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2010 - The Challenges to Global Security: Edward N LUTTWAK
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22/12/99
Edward
N LUTTWAK SENIOR FELLOW, CENTER FOR STRATEGIC & INTERNATIONAL STUDIES, WASHINGTON DC
Studiously ignoring the world's great humanitarian catastrophes of
Sudan where at least two million people already have died with more dying
each day; of Angola where starvation and disease are adding daily to the
several hundred thousand victims of endless fighting; of Rwanda where the
most preventable of genocides unfolded unresisted; and of Sierra Leone where
numbers are beside the point given the peculiar atrocity of its bandenkrieg
the USA and its allies instead decided to bomb Serbia-Montenegro
in a bid to secure the political rights of some two million Albanians. NATO
in the process promoted anti-Westernism in Russia, damaged relations with
the Chinese government, and established a UN protectorate that must now
exist as long as the Serb-Albanian hostility does indefinitely. ASDS is contagious it seems. Nullifying long years of inter-military co-operation with the Indonesian armed forces, Australia has boldly taken the lead in the East Timor intervention, upending its entire policy of Asian 'good-neighbourliness', on which its long-term future depends. Earlier, there were feckless US interventions in such places as Somalia and Haiti, which indeed prompted an early diagnosis by Dr Michael Mandelbaum ("foreign policy as social work") who could still then believe that it was only a Clinton Administration malady. ASDS may have other causes as well, but two seem most obvious.
No longer preoccupied by the Cold War, the US and its NATO allies, and others including Australia, evidently now have spare military capacity. This generates bureaucratic impulses to look for action. The US Joint Staff, for example, is exploring the possibility that peacekeeping missions might also eventuate in ex-Soviet Central Asia; certainly the last place on earth where US interests might be advanced by a US military presence.
No longer disciplined by the hard strategic priorities of preserving a global equilibrium with the Soviet Union and its client states, the foreign-policy machinery in the USA and elsewhere allows the arbitrary choices of media coverage Kosovo, yes; Sudan, no to distort its priorities. But not quite. There is another and much greater distortion: the no-casualty rule of "Post-Heroic" warfare, as I call it.
When the USA abandoned Somalia in 1993 after 18 soldiers were killed in a failed commando raid in Mogadishu, it became clear there were no significant national interests to justify the loss of more US soldiers' lives. But when the diplomatic costs and risk of casualties increased, highlighting the immediate need to end the conflict in Kosovo, the zero-casualty rule still prevented any use of armed helicopters or fixed-wing aircraft for intensive low-altitude attacks against Serbian ground forces, which likely would have forced an end to the conflict instead of awaiting Belgrade's eventual decision to withdraw.
It was comforting to believe the Somalia argument that the acceptance of casualties reflects rational calculations: X interests justify Y casualties. In reality, affluent, low birth-rate societies simply do not tolerate casualties for any reason short of immediate self-defence. Hence we have the paradoxical ASDS conjunction of eager interventionism with a plain refusal to fight except insofar as it can be done by remote bombardment with cruise missiles or exhaustively protected aircraft, whose pilots statistically fly in greater safety than the passengers of some third world airlines. In the meantime, it is Kosovo, yes, Sierra Leone, no, even though neither has any justification unless humanitarian, and the latter's need for a UN protectorate is so much greater. But of course, there are no high-contrast targets in Sierra Leone.
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Edward N LUTTWAK
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2010
- The Challenges To Global Security | Foreword:
Cliff Beal | King
Abdullah II | Kofi
Annan | Ehud Barak
| Tony Blair | Jacques
Chirac | Bill
Clinton | Sadako
Ogato | James
Orbinski | Romano
Prodi | Lord
Robertson Of Port Ellen | Mary
Robinson | Javier
Solana | Cornelio
Sommaruga | James
Wolfensohn | Postscript:
Edward N. Luttwak | Postscript:
Lawrence Freedman