The post-Cold War era, 1989-2001

Contents

A midnight surprise – the U.S. invasion of Panama, Dec. 20, 1989 [US Dept. of Defense]

I. Introduction: New world order?

II. The Panama invasion

III. The Persian Gulf War

IV. New world disorder and “humanitarian intervention”

V. The failed American crusade to remake Russia

About the authors

Endnotes

Recommended resources

I.  Introduction:  New world order?

Reagan’s shift in attitude came after witnessing Gorbachev’s democratizing domestic reforms coupled with his persistent efforts to end the Cold War over the previous three years.^[3]  Gorbachev was a visionary, intent on establishing not only a new détente with the West, but also an unprecedented era of international cooperation, mutual security, and peace.  He outlined his bold vision for a new world order in an hour-long speech before the UN General Assembly on December 8, 1988, which read in part:

Further world progress is now possible only through the search for a consensus of all mankind, in movement toward a new world order…. The world community must learn to shape and direct the process in such a way as to preserve civilization, to make it safe for all and more pleasant for normal life.  It is a question of cooperation that could be more accurately called “co-creation” and “co-development.”  The formula of development “at another’s expense” is becoming outdated.  In light of present realities, genuine progress by infringing upon the rights and liberties of man and peoples, or at the expense of nature, is impossible….

As you ponder all this, you come to the conclusion that if we wish to take account of the lessons of the past and the realities of the present, if we must reckon with the objective logic of world development, it is necessary to seek – and seek jointly – an approach toward improving the international situation and building a new world.  If that is so, then it is also worth agreeing on the fundamental and truly universal prerequisites and principles for such activities.  It is evident, for example, that force and the threat of force can no longer be, and should not be instruments of foreign policy.

Gorbachev addressing the UN General Assembly, Dec. 8, 1988 [Wiki Commons]

For the Pentagon, U.S. leadership meant maintaining and enhancing the nation’s preponderant military power, including the ability to fight two regional wars at the same time.  According to the historian Andrew Bacevich, this preponderant power entailed:

(1) positioning U.S. forces in hundreds of bases abroad; (2) partitioning the whole planet into several contiguous regional military commands; (3) conferring security guarantees on dozens of nations, regardless of their ability to defend themselves or the values to which they subscribe; (4) maintaining the capability to project power to the remotest corners of the earth; (5) keeping in instant readiness a “triad” of nuclear strike forces; (6) endlessly searching for “breakthrough technologies” that will eliminate war’s inherent risks and uncertainties; (7) unquestioningly absorbing the costs of maintaining a sprawling national security bureaucracy; (8) turning a blind eye to the corrupting influence of the military-industrial complex; and easily outpacing all other nations, friend and foe alike, in (9) weapons sales and (10) overall military spending.^[17]

The Center for Defense Information, a peace-oriented educational organization headed by retired admirals Gene La Rocque and Eugene Carroll, noted in 1998 that “the Pentagon, recent administrations, and Congress continue to support a force structure that is more appropriate to policing the entire world unilaterally than it is to supporting multilateral efforts to restore and maintain peace when conflicts erupt.”^[18]

The International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands

Though the U.S. was the sole military superpower in the post-Cold War era, its global leadership was noticeably lacking in important areas.  The U.S. failed to sign an international treaty banning land mines (1997) and eschewed negotiations aimed at limiting small arms trafficking.  The U.S. refused to ratify the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol aimed at combating global warming, and the 1998 Rome Treaty establishing a permanent International Criminal Court.  The court was set up to investigate, prosecute, and try individuals accused of committing war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.^[19] The U.S., in short, was a laggard rather than a leader on arms control and human rights.

