Roger ‘Not-Richard’ Cohen is a columnist for the International Herald Tribune, which is essentially the international-version of the New York Times. He was ‘The Times’s Balkan bureau chief based in Zagreb from April 1994 until June 1995’. In his column today he decries the way the term ‘neocon’ has become an all purpose insult to shout down anyone that supports a robust American interventionism. But his argument exhibits some of the worst traits of Liberal Hawkishness. Take, for example, the following passage (emphasis mine):
In short, neoconitis, a condition as rampant as liberal-lampooning a few years back, has left scant room for liberal hawks. “Neocon is an insult used to obliterate the existence of this liberal position,” says Paul Berman, a writer often so insulted.
Liberal interventionists, if you recall, were people like myself for whom the sight in the 1990s of hundreds of thousands of European Muslims processed through Serbian concentration camps, or killed in them, left little doubt of the merits, indeed the necessity, of U.S. military action in the name of the human dignity that only open societies afford.
I don’t remember any Serbian concentration camps and I certainly don’t remember hundreds of thousands of Bosnians being ‘processed through them’. Here is what I remember.
Two weeks after President Bush ordered American intelligence agencies to determine whether Serbian forces were systematically killing prisoners at detention camps in Bosnia, Administration officials say they have found no evidence to authenticate such allegations.
Intelligence officials, noting that Mr. Bush renewed the order last week, said they had “redoubled and tripled” their efforts to establish what had been happening in detention camps for Croats and Muslims in areas seized by Serbian forces since April.
The officials said they had reached roughly the same conclusions as had European Community observers, United Nations representatives and journalists in Bosnia: that killing and torture had taken place at some of the Serbian camps but that there was no evidence of systematic or institutionalized killing.
By DAVID BINDER, Published: August 23, 1992
In fact, you should not be surprised by the source of this false rumor.
According to senior Administration officials, the first independent official report that torture and killings had taken place in specific detention centers run by Serbian forces was handed to Assistant Secretary of State John R. Bolton by a Bosnian Government official on July 29 at a United Nations conference on Balkan refugees in Geneva.
Like some kind of Where’s Waldo puzzle, the same people seem to show up wherever there is an opportunity to lead this country into war. Unfortunately for the Mustache, his report didn’t pan out.
Backtracking, the State Department on Aug. 4 and Aug. 5, and then President Bush on Aug. 6, said the United States was unable to confirm these reports. It was on Aug. 6 that Mr. Bush ordered the intelligence agencies to investigate the allegations.
An official who has access to intelligence reports and diplomatic cables about the Yugoslav conflict said: “I found nothing confirmed. There were comments in cables over the last five or six weeks saying we have to be concerned that there might well be camps, but no confirmed reports. There were rumors of camps for refugees. The embassy in Belgrade did not have any hard information.”
The official said that until now the National Intelligence Daily, a summary from the intelligence community circulated among top Government officials, including President Bush, had not mentioned concentration camps either.
A quick Google of “Serbian Concentration Camps” will show you just how thin the evidence was, and is, that they existed. There were detention facilities. There were atrocities and mistreatment in those facilities. But there was no systematic killing. That was propaganda. Yet, Cohen repeats it here as if it were an established fact. Why should we listen to another word he has to say?
He creates a fantasy about Serbian concentration camps processing and killing people and then he uses it to justify the use of military intervention. Without the fantasy, where is the justification? It is as illusory as the justification for invading Iraq after the discovery that there were no weapons of mass destruction.
If there is a difference, the difference is only in the effectiveness of the intervention. Cohen would have it otherwise:
Beyond that, neocon has morphed into an all-purpose insult for anyone who still believes that American power is inextricable from global stability and still thinks the muscular anti-totalitarian U.S. interventionism that brought down Slobodan Milosevic has a place, and still argues, like Christopher Hitchens, that ousting Saddam Hussein put the United States “on the right side of history.”
