From Berlin to Bonn to Baghdad: The Axes of Humanitarian Militiarism
An Iraqi solider presses down an American soldier he has taken captive, and asks him what the war was about – and then proceeds to answer his own question by trying to pour oil down the throat of his prisoner. No this was not another news clip from the gulf a la CNN but rather, from Hollywood – more specifically, from the 1999 movie Three Kings [1] . Set in the wake of the first Gulf war, four American soldiers seek to do some bounty hunting before returning back to the US at the end of operation Desert Storm – cynical and war weary, they seek to track down and steel a stash of Kuwait gold that is hidden in Iraq. Three Kings presents, with at times brilliant satirical verve, the political economy that underlies the war at many levels – oil revenues that fuel American militarism, but also the tough economic conditions of the American working poor that feeds military recruitment. Equally interestingly, it tests the gravitational pull of economic motivations against the humanitarian demands of those who, on many accountings, were amongst the biggest losers of Operation desert storm – namely the Kurds. By the end of the movie, their quest for gold both thwarted and abandoned, disillusioned and critical of American policy, these four soldiers flout all rules and work in solidarity with a Kurdish community to enable their escape – and in doing so the soldiers maneuver and fight against the charge of their superiors, and indeed the policy advanced by the American government.
Thus one of the principle narrative threads of the movie is the shift from an imperial militarism to military humanitarianism. How do we understand the politics of this shift: is military humanitarianism an alternative to imperial militarism, or is it part of the same project? In placing humanitarian impulses and imperial impulses for intervention side-by-side, the Three Kings draws attention to how the legitimacy afforded by arguments for humanitarian intervention and arguments for ‘imperial’ intervention simultaneously compete and complement. It even suggests that humanitarian rationales for intervention fundamentally complement and legitimize more imperial claims for intervention so effectively, precisely because, in discrepant ‘local’ battles, humanitarianism also competes and restrains the excesses of militarism. Even in the biblical narrative, the three kings may pay a lightening visit to a lowly manger in Bethlehem, but they don’t wind-up their royal operations, close shop on kingly privileges, and take up political solidarity with shepherds and carpenters as a full time calling. Rather, as they return to their palaces, the overtures they made in the slums of Bethlehem only enhances their royalty – their power appears all the more legitimate for being welded with such benevolence! Ironically, then, the pitch for humanitarian motivations for intervention articulated by the European powers, may be one of the enabling conditions of imperial intervention today. In fact, in the wake of the second gulf war, are we going to observe humanitarian operations being mobilized to offer post facto legitimation of Anglo-American military adventures? Some of the building blocks for the discourses and practices of humanitarianism that may now retrospectively seek to legitimize the intervention in Iraq may have been generated by the discourses of multilateral humanitarian intervention that was advanced in the bombing of Kosovo and Afghanistan, and even the hand wringing about the failure to intervene to halt genocide in Rwanda, or in solidarity with the plight of the Kurdish community in the first Gulf war. In Kosovo, reasonable people disagreed about whether or not there should have been an intervention – if anything, the primary argument was about whether the intervention came too late because they were slaughtering Muslims, whether the intervention should have focused on ground troops rather than aerial bombing and so on. When the world was confronted with the genocide in Rwanda, in many countries it was often the left who took the lead in condemning the UN and members of the security-council for not intervening[2]. By the time Afghanistan came along, the super powers themselves had sought to buttress their military aspirations by appropriating the language of humanitarianism, and succeeded in getting the UN on board. In the operation to shock and awe their effort to mobilize humanitarianism did not succeed in legitimizing the intervention – in fact, imperial intervention was often counter-posed to humanitarian militarism by the French and German governments. However, as we look back on over a decade long rise of humanitarian militarism, a return to humanitarianism as the dominant lens for military intervention may offer little relief; Rather it raises important questions for us about our own complicity in bringing together humanitarian and interventionist arguments in contexts such as Rwanda – as we survey the terrain ahead of us, it may well turn out that humanitarian militarism may play out its role in the ethical economy of future occupations all the more effectively by simultaneously competing with and complementing an overtly imperial lens.
