"Washington's War" by Michael Rose [2]

Thanks to Owen, who reminded me in a comment to part 1 about this review of Rose's account of his tenure in Bosnia, "Fighting for Peace: Bosnia in 1994". This incisive and rather devastating review is by Noel Malcolm, author of the excellent Bosnia: A Short History among other excellent work. It is well worth reading, especially since that book was obviously much more directly concerned with Bosnia.

"Washington's War", on the other hand, only touches on Rose's experiences in Bosnia. However, it is clear that his own agenda--which seems to have been highly influenced by his time as head of UNPROFOR--is to undermine the case for humanitarian intervention by the West. Indeed, Rose seems to share the same contradictory views of many critics of Western intervention on behalf of Bosnia; namely, simultaneously decrying any claims to the universality of Western values and their application it the so-called "Muslim World", even while displaying a sometimes implicit, sometimes quite more explicit, contempt for this presumed monolithic "Muslim World."

So, if you have not already read Malcolm's devastating synopsis of Rose's ignorant, skewed views on Bosnia, please do before reading my review of his latest book. As Malcolm shows, it is no secret that Rose failed the grasp the issues in Bosnia and that failure contributed to his poor performance as UN Commander. I have argued in the past that one reason I think the Bosnian War remains relevant to Westerners even 15 years later is because both government and military elites and the general public learned a lot of poorly-informed "lessons" from NATO's first post-Cold War intervention, and these faulty lessons continue to skew foreign policy debates and decisions to this day. In places like Iraq, for example--a war which Rose argued called for the impeachment of Prime Minister Blair. This book is an example of using poor historical analysis and a selective, imprecise, and sometimes just plain incorrect use of facts, in order to formulate a polemic. This, unfortunately, seems to be part of the legacy of the Western debate about Bosnia.

I will not waste everyone's time with a review of this entire book; however, I will devote two more posts, one towards considering Rose's own statements about NATOs' role in the former Yugoslavia, and one considering his claims about the parallels between the American War of Independence and the current occupation of Iraq.

"Washington's War" by General Michael Rose [1]

I don't know if I'm going to review all of Washington's War: The American War of Independence to the Iraqi Insurgency or not, since the central premise of this book--that there are strong parallels between Britain in the American Revolution and the USA in the current occupation of Iraq--has no direct relation to the subject of this blog.

However, the author of this book is none other than General Sir Michael Rose, commander of United Nations forces in Bosnia from January 1994 to January 1995. This is more than an interesting coincidence--General Rose argues that his experiences in Bosnia provide him the first-hand knowledge necessary to understand the dynamic at play here. In fact, this book is in some ways an attack on the ideals of humanitarian intervention; as we shall see, when the text does address the Bosnian war specifically, it is also a work of implicit Bosnian revisionism.

I will begin to consider Rose's own text in the next post; for now, let us begin with the Foreward, by Professor Sir Michael Howard:

Foreward

This short Foreward is not nearly as clever as Professor Howard would like to believe it is; fully half is taken up with a strained description of the British military experience in the rebellious American colonies, written in a style meant to evoke the current American (and British, it must be noted) experience in post-invasion Iraq. The clumsiness of this piece of writing reveals the flaws in Rose's analysis before Rose himself has taken the stage--one can only see parallels between the British military in American, and the US coalition forces in Iraq if one ignores virtually all context, and shies away from specificity as well. By the time Howard "reveals" that is the American War of Independence, not the current Iraq war, which he is describing, only the dullest of readers will be surprised. For example, one must be completely ignorant of the fact that while the eastern coast of the USA is 3000 miles from London, it is considerably further than that from Washington, DC, to Baghdad.

However, Howard's "aha!" moment does provide a revelation of sorts--his throwaway reference to "the war that the United States has been waging in Iraq, with the British as her unhappy allies" suggests a polemic underneath the guise of historical study.

After giving credence to Rose's analysis of political incompetence in Iraq, Howard does express reservations about his belief that the US should give up and pull out of Iraq; his concern that Rose's belief that "both parties" (it will be interested to see which "party" in Iraq they are referring to) could quickly come to terms and develop a healthy relationship like the US and Britain did, or the US and Vietnam ultimately have. At least Howard recognizes the differences between the Iraqi insurgency and the revolutionary leaderships in both colonial America and--it has to be said--the Vietnamese Government.

However, Howard closes with an approving quote from the Duke of Wellington, to the effect that the hardest thing for a military commander to do is to retreat. His suggestion that this would the noblest and wisest course of action in a fragile state like Iraq, where the "party" we presumably would need to deal with is an insurgency which hardly speaks for a unified national movement, indicates that Howard and Rose are placing the cart in front of the horse. General Rose has an agenda to push, and this book will be an exercise in fitting the facts to fit the theory.

