War in the Name of Peace
October 5, 2007
The world’s best news service Inter Press Service interviews Jean Bricmont, the author of Humanitarian Imperialism.
BRUSSELS, Sep 20 (IPS) – International law is seen by many to have been shunted aside by Western powers when launching their most significant military operations in the past decade.
In 1999, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation lacked any mandate from the United Nations when it attacked Serbia. In Afghanistan, the U.S. continued bombing in 2002, even when the government that replaced the Taliban asked it to stop (lest the civilian death toll rise).
And the United States asserted a highly disputed entitlement to launch a pre-emptive strike against Iraq a year later, citing bogus claims that the country had weapons of mass destruction and had played a role in the Sep 11, 2001 attacks.
In his new book ‘Humanitarian Imperialism’, the pacifist intellectual Jean Bricmont exposes how human rights have been used to justify military exploits that he regards as legally dubious and morally odious.
A 55-year-old professor of theoretical physics in Belgium’s University of Louvain, Bricmont is also editor of ‘Chomsky’, a new collection of articles on the linguist and trenchant political analyst Noam Chomsky.
Bricmont spoke to IPS Brussels correspondent David Cronin.
IPS: You have suggested that NATO’s bombing of Serbia in 1999 was a turning point for a new form of imperialism. Why do you think so?
JB: There were several reasons against that war but there was so little reaction from people on the left. If you exclude a very small number of individuals who knew better, everyone was convinced the war was necessary and the U.S. should intervene for humanitarian reasons, irrespective of the particularities of the case.
I don’t agree that it was a good thing to destroy international law. I don’t agree that the situation in Kosovo was so dire, that it was necessary to bomb (Serbia). And I don’t agree that the removal of (then Serbian president Slobodan) Milosevic was a good thing, irrespective of everything else.
Milosevic was elected. Maybe his election was not pure. But there is no pure democracy in the world. In France, you needed six times as many votes to elect a communist in urban areas as you do to elect a (right-leaning) Gaullist in rural areas. But nobody says France is not a democracy.
IPS: Much of ‘Humanitarian Imperialism’ deals with Iraq. Why do you reject the widely held view that the oil industry should be blamed for the war there?
JB: Of course, oil had a role to play in a trivial sense. The U.S. doesn’t want Iraq’s oil under the feet of Iran, Saudi Arabia or even the present Iraqi government.
But the naïve view of the peace movement that the U.S. went there to rob oil doesn’t seem defensible. I don’t know of any evidence that the oil industry lobbied for war.
Every war needs war propaganda. And the oil industry — to my knowledge — have not done any war propaganda at all.
The Zionist lobby, on the other hand, have always done war propaganda. If you open an American newspaper, you will find columns that are written by people who are Zionist and pro-Israel, even if they are not all Jews. It is fair to call (President George W.) Bush and (Vice-President Dick) Cheney Zionists, even if they are not Jewish. Especially Cheney.
IPS: The U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 was preceded by huge protests across Europe. Why has the peace movement lost that momentum?JB: I’m not a sociologist but if I can resort to conjecture: many people went out in the streets because they thought the war would turn ugly. Of course, it did turn ugly but not in the way that was thought. There were no weapons of mass destruction. And don’t forget that (then British prime minister) Tony Blair was talking about missiles being launched within 45 minutes.
The people in the peace movement were either genuinely anti-war or genuinely concerned about the interests of their own countries.
There are different situations in different countries. In Britain the anti-war movement faced a problem of deciding who to vote for. The Conservatives are as gung-ho as Labour. And with the Liberal Democrats, the system is biased against them.
IPS: Given your criticism of Israel’s tactics in the Palestinian territories, do you think there is a case for boycotting Israeli goods?
JB: Yes, there should be a campaign for a boycott. That is one way that citizens have to show they are angry.
Some people say: why not boycott the U.S.? I think we should boycott the U.S. but I don’t see how this could be done practically.
