The One Where I Rant Incoherently
It's now being argued that the US should turn over a fractured Iraq to the unstable Governing Council, which is to operate under UN supervision. I've been seeing comparisons to the former Yugoslavia.
As in Srebrenica? In the Bosnian war's most notorious incident, more than 7,000 civilians who had taken refuge in a UN "safe haven" were rounded up, as UN peacekeepers stood by, and herded onto buses. They were then taken to a nearby farm and summarily executed. The "safe havens" turned out to be exactly the places for people to go, if they wanted their husbands or sons to be killed.
In this case, those charged with peacekeeping and the protection of civilians transcended appeasement and approached conspiracy to commit mass murder. The attitude of those responsible, wavering between cynicism and naivete, has been documented here and here.
The Serbs need two things: international recognition, and a softening of the blockade on the Drina. I hope that these conditions will be met quickly, given the urgent situation. I think the Serbs are aware of how favorable the situation is to them - I don't think that they want to go to an extreme crisis. On the contrary. they want to modify their behavior, be good interlocutors. It is for this that we must speak to them - not negotiate, but to show them how important it is to have a normal attitude. --General Bertrand Janvier, June 9, 1995, arguing against measures to protect the enclave.
Another individual with unclean hands is French President Jacques Chirac, currently leading the push for a quick handover. Transcripts submitted to the UN war crimes tribunal in the Hague earlier this year suggest that he negotiated a secret deal (with Milosevic) to help Ratko Mladic, the commander responsible for the Srebrenica massacre, avoid extradition and trial.
Comparisons to Yugoslavia are apropos, but it's important to specify at which point on the timeline. The situation in Iraq does not simply resemble Yugoslavia post-Tito. It is more analogous to Yugoslavia post-Tito and after the US intervened militarily. If you want a situation resembling the Balkan wars at their worst, then the US should withdraw quickly. Then we will surely see the total collapse into factional warfare, along with the resulting mass atrocities.
What's especially disturbing about the arguments for disengagement is that they share the worst feature of the necon arguments for unilateral US intervention: they view Iraq primarily as a testing ground for ideology. The Bush adminstration appears to have taken us to war in order to demonstrate its neo-imperialist "national security strategy", regardless of whether invading Iraq was necessary or justified. Calls for a pullout betray a similar blindered fanaticism. The resulting violence and anarchy would be blamed on the United States, since we started the war. The Bush administration and its policies would be humiliated and rebuked. The neocons would be discredited. The price for this ideological victory would be a high body count; at worst, a situation similar to Cambodia or Somalia. "No blood for oil," people on the antiwar left chant, but blood for dogma is OK.
A continued US presence in Iraq is much less likely to result in catastrophe than the alternatives, if only for one simple, pragmatic reason: the United States and the Bush administration bear a modicum of accountability for what happens. War fails, Bush goes back to Texas in disgrace. If it gets really bad, someone could end up in jail. The UN, on the other hand, has an inherent problem with accountability. It's not really answerable to anything other than itself. As head of peacekeeping operations, Kofi Annan presided over two of the most shameful episodes in the history of peacekeeping, yet he still became Secretary General.
Because UN troops are not perceived as "national" , it is perenially difficult to persuade citizens of member countries to place the lives of peacekeepers in danger. This is understandable. We have a great resistance to risking the lives of American soldiers; people in Turkey, the Netherlands or anywhere else are not more altruistic than we are. The result is that the UN is almost by nature limited in its ability to halt the slide from crisis into atrocity. That was one of the lessons of Srebrenica.
11:46:04 AM 
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