In 1884, after their respective military expeditions had laid claims to different parts of Africa, colonial powers convened in Berlin to pour over maps, argue boundary lines and divvy up the continent among themselves[3]. After the bombing of Afghanistan in the fall of 2001, over a hundred years later, Germany was once again the venue of a conference among the great European powers – this time the maps were of Afghanistan. The Berlin conference was explicitly about the contours of European sovereignty over different parcels of land in Africa; there were no Africans present at the gathering. Yet, in the 21st Century, with the ghost of Berlin glossing our current discourse of intervention, the conference in Bonn was ostensibly to be on the contours of Afghan sovereignty; the UN searched all over the world, from the hills of Rome to the beaches of Cyprus, to find Afghans for the conference. Today less then two years later, in the ‘liberation’ of Iraq, Baghdad has become yet another venue for ‘recognizing’ sovereignty – an effort that George Bush says (and apparently with little intentional irony) is about Iraqis choosing their own regime.
In seeking to trace the continuities and discontinuities from Berlin to Bonn to Baghdad, let us look at how a discursive space for military intervention was produced through the norms and conventions of humanitarian in Afghanistan. The fact that there were humanitarian arguments supporting the military campaign against Afghanistan is in itself not a new feature of military intervention in general - almost every war, anywhere, has probably been promoted by its advocates as a just war. In fact, Afghanistan itself follows on the history of the ‘humanitarian’ bombing of Kosovo. As with Kosovo, what was striking about military assault against Afghanistan was the very prominent role of humanitarian arguments. Not surprisingly, human rights, particularly the human rights of women[4], featured large. Accompanying human rights however, were other discourses regarding inter-civilizational dialogue[5], poverty alleviation and economic development[6], democratization, multi-culturalism, cultural authenticity, peace and so on[7]. The US and British government reports outlining their evidence against Osama bin Ladin for the events of September 11 constituted the formal briefs supporting the case for military intervention. Yet in many ways the evidence cited in these reports, and indeed the international law of self-defense, were not that pivotal to the legitimation of that intervention. In fact I would argue that much more crucial in this regard were the past decade’s post-cold war discussions regarding humanitarian intervention in furtherance of international norms[8]. The terms of reference for these discussions created the space for the military intervention by giving content to the moral authority of the Anglo-American coalition in challenging the policies and practices of the Taliban government. Of course this also enabled movement in the reverse direction, from the military rout of the Taliban government by the Anglo-American coalition to the Bonn processes of the United Nations, to be quite seamless. Afghanistan, I would like to argue, had been ‘available’ for military intervention before September 11th; the ideological ground was laid not by macho bombastic talk of the axes of evil and military conquest, but by the soft promise of reluctant advocates (by definition there are only ‘reluctant’ advocates) of intervention as mid-wife to religious tolerance and women’s freedom, human rights and liberal modernity…
We began by tracing the shift from imperial intervention to humanitarian intervention in the Three Kings – today we see aspirations towards such a shift emanating from efforts (particularly by the British) to mobilize humanitarianism in generating post-facto legitimacy for the occupation of Iraq in the wake of this second Gulf war. To the extent that the war was not only about cruise missiles that ‘shock and awe’, but also ideological discourses that legitimize and rationalize, the Anglo-American coalition faced an extraordinary defeat. The strength of the anti-war movement that mobilized against the intervention ensured that ‘coalition’ forces were spectacularly unsuccessful in their invocation of humanitarian discourses to legitimize their interventions in advance of the ‘liberation’ of Iraq. By honing critical antennas regarding the structure of global power and its distributive consequences, unpacking the political economy of oil, asserting democratic claims for accountability regarding the (mis)use of political, economic and military power by governments all over the world, and coalition building across multiple frontiers, the dominant reference point of the intervention in Iraq was conquest rather than humanitarianism. The question now is whether humanitarian initiatives for the ‘reconstruction of Iraq’ will mop up the legitimacy gaps an imperial war has left behind – or, if the long term legacy of the global anti-war effort is that humanitarian militarism has been disabled as a weapon of mass destruction. Have we connected the dots from Berlin in 1844 to Baghdad in 2003?
