Killing With Kindness

The American Conservative ^ | March 9, 2009 issue | David Bromwich

[Ravnagora]

Freedom’s Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention, Gary J. Bass, Knopf, 509 pages

By David Bromwich

The Clinton administration believed in the good of humanitarian intervention, and the Kosovo War aimed to set a pattern for such efforts. The 11 weeks of bombing and the 12,000 killed on the ground seemed to its architects a fair price for so clear a demonstration of enlightened resolve. That false rumors of massacre were used to incite the war, that the ethnic killings turned out to be mainly a consequence and not a cause of the bombing—these were seen as side-effects of a humane exuberance.

By contrast, the Bush administration chose to revert from cold war to war, and defined its enemy by analogy with metaphysical evil. The “war on terror” was a rubric that could support many tributary wars with a minimum of definitional fuss.

Let us say that the neoliberal wants humanitarian interventions that may uneasily shade into wars, while the neoconservative wants wars that sooner or later find a justification to satisfy humanitarian goals. How great is the difference? Our rival schools of empire have in common their commitment to preserve a standing military establishment that every year spends almost as much as the rest of the world combined, and they agree that violence is permissible against other countries in a cause unconnected with national self-preservation. The bare appeal to self-preservation is more often made by the neoconservatives, but this appeal goes along lines where hyperbolic fear becomes indistinguishable from fantasy. As late as 2007, Vice President Cheney warned that any withdrawal of troops in the Middle East would plant the green crescent flag inside the White House.

Gary Bass has written Freedom’s Battle to defend the idealism of humanitarian wars. But rather than speak directly of Kosovo, for example, Bass has gone back to three 19th-century interventions by Great Powers, and one failure of humane intervention in the early 20th century. The episodic narrative is framed by the opening 40 pages and the final 50 pages, which argue that there is such a thing as a good and generous intervention: a military action by a great against a lesser power that is neither brutal nor selfish and that promotes the good of humanity.

Inside that frame are Bass’s four case studies. He starts with the defense of Greek independence by the London Greek Committee and other philhellenic persons and groups in the early 1820s that reached its climax in the British destruction of the Ottoman fleet in Navarino Bay in 1827. A more acute provocation drove Napoleon III in 1860 to stop the Druze massacres of Maronite Christians in Syria. In a parallel episode, British popular opinion was rallied by Gladstone in 1876 to combat the “Bulgarian Horrors,” massacres that sprang from the Serbian wing of pan-Slavism. Gladstone, in the process, advanced the broader cause of liberal internationalism against the conservative realism of Disraeli and incidentally “faced down” the Russians in Constantinople. Finally, Bass recounts the Turkish slaughter of Armenians in the First World War, when Theodore Roosevelt, out of office and a decade away from his advocacy of war on the Philippines, wrote eloquently to rouse an intervention President Wilson would not perform.

Bass is a journalist turned academic, with a fast and readable style that tends toward glibness. He makes Byron the hero of his opening section on the Greek-Ottoman war and comes around to Byron again at the end—not failing to note that he died in Missolonghi a casualty of fever not battle. The later sections of the book are similarly lent a high gloss by personalities—most of all by the contest of Disraeli the passive realist with Gladstone the active humanitarian (whose Balkan policy would become a model for Tony Blair). In the Armenian case, Roosevelt emerges as the hero and Wilson as the prudential leader whose subsequent internationalism seems a kind of expiation. It is perhaps a coincidence of Bass’s plotting that the antagonists in three of his four chosen interventions are Ottoman Turks.

Bass writes with judicious irony about the “complications” of these episodes, but it is fair to say that he takes a romantic view. Practically speaking, he wrote this book to overcome our prejudice against the use of force where self-preservation is not at stake. He knows that the prejudice comes partly from common prudence and partly from revulsion against the war in Iraq—-a war Bass thinks could have turned out well had it been fought in 1988. (A sure test of the interventionist instinct is the belief that Iraq should have worked out better: the fault is said to lie in tactics or timing or leadership.) More particularly, the function of Freedom’s Battle is to supply the Kosovo War with an honorable pedigree. Bass thinks it fitting that great-souled men of the advanced nations should seek to act on behalf of oppressed peoples.

