FPRI Wire

The Question of Humanitarian Intervention

Volume 9, Number 2
February 2001

By the Hon. Alexander M. Haig, Jr.

The Foreign Policy Research Institute is pleased to offer below the text of the keynote address at our conference on The Question of Humanitarian Intervention, held in Philadelphia on February 12-13, 2001. Former Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig, Jr., is a trustee of FPRI and Co-Chairman of FPRI’s Project on Humanitarian Intervention. A report on the conference will be issued in the near future; the complete set of conference papers will also be posted on the Institute’s website (www.fpri.org) shortly.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

It is my pleasure to welcome you here to the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s conference on the question of humanitarian intervention. Let me take this opportunity to thank you for turning out and also to thank all of those involved in putting the conference together.

As you know, FPRI has long distinguished itself through its pioneering work in bringing the best of scholarship to bear on current policy problems. Today’s conference is no exception. We have brought together a great cast of analysts, many of whom have experience not only in thinking about humanitarian interventions but in actually carrying out such missions. And what a job that is.

The most serious decision a President can make is to commit American troops to possible combat. Over the past eight years, Bill Clinton sent American forces into harm’s way, more than any President before him, all on behalf of what has come to be labelled humanitarian intervention. The roll-call of the most significant is familiar: Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo. Today, even as we meet, the United States and our NATO allies have committed some 100,000 troops, including reserves, to Bosnia and Kosovo. And NATO went to war over Kosovo for the very first time in the history of the Alliance.

As the new Bush Administration assesses the appropriateness of these interventions, the President and his team should avoid the old argument over burden-sharing. Washington should know, and every American should know, that some 80% of the forces in the Balkans are European. Our allies also bear 87% of the cost. So it is truly a profound commitment by the Western Alliance, not only by the United States. And this reminds us that NATO only works when the principle of shared risks and shared burdens is observed.

What does humanitarian intervention mean? When I was Secretary of State it meant that someone was coming to help me in my struggle with the White House staff. In those difficult times, let me assure you that such help was very, very rare!

Happily, I can say that the new Administration appears to have the kind of Cabinet that would not tolerate such staff meddling. These individuals are the President’s own choices and so I am optimistic.

Today, humanitarian intervention has come to mean the use of military force to rescue people at risk from political causes, such as the actions of dictators, even if the American national interest does not appear to be meaningfully at stake. It thus appears to fall in that sensitive area where our humane values and our sense of geopolitics— what we believe to be right and what we judge to be prudent — rub uneasily together. And, as such, it often leaves us divided about the course of action and wary of the precedents that may be set.

Let me make the following observations:

Let me begin with the very basic issue of whether humanitarian intervention fits into American foreign policy.

Our debate today tends toward two extremes. One school puts American values at the top and argues that we should use military force in defense of human rights around the world. Some would even argue that we should go further, and use such occasions to impose our democratic values on societies that have no historic experience with democracy. The record suggests that this cannot be achieved, Haiti being a case in point, as we shall see in a moment.

Nonetheless, we should recognize that both types of intervention are sustained by powerful currents of American idealism. They are the lineal descendents of Woodrow Wilson’s ringing declaration, and I quote: “All shall know that America puts human rights above all other rights, and that her flag is the flag not only of America but of humanity.” Some are even willing to subscribe to a variation of Wilson’s mystical belief that, as he put it, America was created “to show the way to the nations of the world how they shall walk in the paths of liberty.”

It is amusing, of course, for this old General to see so many of the doves from the Cold War era suddenly reborn as hawks in advocating the use of American military power without applying the test of whether it is in our national interest. Perhaps we should follow the great Cold War historian Robert Conquest who suggested that one must consider not only hawks and doves but also cuckoo birds and ostriches. Surely those who would use the bayonet to remake the world in America’s image qualify as the cuckoos. I would agree with George Kennan who wrote back in 1993 that, quote “to see ourselves as the center of political enlightenment and as teachers to a great part of the rest of the world… is unthought through, vainglorious, and undesirable.”

