THE NEW MILITARY HUMANISM:
Lessons From Kosovo.
By Noam Chomsky.
Common Courage. 199 pp. $15.95.
The spectacle of human beings acting out mindless violence through pack
behavior instills more terror in the heart than perhaps any other event in
the natural world. State-directed violence, capable of wielding today's
deadliest technology, especially evokes nightmarish thoughts about
apocalyptic ends. But science has not worked overtime to find a satisfactory
explanation for collective madness and, not surprisingly, has not produced
one. Literature and the visual arts have done their best to pick up the
slack. William Golding articulated our fear of human wilding in Lord of the
Flies. George Orwell gave the psychology an overt political spin in Animal
Farm, as did C.S. Lewis from a Christian perspective in That Hideous
Strength. Inspiration runs the gamut from highbrow to lowbrow. George
Romero's film Night of the Living Dead belongs to the genre, for example,
and
is notable for having transformed a primordial terror into an image so alien
it can be laughed away. In reality, though, this fear won't go away. It
can't, because we all feel a subtle pull of unaccountable madness. And life
demands of us, some more than others, a relentless struggle to explain these
elemental experiences for which language apparently has not--yet--acquired
the proper constructs.
Noam Chomsky's book The New Military Humanism: Lessons From Kosovo, ably
demonstrates how far we've come and, inadvertently, suggests how far there
is
to go. Chomsky contends that almost everything you have read or heard or
seen
on television about Kosovo has been a partial truth or outright falsehood.
For a general readership such an assertion would seem like fiction, as if
Animal Farm were actually our controlled society. And Chomsky goes further,
asserting that after NATO's war for Kosovo the malicious use of American
power has become, more than ever before, the dominant fact of international
politics. He writes, "It could be argued, rather plausibly, that further
demolition of the rules of world order is by now of no significance, as in
the late 1930s. The contempt of the world's leading power for the framework
of world order has become so extreme that there is little left to discuss."
The scope and audacity of Chomsky's critique stagger the imagination. To
call
it radical practically misses the point. On the one hand we have the
established media, the respectable community of foreign affairs analysts,
the
government--and on the other, Noam Chomsky. Assuming he is right, or even
partly right, a question begs to be asked: How is it possible for things to
be so out of kilter? Alternatively, what sets Chomsky's critique apart from
common conspiracy theories?
Chomsky rather sensibly assembles a thick file of facts, carefully
documented
in endnotes, to buttress his assertions. He weaves these into a highly
persuasive big picture of media and government shenanigans. So far, so good.
But clearly he is not writing for those who are not already interested in
his
ideas. He meanders, he repeats himself, he overindulges his sarcastic streak
and he doesn't organize his arguments, at least not so you'd notice; Chomsky
needed an editor to impose more discipline. The reader might imagine herself
scouring a beach with a metal detector looking for nuggets--of which there
are plenty. And when it comes to the "How is this possible?" question,
Chomsky assumes the reader's more than casual familiarity with his
voluminous
past writings, in particular Manufacturing Consent (co-written with Edward
Herman). In any case, he completely ignores the magnitude of the problem.
Marxists, or anarcho-syndicalists--which may describe Chomsky's political
leanings--or other Old Left activists may shrug this question off, thinking
it answered a thousand times before. Others are left with a vague and
ultimately quite unsatisfying impression that somehow it is simultaneously
in
all these individuals' (reporters, editors, producers, publishers, experts,
government officials, military officers, etc.) self-interest to deceive the
world while behaving badly.
* * *
What's missing is a novelist's eye and ear for individual moral dilemmas
that
have aggregated onto a grand scale, because what Chomsky has gotten
ahold of, perhaps without realizing it, is the question of evil.
Individually, the
people Chomsky criticizes, or many of them, are not only acting out of
self-interest but also know that they are doing something wrong. Lying to
the
public is wrong, their small, insistent voices of conscience tell them.
Arbitrarily killing innocent people is wrong. Hatemongering in an attempt to
vilify an entire people (the Serbs) is wrong. When reporters or analysts or
government officials do these things, they also must work to suppress their
voice of conscience. Evil, in other words, doesn't need horns and a tail,
just a bureaucratically structured environment that helps convince people of
their false selves. Some notion of morality, or whatever you wish to call
it,
must enter the equation; otherwise Chomsky's masterly descriptions of group
psychology gone haywire don't provide any exit. No morality, no choice, no
redemption. No reform. We will all be stuck living in Animal Farm forever!
