Read THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES Online

Authors: Philip Bobbitt

THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES (172 page)

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Charles Krauthammer, to the contrary, makes the excellent, and to my mind persuasive, point that things were not in fact so much easier during the Cold War, in his “The Greatest Cold War Myth of All,”
Time
(November 29, 1993): 86.

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And in three constitutional variants, vis-á-vis each state's people. These are discussed in Chapter 26.

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President discusses budget in radio address to the nation, August 25, 2001.

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State of the Union Address, January 29, 2002.


Address of the President to the Joint Session of Congress, February 27, 2001.


Inaugural Adress, January 20, 2001.

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Thus, for example, the protection of the South Korean regime became a vital interest of the United States.

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Bearing in mind that there are markets in more than things, e.g., markets in time, information, education.

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Prior to the founding of the United States, sovereign governments were not bound by their laws. That is why the United States was the first modern state to have a written constitution.

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“I saw that two or three men in the Senate and two or three in the House and the President ran the government. The others were merely figureheads… I had no ambition to hold office… because I felt… that I would fall short of the first place and nothing less than that would satisfy me.”
1

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A similar election campaign occurred in 1964 when the incumbent, President Lyndon Johnson, ran against the Republican senator Barry Goldwater. Critics of the American intervention in Viet Nam have often claimed that they were misled by Johnson's claims to have kept America out of deeper involvement in Asia when he was, at the time of the election, already contemplating more extensive U.S. troop deployments there. Like so much else regarding Johnson's presidency, these criticisms have more to do with the pathology of the period than with Johnson's motives. No one can deny that Goldwater's war aims and tactics (including the use of nuclear weapons) were considerably more interventionist than Johnson's nor that a responsible president must often prepare for war if he is to pursue peace. Wilson and Johnson each thought he could lead a nation into war by showing restraint, demonstrating that neither man desired war (which was in fact true). See Michael Beschloss,
Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes 1963 – 1964
(Simon & Schuster, 1997). Once American troops were committed to combat, Wilson succeeded in uniting the country, as did Johnson for about the same period of time—and for no longer.

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The original purpose of the Declaration of War clause was not, as is comonly assumed, to make Congress's adoption of a declaration a condition precedent for the United States to satisfy before it could enter into hostilities. Rather, the purpose of the clause was to enable the United States to
perfect
a belligerency, allowing the declarer to engage in unlimited warfare, as provided by international law.

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Lippmann later claimed that the decision to oppose the treaty was basically his editor's; “I followed him, though I was not then, and not now, convinced that it was the wise thing to do. If I had it to do over again, I should take the other side; we supplied [the Republican opposition to the treaty] with too much ammunition.” Ronald Steel,
Walter Lippmann and the American Century
(Little, Brown, 1980), 166. See also Walter Lippmann, “The Intimate Papers of Colonel House,”
Foreign Affairs
4 (1962); and Walter Lippmann, “Notes for Biography,”
New Republic
, July 16, 1930.

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J. M. Keynes,
The Economic Consequences of the Peace
(Harcourt, Brace, and Howe, 1920), 39 – 44. Consider, however, that Keynes also described Lloyd George as “this goat-footed bard, this half-human visitor to our age from the hagridden magic and enchanted woods of antiquity.” “Mr. Lloyd George: A Fragment,” in John M. Keynes,
Essays in Biography
(Norton, 1963), 35.

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“House was well enough informed about French politics to be aware that failure to allay the well-founded French fears of a future German attack might result in the fall of Clemenceau and his replacement by a premier who would make impossible demands upon Germany in the name of security.” Arthur Walworth, “Considerations on Woodrow Wilson and Edward M. House: An Essay Letter to the Editor,”
Presidential Studies Quarterly
24 (Winter 1994).

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These were used to attack Sarajevo in early 1992. The U.S. Air Force chief of staff recommended air strikes to relieve Sarajevo, and later testified that the artillery ringing the city in mountain batteries could have been destroyed from the air. This, however, was vetoed on the grounds that it might only prompt the Serbs to attack Sarajevo with ground troops. The siege of Sarajevo had begun.

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A group including the United States and the most influential European powers, organized to deal with the Yugoslav crisis.

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Former secretary of state Lawrence Eagleburger has observed that the Bush administration's decision to intervene in Somalia was strongly influenced by television coverage; others have concluded that the American decision to withdraw from Somalia was also precipitated by the media. Secretary of state Madeleine Albright told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that “television's ability to bring graphic images of pain and outrage into our living rooms has heightened the pressure both of immediate engagement in areas of international crisis and immediate disengagement when events do not go according to plan.” “Media and Information Technology,”
Reinventing Diplomacy in the Information Age
(Center for Strategic and International Studies 1999), but see also Warren Sobel, “The CNN Effect,”
American Journalism Review
, May 1996.

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The following references are to the
New York Times; The Times
of London took a very different view.

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Presumably this argument does not apply to the conflict in Croatia, which is a true nation-state in that it is overwhelmingly the creature of a single cultural group, the Croats.

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The Bosnian government has assembled details of 13,000 rape victims. Noel Malcolm,
Bosnia: A Short History
(Macmillan, 1994), 295, n.27.

