Lessons Learned

I was intrigued by the idea of a New Republic masthead editorial purporting to apply the lessons of Kosovo to the situation in Darfur. That, I thought, might provide a respite from the magazine's usual bomb repeat bomb take on the issue. But no:

But the biggest, and most important, parallel is this: We asked Milosevic to stop killing. He did not. We have asked Sudan to stop killing. And still it kills. Yes, it occasionally appears willing to bargain. But, while Sudan bargains, the aircraft continue to roam over Darfur. The paltry U.N. forces on the ground can do nothing to stop them. And that is probably how things will continue to unfold, until this president or the next one remembers the example of Kosovo, puts together a credible NATO force, and finally says enough is enough.

It seems to me that any serious look at Kosovo has to carry with it the lesson that there's nothing nearly as simple as a "say enough is enough" option. Coercive military intervention raises a lot of thorny issues. Do we really want to commit ourselves to a Kosovo-style mission in which we wind up administering Darfur for an indefinite period of time? Not that Darfur is 196,555 square miles to Kosovo's 10,887 square miles. Similarly, what about the wider consequences for Sudan of getting into the partition business? Meanwhile, though they acknowledge that the Darfur rebel groups on whose behalf they want us to go to war are "unsavory" they don't think through any of the implications of this.

Before a country currently engaged in two wars, plus several peacekeeping operations in the Balkans, starts a new war these are the kind of questions that need to be answered. The good news for TNR is that everyone knows their preferred policy has no chance of being implemented. Which means that there's no need to think it through, and also that there's every reason to adopt a maximalist posture. While efforts like the Enough Project to find constructive, practical ways to improve the situation like Darfur necessarily involve awkward compromises with reality, the maximalist gets to ignore details and practical problems and hold the moral high ground for his trouble.

Comments

From Matt's colleague Christopher Caldwell's great Financial Times column from 12/06, It is best to stay out of Darfur:

Some people seem to be nostalgic for the pre-September 11 days when the west could fight symbolic wars against marginal countries in the name of human rights. Others see a chance to restore the west’s humanitarian credentials, after the political quagmire in Iraq. This betrays a short memory and mistakes the war’s outcome for the war’s rationale. Iraq, too, was once a humanitarian cause.

But the lesson – not just of Iraq but also of the debacles in Somalia and Kosovo that made it possible – is that there is no such thing as a humanitarian invasion. The west can destroy the Sudanese government and punish its leaders, as in Iraq. It can support one group of brigands over another, as in Kosovo. It can feed people for a while, as in Somalia. However, humanitarian their motivations, though, military operations turn political the moment they are launched, with consequences that are wildly unpredictable.

Posted by Fred | February 25, 2008 1:52 PM

You'd think that every now and then someone in a position of prominence might want to mention -- maybe just for entertainment's sake -- that it really is possible to take a horrible situation and make it even worse.

Unfortunately, in foreign policy the last item on the list is to consider the actual likely consequences of one's favored actions on those it may affect, and so no one ever has to even consider the notion that military action might make the Darfur / Sudan situation even worse for civilians.

Fortunately, the backers of such action can simply assume that someone, somewhere, will take care of the details in such a way that everything will happen correctly -- and if that does not happen, well, it's not the promoters' responsibility, since they imagined it would all go much better.

So, really, there is no problem then. Bombs away!

Posted by El Cid | February 25, 2008 2:03 PM

The "Lesson of Kosevo" has two major points:
a) The USA should not slap an arms embargo on one party and then let that party be partially exterminated by the other party.
b) Instead, the USA should simply give arms, food, and supplies to the underdog so that the underdog can fight. After the aggressor gets his ass kicked a few times, a truce will arise, boundaries will be set and life will go on.

The REAL protection of liberty is that a defender has a 5 to 1 advantage over an attacker. That means that the underdog, if armed, can always make aggression cost far too much for what profit it can yield.

The only people who get fucked are those stupid enough to let themselves be disarmed -- something to keep in mind if the gun control movement tries to drag the Democratic Party over the cliff yet again.

