Iraq War: A supporter repents?

If this column didn't contain a golden phrase that I'm going to steal for regular usage, I would be hesitant to mention it at all, because virtually every line reverberates with bad historical analogies and painfully strange analysis.

But this guy is a major writer on foreign policy issues, and his book Balkan Ghosts was reportedly quite influential in the Clinton administration's thinking about the Balkan Wars, even though he was critical of the policies they pursued there:  Barren Ground for Democracy by Robert Kaplan New York Times 11/14/04.

Here's the repentence part:

Whether one views the war in Iraq as a noble effort in democratization or a brutal exercise in imperialism, there can be little doubt that it has proved the proverbial "bridge too far" for those who planned and, like myself, supported it. While much has been made of the strategic missteps the Bush administration has made since the Saddam Hussein regime was toppled, it seems likely that even the best-executed occupation would have been a daunting prospect.

Okay, it's not exactly, "The Bush administration snookered me completely with their fake claims about WMDs.  And I supported a war that violated the UN Charter and the Congressional resolution governing it. And it's a disaster for the United States.  And I can understand why nobody would listen to a sap like me in the future."

But for stuffy academics and pretentious conservative intellectuals, this is about as close as it gets to sackcloth and ashes.  And it does have the partially redeeming virtue of a very memorable and appropriate phrase.  After discussing the US interventions in the Balkan Wars in the 1990s, he writes (my emphasis):

Undeterred, Wilsonian idealists in the United States next put Iraq on their list for gun-to-the-head democratization.

"Gun-to-the-head democratization" is a perfect description of the Bush Doctrine ideology of wars to liberation in the Middle East.  Inevitably, the gun-to-the-head part dominates.  But it captures the spirit and the reality of the thing beautifully.  I'm going to make that one a part of my regular vocabulary.

The rest of the column is full of moments to make anyone who stops to think about what is being said cringe repeatedly.  Kaplan seems to have notions about "civilization" and "progress" that approximate those of an English Tory circa 1900.  At least he manages to avoid any bloopers about the superiority of the "Anglo-Saxon" nations or some such thing, though he doesn't miss it by far.  And, in an article about the prospects for democracy in former Ottoman provinces like those that make up present-day Iraq, the words "Islam" and "Muslim" are conspicuously absent.

Here's one headache-producing piece of stodgy non-thought:

After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, communist satellites like Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary promptly evolved into successful Western democracies. This transition was relatively easy because the countries boasted high literacy rates, exposure to the Enlightenment under Prussian and Hapsburg emperors, and strong industrial bases and middle classes prior to World War II and the cold war. In retrospect, it seems clear that only the presence of the Red Army had kept them from developing free parliamentary systems on their own.

Now, the way Prussia (the Berlin monarchy that more-or-less became Germany) and the Hapsburg empire (enthroned in Vienna) brought Enlightenment values to Poland was to carve up the country in a bandits' agreement with the Russian Czar in the 18th century, a situation that prevailed until after the First World War.  Could it be that maybe, just maybe, the existence of massive European popular movements for democracy in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the actual experience of democracy in Germany and Czechoslovakia, played some little role in the transition to democracy there later?  The example, attraction, political culture and economic prosperity of the European Union and its member states seems to have played a major role in the minds of the actual people making the actual decisions that set up the actual democracies in eastern Europe in the 1990s.

Better to use safe Tory abstractions about "strong industrial bases and middle classes." That's so much more tidy than to think all those grubby workers and peasants and shopkeepers and such demanding a say in how their bettersgovern them.

Kaplan does have a lot of knowledge about the Balkans.  And this paragraph also manages to stay reality-based:

Unsurprisingly, upon Communism's collapse, Romania, Bulgaria and Albania struggled for years on the brink of anarchy, although they at least avoided ethnic bloodshed. Of course, Yugoslavia was not so lucky. Though democracy appears to have a reasonably bright future there thanks to repeated Western intervention, it is wise to recall that for 15 years it has been a touch-and-go proposition.

He goes on to make it sound like Western intervention in the Balkan Wars were the product of some soft-hearted Western humanitarianism and Wilsonian idealism designed to export democracy there.  This is a revisionist view that would require some serious mangling of recent history to justify.

Western involvement in the Balkan Wars started in late 1991, when European NATO partners took a notably different diplomatic tack than the George H.W. Bush administration in recognizing the independence of the former Yugoslave nations of Slovenia and Croatia, at a time when they did not fully control the territory in their own borders, thanks to the presence of the hostile (Serb-dominated) Yugoslav army.  (The official, though fortunately not much publicized, view of the United States was that Germany was responsible for causing the Balkan Wars by taking the lead on this diplomatic recognition.)

The concern that led to intervention in Bosnia and later in Kosovo by the European democracies and the US was the worry that civil war and the alteration of borders by force in the former Yugoslavia were not only sending a potentially destabilizing wave of refugees into Europe, but that the habit of altering borders by armed conflict would spread to other parts of the Soviet bloc.  Humanitarian concerns did loom large, and the impact of the news of "ethnic cleansing" - carried out most extensively by Serbs but also by Croats and Bosnians - put huge pressure on European governments and the US to act.

Humanitarian concerns were perhaps more prominent in the Kosovo intervention, which involved outside intervention in the internal affairs of a sovereign country.  Kosovo was (and is today) a part of Serbia, not an independent country.  I personally supported US participation in the Kosovo War at the time, and I think still in retrospect it was the right thing to do, though there's no question it raised some difficult problems of international law.  In my understanding, it was justified based on the potential of the conflict for destabilizing the entire Balkan region. 