The great irony here is that the expansion of capitalism was deemed an American victory despite the fact that increased corporate freedom allowed transnational corporations to abandon American communities, move production abroad, reduce wages at home, and resist environmental regulations.  According to the historian Michael Hunt:

By the end of the 1990s, the neoliberal case for globalization had begun to create a backlash in the United States.  The rising chorus of complaints echoed criticism already circulating in the developing world and in Europe.  Potentially catastrophic environmental degradation, the inevitable result of mounting levels of production and trade, threatened human health and welfare.  Lax labor standards allowed multinational corporations to exploit the working poor.  As businesses transferred jobs to low-wage areas overseas, American workers lost their livelihood.  Surging capital flows could capsize national economies.  Widening inequalities spawned political discontent and violence.^[22]

The capitalist “shock therapy” applied to Russia was especially debilitating, producing mostly shock and little therapy as state-supported social welfare systems were eviscerated during the 1990s (see Section V).  All in all, notes the historian Odd Arne Westad, “the 1990s was a lost opportunity for international cooperation, particularly to combat disease, poverty and inequality.”^[23]

II.  The Panama invasion

Origins of the crisis

Time magazine, March 7, 1988

Noriega’s woes in the United States continued to mount.  In February 1988, grand juries in Miami and Tampa indicted him on drug trafficking and money laundering charges.  Soon after, Panamanian President Eric Arturo Delvalle called for Noriega’s removal as head of the armed forces.  Instead, in deference to Noriega, the Panamanian Legislative Assembly voted to remove Delvalle from office, replacing him with Education Minister Manuel Solis Palma.

Throughout the 1988 Presidential campaign and again in the televised debate Sunday [Sept. 25], opponents of Vice President Bush have invoked the name of Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega, the Panamanian ruler, as shorthand for questioning Mr. Bush’s judgment.  The Panamanian leader has been indicted on drug charges in the United States and accused of other illegal actions, and critics have argued that … Mr. Bush, who was Director of Central Intelligence in 1976, had material that should have prompted him to play a more active role in limiting this country’s dealings with the Panamanian.

Bush vigorously defended his innocence, asserting that he had seen no “hard evidence” of Noriega’s drug trafficking until two Federal grand juries in Florida indicted Noriega in early 1988.  Bush also claimed that he had never met Noriega, which photo evidence later contradicted.^[36]

Bloodied VP candidate Guillermo Ford fends off an attacker. Newsweek (May 22, 1989) asks, “Will the U.S. Intervene?”

After winning the election in November 1988, Bush renewed his predecessor’s commitment to Noriega’s removal.  Noriega’s blatant political manipulation of Panamanian elections in May 1989 helped seal his fate.  When it appeared that anti-Noriega candidates – Guillermo Endara for president, and Ricardo Arias Calderón and Billy Ford for vice-presidents – would defeat Noriega’s hand-picked crony, Carlos Duque, Noriega manipulated the election to ensure Duque’s victory.  In the days after the election, Noriega’s allies, the so-called “Dignity Battalions,” savagely beat the opposing candidates.  A bloodied picture of Billy Ford appeared on the cover of Newsweek.

President Bush condemned Noriega’s election fraud and violence and doubled down on efforts to topple him.  Military operations now became front and center.  According to a history of “Operation Just Cause” by the Army Heritage and Education Center:

Operation Just Cause was initially planned as a gradual buildup of combat troops from the United States. The plan was significantly modified in early 1989 after Noriega increased attempts to intimidate American civilians and soldiers and after he orchestrated assaults against newly elected anti-Noriega candidates…. Code-named “Sand Fleas,” these training exercises represented deliberate demonstrations of force aimed at securing American facilities.  Since many of these facilities needed to be secured or were used as staging areas for the invasion, troops were familiar with their targets.  Furthermore, the exercises were run with such frequency that the enemy became desensitized to rapid movements of troops, thus helping to maintain the element of surprise crucial to success.^[38]

The “Sand Fleas” training operations were designed to pressure Noriega to step down and, if he did not, to prepare U.S. troops for a military takeover.  Aggressive U.S. maneuvers served as a trial run to see how the Panamanian Defense Forces (PDF) would potentially respond to a U.S. invasion.  The PDF, which combined the functions of police and military, was  hardly a match for the U.S.  It numbered about 14,000 men, “of whom at least 4,000 were well-trained and equipped for combat,” according to U.S. military historian Ronald H. Cole.^[39]

Ten-mile wide Panama Canal Zone bordered by U.S. military bases (click to enlarge)