New CNN Special on People who Spoke Out Against Genocide

Try to make time to watch this Christiane Amanpour CNN special:

Scream Bloody Murder

From the CNN website:

# Story Highlights
# December marks the 60th anniversary of the U.N.'s Genocide Convention
# A few strong voices have since tried to focus the world's attention on genocide
# Each time they were shunned, ignored or told it was someone else's problem
# CNN's Christiane Amanpour traveled to the world's killing fields to understand why

I am very glad to see a major US news outlet tackling this issue head on.

Washington Post Editorial on Partition

Richard Cohen Argues That Partition is Inevitable

If proof were needed that the story of Bosnia' war is still being fought over, here it is--an Op-Ed from the Sept. 25, 2007 Washington Post arguing for the partition of Iraq into Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish states. And note that Cohen uses the Republika Srpska as one example of partition.

He claims that Bosnia and places like it break apart because different ethnic groups "cannot get along." This is the sort of simple-minded, myopic, and ahistorical pseudo-analysis which was used to justify inaction and disengagement during the war. It would be nice of Cohen could acknowledge the absence of centralized control and the degredation of civic culture in Iraq. It would also be helpful--and honest--if he were to acknowledge that while both Yugoslavia and Iraq were modern nation-states, the complex multicultural societies they contained were much, much older, and had lived with varying degrees of intermixture for centuries.

Opponants of intervention often accused pro-interventionists of being naive, supporting an idealized multi-cultural Bosnia where everybody held hands and got along swimmingly. "Realists" like Cohen, however, live in a world where every breakdown in civil order can be ascribed to the same, one-size-fits-all root cause of "ancient ethnic hatred."

"A Problem From Hell" by Samantha Powers [1]

Note: Back from vacation, and I've ordered another copy of "Death of a Nation" through my Interlibrary Loan service. Still waiting for it to arrive; hopefully one will show up in the next two or three days. In the meantime, and in the interests of getting back to work, I'd like to consider a few aspects of a book I've been reading: "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide" by Samantha Powers.

---------------------------

Samantha Powers was a correspondent who covered the war in Bosnia and the violent dismemberment of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, prior to becoming executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Her experiences in Bosnia, and the things she learned, inspired her to examine the underlying factors that prevented the United States from assuming a leadership position in confronting an obvious affront to Western values as well as the peace and stability in post-Cost War Europe which a neutral observer would assume would be in America's interest. That inquiry led to this book.

Powers' book is a lengthy and well-researched examination of (as she explains in the Preface):

"America's responses to previous cases of mass slaughter."

Her research was intensive and thorough, but this was mostly necessary in order to flesh out the story and strengthen her case, because:

"It did not take long to discover that the American response to the Bosnian genocide was in fact the most robust of the century. The United States had never in its history intervened to stop genocide and had in fact rarely even made a point of condemning it as it occurred."

The resulting book is an examination of specific American responses to the genocides in Armenia, Nazi-occupied Europe, Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Kosovo. She argues that there are underlying similarities between the official US responses to these atrocities, which were varied across time and place, as well as on the ethnic, relgious, and cultural identity of the victims. In the Preface, she summarizes the main points. The first sentence of each point is quoted below:

"Despite graphic media coverage, American policymakers, journalists, and citizens are extremely slow to muster the imagination needed to reckon with evil."

"It is in the realm of domestic politics that the battle to stop genocide is lost."

"The U.S. government not only abstains from sending its troops, but it takes very few steps along a continuum of intervention to deter genocide."

"U.S. officials spin themselves (as well as the American public) about the nature of the violence in question and the likely impact of an American intervention."

I will summarize the book in coming posts (even while continuing with the Parenti review/rebuttal) but for now--and to illustrate how directly this book connects with the themes of this blog--I will only quote the final paragraph of the Preface:

"Before I began exploring America's relationship with genocide, I used to refer to U.S. policy towards Bosnia as a "failure." I have changed my mind. It is daunting to acknowledge, but this country's consistent policy of nonintervention in the face of genocide offers sad testimony not to a broken American political system but to one that is ruthlessly effective. The system, as it stands now, is working. No U.S. president has ever made genocide prevention a priority, and no U.S. president has ever suffered politically for his indifference to its occurrence. It is thus no coincidence that genocide rages on."

Sobering words. The 500-plus pages of text which follow more than justify the harsh verdict she has rendered.