FIRST DO NO HARM: Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia

By David N. Gibbs.

Vanderbilt University Press, 2009, 346 + xi pages. Paperback, $27.95.

CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- Humanitarian intervention, used by major world powers to justify military invasions and wars, typically promoted human tragedies.

No nation has unlimited financial and human resources. And sometimes, "humanitarianism" is used as a ploy to hide a nation's real motivations to expand power and influence.

David N. Gibbs makes these arguments in First Do No Harm: Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia.

"To have any real effect, humanitarian interventions must be of long duration. It seems straightforward that such expensive and time-consuming operations cannot be performed for every ethnic conflict in the world, given limited resources."

When the Clinton administration used military force, primarily using air attacks, to stop ethnic-cleansing in conflict-ridden former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, those efforts probably ended up costing even more lives of innocent civilians.

Clinton's intervention succeeded in promoting U.S. hegemony, and free-market economies, in the aftermath of the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union.

Gibbs, a history and political science professor at the University of Arizona, published his new book in June, a decade after the U.S.-NATO war against Serbia ended.

The United States, Gibbs argues, often uses humanitarianism "as a pretext to justify aggressive actions that serve to advance its economic and geostrategic position in the world.

"After all, great powers have long justified their self-interested acts in terms of a higher moral purpose."

Since World War II ended in 1945, the Soviet Union had been the main ideological justification for efforts to preserve U.S. hegemony.

But the U.S. and European powers needed a new military crusade, Gibbs argues, a "substitute for the Cold War to give the United States and Europe a new sense of common purpose. Kosovo was to provide this crusade."

Clinton's intervention in Yugoslavia in the 1990s had many similarities to the disastrous invasion of Iraq George W. Bush launched in 2003.

The arguments Gibbs makes in his new academic study, which is not a quick read, will undoubtedly irk many people, including many political liberals.

But increasingly, realistic analysts of all political perspectives are raising major questions about the rationality, humanity and long-term impacts of U.S. foreign policy.

Chalmers Johnson, a foreign policy scholar who once worked for the Central Intelligence Agency, called Gibbs' new book a "pioneering study."

"Of all the excuses for imperialism, the most hypocritical is surely 'humanitarian intervention' - the claim that a powerful foreign nation has invaded a weaker nation in order to stop or prevent domestic human rights abuses," Johnson wrote.

Ethnic tensions and hatreds

The long history of ethnic tensions in Yugoslavia and surrounding countries are complex and hard to understand - tensions between Croatians, Albanians, Serbs, Bosnians, Slovenians, Kosovans and others.

Those tensions grew when the U.S. and other Western nations refused to forgive any of Yugoslavia's growing debts in the years after 1979, instead imposing economic austerity measures that promoted social and economic disintegration.

FIRST DO NO HARM: Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia

By David N. Gibbs.

Vanderbilt University Press, 2009, 346 + xi pages. Paperback, $27.95.

CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- Humanitarian intervention, used by major world powers to justify military invasions and wars, typically promoted human tragedies.

No nation has unlimited financial and human resources. And sometimes, "humanitarianism" is used as a ploy to hide a nation's real motivations to expand power and influence.

David N. Gibbs makes these arguments in First Do No Harm: Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia.

"To have any real effect, humanitarian interventions must be of long duration. It seems straightforward that such expensive and time-consuming operations cannot be performed for every ethnic conflict in the world, given limited resources."

When the Clinton administration used military force, primarily using air attacks, to stop ethnic-cleansing in conflict-ridden former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, those efforts probably ended up costing even more lives of innocent civilians.

Clinton's intervention succeeded in promoting U.S. hegemony, and free-market economies, in the aftermath of the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union.

Gibbs, a history and political science professor at the University of Arizona, published his new book in June, a decade after the U.S.-NATO war against Serbia ended.

The United States, Gibbs argues, often uses humanitarianism "as a pretext to justify aggressive actions that serve to advance its economic and geostrategic position in the world.

"After all, great powers have long justified their self-interested acts in terms of a higher moral purpose."