The American people are much too sensible to support for long either version of humanitarian intervention because they rightly suspect the crusading arrogance of it, the moral overreach of it, and the inevitable rebellion against it. It will multiply adversaries and sour our friends. John Quincy Adams put it best as long ago as July 4, 1821, when he said: “America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” He added that doing so would involve the U.S. “beyond the power of extrication...she might become the dictatress of the world. She would no longer be the ruler of her own spirit.”

The excesses of the Clinton era, in dialectical fashion, have called forth an opposite school, now gaining strength from the evident failure of perfectionist interventionists to produce perfection. These are the abstainers. They would have the United States stay aloof from humanitarian disasters in the name of the national interest. But their idea of the national interest is an imported one, drawn from the realpolitik of a vanished pre-1914 Europe. They ignore the fact that for Americans, the national interest is not simply a calculation of material interests but also a moral one. After all, we do stand for certain values: democracy, respect for individual rights, the settling of disputes through diplomacy rather than force, and the rule of law not the jungle. Who of us could stand idly by if we saw our neighbors, or even a stranger, assaulted by thugs? We resent such assaults upon our values and our innate decency as a nation demands action to prevent massacres. A policy of abstention is thus the policy of the ostrich. The American people will simply not support for long a policy so at odds with our fundamental values.

I know, of course, that I have set up a pair of straw men, or at least, a pair of straw birds. But we all know that each of us bears a little sympathy for these positions. Yes, we would like to right the wrongs of this world, especially on the cheap. Yes, we also resent the idea that we should straighten out the messes made by others. That is why the American national interest, properly conceived, encompasses not only ideals but also reality, not only the world as we would like it to be but the world as it is. On balance, humanitarian intervention can be just but it must be leavened by prudence. We should seek to prevent massacres and genocide through diplomacy, and other actions, including the use of the bayonet if necessary. But this should never be a crusade and should never be undertaken in the absence of careful calculations that include costs and benefits.

In 1981, concerned about this very debate following my experiences in NATO during President Carter’s term, I observed that a foreign policy that pursued ideals while ignoring power would offend America’s sense of reality and probably would fail. Equally, a foreign policy that pursued power while ignoring ideals would offend America’s sense of right and in the long run would also fail. Only a balance between the two would merit consistent public support. Every generation of American statesman has to decide the balance to be struck. Ours is no exception.

With this in mind, let me turn now to my second observation, about the practice of humanitarian intervention as we have conducted it over the past decade. Have we struck that balance between ideals and reality to which I just referred? My answer is no. Our interventions have been neither just nor practical. A brief review of the facts will make the case.

In Somalia, the Bush Administration intervened in late December 1992 with 30,000 troops to prevent a widening of a famine well underway. That mission was expanded in the Spring of 1993 by the Clinton Administration to rebuild the country as a nation under a mandate from the UN Security Council, against a backdrop of media clamor for a continued U.S. military presence. The mission ended, however, after a disastrous ambush cost eighteen American lives and the U.S. withdrew in failure. A notable part of this adventure was the role played by CNN. There can be no doubt that the television image of starving Somalis played a large part in getting us in. There can also be no doubt that the image of a Somali mob abusing the corpse of an American soldier played a large part in getting us out.

In true dialectical fashion, one mistake begat another. We recoiled from Somalia and therefore hesitated about Rwanda. There was no CNN effect to get us in. And a genocide took place while UN troops watched.

In Haiti the U.S. intervened with some 20,000 troops and two aircraft carrier groups to restore democracy in the unique form of President Aristide. The invasion had been produced by a wave of desperate refugees seeking asylum, many dying from either exposure or unseaworthy boats before they could reach Florida. The results of this effort were disheartening, to say the least. Just this last week, after six years of effort and several billions in aid, the UN and the U.S. gave up. Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote to the Security Council that “a combination of rampant crime, violent street protests, and incidents of violence targeted at the international community could severely limit the ability of the mission to fulfill its mandate.” It has now been shut down. All international observers agree that the May 2000 elections giving Aristide’s party a huge majority and indeed, Aristide’s own election in November were blatant frauds.

