Humanitarian Hawks
Commentary: What wars can liberals support? The kind that conservatives hate.
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You howled when Ronald Reagan invaded Grenada. You cursed when George Bush raided Panama. You winced when American jets bombed Baghdad. But this year, when progressive governments stood up to ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, you felt torn. You heard the war's humanitarian rationale but hated to react like a trigger-happy Republican. If only you could subscribe to a case for military intervention defined by the values of the left, not the right.
Well, you're in luck. Disgusted by the Kosovo mission, conservative thinkers have been articulating and attacking what they call "liberal interventionism." Liberals, they allege, are guilty of preferring to fight for humanitarian reasons rather than for oil; of seeking international consensus and legal justification for intervention rather than taking the lead; of deploying American military personnel and expending resources to protect and rebuild countries shattered by war; and of using force not to destroy outlaw regimes, but to drive them to the bargaining table. This is an indictment to which the left should proudly plead guilty. But let's hear the prosecution's case, count by count.
1. Altruism "It is precisely the absence of (sordid) self-interest that assures liberals of the [Kosovo] operation's virtue," wrote conservative foreign policy theorist Fareed Zakaria. "When we did have vital interests at stake -- in the Gulf War -- most liberals were staunchly opposed." Republican hawks define vital interests as oil, economic gain, and political and military power. They disparage liberal interventionist motives such as "altruism," "decency," and "high-minded morality." Some even argue that altruism is immoral. "It's a bit more difficult to justify asking for sacrifice," wrote columnist Mona Charen, "when the United States...is merely chasing an impossible dream of world harmony."
In other words: Liberals are selfless.
2. Multilateralism "Liberalism," in the words of conservative essayist Charles Krauthammer, "sincerely believes that multilateral action -- and, in particular, action blessed by the U.N. -- [is]... more justifiable than the United States unilaterally asserting its own national interest." Conservatism, on the other hand, regards multilateral institutions the way it does domestic government agencies -- as incompetent or oppressive. Thus George Will called NATO's "war by committee" in Kosovo a collectivist fiasco, since target selection was "controlled by [its] most reluctant members." Pat Buchanan accused liberals of using NATO to build a "new world order," and Robert Novak called NATO a vehicle for "liberals putting out their proposals to control the world."
In other words: Liberals believe in a democracy of nations.
3. Global responsibility Far from wanting to see America as the world's policeman, conservatives can't stand the job. Like comfortable suburbanites in gated communities, they'd rather build a missile defense system to keep our neighborhood safe while people kill each other on the wrong side of the global tracks. Essayists on the right called intervention in Kosovo a "needless danger" for the United States, warned that "a policeman's lot is not a happy one," and scorned the "liberal hubris" that inspired Clinton to try to pacify an area of the world that has been fighting for centuries. "Why don't we leave the dirty work to the Europeans?" asked conservative foreign affairs analyst Amos Perlmutter. "Let them send the ground troops to protect their neighborhood." These arguments are sure to resurface if and when ethnic slaughter resumes in central Africa.
In other words: Liberals are their brothers' keepers.
4. Nation-building The only thing worse than police work, in the eyes of conservatives, is social work. They insist that American soldiers be deployed to fight wars to protect American interests, not to enforce peace agreements or to provide the security and order necessary to reconstruct war-ravaged nations. They detest peacemaking, hand-holding, border guarding, and what Henry Kissinger calls "open-ended American commitments." While Clinton "sends troops around the world, trying nation-building in Somalia, democratization in Haiti, reintegration in Bosnia, and now self-determination in Kosovo," Zakaria argues, "conservatives who believe that the state can do nothing right at home" should reject the liberal idea "that good intentions and a burst of state power can transform the world."
In other words: Liberals build bridges.
5. Conditional sovereignty Republicans regard foreign despots, like American corporations, as masters of their domains. They accuse Clinton of violating national sovereignty by intervening for humanitarian reasons in Yugoslavia, Somalia, and Haiti. In Kosovo, said Novak, "We are attacking a province of a sovereign country in something that's...none of our business." Columnist David Limbaugh (Rush's brother) accused Clinton and his "fellow peace-protesting NATO leaders" of "intermeddling in the internal affairs of other sovereign nations," which raises the alarming prospect of similar efforts on behalf of the Kurds in Turkey and the Palestinians in the West Bank. The latter situation particularly troubles conservatives, as Europe and the United States ratchet up pressure on Israel to relinquish Palestinian occupied territory.
In other words: Liberals believe in safeguarding human rights.
