoslav forces acted with quite predictable brutality…
So here we are now, five years on… And have the wonders of democracy, stability, and prosperity made their way to UN- and NATO-ruled Kosovo yet? That would be nice, wouldn’t it– if at least that whole sad tale could have a happy ending?
Don’t hold your breath.
You could read this report, from the July 14 NYT, which cites a report from the Ombudsperson Institution in Kosovo saying that:

the United Nations and the local authorities that have run Kosovo for the past five years have failed to achieve even a minimal level of protection of rights and freedoms, in particular for the province’s Serbian minority.
The report, issued Monday, was published four months after thousands of ethnic Albanians took to the streets across the province to attack Serbian communities. The violence left 19 people dead and more than 800 injured. The head of the United Nations administration, Hari Holkeri, resigned his post last month, citing fatigue. His replacement, Soren Jessen-Petersen, a Danish diplomat, has yet to begin the job.

Or this, from the Institute for War & Peace Reporting on July 8:

The non-meeting of minds since the deadly riots is such that both the Kosovo Albanians and international officialdom regard each other as in the doghouse or on probation. As if in a mirror image, each glowers with disgust at the other, demanding that they get their act together. When EU High Representative Javier Solana visited Pristina on June 7, he berated Kosovo leaders for the slow pace at which hundreds of Serb and Ashkali homes burned in the March disturbances are being repaired.
But Kosovo Albanians do not want to hear any more criticism from abroad…
More segments of society are radicalising against the international administration. On June 10, a group of Pristina youths demonstrated outside UNMIK headquarters. Mimicking football referees, they blew whistles and showed red cards, in a clear message to the authority that they felt its time was up.
Previously, anti-UNMIK demonstrations had been the monopoly of rural and provincial militants.
At least one of the posters on display compared UNMIK with the Serbian regime of the 1990s…
Within the senior management of the international authority there is awareness that their role has to change. As the burning of dozens of UNMIK cars in the mid-March riots made clear, it is no longer functioning as a pacifying mechanism — but rather has begun to attract violence.

On July 11, Mort Abramowitz and Heather Hurlburt had an op-ed in the WaPo in which they reflected on the sorry record of recent western-led international “nation-building efforts” [note that euphemism for what in some cases was actually a war] in Kosovo and elsewhere. They did so in the following terms:

No fewer than nine times over the past decade, Western powers have deployed noble rhetoric, soldiers and taxpayer dollars in the service of nation-building. And no fewer than nine times, they have, to one degree or another, failed to build stable, self-sustaining nations.
The litany consists of Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, East Timor, Liberia, Afghanistan and Iraq. The best one could say is that they are works in progress. The worst: Too many of them still can’t function on their own and continue to pose threats to their own citizens as well as U.S. national interests. While genuine good — both humanitarian and security-related — has come of these efforts, the results have fallen far short of our professed objectives, consumed enormous resources and political capital, and left uncertainty about the U.S. and international commitment.
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that our interest in taking over “problem nations” has far outpaced our ability or willingness to solve those nations’ problems.

I find this rhetoric interesting. By mixing the situations in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq together with those other situations, the authors end up eliding the all-important difference that, while these four ‘nation-building efforts’ were all launched in the aftermath of the western powers’ initiation of a war, the others they list were all much more evidently humanitarian undertakings, pursued without war.
But even given that elision, the non-succesful results the authors refer to are quite striking.
Of course, in Iraq, the judgment that really counts–that is, the one that the Iraqi people themselves will ultimately make on the “balance-sheet” of results from the Bushites’ March 2003 war against their country–still remains to be made. The poll results from from Iraq on that question these days are distinctly negative. Iraqis look at all the brutality, destruction, and sheer bloody chaos that resulted from the Bushites’ decision to launch a war, and recoil.
But war is always like that. There’s no such thing as a ‘humanitarian’ war–any more than there’s such a thing as ‘precision’ targeting of weapons. War is by its nature anti-humanitarian; and the most that the humanitarians of, e.g., the International Red Cross have been able to do is to try to mitigate those anti-humanitarian consequences, just a little.
It would be really great if the good people of the human-rights movement in the west had really learned from some of that wisdom. Have they started to? The evidence seems mixed.
Physicians for Human Rights seems to have started to learn something valuable from their mis-step over Kosovo. On December 23, 2002, as the threat of a US-led war against Iraq loomed larger and larger, PHR issued a statement saying:

