The Post-Cold War American Interventions Into Haiti, Somalia, Bosnia and Kosovo, Part II

Dwight D. Murphey

      Dwight D. Murphey teaches Business law at Wichita State University. This is the second and concluding part of an article that began in the October issue of the St. Croix Review.

The Interventions in Light of the Questions They Raise in Common

      With the review of the interventions as background, we can now examine how the questions that were mentioned at the beginning of this article are answered:

1. Whether the intervention resulted primarily from sensationalist media accounts, leading to a selectivity among possible interventions that had little basis in principle.

      The worldwide mass media have a pervasive impact on the response to specific issues. David Callahan, in Unwinnable Wars; American Power and Ethnic Conflict, says that

Graphic media images of international suffering are now transmitted faster and more widely than ever before, and these images often fuel public demands for action.

Such images spurred demand for the U.S. intervention into Somalia in 1992: Walter Clarke, in Learning from Somalia, relates how

The humanitarian disaster in Somalia was on all the television screens in the United States by August 1992. American General Colin Powell wrote in his memoirs that the mission was decided upon after Somalia "wrenched our hearts."

Lester Brune, in Post-Cold War Interventions, suggests that

Perhaps like the American public, Bush, Powell, and Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney simply judged Somalia by the television pictures reaching their homes. These instant photographs depicted the horrendous suffering of starving women and children but never captured the savage reality of the young gangs.

       The media again provided the provocation for action in Bosnia and Kosovo. Graphic atrocity reports about war crimes committed mainly by Serbs "outraged world opinion and inspired a U.S. congressional debate" in August 1992, Brune says. In Kosovo, according to Malcolm, in Kosovo: A Short History, after Serb forces took men away from their families, "the U.S. government reported that it had satellite images of many newly dug mass graves." These reports received extensive media attention at the time and were the principal provocation for the U.S. air war against Serbia, overriding Serbian protestations that the reports were false and were concocted by the Kosovo Liberation Army precisely to cause NATO intervention. It is a serious embarrassment that the atrocity reports did not prove true when investigated after the war. In an article entitled "Where are the bodies? . . . few 'mass graves' found thus far in Kosovo," the WorldNetDaily in late 1999 told of an independent intelligence report by a U.S.-based firm (the "Stratfor Report"). The report said that the International Criminal Tribunal to try war crimes cases had found no bodies in the Trepca mines despite earlier reports that the corpses of 700 murdered ethnic Albanians were hidden there.

Official estimates indicated that some 10,000 ethnic Albanians were killed in a Serb rampage of ethnic cleansing. Yet four months into an international investigation bodies numbering only in the hundreds have been exhumed . . .

with the FBI [which participated in the search] having found "fewer than two hundred."        Interventions brought about by media attention are in principle no more worthy of intervention than countless other situations that are ignored. Robert Rotberg, in Learning from Somalia, wrote in 1997 that:

We live in a world where civil wars in far-off places are the norm-where thirty wars erupt annually, where there are twenty complex humanitarian crises every year, where 50 million persons are now displaced . . . and where millions of people were killed during 1991-1995 in one corner of Africa alone.

2. Whether the problems that the intervention sought to address are in fact soluble.

       No amount of outside assistance and intervention seems to improve the situation in Haiti. After the 1915-1934 American occupation, Haiti passed into several decades of dictatorship under "Papa Doc" and "Baby Doc" Duvalier. We have seen how corruption, violence and political chaos reign after the U.S. occupation in the l990s.
       In Somalia, Catherine Besteman reminds us in Unraveling Somalia, the situation is one where, even in the absence of the more recent troubles, there are large portions of the country

. . . where bandits attack villages, shooting and looting before disappearing into the bush, where deaths from malaria, tuberculosis, fevers, and accidents claim far more lives than does old age.

Even before the intraclan war of the 1990s, Anna Simons says, in Networks of Dissolution, Mogadishu was a "hardship post" for any Westerner sent there:

Streets were unsigned and driving was a free-for-all. Municipal electricity was erratic and unpredictable, telephone service ineffectual, and local news unavailable.

The picture Anna Simons paints of the larger culture isn't encouraging:

The universal belief among expatriates [was] that Somalis lacked the ability to maintain anything-roads, equipment, offices, projects, or, essentially, themselves.

Corruption, a lack of civic motivation and of any coherent national feeling, pastoralist ideology, an eagerness to rely on the help of outsiders, and a low level of competence all combine to deny a solid basis for a successful culture.
       There is no lack of civilization in the former Yugoslavia, including Bosnia and Kosovo, so the situation is not so obviously irremediable. The insolubility comes, rather, from centuries-long enmities. What foundation is there for a spirit of peace within the heart of a person whose parents and siblings have been shot, raped or hacked to pieces? There is little wonder that the prediction is made that a peacekeeping force will have to remain indefinitely.

3. Whether the intervention was undertaken with an achievable and desirable outcome in mind.

       In May 2000, William B. Jones, the U.S. ambassador to Haiti from 1977 to 1980, wrote that

. . . once again, Haiti has made the complete circle from chaos and violence to chaos and violence. Although well-meaning and idealistic, U.S. policies have failed to bring democracy, stability and economic growth to Haiti.

       No clear case of an "end-game" occurred in Somalia, where a bloodied United States withdrew, "to be replaced," according to Clarke and Herbst (in Learning from Somalia), "by far less well-trained and well-armed soldiers from a multitude of countries." Anna Simons tells how

. . . the humanitarian assistance organizations paid pirates' ransoms to hired guns, bribed well-fed people in order to be able to deliver food to the starving, and otherwise created new inequities based on who [sic] they employed, elevated, and had to secure protection from.