Cohen exaggerates. The war in Iraq has not led very many people to revisit the interventions in Kosovo and Bosnia. But they should revisit them. And they should revisit the decision to give Hussein a green-light to invade Kuwait and the decision to reverse that decision and liberate Kuwait. This possibility seems to be the thing most worrisome to liberal hawks. They fear that George W. Bush’s war in Iraq has weakened the Establishment’s ability to intervene in other areas of the globe when the cause might actually be justified. They are addicted to American power. This excerpt gets to the heart of it.
…neocon has morphed into an all-purpose insult for anyone who still believes that American power is inextricable from global stability…
Cohen cites, for his authority, Isaiah Berlin.
No matter that 20th-century liberal thought, like Isaiah Berlin’s, stood in consistent opposition to totalitarianism in fascist or communist form.
Of course, having come through the trauma of two world wars, including the unfathomable brutality of the Axis powers in the second one…and having found ourselves in a nuclear age…Cold Warriors can be forgiven for ignoring the old saw that discretion is the better part of valor. We did not want to wait around and allow new dangers to gather. American had tried isolationism and it had not protected us. Standing up to totalitarianism, even with Realpolitik compromises, was something most Americans could understand and support, regardless of political ideology.
But the end result has been catastrophic. By hording power to ourselves we have become the only nation with the Navy and Air Transport systems capable of global military intervention. We have effectively become responsible for global stability…especially in the energy sphere. And it is bankrupting us financially, militarily, poltically, and spiritually. If we learn nothing else from the experience of Iraq, it should be that we need a consort of powers to maintain stability. We cannot do it alone.
Are you denying Srebernica?
Here’s a counterpoint.
uh, that’s not a counterpoint. that’s a different war crime. one doesn’t excuse the other.
From Wikipedia:
The Srebrenica Massacre, also known as Srebrenica Genocide,[1] was the July 1995 killing of an estimated 8,000 Bosniak males, in the region of Srebrenica in Bosnia and Herzegovina by units of the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS) under the command of General Ratko Mladić during the Bosnian War. In addition to the Army of Republika Srpska, a paramilitary unit from Serbia known as the “Scorpions” participated in the massacre.[2][3][4][5][6]
The Srebrenica massacre is the largest mass murder in Europe since World War II.[7] In the unanimous ruling “Prosecutor v. Krstić”, the Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), located in The Hague, ruled that the Srebrenica massacre was genocide[8], the Presiding Judge Theodor Meron stating:
By seeking to eliminate a part of the Bosnian Muslims [Bosniaks], the Bosnian Serb forces committed genocide. They targeted for extinction the forty thousand Bosnian Muslims living in Srebrenica, a group which was emblematic of the Bosnian Muslims in general. They stripped all the male Muslim prisoners, military and civilian, elderly and young, of their personal belongings and identification, and deliberately and methodically killed them solely on the basis of their identity.[9]
The International Court of Justice concluded that the Srebrenica massacre was genocide with the specific intent (dolus specialis) to destroy Bosnian Muslims in the area.[10]
you may enjoy a different take on that incident.
However you feel about it, it was not a concentration camp, nor was it part of a larger policy.
self-serving defences of genocide written by relatives of those committing the genocide. They are, shall we say, not impartial, nor are they interested in actual fact. Rather, their purpose lies in muddying the waters, and providing a post-hoc defense of the murders committed by their uncles and cousins.
I stick with the official result from the official tribunal, which called it DELIBERATE GENOCIDE.
Holocaust denial is a dirty business, and should not be engaged in by persons of good will. It is a bad path to go down.
are you not familiar with soj?
I have respect for Soj, but I also think that given the descriptions of what did happen there is unlikely to be much solid evidence for them. What is clear is that although Srebrenica was designated as a safe area, it was captured by the Serb with no resistance from either the UN or the residents of the city.
Those who lived there felt compelled to flee on foot and by bus. There isn’t much testimony from any who chose to remain. I would guess that anyone who chose to remain died.
If the residents of Srebrenica had not felt their lives to be in danger by remaining, they would likely have stayed in the city and tried to continue their lives despite the city being captured. Most people, especially old worlders, feel an attachment to their land and would not leave their homes and most of their worldly possessions unless forces out.
Context Luam, context. From Soj:
I accept that context is an important part and I don’t claim that either side was innocent of atrocities, I have no doubt that those murdering helpless civilians thought that their actions were completely justified. Perhaps they had family that had been murdered as well.
