The New Military Humanism: Lessons From Kosovo

Chomsky certainly provides serious food for thought about "humanistic" wars and what their aims are. While he certainly doesn't purport to know the answer to what should have been done (and that isn't his aim), he rather provides ample evidence that the course taken in Kosovo is the one that shouldn't have been taken.

He raises interesting questions about "The New Humanism" in light of comparisons to situations in East Timor, Lebanon, Iraq, Grenada, Vietnam, Colombia, Turkey and other places. Whether or not one agrees with Chomsky's final asessments or not is of course, debatable. However, one must admire his willingness to criticize the various administrations of the past half century whether Republican or Democrat. The Kennedy, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Bush and Clinton administrations are all dealt with sharply in regards to interventionalism or non-interventionalism as is often the case.

Additionally, Chomsky provides both the plusses and minuses of both Serb and Albanian Kosovar leadership and military. He's careful not to demonize or beatify either civilian group based upon their leadership (as the media was so quick to do.)

My major complaint about the book is Chomsky's tendency to go off on tangents. It is perhaps unavoidable when trying to put forth such a complex argument, but it does weaken the text a bit because it happens so frequently. He often takes you half the way around the world to say something that could've been more succinctly put. Also his repetion of certain catch phrases is a little sensationalistc.

Most importantly though, Chomsky accomplishes showing that NATO's bombing of Serbia isn't such a black & white affair...in fact there is a whole world of grey there. That grey area is more often where the truth is, not in the made for television soundbite polemics of politicians.

For a great intellectual like Noam Chomsky, this is a dissappointing and terribly misleading work. While he might make a few plausible arguments against the bombing campaign (ie. double standard concerning Kurds, East Timor etc.), he gives little background to the entire conflict in the Balkans. As one reviewer put it, he manages to completely leave out important events in places like Sarajevo or Vukovar. Perhaps that might be justified since Chomsky only meant to focus on US involvement in this specific instance, but it can be very misleading to the average reader.

While he might give excellent analysis on other subject areas such as the Mideast or Media and Propaganda, sadly the Balkans seem to be where he lacks in knowledge. As I have mentioned earlier, he makes a few good points, but on the whole his argument against intervention and his background on the Balkan conflict are very poor. This book displays the failure of the left to truly understand the Balkan conflict. It seems their main concern is American hegemony in the world (which is no doubt a serious issue) and they have bent and shaped a history of the Balkans so it may fit the party line.

If you want a good analysis of this conflict, then don't read this book.

This travesty of a book - which purports to investigate NATO intervention in Kosovo - contains no discussion of the character, aims or methods of Milosevic, no attempt to place the crisis in the context of previous wars - whether in Slovenia, Croatia or Bosnia - and virtually no effort to explain decades of historical background. The names of Sarajevo, Vukovar, etc. do not appear: as the Bosnian Institute in London noted, where Chomsky does refer to prior events in the region, "he often gets them wrong, uncritically accepting Serbian propaganda" (Bosnia Report, June-October 2001).

Typical of this phenomenon is the claim that the "violent expulsion" of hundreds of thousands of Serbs from Krajina was "the most extreme single case" of ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia (p26). But far from being violently expelled, the Serbs "fled en masse, many of them before the Croats even attacked" (Bosnia Report, ibid.). In fact the Serb ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims was far worse in every respect, not only in terms of numbers driven out, but also in its genocidal brutality, involving the systematic use of concentration camps, mass rape and mass murder.

There are many other examples. Chomsky maintains that NATO demanded the right to occupy Serbia at the Rambouillet peace talks. But serious observers ridicule this idea, noting that the Serb delegation never objected to that part of the agreement: the clauses were only denounced in retrospect by Serb propagandists and their fellow-travellers on the Western radical left (Bosnia Report, July-September 2000).

Chomsky also pretends that NATO bombing caused the refugee crisis. But he is forced to concede that in the previous year 2,000 people had been killed in the fighting, with 300,000 driven from their homes. He does not mention any of the evidence that the Serb escalation was planned before the NATO bombings: the Serb military build-up, the introduction of paramilitary forces to the region, the integration of the police with army units, etc. According to Noel Malcolm - one of the world's leading experts on Kosovo - if Nato had refused to intervene, standing by as Serb nationalists expelled hundreds of thousands of Albanians, "those refugees would still be in exile today" (Daily Telegraph, UK, March 24, 2000).

