The Current Bombings:
Behind the Rhetoric
By Noam Chomsky
There have been many inquiries concerning NATO (meaning primarily US) bombing in connection with
Kosovo. A great deal has been written about the topic, including Znet commentaries. I'd like to make a few
general observations, keeping to facts that are not seriously contested.
There are two fundamental issues: (1) What are the accepted and applicable "rules of world order"? (2)
How do these or other considerations apply in the case of Kosovo?
(1) What are the accepted and applicable "rules of world order"?
There is a regime of international law and international order, binding on all states, based on the UN
Charter and subsequent resolutions and World Court decisions. In brief, the threat or use of force is
banned unless explicitly authorized by the Security Council after it has determined that peaceful means
have failed, or in self-defense against "armed attack" (a narrow concept) until the Security Council acts.
There is, of course, more to say. Thus there is at least a tension, if not an outright contradiction, between
the rules of world order laid down in the UN Charter and the rights articulated in the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights (UD), a second pillar of the world order established under US initiative after World War II.
The Charter bans force violating state sovereignty; the UD guarantees the rights of individuals against
oppressive states. The issue of "humanitarian intervention" arises from this tension. It is the right of
"humanitarian intervention" that is claimed by the US/NATO in Kosovo, and that is generally supported by
editorial opinion and news reports (in the latter case, reflexively, even by the very choice of terminology).
The question is addressed in a news report in the NY Times (March 27), headlined "Legal Scholars
Support Case for Using Force" in Kosovo (March 27). One example is offered: Allen Gerson, former
counsel to the US mission to the UN. Two other legal scholars are cited. One, Ted Galen Carpenter,
"scoffed at the Administration argument" and dismissed the alleged right of intervention. The third is Jack
Goldsmith, a specialist on international law at Chicago Law school. He says that critics of the NATO
bombing "have a pretty good legal argument," but "many people think [an exception for humanitarian
intervention] does exist as a matter of custom and practice." That summarizes the evidence offered to
justify the favored conclusion stated in the headline.
Goldsmith's observation is reasonable, at least if we agree that facts are relevant to the determination of
"custom and practice." We may also bear in mind a truism: the right of humanitarian intervention, if it
exists, is premised on the "good faith" of those intervening, and that assumption is based not on their
rhetoric but on their record, in particular their record of adherence to the principles of international law,
World Court decisions, and so on. That is indeed a truism, at least with regard to others. Consider, for
example, Iranian offers to intervene in Bosnia to prevent massacres at a time when the West would not do
so. These were dismissed with ridicule (in fact, ignored); if there was a reason beyond subordination to
power, it was because Iranian "good faith" could not be assumed. A rational person then asks obvious
questions: is the Iranian record of intervention and terror worse than that of the US? And other questions,
for example: How should we assess the "good faith" of the only country to have vetoed a Security Council
resolution calling on all states to obey international law? What about its historical record? Unless such
questions are prominent on the agenda of discourse, an honest person will dismiss it as mere allegiance
to doctrine. A useful exercise is to determine how much of the literature -- media or other -- survives such
elementary conditions as these.
(2) How do these or other considerations apply in the case of Kosovo?
There has been a humanitarian catastrophe in Kosovo in the past year, overwhelmingly attributable to
Yugoslav military forces. The main victims have been ethnic Albanian Kosovars, some 90% of the
population of this Yugoslav territory. The standard estimate is 2000 deaths and hundreds of thousands of
refugees.
In such cases, outsiders have three choices:
(I) try to escalate the catastrophe
(II) do nothing
(III) try to mitigate the catastrophe
The choices are illustrated by other contemporary cases. Let's keep to a few of approximately the same
scale, and ask where Kosovo fits into the pattern.
(A) Colombia. In Colombia, according to State Department estimates, the annual level of political killing by
the government and its paramilitary associates is about at the level of Kosovo, and refugee flight primarily
from their atrocities is well over a million. Colombia has been the leading Western hemisphere recipient of
US arms and training as violence increased through the '90s, and that assistance is now increasing, under
a "drug war" pretext dismissed by almost all serious observers. The Clinton administration was particularly
enthusiastic in its praise for President Gaviria, whose tenure in office was responsible for "appalling levels
of violence," according to human rights organizations, even surpassing his predecessors. Details are
readily available.