I don’t know what the line is between a massacre and a genocide. Perhaps it is similar to the difference between a hate crime and a murder.
The facts that we can agree to is that ethnic cleansing occurred, war crimes occurred, places that were once of mixed ethnicity are so no longer. We do know which side was more heavily armed for the duration of the conflict, and which side was asking for help rather than to be left alone to pursue the war. We can play the blame game of who started it, but there is little denying that atrocities were committed by both sides. Certainly different parts of the world took different sides in this conflict.
The context that neither side was perfect does not justify ethnic cleansing. I don’t think you even attempted to counter my argument that without at least the threat of genocide (or hate crimes on a smaller scale) you cleansing an area of an ethnicity or religious group does not occur.
Crimes like these are always denied, some more successfully than others. If the murders do their job right, there are no survivors to tell the tale.
Also, you imagine wrong.
but it was part of a larger policy. as others have noted, the bosnian serbs engaged in deliberate genocide in bosnia.
I’ve never seen any evidence of that. I’ve seen a lot of lazy crap and a lot of propaganda, but I’ve never seen peep that would evidence a policy of genocide. I’ve seen ethnic cleansing, but that is, again, not the same thing, and it was done by all sides.
link
And I have already commented on the severe problems with considering Srebrenica a genocide, or as part of a policy of genocide. Simply put, I do not think it was. It was a massacre. Not genocide, IMO. And it was certainly not unprovoked or anything like how it was portrayed.
first, whether it was provoked or not is irrelevant to the question of whether it was genocide. in every instance of genocide the perpetrator believes the victim provoked it whether it was the turk’s claim that the armenians conspired to dismember the turkish state, the nazi’s claim that the jews engineered the ruin of the german nation in world war one, or the hutu’s long term grievances against the tutsi. none of that makes it not genocide.
second, while the international court only found genocide in srebrenica, they didn’t conclude that there was no genocide anywhere else. instead, the ruling was that there was not enough evidence to convince it that genocide did happen. that ruling was immediately criticized by scholars. the biggest objection was that the court wasn’t permitted to see all the evidence. it’s a mistake to interpret the equivalent of an acquittal as a finding that “it didn’t happen”. it may have happened. instead all it means is that the prosecution in that court with the admisable evidence available to it was not able to meet its burden of proof.
third, the argument that srebrenica is not genocide because women were spared is weak. (plus, not all women were spared) you’re right that genocide and ethnic cleansing are not the same thing. but the legal definition of genocide requires killing because of race, religion or ethnicity. if the men of srebrenica were killed because they were bosnian muslims, that is genocide, even if they let all other bosnian muslims go. (which again, is not quite what happened)
and fourth, the bosnians and croats definitely did commit atrocities during the war. no one is claiming otherwise, but it really has no bearing on the question of whether the serbs committed genocide. all parties did commit atrocities in that war, but the bosnian serbs particularly (and to a lesser extent the bosnian croats) had ethnic cleasing as a goal. and while ethnic cleansing and genocide are not the same thing–cleansing could just involve displacement of people–when cleansing is accomplished through killings that is genocide.
I didn’t make any argument about women.
The question arose here in the context of whether or not a hundred thousand Bosnians were processed through concentration camps where many were killed.
They weren’t. Moreover, the evidence for a systematic policy of mass killing is totally lacking. And in the case of Srebenica I find the case to be weak.
We were TOLD that there was genocide going on, but I have never seen convincing evidence that it was. And even if you could convince me that a fairly discreet event occurred that would qualify as genocide in the technical sense, that does not translate to the kind of pressing humanitarian crisis that we were sold on.
In any case, there is a case that could be made on humanitarian grounds for intervening in Yugoslavia, but it wasn’t because the Serbs were operating death camps.
I am not so sure about actual concentration camps, but it is hard to argue that ethnic cleansing didn’t happen in Eastern Bosnia. From what I know of the conflicts in that region our response was rather late and ill managed. A lot of civilians died in an attempt to create an ethnically pure Serbian population in Serbia and much of Bosnia.