Posted by Don Williams | February 25, 2008 2:13 PM

Darfur is really almost 20 times the size of Kosovo?

Posted by Freddie | February 25, 2008 2:15 PM

The only realistic option for a Kosovo-style intervention, which really isn't all that realistic, would involve the US providing air support to a coalition of African troops, under the auspices of the African Union. There are a great many reasons why such an operation is unlikely to happen and why it might go completely sideways if it did happen. But that possibility exists, if sufficient political will could be mustered in the US and in the capitals of sub-Saharan Africa.

Given that no one is actually trying to put that type of operation together, we should all recognize Darfur for what is: (A) an ongoing tragedy that will be resolved by diplomatic pressure or not at all, and (B) a rhetorical blunt instrument that enables dishonest "humanitarian hawks" to disingenuously attack the Left for being "soft" on genocide... without going to all the fuss and trouble of actually doing anything to help the people of Darfur.

Posted by LaFollette Progressive | February 25, 2008 2:25 PM

A lot of the same people who argue that we shouldn't go into Darfur, fault Clinton for not attending to the Tutsi genocide instantly while insisting that we should stay in Iraq forever. And the same people fault John McCain for regretting Obama's pledge to attack terrorists in Pakistan while not getting over-riled about Bush actually doing so and simultaneously faulting Clinton for not. Rum world. The ratio of rosy-red-rectums to assholes is not 1:1)

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | February 25, 2008 2:55 PM

Something else to think about: There would be less demand for oil from countries such as Sudan (and less diplomatic cover for them from the likes of China) if countries such as ours allowed more local energy exploration. I can't for the life of me understand the Left's opposition to energy exploration in, and offshore, of the U.S. (to be fair, there are 'green' Republicans such as Schwarzenegger who also oppose exploration).

Posted by Fred | February 25, 2008 3:04 PM

Before a country currently engaged in two wars, plus several peacekeeping operations in the Balkans, starts a new war these are the kind of questions that need to be answered.

For once, Yglesias earns that award his colleague named after him.

I've always found it interesting that every time the left suggests an invasion, it refuses terms like 'invasion' or 'war,' preferring Orwellian phrases such as 'humanitarian intervention' or 'peacekeeping mission.' Make no mistake, any injection of US troops into sovereign nations that didn't invite those troops is an invasion. And when the Janjaweed reject the presence of those troops, we'll have both a war and an insurgency.

Points to Yglesias for acknowledging this.

If he had also acknowledged that the situation in Darfur is less terrible than the situation will be when we leave Iraq--and that intervening in Darfur would represent even less of a moral or strategic imperative than the invasion of Iraq--he could have gotten extra credit.

Posted by Shinyk | February 25, 2008 3:11 PM

If he had also acknowledged that the situation in Darfur is less terrible than the situation will be when we leave Iraq--and that intervening in Darfur would represent even less of a moral or strategic imperative than the invasion of Iraq--he could have gotten extra credit.

Wow, by injecting wild speculation and outright bullshit into his post and proclaiming them to be facts, Matt could have earned extra credit from Shinyk! It must pain him to know that he came so close to bathing in the glow of your admiration before falling short.

Posted by LaFollette Progressive | February 25, 2008 3:24 PM

Wow, by injecting wild speculation and outright bullshit into his post and proclaiming them to be facts, Matt could have earned extra credit from Shinyk! It must pain him to know that he came so close to bathing in the glow of your admiration before falling short.

If you want to accuse me of wildness, speculation and bullshit, it would be nice of you to get into specifics, not hysterics.

Posted by Shinyk | February 25, 2008 3:37 PM

Shades of Mars Climate Orbiter! Darfur is 196,555 square miles. Kosovo is 10,887 square KILOMETERS, or 4,023 square miles. So Darfur is almost 50 times as big as Kosovo. The population is estimated at 6 million, three times that of Kosovo.

The 16,000 NATO peacekeepers came into a territory where 90-plus percent of the population (the ethnic Albanians) absolutely loved them, and they still failed to prevent serious unrest in 1994, and, to a much lesser extent, now.