Another U.S. tactic designed to rattle Noriega and keep the PDF off-balance was to send messages to PDF personnel publicly and privately.  These messages essentially warned PDF members not to interfere “with our treaty rights and interests,” for “it will be the PDF that will suffer the consequences.”  As Secretary of State James Baker later admitted, “In truth, we were doing our best to foment a coup.  The policy we were pursuing was steadily increasing pressure across the board. The message to be conveyed at every level was simple: either the Panamanian Defense Forces took Noriega out, or we might.”^[40]

A violent and complex invasion

Administration rationales and counterpoints

President Bush announces that a U.S. military invasion of Panama is underway, Dec. 20, 1989

On the morning of the invasion, December 20, 1989, President George H. W. Bush appeared on primetime television to offer four justifications.  “The goals of the United States,” he said, “have been to safeguard the lives of Americans, to defend democracy in Panama, to combat drug trafficking and to protect the integrity of the Panama Canal Treaty.”^[76]  His claims merit examination.

The conclusion is inescapable that the United States has failed to provide sufficient evidence to prove that the necessity prerequisite was met.  But assuming that some level of intervention to protect U.S. nationals was justified, the scale of the operation and the prolonged period of intervention, coupled with the other objectives cited for the invasion, cast serious doubt on its having been a legitimate case of humanitarian intervention.^[80]

President Jimmy Carter and Gen. Omar Torrijos signed the Panama Canal treaties in Washington, Sept. 7, 1977

President Bush’s fourth rationale, “to protect the integrity of the Panama Canal Treaty,” conveyed the idea that the Noriega regime constituted a threat to the operation of the Panama Canal, which was not true.  No threats were issued and there was no reason to issue any threats, as many Panamanians were dependent on canal operations for their livelihood.  The “Panama Canal Treaty” actually refers to two treaties, the Panama Canal Treaty and the Neutrality Treaty, both signed on September 7, 1977.  These treaties respectively provide for the transfer of canal operations to Panama on December 31, 1999, and for the U.S. to permanently defend the canal from any threat to its neutral service.

According to Nanda, “The U.S. claim [to be protecting the canal] finds no support in either of the two treaties in question – the Canal Treaty or the Neutrality Treaty.”  The Canal Treaty, moreover, recognizes Panama’s rights as a sovereign nation, which means that there is no legal basis in the treaty for U.S. military interventionism.  Indeed, the U.S. Senate, in ratifying the Neutrality Treaty on March 16, 1978, added a clarification to the effect that the U.S. had no right whatsoever to intervene in Panama.  The amendment recognized the right and obligation of the United States to act against any outside threat and noted:

This does not mean, nor shall it be interpreted as, a right of intervention of the United States in the internal affairs of Panama.  Any United States action will be directed at insuring that the Canal will remain open, secure, and accessible, and it shall never be directed against the territorial integrity or political independence of Panama.^[95]

Rather than protect the integrity of the Panama Canal treaties, the Bush administration broke the treaties by failing to respect the territorial integrity and political independence of Panama.

Interpreting the invasion:  Contrasting views

The Panama Deception, a 91-minute American-made documentary film, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 1993

Critics also assailed the U.S. for failing to observe the Geneva Conventions regarding the treatment of civilians.^[108]  In the sixteen months following the invasion, Americas Watch produced two reports documenting the extent of the “collateral damage.”  The first queried, if the strikes were so precise, then why did the civilian body count outnumber military deaths by a count of at least four to one?  The second report noted that the attack on the neighborhood of El Chorrillo and a similar attack in an urban area of Colón were carried out without prior warning to civilians, thus “violating the permanent duty of the attacking forces to minimize damage to civilians.”  The report concluded that “the tactics and weaponry used by U.S. forces resulted in a disproportionate number of civilian victims in violation of specific obligations under the Geneva Conventions.”^[109]  Another investigative report by the Physicians for Human Rights in October 1991 blamed the American “shock and awe” strategy for indiscriminate killing and destruction of homes, presenting figures of at least 300 civilians killed and 3,000 injured.^[110]

III. The Persian Gulf War

1. The war option
2. Geopolitics and the rule of law
3. Iraq and Kuwait
4. Propaganda offensive
5. From defense to offense
6. Sanctions versus war debate
7. Peace activism
8. The six-week war
9. Casualties
10. Chemical cover-up
11. Myth of the Nintendo war
12. Aftermath of war