In this case, the US reaction is (I): escalate the atrocities.
(B) Turkey. By very conservative estimate, Turkish repression of Kurds in the '90s falls in the category of
Kosovo. It peaked in the early '90s; one index is the flight of over a million Kurds from the countryside to
the unofficial Kurdish capital Diyarbakir from 1990 to 1994, as the Turkish army was devastating the
countryside. 1994 marked two records: it was "the year of the worst repression in the Kurdish provinces"
of Turkey, Jonathan Randal reported from the scene, and the year when Turkey became "the biggest
single importer of American military hardware and thus the world's largest arms purchaser." When human
rights groups exposed Turkey's use of US jets to bomb villages, the Clinton Administration found ways to
evade laws requiring suspension of arms deliveries, much as it was doing in Indonesia and elsewhere.
Colombia and Turkey explain their (US-supported) atrocities on grounds that they are defending their
countries from the threat of terrorist guerrillas. As does the government of Yugoslavia.
Again, the example illustrates (I): try to escalate the atrocities.
(C) Laos. Every year thousands of people, mostly children and poor farmers, are killed in the Plain of Jars
in Northern Laos, the scene of the heaviest bombing of civilian targets in history it appears, and arguably
the most cruel: Washington's furious assault on a poor peasant society had little to do with its wars in the
region. The worst period was from 1968, when Washington was compelled to undertake negotiations
(under popular and business pressure), ending the regular bombardment of North Vietnam.
Kissinger-Nixon then decided to shift the planes to bombardment of Laos and Cambodia.
The deaths are from "bombies," tiny anti-personnel weapons, far worse than land-mines: they are
designed specifically to kill and maim, and have no effect on trucks, buildings, etc. The Plain was
saturated with hundreds of millions of these criminal devices, which have a failure-to-explode rate of
20%-30% according to the manufacturer, Honeywell. The numbers suggest either remarkably poor quality
control or a rational policy of murdering civilians by delayed action. These were only a fraction of the
technology deployed, including advanced missiles to penetrate caves where families sought shelter.
Current annual casualties from "bombies" are estimated from hundreds a year to "an annual nationwide
casualty rate of 20,000," more than half of them deaths, according to the veteran Asia reporter Barry Wain
of the Wall Street Journal -- in its Asia edition. A conservative estimate, then, is that the crisis this year is
approximately comparable to Kosovo, though deaths are far more highly concentrated among children --
over half, according to analyses reported by the Mennonite Central Committee, which has been working
there since 1977 to alleviate the continuing atrocities.
There have been efforts to publicize and deal with the humanitarian catastrophe. A British-based Mine
Advisory Group (MAG) is trying to remove the lethal objects, but the US is "conspicuously missing from the
handful of Western organisations that have followed MAG," the British press reports, though it has finally
agreed to train some Laotian civilians. The British press also reports, with some anger, the allegation of
MAG specialists that the US refuses to provide them with "render harmless procedures" that would make
their work "a lot quicker and a lot safer." These remain a state secret, as does the whole affair in the
United States. The Bangkok press reports a very similar situation in Cambodia, particularly the Eastern
region where US bombardment from early 1969 was most intense.
In this case, the US reaction is (II): do nothing. And the reaction of the media and commentators is to keep
silent, following the norms under which the war against Laos was designated a "secret war" -- meaning
well-known, but suppressed, as also in the case of Cambodia from March 1969. The level of
self-censorship was extraordinary then, as is the current phase. The relevance of this shocking example
should be obvious without further comment.
I will skip other examples of (I) and (II), which abound, and also much more serious contemporary
atrocities, such as the huge slaughter of Iraqi civilians by means of a particularly vicious form of biological
warfare -- "a very hard choice," Madeleine Albright commented on national TV in 1996 when asked for her
reaction to the killing of half a million Iraqi children in 5 years, but "we think the price is worth it." Current
estimates remain about 5000 children killed a month, and the price is still "worth it." These and other
examples might also be kept in mind when we read awed rhetoric about how the "moral compass" of the
Clinton Administration is at last functioning properly, as the Kosovo example illustrates.
Just what does the example illustrate? The threat of NATO bombing, predictably, led to a sharp escalation
of atrocities by the Serbian Army and paramilitaries, and to the departure of international observers, which
of course had the same effect. Commanding General Wesley Clark declared that it was "entirely
predictable" that Serbian terror and violence would intensify after the NATO bombing, exactly as happened.