Kosovo was practically an ideal situation for peacekeeping, and it has mostly worked out pretty well. Sudan would be an entirely differenct kettle of fish.

Posted by Invigilator | February 25, 2008 3:57 PM

"the situation in Darfur is less terrible than the situation will be when we leave Iraq"

= Wild speculation

"intervening in Darfur would represent even less of a moral or strategic imperative than the invasion of Iraq"

= Since this clearly implies that preventing Saddam Hussein's regime from surviving past 2003 was a greater moral imperative than ending mass slaughter in Darfur, it is outright bullshit.

Posted by LaFollette Progressive | February 25, 2008 4:01 PM

How come whenever you say something negative about TNR you identify the magazine, but when you say something positive you don't (for example, you've recommended both the John Judis and Michael Tomasky article today without mentioning they are in...The New Republic).

Why do you malign this magazine that puts out so much good stuff. Sure its line on Israel is disagreeable, but TNR is putting out some great pieces. Great LIBERAL pieces.

Posted by Devin Carpenter | February 25, 2008 4:05 PM

"the situation in Darfur is less terrible than the situation will be when we leave Iraq"= Wild speculation

Not at all. The warring Iraqi groups are better armed and better funded. Each side has powerful backers (Saudi Arabia, Iran), deeply invested in the other side's loss. Each side has more reason to fight. All of this points to more death.

"intervening in Darfur would represent even less of a moral or strategic imperative than the invasion of Iraq"= Since this clearly implies that preventing Saddam Hussein's regime from surviving past 2003 was a greater moral imperative than ending mass slaughter in Darfur, it is outright bullshit.

Saddam Hussein's history of systematic crimes against the Shiites and Kurds far eclipses anything that's happened in Sudan. The death toll that can be laid at his foot dwarfs even the total population of Darfur. If Hussein's murderous actions weren't enough to justify a US invasion of Iraq (I don't believe they were), I see no way to make a similar case for invading the tragic, but less-tragic, Sudan.

Posted by Shinyk | February 25, 2008 4:24 PM

The warring Iraqi groups are better armed and better funded. Each side has powerful backers (Saudi Arabia, Iran), deeply invested in the other side's loss.

And they also seem to have reached a roughly stable balance of power, both militarily and politically. Every side has a great deal to lose by escalating hostilities. Mass slaughter of civilians tends to happen when one side is badly outgunned.

Saddam Hussein's history of systematic crimes against the Shiites and Kurds far eclipses anything that's happened in Sudan. The death toll that can be laid at his foot dwarfs even the total population of Darfur.

Even if one accepts this statement as accurate (it isn't even close to accurate, particularly if you factor in the death toll in Southern Sudan) the greatest crimes of Saddam Hussein were all committed prior to the establishment of the no-fly zones. Thus, there was no moral imperative to end a genocidal campaign of violence in Iraq. There was already an effective policy in place to greatly limit Hussein's ability to commit such crimes. The surviving regime was oppressive and vile, but less so than Mugabe's Zimbabwe and certainly less of a pressing humanitarian issue than Darfur or the Congo are today.

You're conflating the moral imperative for punishing a murderer with the imperative to stop a murder while it's occurring.

Posted by LaFollette Progressive | February 25, 2008 5:36 PM

In the first place, no one is going to save Darfur. Period. It's too hard, and there's no payoff. It would help if we could declare a no-fly zone, but that would require a functional UN which we don't currently have.

In terms of Shinyk vs Fighting Bob, both have some valid points, but the bulk of the facts are on Shinyk's side:

--While the situation in Iraq might get worse than Darfur if we pull out too quickly, it might not, and it almost certainly won't if we re-deploy deliberately over several years, which is what we are most likely to do. So, speculation, but not particularly wild.

