The Lessons Of A War Of Values

In today’s world, “wars of values” are the only wars that many nations will ever be asked to fight. There is, for example, no conceivable military threat to the national interest of the Netherlands or Canada. If such nations are to have armed forces at all, their primary mission is bound to be humanitarian. Increasingly, the great world wars of this century–wars in which national survival was genuinely at stake–look like aberrations rather than the norm.

But humanitarian wars raise at least three troubling questions. First, whose human rights are worth waging a war to defend? The New York Times editorial page last week argued that such intervention “should be confined to cases where violence is extreme and threatens to engulf neighboring nations and where democratic nations have the means… to respond.” Extraordinarily, the Times then continued: “The combination will be rare outside Europe.” But if that is the conclusion, then the premises must be wrong. Human rights are human rights, whatever the color, ethnicity or religion of the human beings involved. Rwandans, Chechens and Timorese have no less right to be protected from oppressive governments than Kosovar Albanians. It is not worth going to war for any doctrine that implies the opposite.

Yet the universality of human rights raises a second question. If the rich world thinks it is right to intervene anywhere to protect the oppressed, how does it protect itself from the charge of imperialism? We have been here before: part of the justification for the French and British colonial wars of the last century was to bring European “light” to African and Asian “darkness.” To put it mildly, such generosity was not much welcomed by its supposed beneficiaries. How can we now avoid that trap? Here Kosovo provides a useful lesson. During the war the German and other governments insisted, at every turn, that anything that NATO did or might do needed the sanction of international law. In practice, that will usually mean that no humanitarian war should be waged without explicit backing from the United Nations.

Third: how should we wage a humanitarian war? One answer: not like Kosovo. We will never have a true audit of the atrocities, never know how many Kosovars would have been killed by Serbs if NATO had never started bombing. But it is plain that the slow, uncertain start of the air campaign extended the Serbs’ killing time. NATO’s lack of preparation can now be measured in dead children. The implication of this truth is genuinely unsettling. If an evil government is prepared to kill those it does not like, then it must be stopped from doing so early and quickly. (Cologne is a good place to relearn that old lesson; while appeasers in the rest of the world did nothing, the city cheered Hitler’s troops when they reoccupied the Rhineland in 1936.) Kosovar lives would have been saved if, in the first days of the war, NATO had bombed Serbia as hard as it later did, while massing troops in preparation for an all-out invasion. Humanitarian wars, it seems, must be waged by blitzkrieg.

Yet in the case of Kosovo, such a war might have killed thousands of Serbs. They would not have been butchered and raped, not mown down by their neighbors–but in the rubble and twisted girders of their bombed homes, they would have died, just the same. As the studies of Kosovo begin, it is worth remembering the oldest truth of all: whatever adjective you stick in front of it, war is terrible. Some wars are necessary; some wars are just. No war is good.

title: “The Lessons Of A War Of Values " ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-20” author: “Mark Bransford”

In today’s world, “wars of values” are the only wars that many nations will ever be asked to fight. There is, for example, no conceivable military threat to the national interest of the Netherlands or Canada. If such nations are to have armed forces at all, their primary mission is bound to be humanitarian. Increasingly, the great world wars of this century–wars in which national survival was genuinely at stake–look like aberrations rather than the norm.

But humanitarian wars raise at least three troubling questions. First, whose human rights are worth waging a war to defend? The New York Times editorial page last week argued that such intervention “should be confined to cases where violence is extreme and threatens to engulf neighboring nations and where democratic nations have the means… to respond.” Extraordinarily, the Times then continued: “The combination will be rare outside Europe.” But if that is the conclusion, then the premises must be wrong. Human rights are human rights, whatever the color, ethnicity or religion of the human beings involved. Rwandans, Chechens and Timorese have no less right to be protected from oppressive governments than Kosovar Albanians. It is not worth going to war for any doctrine that implies the opposite.

Yet the universality of human rights raises a second question. If the rich world thinks it is right to intervene anywhere to protect the oppressed, how does it protect itself from the charge of imperialism? We have been here before: part of the justification for the French and British colonial wars of the last century was to bring European “light” to African and Asian “darkness.” To put it mildly, such generosity was not much welcomed by its supposed beneficiaries. How can we now avoid that trap? Here Kosovo provides a useful lesson. During the war the German and other governments insisted, at every turn, that anything that NATO did or might do needed the sanction of international law. In practice, that will usually mean that no humanitarian war should be waged without explicit backing from the United Nations.

Third: how should we wage a humanitarian war? One answer: not like Kosovo. We will never have a true audit of the atrocities; never know how many Kosovars would have been killed by Serbs if NATO had never started bombing. But it is plain that the slow, uncertain start of the air campaign extended the Serbs’ killing time. NATO’s lack of preparation can now be measured in dead children. The implication of this truth is genuinely unsettling. If an evil government is prepared to kill those it does not like, then it must be stopped from doing so early and quickly. (Cologne is a good place to relearn that old lesson; while appeasers in the rest of the world did nothing, the city cheered Hitler’s troops when they reoccupied the Rhineland in 1936.) Kosovar lives would have been saved if, in the first days of the war, NATO had bombed Serbia as hard as it later did, while massing troops in preparation for an all-out invasion. Humanitarian wars, it seems, must be waged by blitzkrieg.

Yet in the case of Kosovo, such a war might have killed thousands of Serbs. They would not have been butchered and raped, not mown down by their neighbors–but in the rubble and twisted girders of their bombed homes, they would have died, just the same. As the studies of Kosovo begin, it is worth remembering the oldest truth of all: whatever adjective you stick in front of it, war is terrible. Some wars are necessary; some wars are just. No war is good.