Among the remarkable aspects of the post-cold-war world is how faithfully
humanity has picked up where it left off 50 years ago, as if a half-century of
East-West conflict froze politics and history in time. The Japanese and the
Italians now seek the functioning political systems that eluded them in the
late 1940s. Indonesia's declared goals today--democracy and national
integration of its disparate population--are those Sukarno set when he became
the new nation's first President in 1949. Elsewhere, many of the conflicts seen
on CNN seem like delayed responses to decolonization and the relaxation of big
power politics during the first few years after World War II. It's a pet
theory, unproven and unprovable. From it follows the corollary--equally beyond
verification--that had the cold war not intervened, at least some of today's
conflicts might have been resolved many years ago.
You needn't look far, certainly, to find ''something approaching chaos in
international relations,'' as William Shawcross puts it in his new book, Deliver
Us from Evil: Peacekeepers, Warlords and a World of Endless Conflict.
But what is the cause of our New World Disorder, Shawcross asks? What should be
done, or not done, to counter it? How effective--how justified, even--is
''humanitarian intervention''? Indeed, what does the term really mean? And what
is meant when ''the international community'' is invoked in rendering judgment
on political causes or the independence movements that would redraw the global
map?
These are questions that concern both Shawcross, a distinguished British
journalist, and Noam Chomsky, the celebrated linguist and decidedly
uncelebrated political polemicist, who now offers us The New Military Humanism:
Lessons from Kosovo. Their books come at the same subject in very
different ways. Shawcross--whose previous books include one on Cambodia, Sideshow--is
a journalist in his very genes, dedicated to seeing and saying. Chomsky is a
listener, a logician, and a Greek chorus all in one: He's not interested merely
in what the West has done in Kosovo; he's just as concerned with what the West
tells itself about what it has done and the gap--a wide one, Chomsky
asserts--between the two. I wouldn't describe either of these books as
delivering a happy, diverting message. But they succeed well in explaining
where things stand a decade after the Berlin Wall fell--and where we need to go
from here.
Deliver Us from Evil is an ambitious book. It's built around close
accounts of the main crises that have erupted since the Berlin Wall's collapse.
We fly from Cambodia to Bosnia to Somalia to Iraq to various African capitals
and finally to Kosovo, with stops at the U.N. in between. In each case,
Shawcross gives us the principal actors, a chronology of the crisis, how
various forces coalesced in response, and the outcome--if, indeed, there has
been one. On his travels, Shawcross is often in the company of U.N.
Secretary-General Kofi A. Annan, with whom he is evidently on chummy terms. He
enjoys wide access to the leadership in pretty much any capital he visits, and
he's at home in the borderless world of international agencies.
Shawcross' conclusions are cogent. Beneath the chaos, he writes, ''a new global
architecture is being built upon the international system that was constructed
after the Second World War.'' Among its principal elements are ''humanitarian
rather than strategic intervention'' and a world judicial system that includes
the International Criminal Court inspired by the messes in Yugoslavia and
Rwanda. ''The overall aim is to protect the rights of individuals and to limit
the impunity of dictators,'' he says. The argument here is best made by Annan
early on. The long-term answer to the world's conflicts, he tells Shawcross, is
to encourage development and a democratic consciousness, so that people are
involved in their own governance and learn to protect human rights and the rule
of law in their own societies.
If there's a problem in this book, it has to do with method more than argument.
Shawcross writes out of a long British tradition of ''I-was-there'' journalism,
exemplified by the early work of Alan Moorehead, the great wartime
correspondent of London's Daily Express. That's fine when describing El
Alamein, but it's a mismatch here. I don't much care about the wind-chill
factor as Annan ruminates one winter evening. Stale detail lends the book a
superficiality that's at odds with Shawcross' purpose--and it crowds out
analysis that would have better supported his arguments. At half the length, Deliver
Us from Evil would be twice as powerful.
''There is never an easy answer as to why the spotlight of international
concern focuses more on some conflicts than others,'' Shawcross writes. In The
New Military Humanism, Noam Chomsky disagrees vigorously with this
assertion. And ''vigorous'' hardly does justice to the force of his argument:
Reading Chomsky is like standing in a wind tunnel. With relentless logic,
Chomsky bids us to listen closely to what our leaders tell us--and to discern
what they are leaving out. The answers become clear enough, he says. The catch
is they won't be the ones we want to hear. ''One of the hardest things to do is
look in the mirror,'' Chomsky writes. ''It is also one of the most important
things to do.''
Kosovo, site of the Western alliance's most recent intervention, is Chomsky's
template. You can't put Western conduct down to humanitarianism, he says, when
the West tolerates (or supports) equivalent (or worse) offenses in Turkey's war
against the Kurds, or Colombia's anti-insurgent drive. NATO bombing may have
brought Milosevic to his knees in Belgrade, but Chomsky makes a good case that
it was against international law, that it could have been avoided via
diplomacy, and that it was motivated by national and NATO self-interest rather
than moral concern. As Chomsky sees it, the issue was credibility: The bombs
were meant to consolidate NATO and stand as a threat to others who would defy
it.
Humanitarian intent? A fig leaf, as Chomsky sees it, a euphemism employed by
everyone from the American Puritans to Stalin and Hitler. Limiting the impunity
of dictators is a fine idea, he argues, but who gets the job? His answer is not
dissimilar to Shawcross': What's needed is a strong international framework to
which all nations are subject. But he's less optimistic about whether that is
within our grasp. ''The world is ruled by force,'' Chomsky writes, ''under a
veil of moral purpose woven by the educated classes, who, as throughout
history, preach eloquently about 'a landmark in international relations,' a
'new era' of justice and righteousness under the courageous leadership of the
enlightened states, by accident their own.''
Chomsky, as he often does, has a voice problem. He is shrill and
sarcastic--chiefly because he's angry with what he sees as rampant American
hypocrisy. The strident tone and unyielding criticism long ago landed him in
the Siberia of American discourse. It's an undeserved fate. What Chomsky has to
say is fully as legitimate as what Shawcross has to tell us. He is certainly
correct as to the price Americans pay for ignoring history and failing to see
themselves as others see them. If there is anything new about our age, it is
that the questions Chomsky raises will eventually have to be answered. Agree
with him or not, we lose out by not listening.
Smith was covering East Asia for the International Herald Tribune as the New
World Disorder emerged.
Copyright 2005, Bloomberg L.P.