--intervening in Darfur would represent FAR less, not just "less", of a moral imperative than invading Iraq. Not only were the numbers of victims of Ba'athist Iraq off-the-scale larger than the victims in Darfur, there were significant additional moral issues of grave significance at stake. Like the principal of collective action to oppose wars of aggression ("the matter of Iraq and Kuwait", as all the Security Council meetings on this subject were opened, was still unresolved with nearly a score of violated Chapter VII Resolutions, including the '91 ceasefire agreement); and the issue of the proliferation of banned weapons (Iraq actually killed tens of thousands of people with them, after all); and the issue of responsibility for the commonly-accepted norm of non-interference in the trade of vital commodities; and the issue of state-supported terrorism, as Iraq was an innovator and practitioner of long standing. There's more, but it's already a lot more than Darfur, right?

Posted by Robert Powell | February 25, 2008 5:43 PM

P.S.
On the "punish the murderer" point, a good one, I would note that punishing a murder is a moral obligation; and preventing future murders is too. There is absolutely no evidence to support the claim of "effective policy in place to limit Hussein's ability..." Alternately, there is quite a bit of evidence that the claim is patently false. The Duelfer Report, combined with the oil exploration deal signed between Iraq and Total/Fina/Elf in 2002 are exhibits A and B. The toll of perhaps a million of the most vulnerable Iraqis killed by the sanctions regime is a moral issue both in terms of what it was, and what it tells us about likely future "limits".

Posted by Robert Powell | February 25, 2008 6:28 PM

And they also seem to have reached a roughly stable balance of power, both militarily and politically. Every side has a great deal to lose by escalating hostilities. Mass slaughter of civilians tends to happen when one side is badly outgunned.

History disagrees. Massive death tolls occur when there is near parity between two well-armed, well-funded enemies. WWI, 20 million+ dead. WWII, 60 million+. Iran-Iraq War, 1.5-2 million (all numbers include civilians).

By contrast, Rwanda saw 500-800,000 dead and Darfur has seen 200-300,000. A situation in which: both sides want something the other has (usually land), fear and hate the other, and believe the other can be defeated, is, minus something like nuclear deterrence, the most likely recipe for massive numbers of dead. That exists in Iraq, not Sudan.

Of course, Cambodia, with its genocide of close to 2 million, violates that general rule, but, then again, the situation in Cambodia before genocide more closely parallels the situation in Iraq than it does Darfur (though it doesn't parallel either very well). In short, there's no reason to think the victorious Iraqi faction wouldn't engage in a similar genocide to that of Cambodia and many reasons to think it would.

Even if one accepts this statement as accurate (it isn't even close to accurate, particularly if you factor in the death toll in Southern Sudan) the greatest crimes of Saddam Hussein were all committed prior to the establishment of the no-fly zones. Thus, there was no moral imperative to end a genocidal campaign of violence in Iraq.

Even ignoring that the Hussein regime resulted in at least 4 million unnecessary, violent deaths (and probably many times that amount), our 'solution' of sanctions ended with another 500,000 deaths, which is still more than have died in the Sudan, and, since our sactions contributed, in part, to those Iraqi deaths, that still would give us a greater moral imperative to invade Iraq than to invade Sudan.

Which isn't to say that sanctioning wasn't the best option after the first Gulf War, just that if the situation in Iraq didn't warrant an invasion, Sudan doesn't even warrant discussion.

You're conflating the moral imperative for punishing a murderer with the imperative to stop a murder while it's occurring.

No, I'm conflating the moral imperative of stopping a serial killer from continuing to add victims to that of stopping a thug. To me, neither necessitates an invasion by itself, but the former is clearly the greater cause for concern.

Posted by Shinyk | February 25, 2008 6:58 PM

A lot of good points have already been made. I think our actions in Kosovo was overall a good thing. However, there was some luck involved, such as not getting into a shooting match with the Russians at Pristina. In addition, the KLA wasn't as big or vicious as other groups hoping for retaliation, so only about 100,000 Serbs in Kosovo were kicked out of their home and only about 1,500 killed, which historically compared to similar situations is rather small. In addition, in Kosovo IIRC it was the Serbian military that was actively killing ethnic Albanians. In Bosnia it was a paramilitary organization that may as well have been the Serb military because there was so much coordination.

In Darfur, Khartoum loves the fact that the Darfuris are being slaughtered by the janjaweed, but it seems to me that the janjaweed have a lot of independent policy inertia at this point. Sudan is awash in small arms and bombing Khartoum to get them to stop supplying the janjaweed at this point probably wouldn't do anything.

