Colossus (62 page)

6
.
http://www.un.int/usa/FactSheets_GA58.htm.

7
. Madeleine Albright, “Think Again: United Nations,”
Foreign Policy
, September–October 2003, p. 22.

8
. The United States walked out of the International Court in 1984 after being sued by Nicaragua for mining its harbors.

9
. Forman et al.,
United States in a Global Age
, p. 10f. The principal opt-outs are from the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the Antiballistic Missile Treaty, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, the Biological Weapons Convention (verification protocol), a proposed UN convention on small arms and light weapons, the Ottawa Convention banning the production, trade and use of antipersonnel land mines, the conventions on the Rights of the Child and on the Elimnation of Discrimination against Women, and (perhaps most famously) the Kyoto Protocol on global warming.

10
. Karnow,
Vietnam
, p. 16.

11
. Department of Veterans Affairs,
http://www.va.gov/pressrel/amwars01.html
.

12
. Priest,
Mission
, p. 69.

13
. Boot,
Savage Wars
, p. 320.

14
. A recurrent error of recent American policy since 1991 has been to give military enterprises names more suitable to brands of medication. “Provide Comfort,” “Southern Watch” “Deliberate Force” and “Enduring Freedom” all are unwittingly reminiscent of remedies for diarrhea.

15
. Haass,
Intervention
, p. 37.

16
. Ibid., p. 168.

17
. Gause, “U.S.-Saudi Relationship,” p. 351.

18
. Ibid., p. 343. In 1990 the Saudi armed forces totaled just 111,500. Iraq, with a population less than double the size, had an army five times larger.

19
. Bergen,
Holy War Inc.,
p. 85f.

20
. Reich, “United States and Israel”, p. 235f.

21
. Ibid., p. 237.

22
. Ibid., p. 236.

23
. Bowden,
Black Hawk Down
, p. 166.

24
. Note that the aversion of American politicians and voters to military casualties has nothing to do with the attitudes of American service personnel, whose often reckless bravery Aidid’s men sought to exploit.

25
. Haass,
Intervention
, p. 46.

26
. See Power,
Problem from Hell
.

27
. The United Nations Convention of the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of 1948 is a widely misunderstood document. Its second article sets out a clear definition of the word that Raphael Lemkin coined four years before. It covers “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such”:

a.killing members of the group;

b.causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

c.deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

d.imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

e.forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

It is not only genocide that is declared a punishable offense by the convention, but also conspiracy to commit genocide, direct and public incitement to commit genocide, attempt to commit genocide and complicity in genocide. There can be no question that according to this definition, crimes of genocide were committed in Burundi in 1972, Iraq in 1987–88, Bosnia in 1992 and 1995, Rwanda in 1994 and Kosovo in 1998 and 1999.

28
. Simms,
Unfinest Hour
, p. 54.

29
. Ibid., p. 56. Cf. Shawcross,
Deliver Us from Evil
, p. 83.

30
. Simms,
Unfinest Hour
, p. 339f.

31
. Ibid., p. 57ff.

32
. Ibid., pp. 88, 95f, 120f, 130f.

33
. Ibid., p. 133.

34
. Shawcross,
Deliver Us from Evil
, pp. 92, 94.

35
. Holbrooke,
To End a War
, pp. 231–312.

36
. Ibid., pp. 318, 322.

37
. The full text of the agreement can be found at
http://www.mondediplomatique.fr/dossiers/kosovo/rambouillet.html.

38
. See my article on the subject in the
Financial Times
, April 3, 1999. See also Bobbitt,
Shield of Achilles
, pp. 468–77. Article 2(4) of the UN Charter states that “all Members shall refrain … from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state,” while Article 2(7) prohibits intervention “in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state.” In addition, the General Assembly’s 1970 Declaration on Principles of International Law denies members “the right to intervene, directly or indirectly, for any reason whatever, in the internal affairs of any other state.” Under the UN Charter, force may be used only in self-defense or with the explicit authorization of the Security Council in response to an act of aggression (Chapter VII, Articles 39 to 51). Only by ignoring the UN Charter (or, in the words of Tony Blair, “qualifying … the principle of non-interference … in important respects”) could the military intervention by NATO on behalf of the Albanians of Kosovo be justified. See Caplan, “Humanitarian Intervention: Which Way Forward?” p. 25f.