I don’t think makes me particularly hawkish to wish that we could have done something earlier to prevent that tragedy.
Tyrants often depend upon high barriers of proof to prevent any counter action until the “facts on the ground” defy ethical solutions. Bush uses it when he wishes to erode our freedom (as well as our environment), and the Serbs used it to cleanse a region of Bosnia so that they could keep the land.
that the Serbs committed genocide, in a systematic and entirely deliberate manner. There is simply no question that the Serbs would have continued their genocide, and that Slobodan Milosevich was intent upon his vision of a Greater Serbia.
You should read a bit about the 1989 speech at the Kosova field, on the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosova in which Prince Lazar was killed, and where the Turks won the suzerainty of the Balkans. He was at that time planning on the expansion of Serbia to many areas, including those traditionally considered parts of Croatia and even Slovenia.
Another thing that you seem to be glossing over in your little discussion above is that we, the US, did not get into a war with Serbia. Rather, this was a NATO action, participated in by all the NATO powers.
So, I’m trying to figure out what your point is in these rewrites of the facts about Serbia and the Serbia-NATO conflict?
ethnic cleansing and genocide are not synonymous. It’s true that Srebrenica has been adjudged an act of genocide. However, the link I provided should educate you about the many problems with that designation, not to mention its greater meaning within the conflict.
But the greater parallel to Iraq is not Bosnia, but Kosovo. The problem with the Kosovo intervention was the predicate it established for acting outside of the UN.
There are many issues we could discuss related to Yugoslavia and U.S. intervention, but I would submit to you that we were subjected to the very same propaganda mechanism in that conflict that we were subjected to for the interventions in Grenada, Panama, Kuwait, and the second Iraq War.
That is to say, we have a false picture. The Bosnians were very much a precursor of the Iraqi National Congress. They funneled false reports to John Bolton, he tried to stovepipe those into the intelligence committee. Under Clinton, a decision was made to intervene on the Bosnian side. To do this we allied ourselves with Al-Qaeda and Egyptian Islamic Jihad and Chechen fighters…we worked with our old mujahideen allies and used heavy Saudi financing. And we vilified the Serbs at every opportunity.
That doesn’t vindicate the Serbs. Our decision to intervene was mainly humanitarian and it was not unreasonable. But we need to understand the false picture that many internalized…either through blind trust in the Clinton administration, or in a failure to draw present revelations into the past and understand how we were controlled by Establishment media prior to the rise of the blogosphere.
the bosnians were like the INC? they were trying to get outside intervention, and using any means they could to convince the international community to intervene. but that’s because they were getting slaughtered by an aggressive group of serbian nationalists intent on wiping out muslims and croats from their imagined greater serbia.
that’s not the same as instigating a war in iraq out of nothing. the bosnians were under siege and doing what they could to get outside help.
At the start of the war, the Bosnians were essentially unarmed, because as a part of FRY they did not need weapons. After the start of the breakup, there was an international arms embargo, prohibiting them from getting weapons to defend themselves against the Serbs with their vision of lebensraum in Bosnian territory. So, I am trying to figure out why it is somehow a war crime to obtain defensive weapons while in the midst of a war that you did not call for, which was declared by a fascist like Milosevic, and in which you had enemies outside your territory and within your territory (Republica Serbska)?
‘The INC were trying to get outside intervention, and using any means they could to convince the United States to intervene. But that’s because they were had been slaughtered by an aggressive group of Sunni Arab nationalists intent on wiping out Shi’a muslim and Kurdish agitation.
that’s is the same.’
Totally different. The INC was a bunch of Iraqis in exile with a grudge against the current dictator of their country. There was no specific imminent threat or even rational reason to suspect that there would be massacres in the near future.
I think it is pretty reasonable to conclude that had the UN and NATO ignored Bosnia the Serbian forces would have conquered Bosnia by force and committed many more massacres as part of their campaign of ethnic cleansing.
The INC had already suffered massacres and we were in the no-fly zones to prevent their resumption. It really is not that different. Both worked the neo-con lines to feed the US IC bogus information.
link
With FRY, the evidence began to build in 1988-1989. Over time, more and more evidence came out. The evidence was not from single cases, but was from many many persons. There were actual forces of the Serbs, who instigated matters about 90 %, in the fields and cities, killing people. The tempo of the evidence increased over time.
