KILLING WITH KINDNESS
By David Bromwich
American Conservative Magazine
09/00029/
March 4 2009
The Clinton administration believed in the good of humanitarian
intervention, and the Kosovo War aimed to set a pattern for such
efforts. The 11 weeks of bombing and the 12,000 killed on the ground
seemed to its architects a fair price for so clear a demonstration
of enlightened resolve. That false rumors of massacre were used to
incite the war, that the ethnic killings turned out to be mainly
a consequence and not a cause of the bombing–these were seen as
side-effects of a humane exuberance.
By contrast, the Bush administration chose to revert from cold war
to war, and defined its enemy by analogy with metaphysical evil. The
"war on terror" was a rubric that could support many tributary wars
with a minimum of definitional fuss.
Let us say that the neoliberal wants humanitarian interventions that
may uneasily shade into wars, while the neoconservative wants wars that
sooner or later find a justification to satisfy humanitarian goals. How
great is the difference? Our rival schools of empire have in common
their commitment to preserve a standing military establishment that
every year spends almost as much as the rest of the world combined,
and they agree that violence is permissible against other countries in
a cause unconnected with national self-preservation. The bare appeal to
self-preservation is more often made by the neoconservatives, but this
appeal goes along lines where hyperbolic fear becomes indistinguishable
from fantasy. As late as 2007, Vice President Cheney warned that any
withdrawal of troops in the Middle East would plant the green crescent
flag inside the White House.
Gary Bass has written Freedom’s Battle to defend the idealism of
humanitarian wars. But rather than speak directly of Kosovo, for
example, Bass has gone back to three 19th-century interventions by
Great Powers, and one failure of humane intervention in the early 20th
century. The episodic narrative is framed by the opening 40 pages
and the final 50 pages, which argue that there is such a thing as a
good and generous intervention: a military action by a great against
a lesser power that is neither brutal nor selfish and that promotes
the good of humanity.
Inside that frame are Bass’s four case studies. He starts with the
defense of Greek independence by the London Greek Committee and other
philhellenic persons and groups in the early 1820s that reached its
climax in the British destruction of the Ottoman fleet in Navarino Bay
in 1827. A more acute provocation drove Napoleon III in 1860 to stop
the Druze massacres of Maronite Christians in Syria. In a parallel
episode, British popular opinion was rallied by Gladstone in 1876
to combat the "Bulgarian Horrors," massacres that sprang from the
Serbian wing of pan-Slavism. Gladstone, in the process, advanced the
broader cause of liberal internationalism against the conservative
realism of Disraeli and incidentally "faced down" the Russians in
Constantinople. Finally, Bass recounts the Turkish slaughter of
Armenians in the First World War, when Theodore Roosevelt, out of
office and a decade away from his advocacy of war on the Philippines,
wrote eloquently to rouse an intervention President Wilson would
not perform.
Bass is a journalist turned academic, with a fast and readable style
that tends toward glibness. He makes Byron the hero of his opening
section on the Greek-Ottoman war and comes around to Byron again at
the end–not failing to note that he died in Missolonghi a casualty of
fever not battle. The later sections of the book are similarly lent a
high gloss by personalities–most of all by the contest of Disraeli the
passive realist with Gladstone the active humanitarian (whose Balkan
policy would become a model for Tony Blair). In the Armenian case,
Roosevelt emerges as the hero and Wilson as the prudential leader
whose subsequent internationalism seems a kind of expiation. It is
perhaps a coincidence of Bass’s plotting that the antagonists in
three of his four chosen interventions are Ottoman Turks.
Bass writes with judicious irony about the "complications" of
these episodes, but it is fair to say that he takes a romantic
view. Practically speaking, he wrote this book to overcome our
prejudice against the use of force where self-preservation is not at
stake. He knows that the prejudice comes partly from common prudence
and partly from revulsion against the war in Iraq—a war Bass thinks
could have turned out well had it been fought in 1988. (A sure test
of the interventionist instinct is the belief that Iraq should have
worked out better: the fault is said to lie in tactics or timing or
leadership.) More particularly, the function of Freedom’s Battle is
to supply the Kosovo War with an honorable pedigree. Bass thinks it
fitting that great-souled men of the advanced nations should seek to
act on behalf of oppressed peoples.