Not least of the concerns was that the Serbs' crackdown and ethnic cleansing in Kosovo threatened to draw the NATO allies Turkey and Greece into the war on opposite sides.  Turkey at one point had threatened to intervene militarily if Serbia resorted to ethnic cleansing of the Muslim Kosovars.  And such an action would very likely have brought Greece into the conflict on Serbia's side, Greece like Serbia being less than happy about the existence of Macedonia, for instance, another post-Yugoslav nation.

So it's true that part of the justification for the Bosnian intervention and the Kosovo War were humanitarian considerations.  And the Western democracies were interested in promoting democratization.  But there was really no stated war aims of imposing gun-to-the-head democratization on the Balkans.  (I told you I was making that part of my vocabulary.)

How much pragmatic considerations were incorporated into US and European intervention in the Balkans is illustrated by the fact that Britain and France were reluctant to sanction any kind of intervention against Serbia before 1995, while the US and Germany were more favorably disposed.  What turned the tide was the fact that Croatia's armed force in 1995 were built up to the point that they could beat the Serbian army and push them out of Croatian territory.  This established a new power balance there created more favorable conditions for intervention there.

In the process of establishing the new balance, the Croat army carried out ethnic cleansing against Serbs every bit as brutal as that committed by the Serbs against the Croats.  Most Western countries held their noses and downplayed that ugly fact.  Austrian Chancellor Franz Vranitzsky, who supported the German position on intervention, was the only Western head of government I know of who spoke out prominently denouncing the brutal behavior of the Croats in that instance.  Beyond that, the Croatian govenrnment under Franjo Tudjman was no model democracy, to put it mildly.  Nor do I remember the democratic countries presenting it as such.  Though, of course, the US leaders in particular feel obligated to justify any military action with grand reference to freedom and democracy in some form, and the Balkan Wars were no exception to that rule.

In addition, it's worth remembering that the Clinton administration gave only limited support to the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), a bizarre coalition of unreconstructed Stalinists, clan groups, gangsters and Islamic extremists.  Many of his Republican Party critics demanding that instead of American intervention, with send arms and money to the KLA instead.  Since Al Qaeda was involved in training at least some of the KLA, it's certainly reasonable to conclude that NATO's refusal to endorse the KLA as the main opposition group while also protecting the Muslim Kosovars from the Christian Serbs meant denying the jihadists at least some influence in that part of the world.

Having said all that, Kaplan's point about democracy being a touch-and-go matter in the Balkans even today is well taken.  Even under relatively favorable conditions like those in Bosnia and Kosovo (relative compared to Iraq), installing an honest, functioning democracy has been no easy task.  And, as I noted in a post last May, I consider it important for US policy-makers to do some serious critical thinking about the particular experience of the Kosovo War.  It's value as a model for the future is limited.

By building on his revisionist strawman of liberal humanitarianism being the reason for the Balkan interventions, Kaplan makes this argument, which despite the misguided way he arrived there is a worthwhile point:

By invading Iraq, Republican neoconservatives - the most fervent of Wilsonians - simply took that liberal idealist argument of the 1990's to its logical conclusion. Indeed, given that Saddam Hussein was ultimately responsible for the violent deaths of several times more people than the Yugoslav dictator Slobodan Milosevic, how could any liberal in favor of intervention in the Balkans not also favor it in the case of Iraq? And because the human rights abuses in Iraq showed no sign of abatement, much like those in the Balkans, our intervention was justified in order to stop an ongoing rape-and-killing machine.

Though the historical specifics of his "logical conclusion" argument are bogus, he does point out the risk that any policy of intervention of "humanitarian" grounds runs if it's not governed by agree principles of international law.  In the hands of the Dick Cheneys and Donald Rumsfelds of the world, such claims easily become the justification for wars as unnecessary as that against Iraq.

Kaplan's viewpoint argued in this piece represents a healthy skepticism about such propaganda claims.  It's too bad he wasn't talking like this before the Iraq War.  But his approach also easily turns into a cynical acceptance of dictatorial governments as allies for the US, a policy which also is not without its limits.  For instance, he manages to conclude somehow: "In Afghanistan following 9/11, we did what we had to do, and otherwise accepted the place as it was. The result has been change for the better."  He even seems to buy the Republican happy-talk about how Afghanistan has become a democracy.

Actually, in a more strictly pragmatic view, the right course for the US would have been to put in American Special Forces as quickly as possible in Afghanistan and target known strongholds of Al Qaeda, and kill or capture as many of them as possible.  Given the situation, there was ample justification - and arguably a unique opportunity - to engage in the kind of meaningful "nation-building" effort that could prevent Afghanistan from becoming the kind of failed state that allowed the Taliban-Al Qaeda alliance to establish itself there as it did in the 1990s.

But if the US had decided from the start to ignore nation-building there - and it's clear now that was the Bush administration's approach - then the approach of backing the Northern Alliance to overthrow the Taliban and re-establish warlord rule and dependence on opium cultivation throughout the country was most definitely not "what we had to do."

So, approach Kaplan's article with caution.  After all, he drank the Kool-Aid and cheered for the Iraq War.  But I am glad glimmers of reality are appearing to him now.