Ronald Steel

Ronald Steel's most recent books are In Love With Night: The American Romance With Robert Kennedy (Simon & Schuster) and Temptations of a Superpower (Harvard).

All during the cold war American intervention was a dirty word on the left. It was usually taken to mean interfering in other countries to suppress radical movements, always under the catchall justification of anti-Communism. But over the past decade, with the disappearance of the ideological foe, what was once viewed as repressive and self-serving is now described as responsible and humanitarian. Enter "Operation Just Cause" in the Balkans and what is described as "virtuous intervention." Since the end of the cold war the United States has intervened with military force in five internal or regional conflicts: Somalia, Haiti, Iraq, Bosnia and Kosovo. In the first two the United States acted alone; in the others it was aided to one degree or another by allies. In each of these interventions the results have been, to say the least, disappointing. Saddam Hussein is still in power, Somalia is still ruled by warlords, Haiti is still mired in misery and oppression, Bosnia has been effectively partitioned into ethnic enclaves and Kosovo is being ethnically purified under the aegis of the Kosovo Liberation Army.

The "virtuous" part of these interventions has been more in the intentions than the consequences. Does this mean that the principle of humanitarian intervention is wrong or doomed to failure? No, but it does provide some important caveats.

First, interventions that are purely "humanitarian" and far removed from obvious concerns about national security can be sustained only if they are relatively cheap in lives and resources; have at least a veneer of international approval; confront situations that are genocidal, in that they threaten the very existence of a people; and can be resolved by military action. The five interventions of the past decade do not easily fill these requirements, and have fallen short of their ambitious goals.

By contrast, the one intervention that we should have undertaken, that we could have accomplished quickly and successfully, and that was shameful not to have undertaken was in Rwanda. There, with several thousand armed men we could have prevented the murder of an estimated 800,000. But it was only Africa, after all, and a few of our soldiers might have been shot, and it was all so primeval and distant, and it was hard to find any political advantage in it.

Where we have intervened the reasons have not always been exclusively humanitarian or virtuous: In Kuwait we also sought to protect the sources of cheap oil; in Somalia in part to get embarrassing TV coverage off the nightly news; in Haiti to stanch the flow of refugees to Florida; in Bosnia and Kosovo to assert America's continued leadership of Europe through NATO. The two major interventions described as "humanitarian"--Bosnia and Kosovo--did end the fighting and some of the human rights abuses. But only for a time. In Kosovo as in Bosnia, the peacekeepers cannot be withdrawn lest fighting resume. This is because the interventions ignored, and in some cases exacerbated, the political nature of the disputes. The issue in both cases was that of self-determination: the right of an ethnic group to secede from an existing state. In Bosnia, the United States (and the Europeans) endorsed this principle; in Kosovo it fought in support of an armed separatist group but maintains that it opposes the total detachment of the province from Serbia.

The trouble with the principle of ethnic self-determination is that its pursuit could lead to the destruction of a great many existing states and widespread warfare of the kind seen in places like Sri Lanka. Based on the exaltation of tribal loyalties, it invites majorities to be intransigent, furnishes pretexts for repression and leads to civil wars. It also denies the basis of our own social compact and our declared allegiance to multiculturalism.

There are times when foreign intervention in support of an ethnic group may be necessary: when its people are targeted for genocidal extermination (as were the Tutsis of Rwanda and the Jews of Nazi Europe), when they have been subjected to severe and repeated crimes against humanity, and when there have been persistent human rights abuses over a sustained period of time against an ethnic community.

In relatively few cases do these conditions apply. But that's all the more reason to draw the lines strictly so that intervention can be undertaken with maximum public support. Whether it will be successful depends on more than virtue or righteousness. It demands the commitment of all sides to a workable accord. It depends on being framed and enforced in such a way as to bring greater stability to the area. It requires support for domestic groups actively seeking a political settlement--not those simply using foreign intervention to further their own purposes. And it must be applied in such a way as to discourage resentful ethnic separatists from using foreign humanitarians to dismember existing states.

The more intervention strays from concerns over self-defense, the more subjective it becomes. To say that we have the right to intervene anywhere we choose to protect our self-defined "values and interests" is to open the door to other nations to defend their own--as they define them. A humanitarian impulse could, through abuse, become a geopolitical nightmare. This is why intervention should be an international undertaking--not because we need the physical support of other nations but to temper the dangers of self-righteousness and self-delusion.

• « Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• Next »

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 75 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.