TIME: The Kosovo Conundrum

[question everything]

Thursday, Apr. 12, 2007
The Kosovo Conundrum
By Peter Beinart

At first glance, the Democratic presidential front runners look like foreign policy clones. Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and Barack Obama all want to get out of Iraq. They all want to double down in Afghanistan. And they're all for a diplomatic deal with Iran. To find someone who sounds really different, you have to scroll down--past Bill Richardson, Joe Biden and Chris Dodd--all the way to Dennis Kucinich, near the rock bottom of the 2008 field.

(snip)

To understand it, start with Blair--not the Blair of today, but the Blair of 1999. Back then, the British leader was supporting the U.S. in a different war, in Kosovo. Remember Kosovo? It was fought without U.N. approval against a dictator, Slobodan Milosevic, who, while slaughtering his own people, posed no direct threat to the U.S. Had NATO's campaign failed, it would have been Clinton and Blair who looked like reckless ideologues. But it worked. And Blair made it the centerpiece of a new foreign policy creed, which he called the "doctrine of international community."

That vision, which Clinton largely shared, summed up Democratic foreign policy at the turn of the millennium. In a globalized world, bad things that happen in other countries spread more quickly to our shores. Genocides spawn refugees, who destabilize their neighbors. Corruption sparks financial meltdowns, which rock the world economy. Pandemics hopscotch across the globe. Blair's answer was for Britain and the U.S., working through international institutions, to intervene more aggressively in the domestic affairs of other nations: to strengthen their financial and public-health systems, to push them toward capitalism and democracy, and in cases of extreme neglect and abuse, to take over the nation-building process by force.

(snip)

Grass-roots Democrats, however--the people who will actually vote for Clinton, Edwards or Obama--are not in a missionary mood... Almost two-thirds of Democrats (compared with less than one-third of Republicans) told CBS in December, "The United States should mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along as best they can." That's about as direct a refutation of the Blairite creed as you can get. At the heart of anti-Blairism is a convergence between antiwar doves and realists like Virginia Senator James Webb, a former Reagan Administration official who believes the U.S. should "send American forces into harm's way only if the nation is directly threatened." Webb and his allies don't oppose all military action, but they vehemently oppose efforts to forcibly remake the world. In Iraq's wake, one of the core anti-Blairite arguments is that real internationalism means understanding what other societies want for themselves, rather than seeing them as clay waiting to be molded in the U.S.'s image.

So which vision will prevail? If a Democrat wins the White House, Blairites will claim most of the top foreign policy jobs. But without the support of people like Webb, they won't get much done. The U.S.'s interest in how other countries govern themselves hasn't changed, but our capacity to influence them has. Blairism still has a lot to recommend it, but when it comes to foreign policy, Democrats can no longer party like it's 1999.

Beinart is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations

*

* Find this article at:
* http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1609765,00.html

[question everything]

1. Perhaps I should have titled it Democratic foreign policy?

I kept the original title but am surprised that no one has commented, especially the Kucinich followers

[mainer]

2. Maybe it worked because we had competent leadership then?

"Remember Kosovo? It was fought without U.N. approval against a dictator, Slobodan Milosevic, who, while slaughtering his own people, posed no direct threat to the U.S. Had NATO's campaign failed, it would have been Clinton and Blair who looked like reckless ideologues. But it worked."

[Igel]

4. So you're saying Iraq wasn't a mistake of principle,

but of execution?

Remember, civilians died in the Kosovo business as the result of American bombs (I remember one case in which a bridge was being bombed, and a passenger train managed to intercept it). We alienated those in the international community by bombing the Chinese Embassy, and we knocked out the power to Beograd, IIRC (a war crime when Israel does it in Gaza). And we were most certainly lied to as to the cause of the Serbian action and the extent of Albanian deaths, as well as about the amount of destruction we caused to the Serbs.

[Hippo_Tron]

5. Iraq was both

A competent President would've stayed the hell out of Iraq realizing how difficult the country would be to stabilize with all of the various rival factions. An honest and principled President wouldn't have told his CIA director to botch the intelligence so that it looks like Iraq has WMDs and therefore would've had to reason to even consider going into Iraq in the first place.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

7. I'd say sort of -decent execution was impossible, but if it had been it would have been right.

If there had been a way of replacing Saddam Hussein with a decent, functioning state without too high a cost, by military force, invading Iraq would have been the right thing to do, so in that sense it was a mistake of execution rather than principle, but there wasn't.

[abburdlen]

3. another difference

was nobody tried to convince the public that Milosevic was behind the Oklahoma city bombing or that they were weeks away from having nukes.

This administration screwed up Iraq in part because they couldn't/ didn't spell out the goals for invading.

[Jai4WKC08]

6. And a couple others...

The only reason the UN did not approve the Kosovo effort was because of the Russian veto. But most of the UN leadership heartily approved of what NATO did, and the Security Council deliberately turned a blind eye. Plus, NATO had a certain legal right to act without UN approval since the former Yugoslavia was obviously within their regional sphere of interest. A destabilized Balkans could have caused half the surrounding governments to collapse.

But mostly what makes Kosovo different than Iraq is the imminence of threat. Milosevic was ramping up the aggression against the Kosovar muslims. Members of the intelligensia and civil leaders had being killed and, based on previous actions by Milosevic, there was every reason to think that more would be. There were also close to a million of the common people forced out of their homes and into the mountains. If they'd still been there by the next winter, who knows how many would have died. Diplomacy had been tried, and there no more time left to pursue further attempts. Something had to be done then or it would have been too late.

Saddam was a bad guy who killed lots of Iraqis (and others), but he wasn't doing anything particularly nasty right then and there, nor was he threatening to. If the elder Bush had attacked Iraq to stop the murder of 100,000 sh'ites back in 1991, or Reagan to save the Kurds in 1988, it might not have been smart but it would have at least been legitimate. But in 1993, there was no imminent threat to anybody, and no reason not to rely diplomacy and economic pressure in lieu of military force.