       As to Bosnia, David Pryce-Jones wrote in National Review that:

       Bosnia is now a protectorate. A Bosnian government goes through the motions of administration, but UN personnel alone guarantee law and order. The world community, in other words, has introduced an updated version of the typical nineteenth-century colonial regime.

Fareed Zakaria, the managing editor of Foreign Affairs, predicts that

The moment the occupation ends, the problems that led to the intervention will resume. Absent an occupying force, Bosnia would split into three separate, ethnically uniform states.

       There would not seem to be a coherent goal for Kosovo. The Clinton administration said that it wanted a multiethnic Kosovo that would be autonomous within Yugoslavia. But the destruction of Serbia's infrastructure and the driving out of the Serbian army set the stage for the "ethnic cleansing," in which ethnic Albanians have driven the Serb population out of Kosovo, that has followed the NATO occupation. Don Feder, writing in Middle American News, reports "triumphant Albanians ethnically cleansed 230,000 Serbs and gypsies from Kosovo."
       The lack of an end game becomes especially apparent when there is difficulty disengaging, as in Bosnia and Kosovo-or where disengagement means "cutting and running," as in Somalia and Haiti-without having produced an appreciable effect.

4. Whether there is conceptual clarity about the ends, and the means to attain them.

       This deserves to be considered as a separate point because interventions are often mired in conceptual muddles.
       There has been an impression that "humanitarian interventions" are both distinct from and much safer than "political interventions." This may be so where there is no local conflict; but where there is, the helping of those in distress is inescapably an intervention on the side of those who have been losing and against those who have been winning. In the context of Somalia, and speaking directly to the idea of the two types of intervention, Clarke and Herbst (in Learning from Somalia) say that

Although analytically attractive, the distinction between the different types of intervention, at the heart of so much of the current debate, is not particularly helpful. Indeed, at a practical level, it is hard to see how anyone could believe that landing 30,000 troops in a country was anything but a gross interference in major aspects of a country's politics.

       There is also a disconnect between the U.S. desire to intervene in crises and its unwillingness to suffer casualties. In Somalia when the warlord Aideed adopted a tactic of "killing Americans," the American public came alive to the dangers and President Clinton immediately announced plans for U.S. withdrawal.
       Another confusion comes from the inability to decide between two ideological absolutes: the devotion to "multiethnicity" and the affirmation of distinct ethnic identities. The "international community" wants "ethnic pluralism" in such places as Kosovo and Bosnia, but at the same time the interventions run up against the separatism that distinct peoples prefer (and passionately seek) in fact.
       There is conceptual confusion, too, in the prosecution of "war crimes" in a world in which "man's inhumanity to man" is as ubiquitous as it is. When there are apparently inexcusable brutalities committed on all sides in an endless string of wars, it is valid to ask just what justifies bringing a few perpetrators before a court either for prison or execution.

5. Whether Americans have had any profound understanding of the situations into which they have intervened.

       Commentators often speak of Americans' poverty of understanding about foreign peoples and situations. About Bosnia, Samuel Huntington (in Clash of Civilizations) says that

American idealism, moralism, humanitarian instincts, naivete, and ignorance concerning the Balkans thus led them to be pro-Bosnian and anti-Serb.

Robert H. Jackson in Beyond Westphalia writes that it was far more convenient to those seeking intervention to see the Yugoslav situation as a struggle among warlords than to see it as a popularly based struggle for ethnic self-determination.

       About Somalia, Walter Clarke, in Learning from Somalia, writes that

Inability or unwillingness to discern the essential political dynamics of the country and to effect remedial measures to foster civil society-out of expedience, disinterest, or naive "neutrality"-lies at the root of the world's failure in Somalia.

6. Whether intervention has made the world a more dangerous place for the United States in light of the animosities incurred.

       There is the risk that to the extent other peoples value their cultural identity and national sovereignty, they may well resent anyone who has a transcendent vision to impose on them. Christopher Layne of the Center for International Studies writes that

This unilateral dominance-what political scientists call hegemony-is self-defeating . . . When one state becomes too powerful, other states become fearful and unite to "balance" against it.

       Such resentment shows up in many places. John Drysdale (in Learning from Somalia) says that the Somalis who inflicted heavy casualties on American Rangers on October 3, 1993, saw it as "an unprecedented triumph over a perceived tyranny." Anna Simons (in Networks of Dissolution) reports that many Somalis were suspicious of the motives behind the intervention: "Obviously Somalia had to have something the United States and the rest of the world wanted."
       Dana Munro says in The United States and the Caribbean Republics that during the long early-twentieth century American occupation of Haiti,

There had always been resentment of the presence of foreign troops and the authority exercised by foreign officials.

He tells how each class in Haitian life had its own reasons for this resentment. Those who in the l990s opposed the American intervention on behalf of Aristide formed a National Anti-Occupation Coalition in 1994, and blamed the assassination of Aristide's opponents on President Clinton. On the other side, we have seen how Rene Preval's government, elected from Aristide's party to succeed him, wasted no time in establishing diplomatic relations with Castro's Communist government in Cuba right after Preval was installed. Then in July 2000, Insight magazine reported

In mid-June, supporters of former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide trampled and spat on an American flag in front of the U.S. embassy in Port-au-Prince.

Conclusion
       The recent American interventions into Haiti, Somalia, Bosnia and Kosovo would seem to illustrate the reasons for humility and caution. They raise serious questions about ends-and-means, conceptual clarity, depth of understanding, the process of decision, and what may well be an incurring of a rage for vengeance. As many of the conflict tell us, reciprocal bloodlust is almost impossible to stop once it is started. Just what forms that bloodlust may take in an age when terrorism will be armed with chemical, biological and nuclear weapons of mass killing remains to be seen. For those who make themselves parties to disputes, they can never tell when the final chapter will be written.