39
. On the “ ‘no casualties’ mindset” that characterized the war, see Boot,
Savage Wars
, pp. 325–27.

40
.
New York Times
, August 15, 2003.

41
. Ignatieff,
Empire Lite
, p. 70f.

42
. Boot,
Savage Wars
, p. 327. The war’s diplomatic low point came when the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade was unintentionally hit by a guided missile. Still more damage was done to the legitimacy of the NATO intervention by the use of cluster bombs on civilian targets in Serbia.

43
. Ignatieff,
Virtual War
.

44
. This was the conclusion of Ferguson,
Cash Nexus
.

45
. Power, “
Problem from Hell
.”

46
. Shawcross,
Deliver Us from Evil
, p. 118f.

47
. Ibid., pp. 106, 119, 207ff.

48
. Ibid., p. 211.

49
. Bacevich,
American Empire
, p. 202f.

50
.
New York Times
, September 24, 2003.

51
. Woodward,
Bush at War
, esp. pp. 30, 150.

52
. Bush’s words to a group of senators on September 13, 2001, quoted by Howard Fineman in
Newsweek
, September 24, 2001.

53
. Clausewitz,
On War
, ch. 1, p. 87.

54
. Around ten thousand Mahdists were killed to just forty-eight British soldiers. For an account of the battle, see Ferguson,
Empire
, pp. 267–70.

55
. American forces had been operating in post-Soviet Central Asia since the mid-1990s, in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan as well as in Pakistan. But it was still far from easy to mount even an air war from territories so recently added to the U.S. sphere of influence: Priest,
Mission
, pp. 38, 101f.

56
. See the exceptionally well-informed account in Woodward,
Bush at War
.

57
. Text from
http://usinfo.state.gov/topical/pol/terror/secstrat.htm.

58
. See, e.g., Galston, “Perils of Preemptive War.”

59
. Leffler, “9/11.”

60
. Shawcross,
Deliver Us from Evil
, p. 224f.

61
. The list of transgressions was eloquently presented to the House of Commons by the prime minister, Tony Blair, on March 18, 2003.

62
. Six in 1999, three in 2000, three in 2001 and five in 2002 alone.

63
. Shawcross,
Deliver Us from Evil
, pp. 250, 320.

64
. Stanley Hoffman, “America Goes Backward,”
New York Review of Books
, June 12, 2003; James P. Rubin, “Stumbling into War,”
Foreign Affairs
, September–October 2003; Madeleine K. Albright, “Bridges, Bombs or Bluster,” ibid.

65
. Pollack,
Threatening Storm
.

66
. “The Divided West,”
Financial Times
supplement, June 2003, p. 5.

67
. Text at
http://ods-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N02/682/26/PDF/N0268226.pdf?
OpenElement.

68
. It would be interesting to see how credible this document looks today.

69
. See the inferences drawn by Mark Danner, “Iraq: The New War,”
New York Review of Books
, September 25, 2003, p. 90.

70
. “The Divided West,”
Financial Times
supplement, June 2003, p. 5.

71
. “It is not well brought-up behavior,” snapped Chirac. “They missed a good opportunity to keep quiet.” For good measure, he added: “If they wanted to diminish their chances of joining Europe, they could not have found a better way.”

72
. Hoffman, “America Goes Backward,” p. 74. Hoffman argues that the United States is pursuing “a policy of hubris in which international domination is presented under the mask of universal benign ideals.” If anyone was wearing that mask in March 2003, it was surely Jacques Chirac.

73
. Mark Husband and Stephen Fidler, “No Smoking Gun,”
Financial Times
, June 4, 2003.

74
.
Financial Times
, June 4, 2003.

75
. Testimony of John Scarlett before the Hutton Inquiry into the death of Michael Kelly, August 28, 2003:
http://www.the-hutton-inquiry.org.uk/
.

76
. Hansard, March 18, 2003:
http://www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/cm200203/cmhansrd/cm030318/debtext/30318–06.htm
and-08.htm.

77
. Woodward,
Bush at War
, p. 106.

78
. Rodric Braithwaite, “End of the Affair,”
Prospect
, May 2003, pp. 20–23.

79
. Gilbert,
Never Despair
, p. 1271.

80
. Ibid.

81
. Dimbleby and Reynolds,
Ocean Apart
, p. 255.

82
. Ibid., p. 252.

83
. Ibid., p. 288.