1.  The war option

“If at First…” (Jeff Hook cartoon, August 1990)

Bush’s saber-rattling did not immediately rouse the American war spirit.  A Gallup/Newsweek poll taken on August 23-24, 1990, asked Americans if President Bush “should quickly begin military action against Iraq” or if he “should wait to see if economic and diplomatic sanctions were effective.”  An overwhelming 80% of respondents said Bush should wait to see if the sanctions were successful; only 17% said Bush should begin military action quickly.^[130]  The American public nevertheless supported sending U.S. troops to Saudi Arabia for defensive purposes.  A New York Times/CBS poll taken August 16-19, 1990, indicated 77 percent approval.^[131]  Among those strongly disapproving were peace activists who immediately began educating and organizing against the possibility of war.  Antiwar demonstrations were held in August and early September, attracting 3,000 in San Francisco, 3,000 in New York, and hundreds in Boston, Syracuse, Chicago, Milwaukee, Austin, Tucson, Los Angeles, San Diego, Seattle, Portland, and Washington, DC.^[132]

2.  Geopolitics and the rule of law

3.  Iraq and Kuwait

4.  Propaganda offensive

Such stories were not easy to confirm or deny, as Iraqi authorities restricted access to Kuwait by humanitarian organizations and foreign journalists.  One group, however, Middle East Watch, a chapter of Human Rights Watch, persisted in its investigations and produced a credible report, dated January 1, 1991, that attested to many Iraqi abuses but found no baby-killing episodes.  The report read in part:

Gross human rights abuses against Kuwaiti citizens and other residents of Kuwait commenced in the immediate aftermath of the August 2 invasion.  Hundreds were killed or wounded, and thousands detained, in the takeover.  Hundreds of thousands of others were forced to flee the country.  Iraqi soldiers and militia committed countless acts of theft, rape and assault on civilians.  Others participated in criminal activity as law and order broke down…. Scores of people were summarily executed in September and October, including physicians, hospital volunteers and food-distribution personnel, some of them in front of their families.  Scores more were killed in confrontations with Iraqi forces, or in detention.  Iraq has yet to give an accounting of people killed in its custody – either to relatives or to neutral organizations.  Middle East Watch estimates that at least 600 were killed in the first three months following the invasion.^[158]

Clearly, there was a strong case to be made against Iraq for human rights abuses in Kuwait.  Yet Kuwaiti and U.S. officials were looking for something more sensational than a legal brief.  They wanted a “shock and awe” tactic that would heighten popular revulsion against Saddam, to the point that the American public would be willing to go to war against Iraq.

I volunteered at the al-Addan hospital [in Kuwait]…. While I was there, I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns, and go into the room where 15 babies were in incubators.  They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators, and left the babies on the cold floor to die.^[159]

Not until months later, after the war began, was it was revealed that “Nayirah” was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the U.S. and a member of the ruling family.  She had not been in the Kuwaiti hospital and had seen nothing at all.  The story was a lie.  Nonetheless, for the next few crucial months, the lie grew to epic proportions.  President Bush repeated it six times in speeches in October and November, embellishing it at each turn.  In a speech at the Dhahran Air Base in Saudi Arabia, he told U.S. troops, “It turns your stomach to listen to the tales of those that have escaped the brutality of Saddam the invader.  Mass hangings.  Babies pulled from incubators and scattered like firewood across the floor.”^[160]

John Chancellor of NBC television also confirmed the falsehood, though he framed it as a natural consequence of war, rather than an intentional deceit by U.S. and Kuwaiti officials to mislead the American public:

The conflict brought with it a baggage train of myth and misconception, exaggeration and hyperbole.… Accounts of Iraqi atrocities were accepted without question.  There was the tale of premature babies thrown out of incubators in a Kuwait hospital and left to die.  It never happened, although other sickening atrocities took place regularly during the Iraqi occupation.… There were facts misperceived, truth bent out of shape and a fog of myth and misconception.^[164]