The result of all this effort has been not to rescue the country but rather to enthrone a leader who is certainly no democrat. I must note that Haiti is by now a familiar object of American humanitarian intervention. We stayed 19 years the first time from 1915 to 1934, and six years the second time. The results truly speak for themselves in this prolonged experiment to impose democracy through the bayonet. Enough said.

Finally, we have the cases of Bosnia and Kosovo. In 1990-91 the Bush Administration thought Bosnia was European business, not ours, and so did the Europeans. Both seemed more amenable to propping up Gorbachev’s Soviet Union, already a political corpse, rather than dealing with the real trouble brewing in Yugoslavia. Without U.S. leadership, clashing European interests produced a predictable paralysis. Massacre followed upon massacre which we condemned, but did not intervene to prevent. Finally in the summer of 1995, a combination of international and domestic pressures, combined with the scenes of the awful Srbrenica slaughter, forced President Clinton to act.

A similar episode followed in Kosovo. Over a million Kosovars were set to flight by the Serbs before NATO went to war. This military action, despite all of the enthusiastic reviews of our air power, succeeded only when we threatened a ground invasion. It ended on a particularly sour note of strain within NATO’s command structure.

Many very dangerous precedents were set. NATO had attacked a sovereign state to rearrange the politics of one of its provinces even though the situation did not pose a threat to the Alliance itself. Clearly such actions alarmed other countries who feared that the promotion of our values would become an excuse to intervene in their internal affairs.

There was another ugly mishap within the NATO command itself. A British subordinate to General Clark, the Supreme Allied Commander, refused his order to intercept the Russians in their dash to the Pristina airport. Oddly enough, the Pentagon sided with the British subordinate. Clearly, these are not experiences the Alliance would wish to repeat.

The result is that today the U.S. and NATO are committed to keep troops in Bosnia and Kosovo until those countries become multiethnic democracies or the end of time, whichever occurs first. Old Balkan hands, including FPRI’s founder Robert Strausz- Hupe, who knows that area intimately, tell me that the end of time is a better bet.

This pattern of interventions illustrates the dangers of what I call “electronic populism.” By waiting until a humanitarian disaster has occurred, replete with gory coverage by the media, a President may find it easier to rally public support for military action. But by doing so, we put our whole foreign policy at the risk of events that are shaped primarily by others.

We lose twice in this approach. First, we forfeit strategic direction, whereby we shape events. Second, we also disarm our diplomacy. As Henry Kissinger has often observed, the early stages of a problem, when positions are still fluid and ambiguous, present the best opportunity for creative diplomacy. Once positions are hardened and the massacres committed, there is little left to do except to summon the troops.

So we end up making much more effort for much less result. Even worse, we expose the very people we hope to save to even greater risk. In both strategic and humanitarian terms, these have been military interventions to rescue an utterly failed foreign policy.

This brings me to my final observation. There is an alternative to humanitarian intervention as we have seen it.

The beginning of wisdom is, first, to restore the primacy of strategic planning in our foreign policy and in doing so, to put humanitarian intervention in its place— a lesser but honorable role. In recent years because of confusion about the real causes of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the inchoate analysis of the so-called “New World Order” has left us vulnerable to passing crises and deprived us of any sensible judgment about their importance to our overall goals.

Above all, we must discard the idea that we need the disaster before we can do anything effective. Ladies and gentlemen, there is no room in a sound American foreign policy for today’s electronic populism!

Once this is done we will be able to revive our diplomacy of prevention. I realize of course, that preventing a crisis sometimes requires an earlier threat to use force. But does anyone not believe that a united U.S.-European approach to the Bosnia crisis in 1991 or 1992 would have spared everyone great agony and saved thousands of lives? Second, if diplomacy fails and we contemplate intervention, we should recall that our military forces operate in support of national objectives that include above all the deterrence of major wars, which is really the most important humanitarian role we can play. We and our allies must keep this in mind as we contemplate minor interventions.

