HUMANITARIAN IMPULSES
By GARY J. BASS
New York Times
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August 15, 2008
United States
The Way We Live Now
The long overdue sight of Radovan Karadzic in The Hague facing trial
for genocide is a useful reminder of wars past. In 1995, after three
and a half years of killing, an American-led NATO bombing campaign
helped stop Karadzic’s atrocities and turned the Bosnian Serb leader
into a fugitive. But do the humanitarian interventions typified by
America’s interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo have a future? Even as
Darfur bleeds, Iraq has become a grim object lesson in the dangers of
foreign adventures. The former Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright
recently wrote that "many of the world’s necessary interventions in
the decade before the invasion [of Iraq] — in places like Haiti and
the Balkans — would seem impossible in today’s climate."
And yet somehow the idea of humanitarian intervention remains
intact. In the 2000 presidential race, both George W. Bush and Al Gore
said they would not have intervened to halt the genocide in Rwanda. But
today, John McCain says the United States has an obligation to stop
genocide when it can do so effectively, and Barack Obama has made
genocide prevention a signature issue. He has surrounded himself with
advisers haunted by America’s failure to stop the Rwandan genocide
and regularly calls for saving Darfur.
How can this be? For many Europeans, there is a simple explanation: the
United States has learned nothing. Rather than recognizing the stark
limitations of military power, Americans are promising again to remake
the world. Infinitely distractable, the United States plunged into
Iraq before it had stabilized Afghanistan; now, while both countries
are still hanging by a thread, it may be on to Darfur. Humanitarian
intervention, in short, seems to many a distinctively American idea
— and not in a good way. During the Somalia intervention in 1992,
Henry A. Kissinger wrote that "no other nation" except the United
States had ever asserted that "humane concerns" matter so much "that
not only treasure but lives must be risked to vindicate them."
But a look back at history shows this to be a caricature. In fact,
Europeans were backing humanitarian interventions almost two centuries
ago, while Americans were often the ones who objected. Throughout the
19th century, people in Britain, France and Russia urged the dispatch
of troops to stop killings in places like Poland and Bulgaria —
even when doing so undermined the national interest. Some of the
most celebrated European names — Victor Hugo, William Wilberforce,
Anthony Trollope, Oscar Wilde — demanded action. The telegraph and
newspapers confronted readers with horrific stories from remote lands
— a forerunner to the famous "CNN effect" in which televised images
of suffering prompt the call for rescue.
The result was actual interventions in Syria and Naples and, perhaps
most spectacularly, Greece. When Greek nationalists rose up against
Ottoman rule in 1821, much of the British public rallied to their
cause, galvanized by press reports of Ottoman atrocities. This
was supremely inconvenient for the British government, which had a
clear imperial interest in supporting the Ottoman Empire as a bulwark
against Russian expansion. But the London Greek Committee lobbied the
government, sent money and weapons to the Greeks and dispatched men,
including Lord Byron, then probably the most famous poet in Europe,
to Greece to fight. Byron died of fever there. (Imagine Bono fighting
in Darfur today.) Finally, in 1827, the British Navy, alongside
French and Russian ships, sank much of the Ottoman Navy in Greece —
helping to secure the creation of today’s independent Greece.
In contrast, the United States was rarely moved by humanitarianism
alone. While Thomas Jefferson, Daniel Webster and countless Americans
thrilled to the Greek cause, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams
refused to act: America, he famously said, "does not go abroad,
in search of monsters to destroy." There was widespread American
outrage at the 1915 Armenian genocide, which Theodore Roosevelt called
"the greatest crime of the war." But Woodrow Wilson dared not risk
entering World War I at the time, and his secretary of state, Robert
Lansing, secretly admitted that his department was "withholding from
the American people the facts now in its possession" — an official
cover-up of genocide.
Humanitarian intervention, in other words, is not the property of the
United States or the generation of liberal hawks who championed Balkan
interventions in the 1990s. For better or worse, it is best understood
as an idea that’s common to the big democracies on both sides of
the Atlantic. Canada has promoted the principle of an international
"responsibility to protect" endangered civilians. Europe has a
fresh crop of foreign ministers who — following their 19th-century
predecessors — support humanitarian intervention: Bernard Kouchner
of France argued for delivering aid to cyclone victims in Myanmar
by force if necessary, and David Miliband of Britain championed the
faltering United Nations-African Union peacekeeping mission in Darfur
on a February trip to Beijing. And in Berlin, Barack Obama won German
cheers and applause by saying, "The genocide in Darfur shames the
conscience of us all."
Of course, the real test will come when George W. Bush is gone and
Americans and Europeans have to turn those cheers into policy. It’s
not at all clear that European publics are outraged by abuses in
Darfur the way they were once outraged by massacres in Greece,
Syria and Bulgaria. When the next president takes office, America
will still have troops in Afghanistan and Iraq and will inevitably
be more eager for European soldiers to deploy in Afghanistan than in
Darfur. In August 1992, a promising presidential candidate named Bill
Clinton said, "If the horrors of the Holocaust taught us anything,
it is the high cost of remaining silent and paralyzed in the face of
genocide." As the Rwandans found out, it’s easier to state historical
lessons than to apply them.
Gary J. Bass, a Princeton professor, is the author of "Freedom’s
Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention," which will be
published by Alfred A. Knopf this month.