As an example of Chomsky's reasoning, we might look at the issue of how many
Albanians were killed by Serbs, taking advantage of reports that have
appeared in the press since the book was published, as well as material
available to Chomsky at his time of writing. This morbid issue of the death
toll, by the way, is not one Chomsky tackles head on, but its reportage by
government and media conforms perfectly to his thesis. As he says,
It is unusual for the resort to violence to be supported with argumentation
so feeble. One might conjecture that advocates of the escalation of
atrocities in Kosovo [e.g., bombing] recognized at some level that
constructing a justification posed some non-trivial problems. That might
account for the outburst of virulent race-hatred and jingoism, a phenomenon
I
have not seen in my lifetime since the hysteria whipped up about 'the Japs'
during World War II, vermin who must be crushed--unlike the Germans, fellow
humans who had strayed.
On March 18, the day the Rambouillet talks broke down, David Scheffer, the
State Department's ambassador at large for war crimes issues, proclaimed
that
"we have upwards to about 100,000 men that we cannot account for" in Kosovo.
Depending upon the sophistication of the press organ involved, this
statement
was variously construed as a warning or, as the New York Daily News put it
in
a headline the next day, 100,000 Kosovar Men Feared Dead. The specter of
mass
murder critically supported public acceptance of NATO airstrikes, which
began
less than a week later, on March 24. After two months of bombing, the
Yugoslav regime was still, to the Administration's deepening chagrin, in the
fight. By this time there were increasing murmurs of discontent in the press
regarding the effect of NATO airstrikes on unmistakably civilian targets.
Ambassador Scheffer stepped to the plate again in mid-May, calling for
"speedy investigations" of war crimes (by Serbs) while now noting that "as
many as 225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and 59 remain
unaccounted
for."
Several wire services quoted him on different days as saying that "with
the exception of Rwanda in 1994 and Cambodia in 1975, you would be
hard-pressed to find a crime scene anywhere in the world since World War II
where a defenseless civilian population has been assaulted with such
ferocity
and criminal intent, and suffered so many multiple violations of
humanitarian
law in such a short period of time as in Kosovo since mid-March 1999." It
was
a profoundly ignorant remark, of course, but what's important is that the
Administration's laserlike focus on allegations and innuendoes of genocidal
acts securely established the legitimacy of continued bombing for an
at-that-time unknown, perhaps lengthy period.
Helpfully sensing that Washington--Scheffer and a battalion of like-minded
flacks--had gone too far out on a limb, in June and July the British started
publicizing their reduced estimate that 10,000 Albanian Kosovars had been
killed. For whatever reason that number stuck in establishment circles. In
fact, however, it appears to be still too many. The actual number is
probably
somewhere in the low thousands.
In mid-July sources from the NATO-led peacekeeping force in Kosovo, known as
KFOR, were telling the press that of 2,150 bodies found by peacekeepers only
850 were victims of massacres. Nevertheless, still eager to bolster the
Serb=devil argument, National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, in an address
to
the Council on Foreign Relations on July 26, poignantly mentioned "the
village of Ljubenic, the largest mass-grave site discovered so far from this
conflict, with as many as 350 bodies." Berger may not have been aware that
the Italian in charge of the site, Brig. Gen. Mauro Del Vecchio, had told
the
press several days earlier that the exhumation had been completed at the
site
and that seven bodies had been found. All press mention of Ljubenic ceases
after that point.
* * *
On September 23 El País, a mainstream Madrid paper, reported that Spanish
forensic investigators sent to Kosovo had found no proof of genocide. The
team, which had experience in Rwanda, had been told to expect to perform
more
than 2,000 autopsies in one of the areas worst hit by fighting, but it found
only 187 bodies to examine. No mass graves and, for the most part, no signs
of torture. And when on October 10 other investigators announced that no
bodies had been found in the Trepca mine complex, long rumored to contain as
many as 700 corpses, skepticism burst into the open. First out of the gate
was a Web site called Stratfor.com, a sort of wannabe Jane's Intelligence
Review, which in a long article concluded that "bodies numbering only in the
hundreds have been found," while taking care not to judge the final outcome
prematurely. Though it raised the right questions, Stratfor's estimate was
too low because of sloppy research, something symptomatic of much of its
work. It was, nevertheless, widely cited. The debate raced around the
Internet, popped up in Alexander Cockburn's November 8 Nation column (which
was recycled as an Op-Ed in the Los Angeles Times), found space in another
author's opinion column in the Amsterdam De Volkskrant and then emerged as a
very lengthy news story in the Sunday Times of London. The Sunday Times
added
an interview with the head of the Spanish team, Emilio Perez Pujol, who was
"disillusioned" by the "war propaganda machine." Pujol says the death toll
may never exceed 2,500.