Chomsky adds that NATO intervention cannot have been humanitarian in intent because NATO planners anticipated the refugee crisis and proceeded regardless. His main support for that belief is the statement by NATO commander Wesley Clark that the Serb reaction to the bombings was "entirely predictable" - a quotation which he repeats throughout the book (e.g. p51). Chomsky's readers do not know - and Chomsky does not tell them - that Clark's comment was made only two days after the start of the bombing and referred only to the initial response, not to the vast campaign of massacres, rapes and expulsions which the Serbs carried out over the following months.

Chomsky even blames NATO for "the undermining of the democratic opposition" in Serbia (p35), quoting with approval the suggestion that "thanks to NATO, Serbia has overnight become a totalitarian state" (p133). Were Chomsky to publish a new edition of this book, he would have to report that thanks to NATO, the dictatorship was overthrown, democracy was established, the refugees returned to their homes and the leading war criminal was placed on trial. But Chomsky's view of NATO's motives hardly merits discussion: "as long as Serbia is not incorporated within US-dominated domains," he declares, it makes sense to "punish it for failure to conform" (p137). Needless to say, had Serbia agreed to be "incorporated" within the hellish domains of US imperialism - as experienced by the tormented masses of London, Paris or Tokyo - then Chomsky would have been no less indignant.

Chomsky also complains about the West's alleged culpability for Indonesian atrocities in East Timor. In his view, policy decisions made during the Cold War in Asia - when countless millions of lives and the future of a continent were at stake - discredit humanitarian intervention today, when these conditions no longer apply. He neglects to quote those who actually speak for the people of East Timor, such as the Nobel Peace Prize winner Jose Ramos-Horta, who applauded the fact that in Kosovo "a Western military alliance has taken up the fight of a small nation for purely humanitarian reasons" (Letters, The Guardian, UK, April 1, 1999).

Consider, next, Chomsky's repeated comparison of NATO action against Serbia with US backing for Turkey or Colombia. The analogy might have some force if either nation could be described as a genocidal dictatorship which had invaded two countries, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths while inflicting mass rape and concentration camps and creating millions of refugees, defying the UN Security Council as well as an international war crimes tribunal at the Hague, before turning on its own ethnic minorities with an unprovoked campaign of massacre, rape and ethnic cleansing. Since not one of these conditions applies in Turkey or Colombia - both democratic societies defending themselves against terrorists - we may dismiss the argument without further discussion. Serious readers should look elsewhere for information about Kosovo.

With the clear intention to elucidate the actions taken by NATO against FRY, the author, indeed, scrutinizes all related aspects of the war, and he also adduces several historical examples of interventions, form past to present, to corroborate his polemic.

Brilliantly, to the question "what is the new military humanism?" the author explains that it is simply a replica of the "old military humanism." In fact, apart from Kosovo and the like, this book is about this ancient tenet of our world, which dictates that both countries and military organizations strive solely for their interests rather than for humanitarian aid.

As far as the so-called "denial syndrome" is concerned the author suggests that "the facts are so numerous as to warrant a chapter on" psychology. Accordingly, I would add that the author reveals so many of them as to justify his granting a "persona non grata" status presumably by his potential opponents.

On the whole, the facts and arguments are so meticulously stated that the reader is overwhelmingly compelled to further investigate the truisms behind the veils, should the latter exist at all.

Chomsky with his usual massive documentation shows that the same elite institutions and motivations which, in this country, butchered or helped butcher millions of Indians, hundreds of thousands of Fillipinos, millions, of Vietnames, Laoations and Cambodians, tens of thousands of East Timorese, tens of thousands of Nicaraguans, Salvadorans and Guatemalans, and so on, were behind the "humanitarian intervention" in Kosovo.