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Many Muslims, however, made it to Tuzla, where there were then reports of reprisal attacks by the displaced Muslims on Serbian civilians living there. Local authorities reported harassment and physical violence, and the robbery of several Serb houses, without police protection. Police reportedly watched as unknown persons killed a Serbian man. The mayor of Tuzla warned the police over this incident, and undertook to compensate Serbian citizens for damages thus incurred.

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For example, Jon Western, a State Department analyst stated, after his resignation, “You can't read through the accounts of atrocities on a daily basis, add them up and see what's happening and not be overwhelmed,” citing one cable—which he said was typical of the diplomatic traffic he received—that told of a nine-year-old Muslim girl who was raped by Serbian fighters and left in a pool of blood, and whose parents were forced to watch helplessly from behind a fence for two days as she died. A few days before Marshall Freeman Harris, another career U.S. foreign service officer, had resigned, calling attention to the U.S. administration's unacknowledged efforts to pressure Bosnia into accepting the Vance-Owen plan. These resignations and the public appearances of George Kenney, who resigned from his post as Yugoslav desk officer, gave credibility to the media's reports from the front, which otherwise tended to be discounted by diplomats and government officials.

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One eyewitness report from the village of Zaklopca, where at least eighty-three men—virtually all the men of the village—were summarily executed by Serb irregulars, stated: “My brother in law was outside in front of the house when the Serbs appeared. They told him to give up his weapons. He told them that he did not have any weapons but that they could take his cows. Then one of them opened fire and killed him.”

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UNSC Resolution 836 did, however, authorize U.N. forces to use “all means necessary” to protect the enclaves.

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The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the successor to the CSCE.

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General Ratko Mladic, indicted for the massacre at Srebrenica, was determined to expel the refugees gathered there before any diplomatic settlement incorporated their right to live in the town and in the surrounding villages, like Zepa. Henry Porter, “Days of Shame,”
The Guardian (London)
, November 17, 1999.

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Of whom I was one at the time, having been appointed the counselor on international law in 1990. This opinion did not, however, reflect my views, though it may possibly have reflected that of others.

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Much to his credit, President Clinton later, in 1999, repudiated these remarks and publicly regretted them. Bill Nichols, “The More Policy Changes, the More It Seems the Same,”
USA Today
, April 21, 1994, A4.

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As the European Community (E.C.) became in November 1993.

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A January 1993 United States Agency for International Development Report concluded that 23 percent of U.N. relief supplies to the desperate refugees were in fact allocated to Serbian warlords. J.M.O. Sharp,
Bankrupt in the Balkans: British Policy in Bosnia
(Institute for Public Policy Research, 1993), 14.

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On July 10, 1995, Karremans, the Dutch commander of U.N. forces at Srebrenica, requested air support from the senior Unprofor officer, the French general Bertrand Janvier. These repeated requests were denied. When on July 11 Karremans desperately asked for NATO air strikes to relieve his position, Janvier declined to send the request forward, unbelievably, on the grounds that Karremans had used the wrong request form. The massacres occurred five days later.


One doubts whether this justifies the actions of those Dutch soldiers who forced Muslim families out of the U.N. compound at one of the “safe areas” and then surrendered their U.N. helmets to the Serbs who used them to dupe Muslims who had fled to the hills into coming forward to their destruction. The real shame, however, lies with the political leaders who put these soldiers in such a position.

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“As 1993 wore on, it became increasingly difficult for me to justify my personal participation in a policy whose tentative nature was being exploited by the Serbian aggressors. We were dealing fairly well with the humanitarian symptoms of the Bosnian war, the refugees and the displaced, but we weren't treating the causes. There was a tendency among administration officials to give public emphasis to the humanitarian issues as a way of disguising the lack of a consistent political approach. I sent several back-channel memos to Christopher suggesting variants of forceful responses but received no acknowledgement that they'd ever been read.” Zimmermann, 226.

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Novel, that is, for the society of nation-states. State-nations had no such restraints, as, for example, in the European coercion of the Ottoman Empire over the treatment of Christian minorities.

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The informal annual meeting of governments to discuss political topics that grew out of the G-7 (Group of Seven) economic summits.

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His celebrated and impressive (even to this day) Theory of Distinctions laid the basis for the philosophical analysis of identity and, importantly, for Descartes's argument for the separation of body and mind. I am indebted to Professor Mark Sagoff for this observation.

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Much as his father had at first been seen as a Burgundian and not a Castilian—and had faced a Spanish revolt on that account. The key difference was that Augsburg had greatly enhanced the “territoriality” of the state, as Westphalia would do to an even greater degree, tying princes to specific places and increasing the importance of national identification with the ruler.


Goethe's tragedy
Egmont
is based on this life, which also inspired Beethoven's
Egmont Overture
.

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The Spanish offer was successful.

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Thus, for example, he allocates the question of the lawfulness of duels between princes when their state is thereby jeopardized to theologians because it depends on a construction of the first three commands of the Decalogue. Similarly, concerning treaties concluded between men of different religions, Gentili delegates authority away from the lawyers. See Haggemacher, 171, who rather deprecates this move.

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Which means, roughly, “Theologians should be silent on matters beyond their province.”
De Juris Belli
, I, xii, 92.

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