Rush Limbaugh and "humanitarian" war

OxyContin (the physical kind)

This little bit of trash in the flotsam and jetsam that flows daily from the rightwing noise machine will likely be swallowed by the news and polemics about the departure of Abu Gonzales the Torture Guy. But I wanted to take note of it while the flows by.

Digby and Steve Benen have called attention to junkie bigot Rush Limbaugh's comment on the air that Democrats support an intervention to stop the killing in Darfur because, he asked, what color are the people in Darfur? "It's black. And who do the Democrats really need to keep voting for them? If they lose a significant percentage of this voting bloc, they're in trouble."

Mr. OxyContin is not known for his thoughtful commentary on foreign policy, and that crack was no different. Rush's fans can't repeat it enough to themselves: black people vote for Democrats, the Democrats are the party of black people, Democrats do things that black people support. And Rush is one of the favorite political commentators among Republicans. On the one hand, we don't need to invest Rush's OxyContin-soaked ravings with more weight than they deserves. On the other, we don't have to go along with the notion that this is "political humor" or pretend that the Republican rank-and-file don't like Rush's bigoted talk. A very substantial portion of them do.

Rush's Darfur comment was meant to be a racial sneer, and that's about all it is.

However, the caller who was calling in trying to sound like a smart-ass dittohead managed, against the odds, to ask a real question:

Hey, Rush. It's great to talk to you. I talked to you once before. I've been listening to you for a couple of years now, and I think I'm getting brighter, but there's a lot to be learned. I know I'm no expert in foreign affairs, but what really confuses me about the liberals is the hypocrisy when they talk about how we have no reason to be in Iraq and helping those people, but yet everybody wants us to go to Darfur. I mean, aren't we going to end up in a quagmire there? I mean, isn't it - I don't understand. Can you enlighten me on this?

In OxyContinLand, everyone "knows" that The Liberals are hypocrites and The Liberals are liars. And this caller was likely trying to toss a softball to give Rush a chance to rave once again about liberal hypocrisy.

I should mention here that I'm not aware myself of any groundswell of enthusiasm among The Liberals for military intervention in Darfur. But OxyContin Vision reveals things to its practitioners that are hidden to us grubby news readers.

But when the caller asked, "I mean, aren't we going to end up in a quagmire there?", he/she managed to touch on a legitimate concern. I don't know if OxyContin Man went on to address that or not.

But one thing that Democrats do need to rethink after the experience of the Iraq War is the whole notion of "humanitarian intervention", or in its variant name, "humanitarian war". Helena Cobban has pointed out what should have been obvious to everyone, but it wasn't really to me before I saw her comment. That is, "humanitarian war" is a grotesque concept, downright Orwellian, actually.

War is about killing people. Bombing and shooting and displacing people. We should never lose sight of the fact that war is about killing people. Sadly, it's all too human to forget it, though. Which is a big part of why wars continue: people listen to sentimental drivel about the glories of war and forget what's really involved.

War is not "humanitarian". A war can be just, it can be necessary, it can have useful or positive or even noble aims, though the latter typically dissolve in the clouds of death and destruction that war involves. But war is not humanitarian. It's about killing and hurting people.

One of these days I'm going to post about the Kosovo War, which I supported at the time, and its aftermath. Although the strategic purpose had to do with controlling the destabilizing effects of Serbian military aggression and ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, it is often thought of as a "humanitarian war" because the most immediate problem was the ethnic cleansing of Albanian Kosovars by Serbian forces. Given the devastated state of our Establishment press, most Americans probably think of the Kosovo War as a brilliant success. Since it was fought heavily by bombing, air power zealots have a particular stake in making it sound like a brilliant success.

But, as Jeffrey Record says, the only legitimate goal of war is to establish a better peace. Whether that has been achieved in Kosovo (or "Kosova" as independence advocates prefer) is still in question. The International Crisis Group (ICG) recently issued a report on the political state of Kosovo that presents something other than undiluted optimism, Breaking the Kosovo Stalemate: Europe’s Responsibility 08/21/07. The IGC warns in the executive summary:

The risks to Europe of inaction are substantial. Before the end of the year, Kosovo Albanian leaders will be under what is likely to be irresistible internal pressure to declare independence, with or without external support. If they act and are not supported, Kosovo would fracture: Serbia reclaiming the land pocket north of the Ibar River, Serbs elsewhere in Kosovo fleeing, and eight years of internationally guided institution-building lost. The implosion would destabilise neighbouring countries, increasing pressure for further fractures along ethnic lines. The EU would quickly experience refugee flows and feel the impact of the boost that disorder would give to organised crime networks in the Balkans that already distribute most of Europe’s heroin, facilitate illegal migration and are responsible for nearly 30 per cent of women victims of the sex trade worldwide.

Has that "humanitarian war" succeeded in establishing a better peace? It arguably has for the past eight years, though it didn't prevent widescale Albanian ethnic cleansing against Serbs in Kosovo after the cessation of hostilities with Serbia.

My point is not that the Kosovo War was wrong. I'm not willing to judge it in a simplistic framework of good war/bad war.

My point is that even the best-intentioned military intervention carries substantial risks. Even in a situation like Kosovo, where a substantial multinational coalition was acting (via NATO) and the international environment was substantially permissive, there is far more involved than dropping some bombs, making the bad guys give up, and leaving. A significant-sized NATO force has been present in Kosovo ever since the conclusion of the war. They haven't faced anything like the resistance seen in Iraq. But even that could change if some mutually satisfactory compromise over Kosovar independence from Serbia isn't worked out relatively soon. (Kosovo was and is legally a part of Serbia.)

Violent resistance. A protracted, expensive and frustrating occupation. Potential long-term damage to a country's international position. These are all risks involved in "humanitarian" interventions just like any other kind. And that's true whether the lead party in the intervention is the US, NATO, the UN or anyone else.

The United States is involved in one losing war (Iraq) more-or-less on our own. We're involved in a second losing war (Afghanistan) formally as part of NATO. And even Dick Cheney may not know how many covert interventions we have going, any one of which could blow up into more complications. I don't see right now as a good moment to be searching for other places to send US soldiers to fight.

After the Kosovo War and before the Scalia Five selected Cheney and Bush to be President, there was serious consideration being giving by the major powers to coming up with an improved international legal and political framework to conduct military interventions with UN approval in cases where genocidal killing was being carried out.

That was one of the casualties of the Iraq War. Not that the need is going away, or efforts to deal with it. But the Iraq War created a new context, along with the unilateralist approach of the Cheney-Bush administration, which was far more interested in shredding international frameworks than building them.

Colonialist rhetoric from Spain and Britain and France to the Cheney-Bush administration always promises to bring the blessings of civilization, including democracy these days, to the people who are being bombed, shot and tortured into accepting such blessings. So it's worth remembering in connection with the "humanitarian" Kosovo War that the neoconservatives generally supported it, while the Congressional Republicans were highly critical and even actively opposed. In those days the Reps didn't seem to think it was "aiding the enemy" to criticize the foreign policy of a sitting President, Bill Clinton in that instance.

Seeing the role that the neocons played in agitating for the Iraq War and now for expanding the war to Iran, it's hard not to conclude that for the neocons, the shaky status of the Kosovo War in international law was an appealing aspect of that war. And that they saw that validating the humanitarian justifications for the Kosovo War could prove useful in their already-active agitation for the Iraq War.

Tags: darfur, helena cobban, kosovo, kosovo war, rush limbaugh