In Britain and the U.S., a large part of the population does not agree with the government. In Israel, there is much more homogeneity. Even the moderates in the genuine peace camp are very marginal.
IPS: Reviewers have pointed out that your book doesn’t examine the situation in Darfur. What should the West do about the killings there?JB: My book is not against intervention within the framework of the UN. In principle, maybe something could be negotiated there. A peacekeeping force can be sent when there is a peacekeeping agreement to prevent rogue elements from destroying the peace. But when you send a peacekeeping force before you have a peacekeeping agreement, that is war.
It also seems to me that some people are using Darfur to change the subject away from Iraq. Iraq may be the worst humanitarian crisis in the world. You have three-four million refugees and maybe one million dead.
IPS: You are quite critical of human rights organisations for being selective in deciding what rights they focus on. Why is that?JB: Human Rights Watch says it will not discuss whether a war is legitimate or not. All it wants is for war parties to respect the Geneva Convention. The Geneva Convention is not respected in any war.
IPS: You’ve also written that the left in Europe is only moderately less in favour of unfettered capitalism than the right. Can you explain what you mean by that?
JB: It is amazing how after the fall of communism, democracy became the new cause. The left adopted this and turned it into a pro-Western, anti-Third World discussion.
Look at the way the left complains about China. When the Chinese said recently that they want to improve the rights of workers in Chinese factories, big Western corporations said: ‘If you do that, we will move abroad, we will move to Vietnam.’ This is not something the left is concerned about. It just blames the Chinese leaders for everything.
IPS: Can I ask you about the European Union and the current efforts by its leaders to introduce a reform treaty that is largely the same as the constitution rejected by voters in France and the Netherlands in 2005. I understand you were pleased by the ‘No’ vote in France?JB: I wasn’t entirely happy. I was happy that at least the media was defeated.
But I have no illusion about why people voted ‘No’. They voted because of nationalism. Fifty-five percent of people voted ‘No’ and of that 35 percent were from the left and 20 percent were from the right.
There is nothing telling me that that the reason why people on the left voted ‘No’ was all for social reasons and not for reasons of nationalism. With the victory of (centre-right candidate Nicolas) Sarkozy (in a presidential election earlier this year), a lot of people who voted for him had voted ‘No’. People over 65 who voted overwhelmingly for Sarkozy had voted ‘No’.
The failure I see in Belgium at the moment (where Dutch and French-speaking parties have not yet formed a coalition government several months after a general election) could anticipate the future of Europe. Why should the Finns, Portuguese, Irish and Greeks be feeling closer to each other, more than Flemish and Walloons feeling closer to each other?Without a common feeling, how do you build a country with bureaucracy and free markets? There is an enormous amount of delusion (about European integration).
IPS: Finally, I’ve been told that you are the man who effectively introduced Noam Chomsky to francophone Europe. Is that true?
JB: I first met Chomsky when I went to listen to him in Princeton (the U.S. university) in the early 1980s. After the first Gulf War, I invited him to Belgium to speak at the Flemish university VUB.
In France it has been an uphill battle to put him on the map. (Journalist) Philippe Val attacked him recently because (Osama) bin Laden mentioned him in his recent video.
He is still being demonised and misrepresented.
Bricmont’s take on NATO intervention in Kosovo and Serbia seems sound.As do his criticisms of the Left’s quiescence with “humanitarian intervention” and market economics.
The demonisation of the Serbs in mainstream media coverage even by leftish reporters like Maggie O’Kane was compounded by academic accounts of the Balkan conflict by writers like Brendan Simms who in Unfinest Hour lamented the failure of Conservative ministers like Malcolm Rifkind to arm the Bosnian muslims so as to offset the vast Serbian firepower superiority.
Typically the left largely acquiesced in the case made by the US for humanitarian intervention(executed by NATO airpower)against the Serbs.Some questioned the legality of the aerial bombardment of Belgrade and other urban centres but most probably galvanised by a sense of self-righteousness(not uncommon on the left)that had been stirring deep in Lefty bowels since Thatcher had expressed outright opposition to intervention in what she perceived as an evenly balanced civil conflict.