Finding allies for intervention was quite easy, and in point of fact, the intervention was a NATO operation, not a US operation.
This was reversed totally in Iraq. Over the period 1991-2002, there was less and less evidence of any problem from SH. Just prior to the invasion, the UN inspectors were re-admitted and found nothing. We had almost no allies, and as recently indicated, our allies were totally unconvinced (like the PM of Spain).
So, remind me again of the parallels here? Save for the modest similarity of generalized concern, there is no similarity at all.
Ethnic cleansing? If one looks at the territory that used to be Yugoslavia you will see that ethnic cleansing has been performed in most areas, Serb, Croat, Bosnian. Why? Because western powers, specifically Germany but also the U.S. (and the Vatican) labored behind the scenes for the breakup of Yugoslavia by hightening ethnic tensions.
When arguing over who were the bad guys in Yugoslavia there are plenty of candidates. Very early in the war several hundred thousand ethnic Serbs were kicked out of a part of Croatia which was issuing ID cards identifying one’s ethnicity. Presumably, they felt fear and the Croats didn’t just say “boo.” Considering the history of WWII (when Germany did the exact same dissection of Yugoslavia) it is not surprising how fearful, hateful people of all ethnicities behaved.
To assess the blame without considering those who kicked the collapse into motion is a considered blindness that interventionists seem to suffer.
Right now Iraq is falling apart. Kurdistan is a separate country due in large part to the U.S.’s plans and actions between Gulf Wars, weakening the central Iraqi government’s control of the region. Other regions are sorting out their own ethnic diversity problems. The current ethnic cleansing done under the noses of our occupation force has left four and a half million Iraqis cleansed from their homes.
The original question was about the accuracy of hundreds of thousands of Muslims being processed and killed through Serbian concentration camps. That, quite simply, is a lie.
But why bother justifying a war where you ethnically cleanse close to five million (if indeed we include the dead as cleansed) Iraqis with lies of about another disintegrated state which was destroyed by, dare I say it, Western Capital?
I agree that in the FRY war there is plenty of blame to go around. The whole thing was signaled by Milosevic’s speech at the Kosova Field on the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosova, in many ways. While I put much of the blame on the serbs and milosevic (certainly more than 50%), the Croats and the Bosnians are certainly due their share.
To this day, the whereabouts of that piece of shit Radavan Karadscic are still concealed by the serbs in Bosnia.
Not sure of the date of the 600th anniversary, but Izetbegovic’s history goes back to working with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem in recruiting the Hanjar Division to fight with the Nazis during WWII. Not sure what Tudjman did in the war, but he was pushing the ethnic identity cards in Croatia long before the first secessions from Yugoslavia. Any Serb who lived in what was Croatia knows about the Ustashi and the several hundred thousand, maybe half million Serbs who were butchered in real, actual concentration camps run by Croats (not the ones that exist in Roger Cohen’s mind).
So instead of trying to pin the blame on one guy or one people, because at this late stage everyone’s covered in blood, let’s at least agree to try to figure out why some countries are allowed to disintegrate, and who benefits.
By the way, Hunt Oil just signed a contract with Kurdistan.
Begging Roger Cohen’s pardon, but speaking only for myself, I don’t find it necessary to use the neocon label to denounce hawks and interventionists. I would, however, argue that there is no such thing as a liberal hawk, as the use of military force to coerce obedience is about as illiberal as you can get.
It’s “liberal” hawks who are, at this point, keeping us in Iraq on the “pragmatic” grounds that the consequences of our withdrawal will be disastrously worse than the consequences of continued occupation.
This is, of course, just as much bullshit as it was during Vietnam, when we were told that the fall of South Vietnam would lead to Soviet conquest of the globe. In the end, it was a regional disaster, but fighting the war cost the US far more than losing it did.
The truth is that we could withdraw from Iraq tomorrow and all we would lose is face. And I don’t know if anyone has noticed, but we have already lost the respect of the world, so we really do have nothing to lose by admitting defeat.