[Previous entry: "Some EU stuff"] [Main Index] [Next entry: "Hanoi on the Tigris"]

23 June 2003: "A comparison of two interventions"

Lately, I've been reacquainting myself with the circumstances surrounding Operation "Allied Force"—NATO's 1999 war with Serbia over Kosovo—and it strikes me the number of parallels with Operation "Iraqi Freedom" merit invoking Yogi Berra's line that it's "déja vu all over again." Or so it seems.

The first parallel between the Kosovo crisis and the Iraq crisis lies in the strategic considerations which contributed to the each intervention. Saddam Hussein formed a strategic threat in that he had demonstrated a desire to establish control of a sizeable portion of the oilfields of the Persian Gulf, evinced by the invasion of Iran in 1980 and the invasion of Kuwait in 1990, and supported by threatening noises made at the United Arab Emirates shortly prior to the invasion of Kuwait. The unimpeded flow of oil from the Persian Gulf has been considered of strategic interest to the United States for decades; this is due not so much to America's reliance on Middle-Eastern oil, which is relatively limited, but because Western Europe, Japan, and South Korea—all key American allies—are greatly reliant on it. In the event of an escalation of hostilities between North and South Korea, for instance, South Korea's technological superiority on the battlefield would be severely impaired if it suffered a shortage of petroleum, oil and lubricants (POL); similarly, a shortage of POL in Europe during a crisis requiring projection of military power could be very ugly. UN Security Council resolutions 687 and following were supposed to curtail Saddam's ability to form a threat, and his continued refusal to comply with these resolutions thus made him a continued strategic risk, which necessitated a continued (and increasingly unpopular) American military presence in the Gulf.

The strategic considerations regarding Kosovo were of a rather different nature, but no less compelling. America's strategic interest in maintaining stability in south-eastern Europe was set forth explicitly as early as 1947 with the "Truman Doctrine." NATO's concern was that Milošević's repression of the Kosovar Albanians would stoke the fires of Albanian nationalism, and with ethnic Albanians living in four different countries in the region—Albania, Macedonia, Greece and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY); and even within the FRY in Kosovo, Serbia proper and Montenegro—the potential for regional destabilisation, particularly in Macedonia, was extremely worrying. In either situation, the governments involved never articulated these concerns, at least not very clearly. Likely, this is because these concerns rely to a large extent on conjectural "worst-case scenarios" et al., which are difficult to package as a coherent case to present to the public.

Secondly, the need to articulate the strategic concerns was somewhat lessened by other considerations in presenting the case to the various electorates. In the case of Kosovo, the Serbian government's methods of counter-insurgency threatened to cause a severe humanitarian crisis. In 1998, faced with the emergence of the Kosovo Liberation Army—the UÇK—in 1997, it bore in mind Mao's dictum that the people "may be likened to the water" and guerilla troops "to the fish that inhabit it." This translated into an effort to eliminate the fish by draining the water, i.e. forcibly displacing the population in areas where the UÇK was active. By September 1998, some 300,000 Kosovar Albanians—a sixth of the total population of Kosovo—had been driven from their homes, and with winter coming, a humanitarian disaster was imminent. Disaster was in fact averted for that winter, but fighting was expected to resume in spring 1999, which would have resulted in a similar crisis later that year. There was therefore a very clear case to intervene in Kosovo on humanitarian grounds, and this was the case that was made. This was reinforced by the earlier lesson of the Bosnian War, which the international community had chosen to treat as a humanitarian disaster while making no effort to physically intervene in the war which caused that disaster.

Where Iraq was concerned, the case was both more and less clear-cut. The Ba'athist régime was repressive and murderous, even genocidal where the Kurds and Marsh Arabs were concerned. It continued to violate a long list of UNSC resolutions by which it had agreed to abide, occasionally making the smallest concessions needed to avert a resumption of hostilities. Yet Iraq did not form a discernably larger problem in 2002 than it had done at any point since 1991. Why, then, should the reasons for war be more compelling now than in, say, February 1998? The answer is, of course, that they weren't; they were just as compelling then. But in 1998, there was a Democrat in the White House who was impopular with much of the Republican-led Congress; Congress also had serious misgivings about his military adventures overseas. It has been observed that 9-11 didn't change the world, but it did change the way Americans, including Congress, perceived it. Broadly, the reasons for war in 2003 were much the same as in 1998. Many opponents of the war asked "Why now?" The answer was "Because now is as good a time as any." (I'd have liked to have heard some Republicans admit that if they hadn't been so partisan, this war could have been over five years ago, but that's probably too much to expect.)

In both instances, of course, the case presented ultimately related back to the strategic considerations mentioned earlier. In the case of Kosovo, an influx of refugees into Macedonia and Albania would have placed a serious strain on both countries, while mass deaths of internally displaced Kosovars from malnutrition and exposure (let alone military action) would have likely stoked inter-ethnic animosity throughout the region. The purpose of disarming Iraq, as mentioned earlier, was to remove the threat it presented to the rest of the Gulf, and thus to the oil supply of both the developed and developing world.