Also, it bears repeating that Rwanda is rather tiny. While some of the more realistic scenarios I've seen have put the number of Rwandans we could have saved at only 100,000 people out of a lot more killed (since the speed of slaughter was so high), logistically securing Rwanda would have been a lot easier than securing Iraq is now or securing Darfur would be. Even some things that wouldn't require troops and wouldn't be 100% effective, such as jamming the signal coming out of Radio Milles-Collines (ironically the actual hotel from Hotel Rwanda shares the name of the Hutu chauvinist station), would have been doing. We didn't even bother getting the local Rwandans who worked at our embassy out of the country before sending the American employees home, so most of them died.

Posted by Reality Man | February 26, 2008 1:00 AM

"would involve the US providing air support to a coalition of African troops"

Because African troops are known for their humanitarian war fighting methods?

I disagree with Don about giving the "underdog" weapons - unless one is absolutely sure that the "underdog" is not merely a "dog."

I could see the US arming the Palestinians to the gills, just to piss off Israel. That might make some slight sense (but probably not - it would just motivate Israel to nuke Gaza...)

But in Kosovo, neither side was worth supporting. The evidence is that Clinton intervened in Kosovo for two reasons: 1) the military-industrial complex - projecting military power into the region for various economic reasons; and 2) diversion from impeachment (like most of his bombing campaigns in Iraq.)

The "George Washington" approach is still best. The US and its electorate really does not and should not give a shit about the people in North Africa - regardless of how wealthy we are, how powerful we are, how much "good" we could do if we intervened, etc.

It's not our problem. There are six billion people on this planet - 20 times the population of the US. We can't help them all by getting PHYSICALLY involved in their physical disputes.

We can help them by offering to mediate or by offering humanitarian aid to those who are really suffering (if we can insure that the aid actually gets to those people and isn't pocketed by the rulers, as is the case in Pakistan - where some of the money devoted to the Afghans war against the Russians was diverted to the Pakistani nuclear weapons project.)

"Kosovo was practically an ideal situation for peacekeeping, and it has mostly worked out pretty well."

Well, if you conclude that filling the country with Albanian mafia has "worked out well." In any event, I forget the exact figure, but Kosovo WAS a case where the official counterinsurgency ratio of boots on the ground to indigenous population was close to textbook - something like 20 soldiers per thousand.

Try that in Darfur. Where you going to find the troops?

Also, H.C. Berkowitz over at TPM has been repeatedly pointing out: how are you going to get them in country? There are few airports and rail lines. Logistics would be a frickin' nightmare. You don't have Kuwait next door to help...

You want to stop genocides? Step back and consider the "Big Picture" (as Williams S. Burroughs liked to say). Work toward that "Big Picture". Stop trying to play "whack-a-mole" with every regional dispute that pops up and kills a bunch of people.

The reality is: there is no shortage of chimpanzees.

Try working on preventing them from being chimpanzees in the first place.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | February 26, 2008 2:20 AM

Shinyk--
General agreement, but on the toll of the sanctions regime in Iraq, UNICEF confirmed that 500,000 Iraqi CHILDREN were killed by them, but put the estimated total at "perhaps a million" due to the toll among the elderly and infirm. Two consecutive high-ranking UN officials, Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck, resigned rather than continue to administer a program Halliday described as "meeting the legal definition of genocide."

Posted by Robert Powell | February 26, 2008 3:44 AM

[the aircraft continue to roam over Darfur]

they don't, of course - Peretz' shop can't even get details like this right. The entire reason that the JEM/NRF aren't interested in peace talks at the moment is that they've got hold of anti-aircraft missiles.

Posted by dsquared | February 26, 2008 4:50 AM

General agreement, but on the toll of the sanctions regime in Iraq, UNICEF confirmed that 500,000 Iraqi CHILDREN were killed by them

Fair enough. I went with the lowest estimate I could find in print so as not to be accused of picking a high number to overstate my point.

Posted by Shinyk | February 26, 2008 9:01 AM