The terror for the first time reached the capital city of Pristina, and there are credible reports of large-scale
destruction of villages, assassinations, generation of an enormous refugee flow, perhaps an effort to expel
a good part of the Albanian population -- all an "entirely predictable" consequence of the threat and then the
use of force, as General Clark rightly observes.
Kosovo is therefore another illustration of (I): try to escalate the violence, with exactly that expectation.
To find examples illustrating (III) is all too easy, at least if we keep to official rhetoric. The major recent
academic study of "humanitarian intervention," by Sean Murphy, reviews the record after the
Kellogg-Briand pact of 1928 which outlawed war, and then since the UN Charter, which strengthened and
articulated these provisions. In the first phase, he writes, the most prominent examples of "humanitarian
intervention" were Japan's attack on Manchuria, Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia, and Hitler's occupation of
parts of Czechoslovakia. All were accompanied by highly uplifting humanitarian rhetoric, and factual
justifications as well. Japan was going to establish an "earthly paradise" as it defended Manchurians from
"Chinese bandits," with the support of a leading Chinese nationalist, a far more credible figure than anyone
the US was able to conjure up during its attack on South Vietnam. Mussolini was liberating thousands of
slaves as he carried forth the Western "civilizing mission." Hitler announced Germany's intention to end
ethnic tensions and violence, and "safeguard the national individuality of the German and Czech peoples,"
in an operation "filled with earnest desire to serve the true interests of the peoples dwelling in the area," in
accordance with their will; the Slovakian President asked Hitler to declare Slovakia a protectorate.
Another useful intellectual exercise is to compare those obscene justifications with those offered for
interventions, including "humanitarian interventions," in the post-UN Charter period.
In that period, perhaps the most compelling example of (III) is the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in
December 1978, terminating Pol Pot's atrocities, which were then peaking. Vietnam pleaded the right of
self-defense against armed attack, one of the few post-Charter examples when the plea is plausible: the
Khmer Rouge regime (Democratic Kampuchea, DK) was carrying out murderous attacks against Vietnam
in border areas. The US reaction is instructive. The press condemned the "Prussians" of Asia for their
outrageous violation of international law. They were harshly punished for the crime of having terminated
Pol Pot's slaughters, first by a (US-backed) Chinese invasion, then by US imposition of extremely harsh
sanctions. The US recognized the expelled DK as the official government of Cambodia, because of its
"continuity" with the Pol Pot regime, the State Department explained. Not too subtly, the US supported the
Khmer Rouge in its continuing attacks in Cambodia.
The example tells us more about the "custom and practice" that underlies "the emerging legal norms of
humanitarian intervention."
Despite the desperate efforts of ideologues to prove that circles are square, there is no serious doubt that
the NATO bombings further undermine what remains of the fragile structure of international law. The US
made that entirely clear in the discussions leading to the NATO decision. Apart from the UK (by now, about
as much of an independent actor as the Ukraine was in the pre-Gorbachev years), NATO countries were
skeptical of US policy, and were particularly annoyed by Secretary of State Albright's "saber-rattling" (Kevin
Cullen, Boston Globe, Feb. 22). Today, the more closely one approaches the conflicted region, the greater
the opposition to Washington's insistence on force, even within NATO (Greece and Italy). France had
called for a UN Security Council resolution to authorize deployment of NATO peacekeepers. The US flatly
refused, insisting on "its stand that NATO should be able to act independently of the United Nations," State
Department officials explained. The US refused to permit the "neuralgic word `authorize'" to appear in the
final NATO statement, unwilling to concede any authority to the UN Charter and international law; only the
word "endorse" was permitted (Jane Perlez, NYT, Feb. 11). Similarly the bombing of Iraq was a brazen
expression of contempt for the UN, even the specific timing, and was so understood. And of course the
same is true of the destruction of half the pharmaceutical production of a small African country a few
months earlier, an event that also does not indicate that the "moral compass" is straying from
righteousness -- not to speak of a record that would be prominently reviewed right now if facts were
considered relevant to determining "custom and practice."