PHR is gravely concerned about the potential for loss of life on a large scale and serious risk to health and human rights of the Iraqi people and others in the region should a war ensue. We urge continued efforts to avoid war, but if a war is waged, we urge the US Government to take crucial steps to protect the civilian population and captured combatants through scrupulous compliance with international humanitarian law… [HC emphasis]

The policy statements of Amnesty International were not quite so forthright in actually advocating a policy of war-avoidance. But in the whole lead-up to the war they stressed over and over again the possibly disastrous human-rights and humanitarian consequences of any decision to go to war, and they urged both a public discussion and consideration of those risks and extensive preparations to try to mitigate the harms they predicted should war be launched.
(I was interested, in going through those statements from AI, to see this one, from March 6, 2003, in which they urged the Security Council to deploy teams of human rights monitors to Iraq.)
On March 20, 2003, Amnesty issued this statement, which made an argument that looked particularly interesting in light of the history in Kosovo, as described above:

“Those who have launched the military attacks must take responsibility if their action provokes a human rights and humanitarian catastrophe. We fear it will disrupt delivery of essential services and supplies to a population heavily dependent on government aid, and could trigger a humanitarian catastrophe. They must make every effort to safeguard the people and alleviate human suffering,” said Irene Khan, Secretary General of Amnesty International.

And then, there’s Human Rights Watch. (Disclosure: I sit on their Middle East Advisory Committee… They don’t always take our advice!)
Back just before or at the launch of the war, HRW issued a convoluted and carefully crafted statement in which it sought to justify its position of not taking a position for or against the war. (The web-archive version of the statement has no date.)
Many people on the HRW Board and staff had for years been working hard to try to have Saddam brought to trial, so I’m pretty sure a lot of people there were fairly eager for the war to start so that that might finally happen. But in the statement, Executive Director Ken Roth showed what–in the circumstances–was quite admirable restraint. It stated:

Human Rights Watch does not make judgments about the decision whether to go to war – about whether a war complies with international law against aggression. We care deeply about the humanitarian consequences of war, but we avoid judgments on the legality of war itself because they tend to compromise the neutrality needed to monitor most effectively how the war is waged – that is, compliance with international humanitarian law – and because they often require political and security assessments that are beyond our expertise.

Frankly, I don’t believe that the first of those arguments– “because [these judgments] tend to compromise the neutrality needed to monitor most effectively how the war is waged”– holds any water at all. And the second, “because they often require political and security assessments that are beyond our expertise”, doesn’t seem like a strong argument at all. Firstly, HRW can afford, and does pay for, expertise on any number of topics when it needs it; and secondly, how much expertise does it take to understand that war is harmful to men, women, and children and should be avoided whenever possible?
The next paragraph in the statement is interesting, too:

As in the case of other armed conflicts, Human Rights Watch thus does not support or oppose the threatened war with Iraq. We do not opine on whether the dangers to civilians in Iraq and neighboring countries of launching a war are greater or lesser than the dangers to U.S. or allied civilians – or, ultimately, the Iraqi people – of not launching one. We make no comment on the intense debate surrounding the legality of President George Bush’s proposed doctrine of “pre-emptive self-defense” or the need for U.N. Security Council approval of a war.

For an organization that is supposedly dedicated to the international rule of law, both halves of that last sentence there seem quite shockingly inappropriate. The sentence before it seems troubling to me, too. Somehow, they seem to be trying to disaggregate, and balance against each other, gdangers to civilians in the Middle East, on one hand, and dangers to US and allied civilians, on the other (with the “or, ultimately, the Iraqi people” stuck in as an afterthought there.)
But how about they just look at potential “harms to human persons”, globally, without seeking to weigh the interests of one group of persons against the interests of another in any way at all?
Oh well, I suppose I should be grateful for small mercies. It was quite possible, in the run-up to the war, that HRW would have come out openly in favor of it. Then, I would really have had to reconsider my relationship with the organization.