In all the stories he recounts, selfish motives preceded intervention,
and unintended consequences followed the violence of the war. French
support for Maronite Christians in the forming of modern Lebanon
is only the most obvious instance. Often, too, unselfish motives
were mixed with selfish or ordinary motives in a way that Bass,
though he does not suppress, consistently pushes to the side. Thus
Freedom’s Battle tells of the attack in October 1827 by the "Allied
squadron"–the British navy under Admiral Codrington accompanied
by a few Russian and French ships–on Ottoman and Egyptian forces
massed in Navarino Bay. The Allies did not lose a ship, while every
Ottoman and Egyptian ship was "either burned, sunk, or driven on shore
[and] totally annihilated" (in the words of Codrington as quoted by
Bass). The Allies lost 174 sailors, the Ottoman forces 6,000. Bass
writes, "The battle of Navarino spelled Greek independence." Compare
Ã~Ilie Halévy in the second volume of his History of the English
People in the Nineteenth Century, who remarks that "at first sight the
student might be tempted to regard" Navarino as "the crowning victory
of that policy of national liberation to which Canning had willingly
seen his name attached." Yet the battle in reality, says Halévy,
was "a defeat of the policy which Canning had secretly pursued–the
policy of the Balance of Power–for it provoked the Russian war which,
ever since 1822, he had endeavoured to prevent by every means at
his disposal."
Passing, then, from interested journalism to serious history,
we find that in the wake of the good war lay a war less good and
less desired. This is a fact about humanitarian interventions
generally. Party advantage enters the calculations in a democratic
system; charismatic aggrandizement may play a part elsewhere;
"a successful humanitarian mission in Syria," Bass concedes, was a
"welcome opportunity" for Napoleon III and a decision that "suited
French imperial interests." Why reserve this sort of detail for
subordinate clauses and parenthetical sentences?
Gladstone, who denounced in writing and campaigned against the
"Bulgarian Horrors," felt chagrin that the Russians came first to
liberate the Balkans from the Ottoman yoke. Here is another clue that
Bass does not follow but might have. Competitive humanitarianism may
simply augment the ordinary rivalry of great powers. Gladstone, too,
was keen to outbid Disraeli for the honor of inheriting the mantle of
Lord Byron. It is hard to know quite what to make of such a motive. It
may be more high-minded but is scarcely more moral than the realism
of Metternich. Yet Bass makes much of the Byronic succession: he
enjoys the surface poetry of politics, as he enjoys the occasional
politics of poetry. His own prose ought to have concerned itself more
with surface. He speaks of "vociferous voices," and people who are
"vocally shocked." We catch a glimpse of Byron before his conversion to
politics, "mooning about in Italy." Disraeli is described as "Byron’s
fan" and a "flashy imperialist," and Gladstone as "a very weird man."
Freedom’s Battle aims to contribute to a tendency more than to
impress by the close articulations of an argument. Central to
that tendency is the need to sustain the distinction between good
"hegemonic" influence and bad "imperialist" domination. Yet where,
in both cases, it is violent force that is justified, one’s view of
the distinction will depend on the nature of one’s sympathy and not
on a weighing of the facts. Does a democracy that kills more than
a million in its mission to crush an internationally nonthreatening
tyranny deserve more admiration than, say, a dictatorship that kills
10,000 and imprisons political enemies to evict the foreign investors
that have subsidized a guerrilla opposition? Does the greater become
the lesser crime when the criminal is a democracy? This is a question
Bass does not bring himself to ask, but it lies at the heart of the
doubts that entangle his subject. And it seems closely linked to the
more compelling question: is a military state compatible with justice?
The big democracies, which Bass looks on as natural bringers of
political justice to victim countries, must, in order to perform such
services, first have been thoroughly militarized. On Bass’s view,
it is their duty to stay militarized until they have made the world
a place where democratic justice is at home. Yet the most candid
sentence in his book strikes an oddly discordant note: "the strength
of democracies today has made the violation of weaker dictatorships
an opportunity too great to resist."
This book jauntily and entertainingly asks us to yield to the
temptation. What it does not consider is the cost to the morale of
democracy of giving in to the temptation repeatedly. It is possible
for selfless vindicators of the rights of the oppressed to become
brutal overseers who happen to speak the language of natural rights.
In a characteristic touch, Bass tells us that the "scariest" risk of
humanitarian intervention is not the mass destruction of civilian lives
but rather, "that two great powers will clash." Maybe he has not come
such a long way from Metternich after all. A peculiarity of Freedom’s
Battle, indeed, is that it scatters, among its facts and fancies, so
rational a quantum of realistic knowledge and psychological insight
(though the latter is too sparingly used). Bass knows that the form
of intervention he desires can only stay free of the imperialist
poison if placed in the hands of an international body. Yet he does
not propose reliance on an existing body or the devising of a new
one. Rather he worries that "multilateralism can be paralyzing." Fast,
clean results are what he wants–a very American point of view. Or
as he says, in a more judicial tone: "The challenge is finding the
right middle ground: a mission big and lengthy enough to be effective,
but small and swift enough not to be mistaken for imperialism."
Gary Bass means well. He is young and eager for a fight, provided it
is a good fight. But to justify the violence of the state in any cause
besides self-preservation is an intricate and troubling enterprise. He
has not thought it through.
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David Bromwich is the editor of a selection of Edmund Burke’s speeches
and letters, On Empire, Liberty, and Reform (Yale University Press).