To: Kosovo Talk
From: Howard Zinn
Subject: Question 2 National boundaries should not be a protective shield around violations of human rights inside those boundaries. There is indeed a moral imperative to intervene. The real questions are: Who shall undertake it, and what kind of intervention will it be?
On the question of "who": For the United States to intervene is to taint the intervention, because it is one nation, and it is inherent for a nation to be preoccupied with its own interest (and not the interest of its own people, but the interest of whatever elite dominates national policy). It is not in the nature of nations to have as a primary preoccupation the human rights of people elsewhere; nations didn't develop that way, and their control by elites militates against humanitarian interests.
So far I am talking about nations as a genre, based on the history of nations in the modern world. When you get to the United States specifically, and examine the history of its interventions in the world, you end up with a very strong doubt that an intervention by the United States will advance the cause of human rights.
History doesn't definitively tell you what is true in a new situation. There is always the possibility that the new situation will differ radically from all previous ones. But history can suggest a probable truth, if not a definitive one. And it can lead you to look skeptically at the claims of political leaders and the information given in the media. Given the disastrous intervention of the United States everywhere since World War II (Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, Chile, Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Grenada, Panama, the Congo, Somalia, Iraq) and before World War II in the Caribbean and the Pacific (I'm leaving World War II itself as a possible exception, since it's too complex a problem of intervention to discuss right now), we would be right to be skeptical of any military intervention by the United States, no matter how strongly our leaders claim it is on behalf of human rights. Therefore, if we grant that someone should intervene to stop violations of human rights, it should not be any one nation, and certainly not the United States. An international body like the U.N. is a more likely candidate, although even that, given the control of the U.N. by the great powers, would have to be examined very carefully.
On the question of what kind of intervention: military interventions claiming to protect human rights are inherently immoral, because the consequence of military intervention is almost always to destroy more human rights than are saved. I don't want to be absolutist; there is theoretically the possibility that a small military intervention might serve to prevent an enormous human disaster -- this might have been the case in Rwanda, and it might have been the case in Haiti. But we have enough history of military interventions to suggest a presumption against them. Indeed, the bombing of Serbia almost immediately corroborates what I have said. Presumably undertaken to save the Albanian minority in Kosovo, it made their situation ten times worse; and by destroying the internal opposition to Milosevic, made a long-term solution to the human-rights problems in both Kosovo and Yugoslavia far more difficult. So we are left with the idea that we must do something if human rights are being violated, but we must not do it with bombs.
That leaves us with a very difficult task: how to use our ingenuity to intervene, without making things worse for human beings. The answer must be something in between inaction and military action, but exactly what that is, I'm not sure. But one kind of intervention is diplomatic: to come to a compromise agreement that will stop the worst things that are happening. That requires patience, compromise, and a surrender of macho notions of "We must prevail. We must win. Milosevic must not win. We must show our strength." In any case, as a first step, follow the rule given to medical students: "First, do no harm."
