Schwarz - Round Three

Benjamin Schwarz
Round Three: Concluding Remarks - April 14, 2000

Edward Luttwak is right about the U.S. military's reluctance to shed its blood in Kosovo and other sites of humanitarian intervention. But I've always thought that the Joint Chiefs' reluctance (although they're clearly not supposed to be making this sort of political judgment) was rooted in its conviction that the American military's charge is to defend the United States, not to be a global social worker, and that the stakes involved in places like Kosovo aren't (to paraphrase Bismarck) worth the bones of a single U.S. infantryman -- a conviction the military shares with the U.S. public.

I agree with nearly all the points Robert Kaplan raises in his astute response. He's right that military interventions, even if they don't require occupation, perforce demand brutal means. As someone who has written penetratingly about Joseph Conrad, Kaplan can appreciate the moral hazards in the savage wars of peace that many clamor are America's duty to wage. If we choose to be morality's avenging angel in places like Kosovo, we may at first be pleased to see ourselves, like Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, as "an emissary of pity and progress." But as warriors for right, faced with those we have demonized, we may well succumb to Kurtz's conclusions as well: "Exterminate the brutes."

Those calling for crusades in the Balkans and elsewhere forget that something perhaps necessary, but nonetheless terrible, happens to nations when they make war. They become ruthless. The U.S. public's response to the war in Vietnam is a good example. In 1968, when opposition to that conflict turned fierce all across the country, the number of Americans who favored ending the war by escalating it -- even to the point of invading North Vietnam, a move widely seen as likely to risk war with China and the Soviet Union -- exceeded, by a majority of five-to-three, the number favoring complete withdrawal. Pollsters described public reaction to American soldiers committing mass murder and rape at My Lai in 1969 as "at best bland." Far from feeling moral outrage, a disturbing number of Americans were crying for blood. More recently, although there was initially little public enthusiasm for the Gulf War, once it became clear that a ground war was imminent, fully half the public favored using tactical nuclear weapons against Iraq.

War is at best a defensive necessity; it is never a civilizing exercise. Even -- or perhaps especially -- a war in the name of morality brutalizes all. Fortunately, we managed to avoid our worst excesses in Vietnam and Desert Storm. During Vietnam, America's political leadership, sensitive to the apocalyptic dangers of unlimited conflict, held back the dogs of war. The Gulf War was less restrained, since there was no fear of inciting a superpower confrontation, but it was mercifully short.

Vietnam and the Gulf War were fought for the same ostensible purposes that impel humanitarian intervention today: to punish aggression and to ensure a just and peaceful world order. But these laudable, if abstract, ends justified the most atrocious means. Notoriously, in Vietnam, villages were "saved" by being destroyed and our "pacification" campaign created 5 million refugees. In the Gulf, international law was preserved -- and a virtually bloodless victory for the U.S. purchased -- by America's "antiseptic" air war, a campaign described by a UN report as "near apocalyptic." Given an enemy to hate, a righteous cause, and fear for its men and women in uniform, America -- like any country -- will treat military operations not as a delicate and limited means to bring about a more moral world, but as a blunt instrument to inflict pain.

President Clinton is always talking about America's moral force as born of this country's "founding ideals." But he should remember that America's founders warned us not to go "abroad in search of monsters to destroy" for fear of the monster we might create at home.

Kaplan's arguments about the importance of demonstrating "our ability to act ruthlessly and bloodily" remind me of policymakers' arguments during the Vietnam War. Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton encapsulated this thinking in an important, classified memorandum to Robert McNamara on the verge of the U.S. ground commitment in 1965. The real stakes for America in Vietnam, he asserted, were "70% to avoid a humiliating U.S. defeat (to our reputation as a guarantor), 20% to keep South Vietnam (and the adjacent) territory from Chinese hands, 10% to permit the people of South Vietnam to enjoy a better, freer way of life." He went on to argue,"It is essential -- however badly South East Asia may go over the next 1-3 years -- that U.S. emerge as a 'good doctor.' We must have kept promises, been tough, taken risks, gotten bloodied and hurt the enemy very badly. We must avoid harmful appearances which will affect judgments by, and provide pretexts to, other nations regarding how the U.S. will behave in future cases…." This kind of logic can get us into a lot of trouble. Now, I agree that once the United States militarily intervenes, it's vital for a variety of reasons that it not pussyfoot around; but this imperative supports the argument that America intervene very discriminately, and only when its vital interests are threatened. In Vietnam, a geopolitically peripheral region, fifty thousand American dead was a huge price to pay to demonstrate Washington's toughness, and it never occurred to policymakers that whatever the United States gained by establishing the steadfastness of its commitments, it lost by an erosion of confidence in its judgment. To put Kaplan's argument into perspective, no one doubts that the People's Republic of China will act "ruthlessly and bloodily" to protect its interests, but Beijing has never felt the need to intervene in situations in which its interests aren't at stake to buttress its tough-guy image.

Again, I agree with Kaplan and disagree with David Rieff about the American public's supposed demands for intervention: the public is much more "realist" than its truculently self-righteous Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, a woman with an appalling lack of knowledge and interest in her adopted country. And, of course, Rieff and I disagree about Kosovo, but I wish he wouldn't suggest that because I oppose the Clinton Administration's policies I'm in league with Milosevic. After all, Jiri Dienstbier, one-time foreign minister of the former Czechoslovakia, said in his report to the UN Commission on Human Rights that NATO should admit that its bombing of Yugoslavia was a mistake that only succeeded in destroying Kosovo and the Yugoslav economy and that NATO should now send in ground forces to battle extremist Albanians and restore the ethnic balance in Kosovo. (He also said that U.S. officials in the region generally share his view, but were constrained by Albright and the Administration.) Surely Rieff wouldn't argue that Dienstbier -- and anyone else who doesn't toe the Rieffian line on the Balkans -- is merely an instrument of the thuggish regime in Belgrade.

What do you think?

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Benjamin Schwarz is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a book critic for the Los Angeles Times. He's the former executive editor of World Policy Journal and a former staff member of the RAND Corporation and the Brookings Institution.