Will the US and other Western countries bomb Syria for its government’s alleged chemicals weapons attack on civilians? It seems likely, despite the compelling case against any such intervention, as set out by Seamus Milne and many others. At the time of writing, it also appears likely that the US will not even seek the fig-leaf of UN Security Council authorization. Richard Haas, president of the US Council on Foreign Relations, has said that “The UN Security Council is not the sole or unique custodian about what is legal and what is legitimate, and, as many have pointed out, it was bypassed at the time of Kosovo.” Indeed, reference to Kosovo is widespread right now with supporters of Western military action arguing that not only was the 1999 Kosovo intervention legal (it clearly was not) but also that it generated positive outcomes. In 2006, I wrote an article, titled ‘bomb the bad guys and save the innocents’, for Village magazine which sought to explain precisely why NATO’s actions vis-à-vis Kosovo did not constitute a justification for Western countries bombing the rest of the world – that article seems worth reprinting now.
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What happened in Kosovo in 1999? This may seem like an obscure question, but it’s an important one, because Kosovo is often cited today to justify “humanitarian interventions” by the West, at a time when Iraq is giving Western military interventions an otherwise bad name. According to the official version of events, NATO attacked Serbia in 1999 to stop Serb forces “ethnically cleansing” Kosovar Albanians. And, so this version goes, it worked – genocide was prevented and a dictator (Milosevic) toppled. We (the West) may have gotten it wrong in Iraq, but we got it right back then in the Balkans and we can do it again elsewhere.
The official version has the status of holy writ – questioning it is tantamount to blasphemy. Noam Chomsky is described as one of the “contortionists of the left”, rejecting intervention even in “situations – such as the Kosovan crisis – which were plainly crying out for assistance”, according to Shane Hegarty of the Irish Times (14 January). RTÉ’s Mark Little, wholly in thrall to the official version, engaged in a Prime Time barracking of Chomsky over his opposition to the 1999 NATO bombardment.
But what really happened in 1999? If the real story is not quite as simple as the official version suggests, and it isn’t, then we should be suspicious when the precedent is invoked to justify Western military adventures today.
In the first place, there is a strong argument that the NATO attack need never have taken place. The Yugoslav government refused to sign the initial Rambouillet peace accord, in part because it contained an annex provision that granted NATO troops free access to all Yugoslav territory, a provision later dropped from the final post-war settlement terms. Other issues and suspicions also impeded the progress of the peace negotiations, including legitimate doubts about the extent to which the Milosevic regime would have accepted, or abided by, any deal. But the bizarre volte face regarding NATO access to Yugoslavia raises the suspicion that the provision was simply an excuse to provoke a conflict and thus assert a role for NATO in the post-Cold War world.
