"Fools' Crusade" Chapter Two [29]

"THE UNITED STATES USED THE INEVITABLE FAILURE OF THE AMBIGUOUS "UN SAFE AREA" CONCEPT TO DISCREDIT THE UNITED NATIONS AS A PEACEKEEPING FORCE, THUS PROMOTING NATO TO THAT ROLE"

This section consists of only one (rather lengthy) paragraph. The argument is more of her typical cart-before-the-horse logic. The entire premise is ridiculous--the UN did a fine job of discrediting itself long before Srebrenica.

While there isn't much substance in this section--how could there be, given the non-starter of a premise above--a couple of points need to be addressed.

"For the advocates of armed "humanitarian intervention," the fall of Srebrenica was used as proof of the failure of the United Nations. More than that, it was used to discredit the whole tradition of neutral diplomacy in favor of the moral absolutist approach of "identifying and destroying the enemy." "

Some advocates of humanitarian interventionism most certainly did point to Srebrenica as proof of UN weakness; what of it? The bold statement at the beginning of this section claimed that The United States is the culprit; now that we are reading the fine print, we find that we're actually talking about "some advocates of "humanitarian intervention" "? For all her self-professed sophisticated grasp of complex issues, Ms. Johnstone often manages to get herself mighty worked up over what "some" people say and believe.

Also--this is becoming quite the motif in her book--who is she quoting when she puts "identifying and destroying the enemy" in quotation marks? She doesn't say. I suspect it comes from her own paranoid imagination.

Finally, she quotes Kofi Annan ("Washington's choice as Secretary General" she notes) on Srebrenica; his condemnation of the:

"institutional ideology of impartiality even when confronted with atempted genocide"

sounds pretty refreshing to me, after the craven blathering of Boutros-Gali. But leave it to Johnstone to find something far more sinister in his comments (from 1999).

"The United Nations thereby renounced the role of impartial diplomacy and endorsed U.S. military might as the best means to deal with civil conflicts."

For a woman who can write pages detailing the uncertain provenance of rape victim eyewitness testimonies, this is pretty pithy description of what would surely be a monumental shift in the geopolitical order, were there a shred of truth in it. Not only does she not have a bit of evidence to back up this incredibly crude bit of hyperbole, she doesn't even get her own comparison correct: Annan, in the quote above, is not addressing "civil conflicts"--he specifies attempted genocide. We already know that she doesn't believe a genocide actually happened in Bosnia; but Annan's comments make clear (not only in the quote above) that he believed there was a genocide underway in Bosnia; if she had even a shred of integrity and honesty she would have felt compelled to address this. Needless to say, she does not.