It would be more accurate to say that the truth was intentionally bent out of shape for strategic reasons.  According to John Oddo in The Discourse of Propaganda (2018), “the incubator story is not simply something Bush haphazardly alludes to.  It is strategically linked to the promise of military action and serves as the argumentative ground for war.”^[165]  The sensationalism of the story was intended to convince Americans that the situation in Kuwait could not wait for slow-moving economic sanctions to take effect, but that the only moral choice was quick and forceful U.S. military intervention.  Defense Secretary Cheney added to the sense of urgency by suggesting on an ABC news program that Saddam Hussein was acquiring nuclear materials to build a bomb with “some kind of yield,” which could be ready in a year.^[166]

5.  From defense to offense

6.  Sanctions versus war debate

Following President Bush’s shift to an offensive strategy on November 7, the debate over sanctions versus war intensified in the U.S.  According to political scientists Michael Mazarr, Don Snider, and James Blackwell, the sanctions were taking their toll:

The embargo’s impact on Iraq was crippling…. Before the war, Iraq imported some 70 percent of its food; the embargo blocked 90 percent of those food imports.  Oil production fell from 3.4 million barrels per day in July 1990 to 400,000 barrels by March, and only about 60,000 barrels were finding their way out of Iraq into neighboring Jordan.  These cuts in oil production cost Baghdad over $1.5 billion every month.  Before the war, Iraq was a major industrial power in the Middle East; by January 1991 its foreign trade was reduced to some desultory smuggling across a few inhospitable borders.  Tens of thousands of foreign workers had fled, dozens of industries were shutting down for lack of spare parts or supplies, civilian production plummeted by almost half, and the price of food soared.^[180]

The Senate Armed Services Committee began hearings on the issue on November 26.  CIA Director William H. Webster testified on December 5 that sanctions had cut off more than 90 percent of Iraq’s imports and 97 percent of its exports.^[181]  Among the national security and military experts speaking in favor of economic sanctions over military action were former Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Admiral William Crowe, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.  Schlesinger testified that “our current policy” was working and that war could produce debilitating results.  “The sight of the United States inflicting a devastating defeat on an Arab country from the soil of an Arab neighbor may result in an enmity directed at the United States for an extended period.”^[182]  Brzezinski, well-known for his hawkish views, voiced similar concerns:

Iraq has been deterred, ostracized, and punished…. Therefore, in my view, neither an American war to liberate Kuwait nor a preventative war to destroy Iraq’s power is urgently required, be it in terms of the American national interest or of the imperatives of world order…. By any calculus, the trade-offs between the discomforts of patience and the costs of war favor patience.  Both time and power are in our favor – and we do not need to be driven by artificial deadlines, deceptive arguments, or irrational emotion into an unnecessary war.

Admiral Crowe testified:  “I firmly believe that Saddam Hussein must leave Kuwait.  At the same time, given the larger context, I judge it highly desirable to achieve this goal in a peaceful fashion, if possible.  In other words, we should give sanctions a fair chance before we discard them…. The issue is not whether an embargo will work but whether we have the patience to let it work.”^[183]

Rep. Henry Gonzalez

Rep. Henry Gonzalez, Democrat of Texas, introduced a resolution in Congress (HR 86) on January 16, and again on February 21, to impeach President Bush.  The resolution charged that from August 1990 through January 1991, President Bush had “embarked on a course of action that systematically eliminated every option for peaceful resolution of the Persian Gulf crisis,” and that Bush had “prepared, planned and conspired to engage in a massive war against Iraq employing methods of mass destruction that will result in the killing of tens of thousands of civilians, many of whom will be children.” The measure was predictably tabled.^[190]

Noam Chomsky, one of America’s leading public intellectuals, offered a different perspective on the administration’s push for war.  In an article published in February 1991, he asked rhetorically, “Why not let diplomacy and sanctions push Hussein out?”