Chomsky shows that the claim that while the U.S. and its allies may have done some very horrible things to third world in the past, that era is in past (part of the Cold War,etc.)and a new epoch has dawned where states are free to exercise their power to zealously promote human rights and fight dictators, is not tenable with the slightest effort toward serious analyses (as opposed to ,say, believing every pronouncment of our leaders and their dupes in the media). After all, what are we to make of the fact that the Clinton administration refused to contribute to efforts for a peacekeeping force to mitigate horrendous atrocities in Sierra Leone and, shortly before the Kosovo bombings began, refused to provide a paltry sum for a UN peacekeeping force in the Republic of Congo for the same purpose. Why is it that the Clinton administration was providing massive military and economic assistance to a fascist regime in Turkey, which as documented for years by the major human rights organizations, Turkish dissidents, and even the Turkish government, has slaughtred tens of thousands of Kurds, created millions of internal Kurdish refugees, burned thousands of Kurdish villages using U.S. weapons. Why is it that the Clinton administration was (and is) providing massive weapons and assistance to a death squad/military run "democracy" in Colombia, which according to the State departments own human rights report, conducted about the same murders, created around the same number of refugees, burned around the same number of villages, etc. as during the period of serious violence before the bombings in Kosovo began (February 98' to March 99')? Why is it that the Clinton adminstration, continuing U.S. policies since December 1975, continued to have normal military, economic and diplomatic relations with the military generals in Indonesia, even as they were stepping atrocities against the people of East Timor in order to deter the people from voting to remove themselves from Indonesia's fascist rule in the September 1999 U.N. sponsored referendum, and then sat on its hands for a few weeks after the referndum before making any remotely serious gestures, compelled mostly by Australian public opinion, toward stopping the terror and murder that the Indonesians were paying back the people for daring to exercise their right of self-determination?

The answer is simply that the Clinton administration is no different that past administrations. Alot of the leftists who supported the war admit that this is the case but claim that in the instance alot of good was done by the great powers in stopping genocidal tactics perpetrated by a genocidal madman. Chomsky devotes considerable space to documenting (what should quite obvious) that misery and death vastly increased after verification monitors left Kosovo on March 19th and the Nato began bombing five days later. It was only natural for the Serbs to react with such violence and murder. After all, as Chomsky shows but which the mainstream media has obscured, Nato told them at the Ramouillet talks that they must accept a Nato occupation of Kosovo and grant them unhindered access to the rest of Yugoslavia or be bombed. A Serb parliament proposal of March 23 accepting all Nato demands except for the Nato occupation force and allowing for negotiations on an international security presence in Kosovo was reported by the major wire services but quickly died in the rest of the media and was ignored by the U.S. government. Under these conditions, with Nato about to unleash its massive war machine to destroy Serb and Kosovar infrastructure (hitting very few military targets) and drive much of the Serb population out of Kosovo, killing thousands of Serbs (and many Albanians too) and with that force that was about to rein massive destruction upon it, not too discretely heavily funding a terrorist group claiming to represent its most volatile minority, it is horrible but strategically understandable that a nation would undertake to cleanse itself of that minority. That atrocities would vastly escalate once the bombing started and there would be an explosion of refugees has been noted by many journalists, was "absolutely predictable" in the words commanding general Wesely Clark a few days after the bombings began. When the peace treaty was signed, Chomsky noted that Nato agreed on paper to the proposals of the Serb parliament of March 23rd and subsequent proposals by Milosevic. But only on paper that is. Nato proceeded to impose its version of the treaty, with media acceptance and ignoring of the truth, commanding and dominating the security force that occupied Kosovo whereas the treaty actually only called for an "international securtiy presence" under "UN auspicies" with "substantial Nato participation" and nothing more.

Chomsky also deals with some other effects of the war. The democratic opposition to Milosevic was severely damaged, especially in the fervently anti-milosevic province of Vojvodina. Other nations in the third world as well as the first expressed great dismay at the war, as a survey of their media demonstrates, and will be further enriching world arms manufacturers as they load up on lethal weapons in order to try to defend themselves against the United States should they cross its path.

In the past, the United States used Russian imperialism as a fraudulent pretext to destroy third world nations or indiginous liberation movements who dared to attempt to develop their economies and political structure outside of American domination. With the cold war gone, policy has been modified but it is essentially the same. For seeing the main reason for the Kosovo war, Chomsky refers to the recently declassified 1995 document of our nuclear arsenal command entitled "Essentials of Post Cold War Detterernce" which argues that the United States should portray itself as very irrational and vindictive toward the rest of the world so that they will be scared into submission and ruthelessly crush any nation, no matter how weak, if it should dare threaten its "interests." i.e. resist its economic and political hegemony.