http://en.rian.ru/analysis/20080811/115951466.html
Russian Information Agency Novosti
August 11, 2008
Humanitarian intervention: the American model
Dmitry Kosyrev
MOSCOW - Sending armed forces into the territory of a
sovereign state without the UN's authorization,
so-called "humanitarian intervention," is an American
invention.
Its date of birth is thought to be 1999, Yugoslavia.
But that is not quite so. What happened in 1999 was
the launching of the term, an attempt to make it part
of international practice.
But in reality much of the experience of such military
actions dates further back. Among the numerous wars
and military actions undertaken by the U.S. after the
adoption of the UN Charter, one should pay attention
to the operations in Grenada and Panama, and look at
the attempted intervention in Somalia. The experience
acquired then came in handy in Yugoslavia and Iraq.
Grenada, 1983. The order to launch a preemptive
military operation against the Caribbean island state
of Grenada was given by U.S. President Ronald Reagan,
although formally the decision to use military force
was taken by the Organization of Eastern Caribbean
States.
The pretext for the military operation was "the taking
of American students as hostages." Later it turned out
that Grenada authorities had simply decided to provide
the students with guards because shortly before armed
clashes had broken out in Grenada and the leader of
the local Marxists who had just come to power had been
murdered by his associates, creating tensions in the
country.
Reagan declared that a Cuban-Soviet invasion of
Grenada was imminent and that weapons were being
stockpiled there that would be used by international
terrorists. As it turned out, the arms dumps in
Grenada were filled with old Soviet weapons and no new
consignments had arrived. Next the U.S. declared that
there were 1,200 Cuban commandos on the island. Later
it turned out that there were no more than 200 Cubans,
a third of whom were civilians.
After the capture of the island by American troops,
many civilian casualties at the hands of the American
troops were recorded.
Panama, 1989. The decision on the armed invasion and
the overthrow of the Panamanian government was taken
by George Bush Sr. The declared reason was the
involvement of Panama and its head, General Manuel
Antonio Noriega, in drug-trafficking (above all,
supplies to the U.S.) and the fact that in the 1980s
the city of Panama had become a money-laundering
center.
The American invasion of Panama was marked by two
features. The first was an atypical scale of American
military atrocities.
Reports spoke not only about casualties due to air
raids, but of U.S. soldiers opening up machine-gun
fire on street crowds and of American vehicles
crushing and firing on cars with people.
As a result of this action, a whole quarter in Panama,
partly consisting of wooden buildings dating back to
the 1900s, was gutted by fire. For a week thereafter
the Americans left the city at the mercy of the
criminals they had released from jails. Almost all the
supermarkets, warehouses and businesses were looted.
The country suffered damage to the tune of $2 billion.
It was in Panama that a group of hand-picked
journalists and cameramen was first created and
briefed and sent to similarly hand-picked places just
before the military action was launched. Most of these
media people were at American war bases. The American
command did not allow undesirables into the combat
zone.
The technology of briefings, press conferences,
meetings with prominent politicians, businessmen and
other local VIPs was worked out.
Correspondents of foreign newspapers and TV companies
who did not belong to the news team were caught and
attempts were made to murder some of them. All the
radio and TV stations were instantly captured and then
used to disseminate American propaganda.
The same scenario has been acted out repeatedly,
notably in Yugoslavia in 1999 and in Iraq in 2003,
except that news coverage was organized well in
advance and was much more professional.
Somalia, 1993. That operation, unlike the previous
ones, had UN sanction, and can be described as a
humanitarian intervention. The soldiers of the U.S.
and some other countries were in Somalia as
peace-keepers to secure the delivery of the
humanitarian care.
The pretext for that operation was the murder of four
U.S. military police by the militants of the Somali
rebel General Aidid in 1992-1993. Washington sent a
Delta Force unit to Somalia to arrest or liquidate
Aidid. In the meantime an American helicopter was shot
down, three Americans died, and the crowd mutilated
their bodies and dragged them through the streets.
Finally, on October 3-4 Aidid's headquarters in a city
neighborhood was raided with disastrous results.
Eighteen Americans died in Mogadishu and it was
decided to withdraw the American contingent from the
country. It was one of the darkest pages in American
military history.
NATO's air war against Yugoslavia in March-April 1991
was launched under the pretext of the need to prevent
a humanitarian disaster, namely, the plight of
refugees and also ethnic cleansing in Kosovo (NATO
spoke exclusively about the plight of Albanians
ignoring similar problems of the Serbian population).
It was in 1999 that the thesis on the right of the
alliance to launch humanitarian interventions all over
the world without UN security sanctions was introduced
in the NATO strategy.
The U.S. National Security Strategy circa 2002
stipulates the right to launch preemptive strikes as
part of the fight against international terror. In
2005 the strategy was enlarged by the provision that
victory in the war against terror can only be achieved
if there is a change of regime in some countries.
Examples cited included Iran, Syria, Kyrgyzstan,
Uzbekistan and Belarus.
The talk at the U.S. Congress at the time was about
"the UN not helping peoples but governments," about
"the problems usually arising in the countries where
the governments are in conflict with their own
people." Hence, effective humanitarian assistance
presupposes the breach of state sovereignty.
The best known and the largest military action taken
without UN sanctions was, of course, the war waged by
the U.S. and Britain against Saddam Hussein's regime
in March-April 2003.
A special category among such interventions is an
intervention that does not involve land forces but
relies primarily on air raids. In all these cases the
UN did not authorize the actions.
They include the bombings of North Vietnam in the
1960s and Cambodia in the 1970s (let it be recalled
that U.S. troops did not engage in any other military
actions in North Vietnam), Ronald Reagan's decision to
bomb Libyan cities in 1983 and many others.
Serbian News Network - SNN
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