In all the stories he recounts, selfish motives preceded intervention, and unintended consequences followed the violence of the war. French support for Maronite Christians in the forming of modern Lebanon is only the most obvious instance. Often, too, unselfish motives were mixed with selfish or ordinary motives in a way that Bass, though he does not suppress, consistently pushes to the side. Thus Freedom’s Battle tells of the attack in October 1827 by the “Allied squadron”—the British navy under Admiral Codrington accompanied by a few Russian and French ships—on Ottoman and Egyptian forces massed in Navarino Bay. The Allies did not lose a ship, while every Ottoman and Egyptian ship was “either burned, sunk, or driven on shore [and] totally annihilated” (in the words of Codrington as quoted by Bass). The Allies lost 174 sailors, the Ottoman forces 6,000. Bass writes, “The battle of Navarino spelled Greek independence.” Compare Élie Halévy in the second volume of his History of the English People in the Nineteenth Century, who remarks that “at first sight the student might be tempted to regard” Navarino as “the crowning victory of that policy of national liberation to which Canning had willingly seen his name attached.” Yet the battle in reality, says Halévy, was “a defeat of the policy which Canning had secretly pursued—the policy of the Balance of Power—for it provoked the Russian war which, ever since 1822, he had endeavoured to prevent by every means at his disposal.”

Passing, then, from interested journalism to serious history, we find that in the wake of the good war lay a war less good and less desired. This is a fact about humanitarian interventions generally. Party advantage enters the calculations in a democratic system; charismatic aggrandizement may play a part elsewhere; “a successful humanitarian mission in Syria,” Bass concedes, was a “welcome opportunity” for Napoleon III and a decision that “suited French imperial interests.” Why reserve this sort of detail for subordinate clauses and parenthetical sentences?

Gladstone, who denounced in writing and campaigned against the “Bulgarian Horrors,” felt chagrin that the Russians came first to liberate the Balkans from the Ottoman yoke. Here is another clue that Bass does not follow but might have. Competitive humanitarianism may simply augment the ordinary rivalry of great powers. Gladstone, too, was keen to outbid Disraeli for the honor of inheriting the mantle of Lord Byron. It is hard to know quite what to make of such a motive. It may be more high-minded but is scarcely more moral than the realism of Metternich. Yet Bass makes much of the Byronic succession: he enjoys the surface poetry of politics, as he enjoys the occasional politics of poetry. His own prose ought to have concerned itself more with surface. He speaks of “vociferous voices,” and people who are “vocally shocked.” We catch a glimpse of Byron before his conversion to politics, “mooning about in Italy.” Disraeli is described as “Byron’s fan” and a “flashy imperialist,” and Gladstone as “a very weird man.”

Freedom’s Battle aims to contribute to a tendency more than to impress by the close articulations of an argument. Central to that tendency is the need to sustain the distinction between good “hegemonic” influence and bad “imperialist” domination. Yet where, in both cases, it is violent force that is justified, one’s view of the distinction will depend on the nature of one’s sympathy and not on a weighing of the facts. Does a democracy that kills more than a million in its mission to crush an internationally nonthreatening tyranny deserve more admiration than, say, a dictatorship that kills 10,000 and imprisons political enemies to evict the foreign investors that have subsidized a guerrilla opposition? Does the greater become the lesser crime when the criminal is a democracy? This is a question Bass does not bring himself to ask, but it lies at the heart of the doubts that entangle his subject. And it seems closely linked to the more compelling question: is a military state compatible with justice?

The big democracies, which Bass looks on as natural bringers of political justice to victim countries, must, in order to perform such services, first have been thoroughly militarized. On Bass’s view, it is their duty to stay militarized until they have made the world a place where democratic justice is at home. Yet the most candid sentence in his book strikes an oddly discordant note: “the strength of democracies today has made the violation of weaker dictatorships an opportunity too great to resist.”

This book jauntily and entertainingly asks us to yield to the temptation. What it does not consider is the cost to the morale of democracy of giving in to the temptation repeatedly. It is possible for selfless vindicators of the rights of the oppressed to become brutal overseers who happen to speak the language of natural rights.

In a characteristic touch, Bass tells us that the “scariest” risk of humanitarian intervention is not the mass destruction of civilian lives but rather, “that two great powers will clash.” Maybe he has not come such a long way from Metternich after all. A peculiarity of Freedom’s Battle, indeed, is that it scatters, among its facts and fancies, so rational a quantum of realistic knowledge and psychological insight (though the latter is too sparingly used). Bass knows that the form of intervention he desires can only stay free of the imperialist poison if placed in the hands of an international body. Yet he does not propose reliance on an existing body or the devising of a new one. Rather he worries that “multilateralism can be paralyzing.” Fast, clean results are what he wants—a very American point of view. Or as he says, in a more judicial tone: “The challenge is finding the right middle ground: a mission big and lengthy enough to be effective, but small and swift enough not to be mistaken for imperialism.”

Gary Bass means well. He is young and eager for a fight, provided it is a good fight. But to justify the violence of the state in any cause besides self-preservation is an intricate and troubling enterprise. He has not thought it through. __________________________________________

David Bromwich is the editor of a selection of Edmund Burke’s speeches and letters, On Empire, Liberty, and Reform (Yale University Press).

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