Until recently the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia
kept out of the debate, except indirectly in late August when it was quick
to
deny the figure of 11,000 dead that Kosovo's UN civilian administrator,
Bernard Kouchner, was then touting. But on November 10 Carla Del Ponte,
chief
prosecutor for the ICTY, reported to the UN Security Council that its
investigators had found 2,108 bodies at 195 sites, out of 529 reported
locales. Del Ponte cautioned that it was an interim figure and that evidence
of grave tampering did exist; Ljubenic and Trepca sites made notorious in
press reports were found not to contain masses of bodies. A State Department
draft report still set the number of likely Kosovar Albanian deaths at "over
8,000."
Investigators have probably cherry-picked the most likely large mass graves.
Serbian forces probably did truck some bodies to Serbia for disposal in, for
example, smelters. But could that have been more than a couple of thousand,
without leaving a trail of evidence that has so far not appeared? The press
has reported on most of the larger graves that KFOR has found. And we know
that several thousand Albanian Kosovars were taken to Serbian prisons during
the war, are still being held and are gradually being accounted for. Given
the number of ICTY-identified sites and the tribunal's findings so far, a
reasonable guess of the Albanian dead lies somewhere between 2,000 and
4,000.
* * *
By the standards of its own humanitarian argument, Chomsky points out, NATO
accomplished nothing or less than nothing. Largely in response to NATO
bombing, Serbs killed a few thousand Albanian civilians; to even the score
NATO killed a few thousand Serb civilians while, incidentally, clocking
Yugoslavia's economic infrastructure. Chomsky ridicules the notion that
bombing was meant to stop the Serbs' forcible expulsion of Albanians or that
it did anything but accelerate the process--although these expulsions, which
were televised around the world, did generate support for NATO's bombing
campaign. Chomsky lambastes Administration claims that without bombing, the
Serbs would have committed more and worse atrocities. He provides important
corrections to conventional wisdom regarding the Organization for Security
and Cooperation in Europe's monitoring mission in place before the bombing,
underappreciated by Washington, and he documents Serbia's eagerness to seek
a
negotiated settlement that would have included a substantial international
armed presence. He also notes, as have several others, that Rambouillet set
up a pretext for bombing, but then he goes on to describe, as only a handful
have, how it may well not have been the bombing that led to a settlement but
rather a significant change in US demands, a more than face-saving
compromise
that shifted ultimate responsibility for deciding Kosovo's political future
from NATO to the UN. Most thoughtful critics of the war--Michael
Mandelbaum's
article this fall in Foreign Affairs comes to mind--unfortunately missed
this
point, which is essential to understanding not only recent history but also
the ongoing dynamics of Serb-NATO exchanges.
Chomsky speculates that Washington initiated the NATO war in order to boost
NATO's credibility, not in a positive sense but as an arch-demonstration of
power. Serbia, Chomsky writes, "was an annoyance, an unwelcome impediment to
Washington's efforts to complete its substantial takeover of Europe."
Furthermore, "as long as Serbia is not incorporated within U.S.-dominated
domains, it makes sense to punish it for failure to conform--very visibly,
in
a way that will serve as a warning to others that might be similarly
inclined." The theme of a rogue superpower serves as the basis for many
illuminating comparisons regarding US abuse of power, directly or by way of
clients, in Vietnam, Laos, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Colombia, Cuba,
Guatemala,
Haiti, Palestine, East Timor, Iraq and Turkey, to name a few. Given, for
example, that US actions have steadily encouraged the Turks to persecute the
Kurds, it would be inconsistent, Chomsky argues, indeed irrational, to give
any credence at all to a general claim that US policy is guided by
benevolent
humanitarian impulses, and the same holds for any such claim about Kosovo.
One by one his examples could be debated separately according to the
exigencies of circumstance; taken together, they form a damning indictment.
* * *
In today's world the flip side of high-tech bullying is a mad scramble among
small states to acquire weapons of mass destruction for their own
protection.
Proliferation, Chomsky points out in an extended aside, will be one of many
unpleasant aftereffects of NATO's war. With some embarrassment, one wonders
whether, after the North Koreans sell their missiles and the Russians their
bombs, Washington will reconsider the gusto with which it launches military
operations.
