Serbia and Abu Ghuraib

Laura Rozen was a war correspondent in the Balkans in the 1990s.  In this blog post of May 14, she describes part of how she connected her experiences there with the news of the torture being practiced by Americans in Abu Ghuraib:

In the days after Serb forces fled Kosovo in June 1999, I was taken to a torture chamber, in the basement of a Serbian police station in the provincial capital Pristina, then being manned by British troops. In the basement, there was a bed with a ratty foam mattress and leather handcuffs, bottles of medicines of atropine and syringes on the wet filthy floor, and a kind of briefcase full of hammers and torture devices with names engraved in them beside it. Calendars of Serbian saints hung from the walls of the offices upstairs, and the hardest core pornography and lots of bottles of half empty bottles of liquor were on the desks. The British troops were as horrified as I was. The atmosphere was so sinister, so clearly one of torture, that a feeling of revulsion and nausea just kind of settled on one, and even now, remembering, returns. ...

Reading a Los Angeles Times report on Abu Ghuraib defendent Jeremy Sivits, "reminds me of that dank torture chamber in Pristina," she says.

And she describes how her experiences of American forces in the Balkans led her to expect a very different kind of conduct that what the Abu Ghuraib photos depict.

Honestly, it sounds naive, but I did not expect US troops to so easily become the kind of war criminals I saw evidence of in Serbia. My first encounter with US troops was flying in with them on a C-130 into Bosnia in December 1995, when their very presence was stopping a war. I had, I have huge respect for them. I thought that the kind of power these people represented was a force for good. My encounters with them throughout my time in Bosnia and Kosovo between '95 and '99 only reiterated my respect for the force for good US military troops could be. I can't tell you how disillusioning it is to see how corrupting occupation can be on people, including the US military. How ordinary, how unpremeditated, how random was the cruelty and violence [Abu Ghuraib defendents] Sivits and Graner and their team perpetrated on their victims. It's truly sickening.

This relates to the experiences of the Balkan War that I discussed in  a previous post.  The Balkan interventions by NATO looked at the time like a new model of international action.  They sparked considerable discussion, at least among diplomats and foreign policy types, about expanding the concept of international law to more explicitly allow military intervention for humanitarian reasons, like refugee concerns.

The Iraq War has effectively destroyed the possibility of that happening any time in the foreseeable future.  Because the Bush Administration has been so adamant about couching its Iraq War and the so-called "war on terrorism" as a fight of Good vs. Evil.  And after the failure to find WMDs in Iraq, the Bush team switched to emphasizing the horrors of the Baath dictatorship.  To much of the world, this "humanitarian" rhetoric is seen for the gruesome cynicism that it was on the part of the Administration.

People like Laura Rozen are likely to be more skeptical in the future of US Administrations of either party calling for war on "humanitarian" grounds.  And the Bush team's use of humanitarian rhetoric as cover in the Iraq War emphasizes to the whole world the inherent problems of creating a humanitarian exception to the prohibition in international law against preventive war against sovereign states.

Despite globalization in the economy, and the rise of "transnational actors" like al-Qaeda in world politics, the international order is still founded on sovereign nation-states.  Rulers demanding wars of liberation against other countries to spread the virtues of freedom and democracy should be regarded very critically.