[1] In fact, against the backdrop of the first gulf war making its appearance in our living rooms via CNN’s tele-drama of smart bombs, one of the interventions made by the movie is stylistic experiments with technical stunts about the theater of militarism. It speaks to the production of news as popular culture, while itself being a newsworthy product for popular cultural consumption.
[2] This should be situated in a gradual transformation in the left’s attitude towards sovereignty in a post-colonial context. In the independence struggles of anti-colonial nationalism, sovereignty was often asserted to advance democratic participation – yet, over the last few decades, (in the global North and the global South), claims to sovereignty have been often deployed to defeat the democratic aspirations of minorities, dissenters, subalterns… this has been accompanied by a concomitant complication of earlier attitudes towards the sacredness of territorial boundaries. Yet the disillusionment with sovereignty as the response to colonialism doesn’t diminish the critical scrutiny we pay to the arguments, humanitarian and otherwise, used to justify ‘intervention’….
[3] Bismarck convened this conference, 1884-85.
[4] “Because of our recent military gains in Afghanistan” Laura Bush told the American people “women are no longer imprisoned in their homes. The fight against terrorism” is, she says, “a fight for the rights and dignity of women.” Lest we think that this marriage of feminists and interventionists is merely a post-facto appropriation of Afghani women to launder a dirty war, we are reminded that many feminists had been chiding the U.S. government for not taking a stronger position earlier. The Feminist Majority Foundation has been campaigning for several years to pressure the American government and the United Nations “to do everything in their power to restore the human rights of Afghan women and girls.” http://www.feminist.org/afghan/facts.html
[5] Multi-culturalism is another piece of the normative map situating the military effort. In fact, linking domestic multiculturalism and foreign policy, Bush situated the military effort as a ‘crusade’ for a multi-cultural world bringing together “the Christian faith ... Judaism ... the Hindu faith and …Islamic tradition…. Foregrounding this normative commitment over military goals, “our coalition” he says “is more than just one to rout terrorism out of the world. It’s one to bind together, to knit those traditions in a way that helps people in need.” (Speech By George W. Bush, President, U.S. State Department, Washington, D.C., October 4, 2001).
[6] Reconstruction assistance has also been linked to a deeper normative vision of poverty alleviation and economic development. In fact, citing the political and geographic access enabled by the defeat of the Taliban, the military intervention is translated into a humanitarian relief operation. On the eve of the U.S. military effort on October 4th, U.S. officials urged that “you can initiate… development programs in the middle of a civil war and a famine.” Encouraging reporters to beef up on the literature regarding opportunities for pursuing humanitarian goals in the context of military engagement, officials cited books such as Rising from the Ashes and Disasters and Development to urge a learned optimism about compassionate militarism!
[7] By drawing attention to the prominence of issues such as women’s rights and multi-culturalism, I do not intend to dilute the continued force of self-defense, racism, machismo and other received markers of militarism in the public sphere – However, although the traditionalist discourses of military muscle remained potent, Afghanistan did mark an extraordinary moment in the international public sphere, where, against the backdrop of a decade long tussle with humanitarian engagement, the normative force of ‘humanitarian’ discourses constituted a space for war.
[8] As David Chandler has noted, “Humanitarian militarism, widely advocated during the 1999 Kosovo war, would have been an oxymoron before the 1990s; today it has become a tautology.” In fact the bombing of Afghanistan came at a time when the founding assumptions of the world of large-scale humanitarian intervention was said to be undergoing a tectonic shift.