On wars, and when they're right

Howard Dean gave a speech on foreign affairs today, and the right-wing blogs are beginning to criticise him on supporting the Bosnian and Kosovan wars (which were illegal under international law, as they didn’t get UN approval), but not the war on Iraq.

If international law was well-established and functioned well, I’d agree with them. The fact that the International Criminal Court a) hasn’t reached a verdict on Slobodan Milosevic, and b) isn’t recognised by the US, is emblematic of how proper international law is still in its infancy.

I also think that the post-Yugoslavian wars and the second Gulf War are fundamentally different in nature, and that explains why actions that were legitimate in Bosnia and Kosovo have no validity in Iraq part 2.

Now, it’s true that the international community was slow to act on the civil wars that followed the break-up of Yugoslavia. This was partly because of national differences, in many cases dating back to World War I (France had historical ties with Serbia, Germany with Croatia - you may recall that World War I started because of a chain of interlocking alliances, triggered by the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand). Nonetheless, the Serb-Croatian war was met with revulsion in many parts of Europe, especially when the World Heritage site of Old Dubrovnik was brutally shelled. Although it was too late to prevent those brutalities, when the war engulfed Bosnia, public opinion demanded that Europe do something, to a great degree because people were ashamed that a war was happening on European soil. Remember that one of the European Union’s touted great achievements is that it prevented any further wars in Europe, and notably between France and Germany. Its predecessor, the European Community of Coal and Steel, was set up deliberately to make any war over economic issues such as who had the largest of the Alsace-Lorraine-Ruhr coal basin impossible.

The Bosnian and Kosovan wars had to be stopped, was the general consensus in Europe, so the question became: how? All major wars require the participation of the US, and that was achieved; the problem then became the opposition of Russia, because Russia and Serbia have very strong historical links as well (also dating back to WWI). Russia didn’t budge, so the US and the EU decided to forego UN approval, and conduct the war under the auspices of NATO, which was the second-best international organisation they could get.

A crucial thing about this part of European history is that, to the best of my knowledge, very few people who weren’t inherently anti-war said this was an unjust war. You didn’t have anybody saying this was a war about oil, for instance. I don’t remember anyone saying that this was fighting the wrong war. Despite the lack of a UN approval, it was clear that this war was happening to stop an existing war. The EU/US intervention in the former Yugoslavian wars was an explicit, and unfortunately tardy, response to an existing, new conflict.

The war in Afghanistan was less close to most Western audience’s hearts and minds. Nonetheless, September 11th had just happened, and we were pretty sure that the people who had commandeered it were in Afghanistan; plus, we already knew that the Taliban were a nasty bunch, for instance because they blew up those statues of Buddha only a few months earlier.

Now consider Gulf War II, the deliberate invasion of Iraq on the grounds of regime change. Saddam Hussein had not done anything particular to warrant this invasion - although he was guilty of gassing his own people, and invading neighbouring sovereign nations, all of these were in the past and, although worthy of condemnation and efforts to oust him, did not justify an immediate, urgent response. There was no proof that he was linked with the September 11th attacks, there was no proof that he was developing Weapons of Mass Destruction that could be used on his neighbours (reports of Saddam Hussein having chemical weapons only mention weapons that could be fired with a RPG launcher, i.e. close-range battlefield weapons). Hans Blix’s UN inspectors were frustrated by an unco-operative regime, but nonetheless announced that they had discovered and destroyed more dangerous weapons than the 1991 Gulf War I had.

I am glad that Saddam Hussein has been captured; it’s always good when a dictator is humiliated and brought to trial. I hope that it’s a fair, honest and healing trial; South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation committee is still the benchmark in this regard, and Rumania’s blurry show-trial execution of Ceaucescu the example we want to avoid. I hope Iraq does not develop into a quagmire that will keep US troops there for years on end.

I hope the Bush administration had a decent understanding of what they were getting themselves into, and had a reasonable exit strategy from the get-go. Unfortunately, everything I’ve seen suggests this is not the case.