Thirdly, in both cases, war came after several years of diplomatic pressure, sanctions, etc. following an earlier conflict. Milošević had been warned as early as Christmas 1992, by George Bush the Elder (though the warning was repeated by Clinton shortly after he entered office), that his policies on Kosovo would lead to a military confrontation with the West if he persisted in them. The threat the Iraqi government faced, of course, was the resumption of hostilities which had been suspended with the 1991 if it did not observe the terms as set out in UNSC resolution 687 (or, more accurately, an escalation of the hostilities which had continued in the wake of the cease-fire).

The fourth parallel follows on the heels of the third. It is that the international community professed to be in agreement that "something should be done," and the UN Security Council accordingly passed resolutions under Chapter VII of the UN Charter—to wit, 1199 and 1441—demanding the strongman in question adopt a specified course of action or face the consequences. Both Milošević and Saddam failed to do so and, even as the Secretary-General of the UN was making noises about how sometimes force had to be met by force, various Permanent Members of the Security Council (in both cases Russia and China, along with France in the later situation) refused to sanction coercive measures beyond those which had already been tried and found ineffective. In short, having first agreed that "something should be done," they then refused to allow anything to actually be done. In both cases, an American-led coalition proceeded to enforce the resolutions, citing the "or else" language of these resolutions as granting the requisite authority.

The fifth parallel can be found in criticism of the conduct and aftermath of each war by those opposed to it. The terms "quagmire" and "Vietnam" were bandied about freely. Civilian casualties, regardless of the context in which they occurred, were deemed an atrocity when inflicted by NATO or Coalition forces, but ignored when inflicted by Serb or Iraqi forces. During the three and half months of Operation "Allied Force," NATO air strikes are thought to have caused some 1,000 non-combatant deaths (many sources think fewer), split roughly equally between Serbs and Kosovar Albanians; these deaths were for the most part unintentional. By contrast, Serb forces inflicted almost 2,000 civilian deaths in September 1998 alone; there are many reports of people having been killed by having their throats cut or being shot in the head at extremely close range, acts which can only be described as murder. Iraqi military and paramilitary forces killed thousands during the crushing of the 1991 Shi'a uprising, and thousands more during the expulsion of the Marsh Arabs. In addition to these numbers, many more people were rounded up and detained, and never released. Human Rights Watch estimates that as many as 290,000 Iraqis have been “disappeared” by the Iraqi government over the past two decades. Their fate is becoming clear with the discovery of mass graves in Iraq at the present time. Associated Press puts the Iraqi civilian death toll between 20-Mar-2003 and 20-Apr-2003 at 3,240 at least; however, AP acknowledges that,

[...] while the great majority of civilian deaths appear to have been caused by American U.S. and British attacks, witnesses say some - even a rough estimate is impossible - were caused by the Iraqis themselves: by exploding Iraqi ammunition stored in residential neighborhoods, by falling Iraqi anti-aircraft rounds aimed at U.S. warplanes, or by Iraqi fire directed at American troops.

"We are now seeing about 100,000 military age men missing. I think they are missing. They may have been murdered. We have had reports that as many as 4,600 have been executed. But I suspect it's far higher than that."

Why does the number of victims matter?
For Nato member states it is important to justify the bombing campaign against Yugoslavia on humanitarian grounds - especially since Nato's own air raids killed civilians, both Kosovar Albanians and Serbs, mostly as a result of pilot error or rockets and bombs going astray. According to Belgrade, hundreds were killed in the Nato strikes. By contrast, opponents of Nato's action want to downplay the level of Serbian atrocities in an attempt to show that the campaign was unnecessary.

The Iliad and Odyssey were not written by Homer, but by another poet whom we know by that name.

"The idea that it doesn't matter whether we find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or not is to me one of the most dangerous notions that's been put out anywhere in my lifetime," [says Susan Tifft, a Duke University professor and former Time magazine writer]. "Basically, what it's saying is that the ends justify the means. In this case, it's hard to argue with the ends. As chaotic as things are, no one can say Iraq isn't better off without this psychopath. But if Americans buy into that notion, what they're saying is it's OK to destroy democracy at home in order to export it overseas."

au currant
Black Decaf
The Illiterati
Cointelpro Tool
Norman Geras
A Fistful of Euros
Harry's Place
Plastic Gangster
Blogfonte
Tim Newman
€urosavant
Crooked Timber
Gallowglass
Mr. McGillicuddy
eameljenet
Civax
101-280
Colby Cosh
Peaktalk
Mick Hartley
Oliver Kamm

Miscellanea:

Care to contribute
to the coffee fund?