A less tangible but no less important logical consequence of NATO's
unprovoked assault on Yugoslavia is the dangerous precedent this sets for
international law. Chomsky says that
in the real world, there are two options: (1) Some kind of framework of
world
order, perhaps the U.N. Charter, the International Court of Justice, and
other existing institutions, or perhaps something better if it can be
devised
and broadly accepted. (2) The powerful do as they wish, expecting to receive
the accolades that are the prerogative of power.
This is quite right. More specifically, what the world has now is, on the
one
hand, the Westphalian system as it evolved after 1648, with its core insight
that sovereign states must mind their own business when it comes to each
other's internal affairs, and, on the other, the notion that some doctrine
of
moral imperatives (or the illusion of such) may justify intervention. The
two
views are mutually exclusive, notwithstanding recent efforts by UN Secretary
General Kofi Annan and others to meld them. Even the systems of discourse
these paradigms employ to justify themselves operate on entirely different
levels. The Westphalian view is pragmatic, rational, concerned with avoiding
war; humanitarian interventionism is quasi-religious, unapproachable except
through belief. Choosing between them depends upon how one feels getting out
of bed. Except now the world learns that it doesn't have much of a
choice--we're taking a giant leap backward, some 350 years.
One can, perhaps, define modernity as the evolution of the awareness and
appreciation of individuality. In this matter, "humanitarian intervention"
represents a significant leap backward. Arguing, in extreme form, not only a
right but a duty to intervene, it rejects the gray area of international
humanitarian law that applies to individuals, as practiced, say, by the
International Committee of the Red Cross. Neutrality is out, while
co-belligerency is in. The first to suffer will be individuals who otherwise
may have had recourse to some limited, painstakingly created international
protections. It's worth recalling that the humanitarian interventionist
argument has its modern roots in the Biafra crisis of the late sixties.
Francophone groups in particular, and those who would form Doctors Without
Borders, argued that aid agencies had to take sides. France, of course,
wanted to take sides, in part to secure lucrative oil-lifting rights. For
its
own reasons the United States decided to take sides in Yugoslavia. The trend
is clear enough: We are moving from somewhat successful efforts to moderate
or defuse violence, efforts based on enlightened notions of individual
rights, toward approving and channeling violence for group ends.
* * *
But let's face it, most people who observed the Kosovo conflict didn't
suspect they might themselves be victims of a massive government and media
disinformation campaign. Moreover, a theoretical or comparative argument
wouldn't have seemed particularly persuasive coming from the initiated, who
themselves rightly remain puzzled about whether or how to vest abominable
government misbehavior with a collective conscious volition. No, the thing
that got people's attention was that those articulating the policy seemed to
enjoy just a little too much the misery they were causing. The twitchy
rantings of US Gen. Wesley Clark, the NATO supreme commander. The snide
egoism of Madeleine Albright's amanuensis, Jamie Rubin, and his puckish NATO
counterpart, Jamie Shea. What a cast of characters! What an extravaganza! A
small group at the pinnacle of power set out capriciously to destroy a small
country, succeeded and relished every minute of it. The public recognized
the
smell of evil. How many kids, indeed, did NATO kill?
In fact, there was quite a lot of dissent brewing about the war. Even the
mainstream media voiced doubts. Chomsky barely mentions this, doesn't make
anything of it and maybe wasn't aware of it except unconsciously in a
feeling
of reproach: the public coming to the right conclusions for the wrong
reasons. Nevertheless, there were hopeful signs of a nascent antiwar
movement, one that could have taken to the streets in large numbers if the
war had continued. This suggests that establishment power has real limits,
that the public has a moral sense of fair play--you could have read that
into
news from Seattle lately, too. People knew that Kosovo was not an immaculate
mistake: The war sprang from a series of bad decisions, and different
decisions could have cut it off. There was a way out, after all.
Chomsky's splendid critique demands attention for many reasons, but above
all
for the questions in it he already thinks answered. How could this happen?
Can't we devise laws to regulate properly the conduct of foreign policy? Why
do intelligent people in the press tell one another lies? How do we know,
really, when we're doing something wrong? Chomsky, described by the science
writer Martin Gardner as a "mysterian"--that is, one who believes we never
will have answers to explain human consciousness or the creative powers of
the human mind--may think not all these questions are worth asking; that
only
macro-policy and global effects deserve investigation. True, by their
nature,
questions of practical ethics have no definitive answers. Human beings will
continue asking them, though, because we know from experience that in
different historical times and places asking about the right moral procedure
leads to better and better approximations of the truth, and because it is in
our genes to be very afraid of what may happen if we don't.
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