The US with their Al Qaida proxies(imported wholesale from Afghanistan,Chechnya etc.)got their war on Milosevic and the desired break-up of the former Yugoslavia.
Bricmont is right in his sensing that the case for intervention against Serb atrocities in Kosovo was never substantially made.
Media watchers attentive to issues of balance recall how the likes of Newsnight’s Kirsty Wark sought to convince us that the 40 or so Kosovan Albanian corpses found in shallow graves at Racek were the result of another atrocity carried out by Serb police and gave NATO the right to intervene on the side of the KLA.
Months later when the Israelis stormed Jenin in the West Bank and Western journalists had finally been given access to the Palestinian town left in ruins,Wark told us that since only around 60 Palestinian civilians appeared to have died then Palestinian sources who had estimated the scale of casualties to have been decidedly higher had been guilty of a gross PR error.
At any rate Wark and her colleagues had decided that there was,contra the Kosovo case,no necessity for Western intervention on behalf of the Palestinians.
Bricmont is on far less secure ground when he considers the current inertia of the British anti-war movement.The idea that the movement’s success or failure was dependent on how the Parliamentary parties stood on the Iraq war is a little far-fetched.
The anti-war movement’s high point:the 2m march in London in February 2003 was achieved by the vast array of extra-parliamentary political forces operating well beyond the corridors of power in Westminster.There was a groundswell of revulsion at the prospect of a country that had obviously been brought to its knees by sanctions over 12 years suffering further under a US-led bombardment.No-one in the anti-war movement had swallowed any of the WMD lies or took Blair’s 45 minute warning seriously.
Why has it all fallen apart?Why did the numbers participating on the marches go into palpable
decline?
The reasons are complex and George Galloway has
identified the amateurishness of the SWP/Respect leadership.Certainly it was glaringly obvious to many marchers that for a party that had always adopted a traditional class struggle approach to become so heavily committed to an issue in the Middle East rather than the workers’ struggle in UK the SWP was in new territory.
Nor did it escape our notice that whereas the Iraq war was not a gainful recruitment opportunity for the British armed forces it was seen by many SWP activists as a God-given opportunity to recruit from a new flood of potential support.
There was also the populist drive that led Respect to embrace muslim groups without any history whatever of class struggle.There were mumblings from the politically correct left about how well the SWP’s new front-party policy on gay pride sat with such alliances.Murmurs surfaced too about how such muslim groups might be Islamist-linked.
As it’s turned out the real threat to unity among this populist-driven pot pourri came from the conservative muslim business leaders who came predictably to dominate.They have recently refused to countenance any SWP candidates standing for Respect in Birmingham wards.
Thus the predicament in which Respect/SWP has landed the anti-war movement is as farcical as it is tragic and it goes to show all the pitfalls that will dog any class-based party that eschews such a base in the name of populism.
The case for enforcement of boycotts against the US and Israel is 100% solid.The BBR(Bloated Banana Republic of Israel)for one is preposterously still permitted to compete in European soccer tournaments.Maybe FIFA needs to look at a map.Since when has Israel been in Europe?
Bricmont makes the point that there is largescale commitment to militarization policies among the Israeli population.If this is the case then there should be largescale collective punishment of the country along the lines of the collective forms of punishment endured by the citizens of Fallujah and Jenin!
Finally Bricmont is certaily not the first commentator to have noticed the role played by Darfur in mainstream media coverage.Acting as a Weapon of Mass Distraction or smokescreen for the appalling humanitarian catastrophe wreaked by the US in Iraq,Darfur is a complex international issue lacking international statesmen and women with any
modicum of specialist expertise to address it.
Which is what Brendan Simms said of British ministerial competence re-the break-up of Yugoslavia.No wonder they were outflanked by the Germans and US who got their desired geopolitical outcome before Britain realised what was at stake.