6. Pluralism Clinton constantly compares ethnic conflict abroad to American racism. Unveiling the Hate Crimes Prevention Act in April, he likened racist and antigay violence here to Serbian ethnic cleansing, Rwandan genocide, bitterness in the Middle East, and the oppression of women in Afghanistan. Conservatives, always skeptical of racial and sexual bias claims, and often contemptuous of pleas for tolerance, discount these concerns abroad just as they do at home. They also scorn comparisons between Adolf Hitler and Slobodan Milosevic, ignoring the similarity between the two dictators (ethnic destruction) and focusing on the difference (military strength). "The reason for the killing in Kosovo is not mindless ethnic hatred but quite rational power politics," said Krauthammer, and the Hitler analogy is ridiculous because "Serbia has no ambition to rule a continent."
In other words: Liberals will fight violence based on intolerance.
7. Universalism While battling the Serbian regime, Clinton cautioned Americans not to treat Serb civilians as enemies. "We must not let his ethnic cleansing provoke us to ethnic bias," Clinton said of Milosevic. Republican hawks consider this love-thy-enemy credo spiritually appealing but militarily absurd. "If we want to make [the Serbs] obey, we're going to have to make them bleed," conservative theorist David Frum, an opponent of the war, wrote early in the conflict. Conservatives also faulted Clinton for refusing to fight ethnic fire with ethnic fire by arming the Serbs' enemies, the Kosovo Liberation Army.
In other words: Liberals seek rehabilitation, not retribution.
8. Legalism Right-wing hawks ridicule the liberal instinct to justify and conduct wars on the basis of laws and treaties. Conservatives argue that treaties such as those against nuclear testing and chemical weapons are, like domestic government regulations, too burdensome for law-abiders and too easily skirted by cheaters. Like the conservative case against gun control, this critique boils down to cynicism about people who are different from us and umbrage at the notion that good folks like us should have to be scrutinized. The faith that liberals place in international law "is hopelessly utopian," wrote Krauthammer. "Britain, North Korea, and Burundi have no shared norms about how nations ought to behave."
In other words: Liberals believe everyone can and should play by the same rules.
9. Diplomacy "Liberals tend to prefer soggy over crunchy policies," argues conservative essayist Michael Barone. Soggy policies, he explains, are those that leave options wide open -- in the case of war, the option of suspending hostilities and resolving the conflict through negotiations rather than demanding military victory. In this respect, says Barone, Kosovo has been a liberal's war because, instead of trying to destroy Yugoslavia on the battlefield, Bill Clinton has used "military action as a bargaining tool" to persuade the targeted regime to "go to the negotiating table." Indeed, Republican hawks dismissed Clinton's early diplomatic efforts in Kosovo as "debasing pilgrimages" and "appeasement" efforts by "conflict-resolution" therapists. Clinton took the same rhetorical beating last November, when he called off a military strike against Iraq after Saddam Hussein offered to let U.N. weapons inspectors resume their work. National Security Adviser Sandy Berger defended that decision by observing, "We have to be able to take yes for an answer."
In other words: Liberals are willing to give peace a chance.
10. Casualty avoidance Conservatives mock Clinton for bombing "empty buildings" and "inanimate objects" in Iraq and Yugoslavia. "Yugoslavia is a liberal war because our supreme imperative is to avoid casualties -- on either side," Frum charged. National Review writer Ramesh Ponnuru blamed Clinton's determination "to inflict as few casualties as possible" on "hang-ups that liberals acquired from McGovern." Krauthammer even derided the Dutch government for refusing to let a Dutch pilot "make the traditional mark on his fighter to commemorate his Ôkill'" after he had shot down a Yugoslav warplane. This, Krauthammer concluded, "is war as waged by humanitarians, idealists, and the flotsam of the counterculture."
In other words: Liberals hate killing.
How do humanitarians and idealists plead to these charges? Guilty, says longtime antiwar activist Robert Borosage, a co-director of the Campaign for America's Future. America should "build multilateral ways of acting and use its power proportionately, so that it's seen not as a bully but as part of a legitimate global order in which everyone has a stake," says Borosage. "Nation-building is a part of that. Multilateralism is also. The sensible part of the intervention [in Kosovo] is the attempt to build a legal and moral framework that says when you have grotesque crimes against humanity, sovereignty will not be a shield. If you're Pinochet, it won't be a shield from legal recourse. If you're Milosevic, it won't be a shield from an attempt to bring your crimes to an end.... And that is in the national interest."