The answer is at the heart of understanding the U.S. role in the so-called “new world order.”  George Bush wants Hussein out of Kuwait, yes.  But he does not want UN activism, international sanctions, and multilateral diplomacy credited with causing withdrawal.  From Bush’s perspective a diplomatic solution would be as bad as Hussein’s interference in the first place.  Diplomatic success would undercut the efficacy of U.S. military interventionism, now, and well into the future.  And it would add powerful fuel to calls for a “peace dividend” and conversion [to a peace economy] here in the U.S.^[193]

7.  Peace activism

The shift in U.S. military posture from defense to offense on November 7 catalyzed an upsurge of peace activism.  Rallies in early December drew 10,000 people in Boston and lesser numbers elsewhere.  Nine major U.S. unions, representing six million workers, took out a full-page advertisement in the New York Times declaring that any war in the Middle East would be largely fought by the children of blue-collar workers.  On November 15, the National Council of Churches, representing Protestant and Eastern Orthodox denominations, voted unanimously to denounce the Bush administration’s offensive strategy.  The Council criticized the administration for “reckless rhetoric” and declared that Christians “must witness against weak resignation to the illogical logic of militarism and war.”^[196]  A delegation of eighteen U.S. church leaders from mainline denominations took part in a “peace pilgrimage” to the Middle East December 14-27.  Upon return, they issued a press release:

War will not liberate Kuwait, it will destroy it.  War will not save us from weapons of mass destruction, it will unleash them.  War will not establish regional stability, it will inflame the entire Middle East.^[198]

8.  The six-week war

In five months of preparation, the coalition built an armada of almost 2,000 fighters and bombers in the region surrounding Iraq. The list of Iraqi targets grew from 84 facilities to some 480 on the eve of the war and more than 1,200 by war’s end. The targets included airfields, air defense installations, military support facilities, weapons of mass destruction, Scud missile sites, bridges, communications complexes and electrical generating and transmitting facilities. Government command centers and other facilities in Baghdad were also pinpointed.^[203]

On the “Highway of Death,” they could see hundreds of burning and exploding vehicles, including civilian automobiles, buses, and trucks.  Hundreds more raced west out of Kuwait City to unknowingly join the deadly traffic jam.  Here and there, knots of drivers, Iraqi soldiers, and refugees fled into the desert because of the inferno of bombs, rockets, and tank fire.  These lucky ones managed to escape and join the ranks of the growing army of prisoners.^[213]

General Schwarzkopf expressed the view that victory required the complete liquidation of the enemy as a military force.  He told his commanders:

We need to destroy – not attack, not damage, not surround – I want you to destroy the [Iraqi] Republican Guard.  When you are done with them, I don’t want them to be an effective fighting force.  I don’t want them to exist as a military organization.^[215]

General Schwarzkopf, Jan. 26, 1991 [New York Times]

9.  Casualties

Middle East Watch, which conducted interviews and visited sites, estimated an upper limit of 2,500 to 3,000 Iraqi civilian fatalities.  “These numbers,” the human rights group noted, “do not include the substantially larger number of deaths that can be attributed to malnutrition, disease and lack of medical care caused by a combination of the U.N.-mandated embargo and the allies’ destruction of Iraq’s electrical system, with its severe secondary effects.^[227]  A Middle East Watch report on June 1, 1991, titled “Needless Deaths in the Gulf War: Civilian Casualties during the Air Campaign and Violations of the Laws of War,” criticized the U.S. for withholding and censoring information regarding the results of coalition bombing missions:

Though occasionally acknowledging that some civilian casualties were inevitable, the impression was created by statement after statement and television image after image that, so far as the allied performance was concerned, it was a near-perfect war, with as little harm to civilian life and property as humanly possible.  This impression was reinforced by a deliberate policy on the part of the United States and its allies to manage the news of the war in a manner designed to suggest that all feasible precautions in fact had been taken to avoid harm to civilians.  Restrictions placed on journalists attempting to cover the war and the selective presentation of information about the conduct of the war, in part through elaborately rehearsed military briefings, left the press unable to probe the extent of the precautions actually adopted.  Parallel curbs on the foreign press imposed by Iraq exacerbated the difficulty of penetrating the veils that blocked the view of the actual conduct of the war.^[228]

Through its own investigations and interviews, Middle East Watch documented extensive damage and destruction:

In the course of Middle East Watch’s fact-finding alone, we found the following civilian objects were damaged or destroyed during the air war:  some 400 one- and two-story homes, often in poor neighborhoods; 19 apartment buildings and several hotels; two hospitals and two medical clinics; two schools and one mosque; restaurants and other commercial buildings; and market areas in four cities – Basra, Falluja, Samawa and al-Kut.  By far, the greatest number of civilian objects damaged in Iraq during the war were residential buildings.^[229]

A UN team headed by Under-Secretary General Martti Ahtisaari of Finland investigated the damage after the war and concluded that the bombing left Iraq unable to produce industrial goods to any significant degree.