Since World War II ended in 1945, the Soviet Union had been the main ideological justification for efforts to preserve U.S. hegemony.

But the U.S. and European powers needed a new military crusade, Gibbs argues, a "substitute for the Cold War to give the United States and Europe a new sense of common purpose. Kosovo was to provide this crusade."

Clinton's intervention in Yugoslavia in the 1990s had many similarities to the disastrous invasion of Iraq George W. Bush launched in 2003.

The arguments Gibbs makes in his new academic study, which is not a quick read, will undoubtedly irk many people, including many political liberals.

But increasingly, realistic analysts of all political perspectives are raising major questions about the rationality, humanity and long-term impacts of U.S. foreign policy.

Chalmers Johnson, a foreign policy scholar who once worked for the Central Intelligence Agency, called Gibbs' new book a "pioneering study."

"Of all the excuses for imperialism, the most hypocritical is surely 'humanitarian intervention' - the claim that a powerful foreign nation has invaded a weaker nation in order to stop or prevent domestic human rights abuses," Johnson wrote.

Ethnic tensions and hatreds

The long history of ethnic tensions in Yugoslavia and surrounding countries are complex and hard to understand - tensions between Croatians, Albanians, Serbs, Bosnians, Slovenians, Kosovans and others.

Those tensions grew when the U.S. and other Western nations refused to forgive any of Yugoslavia's growing debts in the years after 1979, instead imposing economic austerity measures that promoted social and economic disintegration.

The U.S. and Europe, Gibbs argues, must therefore "bear a large part of the blame for the wars of 1991-1999 and the associated humanitarian disaster."

The areas most eager to secede from the dissolving central government were Slovenia and Croatia, the most affluent areas of the former Yugoslavia.

In the early 1990s, most European nations opposed the disintegration of Yugoslavia, while Germany - eager to enhance its own political prominence, promoted it.

U.S. leaders repeatedly undermined peace efforts, Gibbs argues.

In 1992, the George H.W. Bush administration thwarted European Union effort to settle the Bosnian conflict through the Lisbon Agreement. After Bill Clinton became president in 1993, his administration did the same thing.

Major advocates of U.S. intervention included Hillary Clinton, Vice President Al Gore and especially Madeleine Albright, who served as U.S. ambassador then as secretary of state.

At the time, other Bush administration leaders resisted efforts to launch new military conflicts, including Gen. Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser.

Gibbs said many figures released were exaggerated, used to promote and justify military intervention, making it hard to estimate the impact of ethnic conflicts.

After the U.S. intervention in Kosovo between March and June 1999 ended, 850,000 Albanians, half their population in the area, were forced out of Kosovo. And the conflict displaced 90 percent of all Albanians from their homes.

Solving humanitarian problems

The Balkan and Iraq interventions both increased humanitarian problems.

"U.S. intervention was not an act of idealism but, on the contrary, a class act of power politics," Gibbs writes.

The U.S. sought to protect its international trade interests and enhance its military-industrial complex - about which President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned in his 1961 farewell speech.

That military-industrial complex, especially with the expansion of private military contractors such as Blackwater, continued to profit and expand during conflicts begun after the Cold War ended.

Major powers repeatedly choose to intervene in relatively marginal areas in the world "to demonstrate their power and their potential for leadership."

Gibbs cites examples including U.S. interventions in Korea in the 1950s, Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, Grenada in the 1980s and Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

Intervention in many conflicts - such as those in Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda or Darfur - also serves to distract and divert public attention from more basic issues, including economic poverty and underdevelopment throughout the Third World.

Gibbs also believes attention is diverted from the increasingly disastrous spread of infectious diseases, such as AIDS, which have killed tens of millions and shattered societies, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa.

As an alternative, Gibbs urges the United States and its European allies to seek strategies "aimed at preventing ethnic conflicts before they explode - by alleviating the economic stresses that can cause such conflicts."

Prevention could be far more effective than intervention. And prevention could use the tens of billions of dollars spent in Yugoslavia and hundreds of billions spent in Iraq for better, more humanitarian purposes.

Reach Paul J. Nyden at pjny...@wvgazette.com or 304-348-5164.