Why Wes Clark Says Yes to Kosovo But Not Iraq
There is a mostly positive article in Slate about General Wes Clark's new ad. It consists of an exchange between Slate correspondent William Saletan and editor Jacob Weisberg.
Saletan says "How do I love this ad? Let me count the ways. I love it because it's a story..." and continues to praise the ad.
Weisberg responds to Saletan, however, by criticizing the Clark ad for justifying the Kosovo war on the grounds of a humanitarian crisis while Clark has not allowed that the Iraq War addressed an equivalent crisis. Weisberg says:
Saddam Hussein was Stalin to Milosevic's Mussolini. Saddam's efforts at ethnic cleansing and repression were bigger and more vicious than anything Milosevic was capable of.
Dan Rather brought this up at the conclusion of a 60 Minutes II interview with Clark yesterday, without giving Clark a chance to respond. Clark has stated previously that significant differences existed between the humanitarian situation in Kosovo and the one in Iraq.
In Kosovo, diplomatic efforts had been exhausted. Extensive negotiations were carried out between the US and Milosevic and between NATO and Milosevic. Other countries, including Milosevic's allies, also tried to persuade him to accept a diplomatic solution. He refused. Additionally, international war crimes charges were filed against Milosevic for his heinous acts in Bosnia, whereas no such charges had ever been filed by the international community against Saddam Hussein as of March 2003, when the US invaded Iraq.
Hussein had allowed UN inspectors back into Iraq. He was engaged with the UN and had made a last minute offer through an intermediary to Richard Perle, who was at the time the appointed chairman of Bush's Defense Policy Board. Perle acknowledged that he had received such an offer through "back channels" and relayed it to the White House and the Pentagon. The Bush adminsitration disregarded the offer because it was not made through one of several legitimate channels available to Hussein. The intermediary, a Lebanese businessman, also met several times with a senior aide to Paul Wolfowitz. Because the White House dismissed this offer out of hand, without attempting to follow up, we will never know whether the proposal would have afforded a genuine opportunity to avoid war.
This again points to a fundamental difference between Iraq and Kosovo, which Clark has referred to as consensus. In Iraq, an opportunity still remained for a diplomatic solution and our allies in France, Russia, and Germany were willing to work with us in pressuring Hussein for improved cooperation. But in Kosovo, almost every member of the security council except Russia and China agreed that force was the only alternative to end Milosevic's campaign of ethnic cleansing. For this reason, our nineteen NATO allies willingly participated in the campaign to oust Milosevic. Contrast this to the coalition Bush scrambled together for Iraq, which consisted mainly of small countries offering insignificant military and financial resources, with the exception of the UK. While Italy and Spain were not insignificant allies, their contributions to Bush's coaliation were minimal.
Clark has also stated that for him, a significant difference between the wars in Kosovo and Iraq was that for Kosovo, NATO outlined a clear exit plan, but the US had no strategy for post-war Iraq. He has also remarked that the situation in Kosovo was imminent, in that the Albanians were being exterminated and driven from their homes during the negotiations, and it was known that Milosevic planned to eliminate all ethnic Albanians from Kosovo. This included a directive from the upper echelon of command to have Serbian soldiers rape and impregnate as many ethnic Albanian women as possible.
The atrocities in Iraq were not orchestrated on this level, although Hussein and his sons were undeniably responsible for much of the brutality. It should be noted, however, that Hussein was concerned about the extreme depravity of his son Qusay and at one point even had him arrested. Milosevic probably would have promoted him.
The Bush administration likes to repeat the claim that Hussein gassed the Kurds, "his own people." This is opposite the position taken by the Reagan administration (which included Powell and Rumsfeld) immediately following the incident, whose officials repeated the conclusion of a 1990
Defense Intelligence Agency report. This report determined that while Iraq deployed poison gas in Halabja, it was Iranian gas that killed the Kurds. The DIA report validated the findings of Dr. Stephen Pellitiere and his colleagues from the Army War College. Human Rights groups disputed these conclusions, alleging that the US was trying to protect its ally Hussein, but the press reported them at the time and congress considered them credible enough to vote against a proposed resolution to censure Hussein for the incident in Halabja.
For the sake of argument, assume that Hussein was responsible for gassing the Kurds. It should be noted that the incident came at the end of a seven-year war with Iran in which the Kurds had allied with Iran to overthrow the Iraqi government. Kurds fought alongside Iranian soldiers and turned over their villages to the Iranian troops from which they could drive further into the heart of Iraq. In the US, we would consider this treason. While this does not justify gassing the many innocent civilians who died, it does suggest the motive was not simply genocide.
The DIA and War College reports both reached the conclusion that the Iranians and Iraqis assumed they were deploying gas against each other. Unknown to the Iraqis, The Iranians had pulled out of Halabja the day before, allowing the displaced Kurds to return. Unknown to the Iranians, the Iraqi soldiers had not taken over the town.
The second most highlighted example of Hussein's brutality relates to the Shiite uprising at the end of the first Gulf War. This uprising was instigated by US forces, who then withdrew and abandoned the Shiites to Hussein's bloody revenge. Hussein purged the Shiites of all those he believed were dissidents, along with their family members; but he never initiated a campaign to exterminate all Shiites or all Kurds.
Shortly after the Shiite massacre, the UN established "no fly" zones in the north and south of Iraq. This provided protection for the Kurds and Shiites in Iraq and prevented Hussein from carrying out any retaliatory or genocidal campaigns against them. Hussein did continue to abuse human rights and murder his "enemies" regardless of their ethnic persuasion. Most happened to be Shiite, however, since Hussein was a Sunni Muslim and treated Sunnis much better than he did Shiites.
In Kosovo, there were no such "no fly" zones. At the time NATO invaded, thousands of civilians had already been murdered or displaced in an ongoing campaign to purge Kosovo of ethnic Albanians. Bodies were cremated in an industrial furnace, a la Hitler, as Milosevic carried out his own "final solution" campaign.
Had NATO not intervened in Kosovo when it did, Milosevic might have succeeded in exterminating all ethnic Albanians:
Several of the Serbian fighters who took part in burning Albanian bodies--including Dusko--expressed no remorse. In fact, Dusko only wishes he could have done more.
"Had it not been for the NATO bombing," he said, "I guarantee you we would have driven out all 2 million Albanians from Kosovo. ... You gotta know, Albanians are stupid. They're a dirty people. And this hatred has been around for 600 years. It will never go away. In 30 years, or whenever these NATO troops and these human rights monitors leave, we'll start fighting again." [Burning the Evidence, Michael Montgomery and Stephen Smith, 2001]
No evidence exists that Hussein had an active plan to exterminate all the Shiites and Kurds in Iraq, one that only an invasion could stop. In fact, at the time of the US invasion, the Kurds had established an autonomous region in the northern "no fly" zone, with a semblance of democratic government and economic independence.
With greater UN pressure and negotiations to reduce or eliminate sanctions, perhaps an international presence could have been established inside Iraq, which then could have persuaded the Iraqi government to improve its human rights record in order to rejoin the world economy. While international diplomacy was tried and ultimately failed in Kosovo , it might also have failed in Iraq. But we will never know.
The greatest difference between Iraq and Kosovo is that no one can say with absolute certaintly whether a diplomatic solution could have been found for Iraq, because George Bush unleashed "shock and awe" long before the last resort.
