Luttwak - Round One

Edward Luttwak
Round One - April 6, 2000

"Intervention" and "aggression" are differently loaded words for the same thing: a deliberate military attack on a sovereign power that initiates a war. A successful outcome always depends on a conjunction of military success at the level of theater strategy (i.e., more than just tactical or operational victories) and political success in reaching a post-combat equilibrium. That political success may, in turn, be achieved by effective domination and/or the acceptance of the military outcome by all those who might challenge it, be they other powers, the local population, or even one's own political community. Without political success, any military victory is only a bout of fighting that may merely inaugurate further warfare, leaving the outcome undetermined.

Failure has an infinity of forms, ranging from the inability of Mussolini's army to win battles, to Hitler's inability to translate any number of splendid operational-level victories into a theater-level victory over Russia (or before that into a negotiated equilibrium with Great Britain), to the French failure in Algeria, where decisive military victory over the FLN was repudiated by Charles de Gaulle, who did not want France to remain an old-fashioned colonial power.

Success, by contrast, has only one form: the conjunction of military and political success. Except in trivial cases, both require real sacrifice and real efforts, perhaps very strenuous. They, in turn, require a real incentive, perhaps a compelling incentive, arising from a perception that proportionately important interests will be served by success or damaged by failure. That such perceptions may not impress us as realistic in retrospect is irrelevant. European colonial conquests, for example, reflected at least elite convictions that colonies were essential attributes of power and wealth. Accordingly, colonial wars were fought with much energy, occasional military setbacks were overcome, and a post-conquest equilibrium was assured by establishing colonial governments intended to rule forever.

By definition, humanitarian interventions are perceived as disinterested. Therefore they do not evoke strenuous efforts. Afghanistan and Sudan, for example, are humanitarian catastrophes, but intervention is ruled out because their sheer size, inland location, and lack of infrastructures would require elaborate and costly logistic preparations as well as large-scale operations. Rwanda was a much easier case, if the aim were only to stop the genocide, but intervention was ruled out because nothing could be done by bombing; success would instead have required European or U.S. combat troops actually willing to kill the killers. Other cases, such as Sierra Leone or, for that matter, Angola and Zaire/Congo, are ruled out because it is obvious from the start that conquest would have to be followed by indefinite colonial rule, owing to the proven inability of the inhabitants to operate governments that are not ipso facto human-rights violations. More generally, in sub-Saharan Africa, Kofi Annan's call for intervention whenever and wherever "massive" human-rights violations are taking place is not practicable in the absence of willing colonial powers. Still other cases are ruled out because the violators of human rights are Great Powers, notably the Russian Federation (in Chechnya, for now) and China (in Tibet and Xinjiang).

It follows that disinterested humanitarian interventions must also be highly arbitrary, with the loss of national rights in one place (Kosovo) privileged over the loss in another of all civil rights (Afghanistan), the loss of limbs (Sierra Leone), outright slavery (Sudan), or even genocide (Rwanda). Such glaring inconsistency further weakens public support for interventions already lacking the impulse of perceived interests. Hence only zero-casualty military operations are acceptable, whether they involve bombing from very safe altitudes, as in Kosovo (only feasible if there are relevant high-contrast/high-value targets), or the dispatch of symbolic troops, in the standard UN manner, who will not fight to defend civilians under attack, and sometimes not even themselves (in Sierra Leone, most recently, ECOMOG troops sent to disarm rebels instead allowed themselves to be disarmed by small bands of teenagers; but this is only the latest expression of the phenomenon of multinational troop degradation often witnessed in Somalia, Bosnia, etc.).

Zero-casualty troop insertions usually fail, but zero-casualty bombing was eventually successful in Kosovo. Yet it seems unlikely that this success will ever be repeated, because Serbia is unique among human-rights violators: sufficiently developed to be hurt by bombing, with a government sufficiently democratic to respond to the resulting civilian deprivations, and not strong enough to be immune from military attack. In any case, strenuous efforts are still needed to establish a post-war equilibrium by appropriate diplomatic, political, security, and economic action. Otherwise the outcome is not peace but only congealed war, as in Bosnia, where war-interruption was not followed by effective peace-making, or anarchic dis-equilibrium, as in Kosovo. There the increasingly helpless UN protectorate has not enough funds to govern, not enough police to maintain order, and only a mass of very costly, pampered troops that would not fight before, and will not patrol now -- even complaining when asked to contain riots. In the meantime, Kosovo's civil society is not only harried by pervasive crime but also depleted by a plague of NGOs, whose highly self-interested disinterestedness has turned teachers, administrators, doctors, and plumbers alike into cooks, cleaners, waiters, drivers, and interpreters for those self-appointed saviors of humanity -- the new NGO colonialists.

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Edward Luttwak is Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. In addition to several books, he has published many articles, including a number of widely discussed articles on intervention.