-Caveat Lector-
>From Boston Globe
> <Picture: Boston Globe Online: Print it!>
>
>
> THIS STORY HAS BEEN FORMATTED FOR EASY PRINTING
> -----------------------------------------------------------------
> -------
>
>
> America's double-edged sword
>
> By Globe Staff, 07/05/99
>
>
>
> <Picture>he air campaign against the Serbs has been touted as a
> harbinger of things to come - waging war for human rights rather
> than to defend traditional national interests. Vaclav Havel of
> the Czech Republic said: ''This is probably the first war that
> has not been waged in the name of national interests but rather
> in the name of principles and values. Kosovo has no oil fields to
> be coveted.... [NATO] is fighting out of the concern for the fate
> of others.'' Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair said: ''This is
> a just war, based not on any territorial ambitions but on
> values.''
>
>
>
> The two men spoke for Americans who believe that concern for
> national interest is unworthy. Many who decried the Gulf War,
> which involved both strategic interests and humanitarian
> concerns, hailed the Kosovo war for its moral purity.
>
>
>
> In the opposite corner is Henry Kissinger, the former secretary
> of state, who wrote in Newsweek: ''No issue is more in need of
> rethinking than the concept of humanitarian intervention put
> forward as the administration's contribution to a new approach to
> foreign policy. The air war in Kosovo is justified as
> establishing the principle that the international community - or
> at least NATO - will henceforth punish the transgressions of
> governments against their own people.... Moral principles are
> expressed in absolutes. But foreign policy must forever be
> concerned with reconciling ends and means. At every stage of the
> Kosovo tragedy, other mixes of diplomacy and force were
> available.'' The result, he writes, produced ''more refugees and
> casualties than any conceivable alternative'' and ''deserves to
> be questioned on both political and moral grounds.''
>
>
>
> In truth, all wars are justified on moral and humanitarian
> grounds to gain public support, and when it comes to national
> interests, much depends on how those interests are defined.
>
>
>
> In his most recent book, ''Years of Renewal,'' Kissinger writes:
> ''The United States, to be true to itself, has a duty to stand
> for human rights and democracy.'' But if we treat the behavior of
> countries that do not live up to American standards ''as
> resolvable only by the overthrow of the offending government - or
> by its public surrender to American pressures - we will turn
> every problem into a life or death struggle, actually inhibiting
> progress on human rights.'' These words were written before the
> Kosovo crisis, but it is now clear that Secretary of State
> Madeleine Albright's missteps at Rambouillet made a bad situation
> infinitely worse.
>
>
>
> Harvard's Joseph Nye, writing in Foreign Affairs, put the issue
> into perspective by arguing that ''Americans have rarely accepted
> pure Realpolitik as a guiding principle, and human rights and the
> alleviation of human disasters have long been important aspects
> of our foreign policy. But foreign policy involves trying to
> accomplish varied objectives in a complex and recalcitrant world.
> This entails trade-offs. A human rights policy is not itself a
> foreign policy; it is an important part of a foreign policy....
> We should generally avoid the use of force except in cases where
> our humanitarian interests are reinforced by the existence of
> other strong national interests.''
>
>
>
> Former defense secretary William Perry and his deputy, Ashton
> Carter, divided national interests and security risks into three
> categories. The A list includes threats to national survival. On
> the B list are threats to American interests but not survival.
> Iraq and North Korea are included in this category. Civil wars in
> Kosovo or in Africa and Asia are C list problems - they do not
> present a threat to the economic or physical well-being of the
> American people but are nonetheless humanitarian tragedies.
>
>
>
> Nye notes that the C list has come to dominate foreign policy in
> the Clinton administration. He has a point. If the same
> determination shown in Kosovo were applied to getting weapons
> inspectors back into Iraq, the world would be a safer place than
> it is today.
>
>
>
> Nye suggests that one of the reasons that C problems get
> themselves on the A list is that there are no real threats to
> America's survival, as there were in the Cold War. In addition,
> human rights in the information age get media attention that can
> sway public opinion. This is undoubtedly true and has been for
> more than a century. In 1876, for example, the reporting of
> Januarius Aloysius MacGahan, an American writing for the London
> Daily News, is credited for stirring passions in the West and in
> Russia against Ottoman atrocities in the Balkans. By describing
> massacres and mass rapes, MacGahan influenced policy. Russia used
> his reports as an excuse to go to war against the Turks.
>
>
>
> Another harbinger of things to come is supposed to be that
> national sovereignty no longer rules and that nations have been
> put on notice that intervention may come if countries do not live
> up to Western standards. Nye warns against ''intervention in
> civil wars over self-determination. The principle is dangerously
> ambiguous; atrocities are often committed by activists on both
> sides, and the precedents can have disastrous consequences.''
>
>
>
> There are hundreds of minorities in the world who would love to
> have NATO intervene on their behalf. And, as has been shown in
> the Balkans, NATO's righteous sword is not unsheathed against all
> ethnic cleansing. Croatia has become arguably the most ethnically
> cleansed state in the former Yugoslavia, but no US president
> threatened a just war to defend more than 200,000 Serbs who were
> expelled from their ancestral lands by the US-trained Croatian
> Army.
>
>
>
> Human rights will and should be a pillar of American foreign
> policy, but the United States should avoid what Kissinger calls a
> ''missionary version of Wilsonian enthusiasms that threatens anew
> to involve us in every one of the world's upheavals in the name
> of a global mission, this time justified by our position as the
> sole superpower.''
>
>
>
> The United States should remain a force for human rights
> overseas, but when it comes to going to war, other considerations
> must be present if a coherent foreign policy is to be maintained.
> The United States was lucky not to lose any personnel in the
> Kosovo fighting. The lesson of Somalia - if anything, an even
> more selfless intervention waged for humanitarian values - is
> that the Americans are quick to jump in but just as quick to jump
> out when the killing begins.
>
>
>
> This story ran on page A14 of the Boston Globe on 07/05/99. ©
> Copyright 1999 Globe Newspaper Company.
>
>
>
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