It could be argued, rather plausibly, that further demolition of the rules of world order is irrelevant, just as it
had lost its meaning by the late 1930s. The contempt of the world's leading power for the framework of
world order has become so extreme that there is nothing left to discuss. A review of the internal
documentary record demonstrates that the stance traces back to the earliest days, even to the first
memorandum of the newly-formed National Security Council in 1947. During the Kennedy years, the
stance began to gain overt expression. The main innovation of the Reagan-Clinton years is that defiance of
international law and the Charter has become entirely open. It has also been backed with interesting
explanations, which would be on the front pages, and prominent in the school and university curriculum, if
truth and honesty were considered significant values. The highest authorities explained with brutal clarity
that the World Court, the UN, and other agencies had become irrelevant because they no longer follow US
orders, as they did in the early postwar years.
One might then adopt the official position. That would be an honest stand, at least if it were accompanied
by refusal to play the cynical game of self-righteous posturing and wielding of the despised principles of
international law as a highly selective weapon against shifting enemies.
While the Reaganites broke new ground, under Clinton the defiance of world order has become so
extreme as to be of concern even to hawkish policy analysts. In the current issue of the leading
establishment journal, Foreign Affairs, Samuel Huntington warns that Washington is treading a dangerous
course. In the eyes of much of the world -- probably most of the world, he suggests -- the US is "becoming
the rogue superpower," considered "the single greatest external threat to their societies." Realist
"international relations theory," he argues, predicts that coalitions may arise to counterbalance the rogue
superpower. On pragmatic grounds, then, the stance should be reconsidered. Americans who prefer a
different image of their society might call for a reconsideration on other than pragmatic grounds.
Where does that leave the question of what to do in Kosovo? It leaves it unanswered. The US has chosen
a course of action which, as it explicitly recognizes, escalates atrocities and violence -- "predictably"; a
course of action that also strikes yet another blow against the regime of international order, which does
offer the weak at least some limited protection from predatory states. As for the longer term,
consequences are unpredictable. One plausible observation is that "every bomb that falls on Serbia and
every ethnic killing in Kosovo suggests that it will scarcely be possible for Serbs and Albanians to live
beside each other in some sort of peace" (Financial Times, March 27). Some of the longer-term possible
outcomes are extremely ugly, as has not gone without notice.
A standard argument is that we had to do something: we could not simply stand by as atrocities continue.
That is never true. One choice, always, is to follow the Hippocratic principle: "First, do no harm." If you can
think of no way to adhere to that elementary principle, then do nothing. There are always ways that can be
considered. Diplomacy and negotiations are never at an end.
The right of "humanitarian intervention" is likely to be more frequently invoked in coming years -- maybe
with justification, maybe not -- now that Cold War pretexts have lost their efficacy. In such an era, it may
be worthwhile to pay attention to the views of highly respected commentators -- not to speak of the World
Court, which explicitly ruled on this matter in a decision rejected by the United States, its essentials not
even reported.
In the scholarly disciplines of international affairs and international law it would be hard to find more
respected voices than Hedley Bull or Louis Henkin. Bull warned 15 years ago that "Particular states or
groups of states that set themselves up as the authoritative judges of the world common good, in
disregard of the views of others, are in fact a menace to international order, and thus to effective action in
this field." Henkin, in a standard work on world order, writes that the "pressures eroding the prohibition on
the use of force are deplorable, and the arguments to legitimize the use of force in those circumstances
are unpersuasive and dangerous... Violations of human rights are indeed all too common, and if it were
permissible to remedy them by external use of force, there would be no law to forbid the use of force by
almost any state against almost any other. Human rights, I believe, will have to be vindicated, and other
injustices remedied, by other, peaceful means, not by opening the door to aggression and destroying the
principle advance in international law, the outlawing of war and the prohibition of force."
Recognized principles of international law and world order, solemn treaty obligations, decisions by the
World Court, considered pronouncements by the most respected commentators -- these do not
automatically solve particular problems. Each issue has to be considered on its merits. For those who do
not adopt the standards of Saddam Hussein, there is a heavy burden of proof to meet in undertaking the
threat or use of force in violation of the principles of international order. Perhaps the burden can be met,
but that has to be shown, not merely proclaimed with passionate rhetoric. The consequences of such
violations have to be assessed carefully -- in particular, what we understand to be "predictable." And for
those who are minimally serious, the reasons for the actions also have to be assessed -- again, not simply
by adulation of our leaders and their "moral compass." _
