The Lessons of Yugoslavia
by Louis Proyect
David Gibbs, First Do No Harm: Humanitarian Intervention and the
Destruction of Yugoslavia (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press,
forthcoming, June 2009).
As a rule of thumb, there is an inverse relationship between the success
of American foreign policy adventures and the amount of scholarly
critiques they generate. When they fail, as they did in Vietnam and
Iraq, a mass market will be created for books like David Halberstam's
The Making of a Quagmire: America and Vietnam during the Kennedy Era or
Thomas Ricks's Fiasco. But when they succeed, publishers will not rush
to the door of a scholar who questions such victories, especially if the
main criterion of questioning is the impact on the lives of those whose
lands were attacked.
Perhaps the most obvious recent example of this is the wars in
Yugoslavia, which have generated very little in the way of serious
analysis except from Diana Johnstone or Edward Herman. As a measure of
their isolation, both have been attacked as "holocaust revisionists" for
making essentially the same kinds of points that have been made with
respect to Iraq.
Thus, it is of some importance that David Gibbs, a respected professor
of history and political science at the University of Arizona, has
weighed in on the Balkan wars through the publication of First Do No
Harm: Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia.
Using his background in the two disciplines, Gibbs has written one of
the few chronicles of the wars in Yugoslavia designed simply to tell the
truth about what happened. Since so many mainstream accounts are
content to recycle propaganda, it is no small accomplishment to present
the facts without fear or favor. With a twenty-five page bibliography,
First Do No Harm is a substantive contribution to the scholarly
literature, one that will have to be engaged with whatever your
perspective on the Balkan wars.
Just as importantly, Gibbs has provided one of the few book-length
analyses of the political economy of the wars' origins. With the
exception of Sean Gervasi's "Why Is NATO in Yugoslavia?" a paper
delivered to a conference in Prague in 1996, there have been very few
attempts to understand the implosion of Yugoslavia except in terms of a
"great man" theory of history, in which an Evil Slobodan Milosevic gets
blamed for everything that went wrong. In that paper, Gervasi raised
the question:
"Why are the Western powers pressing for the expansion of NATO? Why is
NATO being renewed and extended when the 'Soviet threat' has
disappeared? There is clearly much more to it than we have so far been
told. The enforcement of a precarious peace in Bosnia is only the
immediate reason for sending NATO forces into the Balkans."
Gervasi died only six months after this paper was delivered, so he never
really had a chance to give a fully elaborated, book-length treatment on
U.S. ambitions clashing with one of the few remaining socialist
strongholds in Eastern Europe. In describing American foreign policy as
a "Great Game," not that much different from imperial ventures in the
past, Gervasi dared to go against the liberal consensus.
full: http://www.monthlyreview.org/mrzine/proyect300309.html
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