The Marines, in their very plain-spoken way— only an Army General could say that — described it accurately when they called their manual on the subject “The Small Wars Manual.” It was published in 1940 and if you can get beyond the fascinating chapters on the care and feeding of mules, you will find a fair description of what humanitarian missions are today. Mark that title. “Small wars,” not “big wars.” Small wars are compounded by ambiguity, different rules of engagement and many other snares and traps. It was Wellington who said that “a great country can have no such thing as a little war.” So in the interest of our larger role in deterrence we must be wary of frittering away our strength.

Third, if no other alternative is available, when we do intervene militarily we ought to do so with military prudence. These are not exercises that break new ground in military science. The key point is to determine whether and how the use of military force will make a difference for the better. The definition of that difference will automatically allow us to measure whether our objectives are being achieved once we hit the ground. That, in turn, will make it much easier to determine the point of exit.

I would like to stress this last issue. Forget about the fetish for doing checklists and artificial exit deadlines. The key is to set reasonable goals and then to measure our progress toward them. It cannot be something vague like building a nation or something superficial like just holding an election. These are troops trained to fight, kill, and overcome. They are not police and not social workers. And I do not accept the argument by some that peacekeeping actually sharpens combat skills. Just the opposite is true.

Fourth and finally, we ought to use the coalition principle as often as we can. Others share our values. Some are better placed to intervene and have a more acute understanding of the situation.

I want to add a caveat here. NATO itself, as an alliance should not necessarily be pressed into this task. Those few in NATO who have the capacity to project military power should act if it is in their interest to do so. The rest of the Alliance should be supportive. This was the formula I used successfully while Supreme Allied Commander of NATO to deal with so-called out of area crises. I am convinced that it remains both workable and far preferable to the cumbersome and restrictive procedures we saw in the Kosovo war.

The U.S. has an essential role to play in forming such coalitions. We need not — we should not— provide the lion’s share of forces. In fact, as I pointed out, we are not doing so today in the Balkans. But the essence of any coalition, shared burdens and shared risks, may require important U.S. participation. We should never forget that there is a price for leadership.

Let me conclude now by reviewing the main points. Humanitarian intervention has a minor but honorable role to play in American foreign policy. It must be gauged on the balance of values and interests, ideals and reality, what is right and what is prudent. The American people will not support humanitarian intervention as a formula to impose American values on the rest of the world but they will also not support a realpolitik that does nothing about genocide.

Thus far, we have failed to strike the proper balance. Humanitarian intervention as we have known it over the past decade has been neither just nor practical. “Electronic populism” stays our hand until disaster strikes, depriving our foreign policy of strategic sense, and our diplomats of their most effective opportunities, before positions congeal in blood.

There is a better way. First, restore strategic balance to our foreign policy and focus on prevention at the earliest stage when creative diplomacy can work best. Second, consider engagement in these “small wars” with an eye to the larger more important mission of deterrence— the prevention of big wars— so that we do not fritter away our strength. We should know beforehand that any new commitment will not undercut this greater objective. Third, if we must commit, then do so to make a decisive difference with attainable objectives and a way to measure them so that we can leave. Fourth, use the coalition principle that shares burdens and responsibilities in the use of military force. Above all, lead.

I want to close with this comment. Humanitarian intervention, like the rest of foreign policy, is ultimately a test of a nation’s character. Are we willing to defend the right, and fight for it, if need be? Americans have answered this call throughout their history. But there is another part to character and that is humility. Robert Strausz-Hupé wrote that “moral perfection, especially when it uses service to humanity as its vessel, puts me on my guard.” We ought to be on guard too, that the promise of America’s values does not become the excuse for an American crusade, one that repeats the folly of the European empires who imagined that a lasting civilization could be imposed by bayonets. Yes, let us do our duty when our forces must be used to rescue humanity from man-made disasters. But we should do so understanding that foreign policy, and military forces, are very imperfect instruments in a very imperfect world.

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