Nothing we had seen or read had quite prepared us for the particular form of devastation which has no befallen the country.  The recent conflict has wrought near apocalyptic results upon the economic infrastructure of what had been, until January 1991, a rather highly urbanized and mechanized society.  Now, most means of modern life support have been destroyed or rendered tenuous.  Now, most means of modern life support have been destroyed or rendered tenuous.^[230]

The destruction of urban infrastructure by coalition air attacks resulted in an unspecified number of additional Iraqi deaths due to the breakdown in water purification and sanitation, which in turn caused outbreaks of infectious diseases such as cholera, typhoid, malaria, polio, and hepatitis.”^[231]

10.  Chemical cover-up

I would say to that report that we have, in attacking those targets, attacked them in such a way – and I can’t give you all the technical aspects of it – to minimize the potential for that, for any of those toxins to go into the air.  It’s not to say that it couldn’t happen, but certainly with a view to minimizing, if not eliminating any possible contamination of the surrounding areas.  It’s been done very carefully.  I can’t say that some may not be in the air and the immediate surroundings, but I suspect there would be no serious damage to any community.^[238]

One would expect a complete investigation to be initiated, but this was not the case.  An exposé written by investigative reporter Barbara Koeppel for Newsweek twenty-five years after the war, recounted the stories of Gulf War veterans:

During January and February 1991, when the U.S. bombed Iraq’s weapons plants and storage sites, poisonous plumes floated across the desert to thousands of U.S. troops based on the Saudi border…. Ron Brown, a soldier with the 82nd Division, watched the demolitions from a mile away.  “Within 15 minutes, I couldn’t breathe and my head was about to split open,” Brown said.  “Soldiers were nauseous, dizzy and had diarrhea and muscle spasms.  About 30 of us went to the medic, who gave us Motrin and told us to drink water.”  Later that month, Bunker almost died. As the demolitions continued, his symptoms became more severe.  “First, I couldn’t control my muscles,” he said. “But in a couple days, I had convulsions and collapsed.  After this, they medevacked me to hospitals in Saudi Arabia and Germany, and then to the U.S.”

In 1993 and 1994, Senator Donald Riegle, Democratic of Michigan, held hearings on veterans’ illnesses.  DOD and CIA representatives testified they received no reports of “any soldier or civilian experiencing symptoms consistent with chemical warfare agent exposure,” according to Koeppel.  Their testimony was contradicted by a United Nations Special Commission report, which cast doubt on the credibility of these claims.  The VA, meanwhile, denied full disability status to 80 percent of veterans seeking medical care.  “From the time the DOD initially admitted that troops may have been exposed,” writes Koeppel, “it constantly retallied the toll:  In 1996, there were from 300 to 400; from 1997 to 2002, there were 5,000, 20,000, 99,000 and finally 101,752 – but … it also claimed ‘exposure levels were too low to activate chemical alarms or cause any symptoms.’  If they had questions, veterans were told to ‘call a hotline.’”^[239]

11.  The video game war

During the first days of the bombing, the CNN news team reported live from the Rashid Hotel in Baghdad

The Persian Gulf War provided an important showcase for new military hardware.  The signature weapons included Chrysler M-1 “Abrams” tanks capable of firing depleted uranium shells going 45 miles per hour; Cobra and Apache gunships that fired tank-busting Martin Marietta hellfire missiles; F-16s equipped with Martin Marietta Low Altitude Navigation and night Targeting Infrared system (LANTIRN); cruise missiles guided by internal computers programmed with precise target coordinates; unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which flew 568 flight hours during the Gulf War; and stealth F-117 aircraft fighters which took advantage of new technology reducing an aircraft’s radar cross-section and infra-red signature.  The Gulf War also saw the pioneering use of Global Positioning System (GPS), which could determine exact locations by timing how long it took a radio beam to travel from its position to several satellites in fixed-orbit.^[244]  Gen. Barry McCaffrey perceptively commented afterwards that “the [Persian Gulf] war didn’t take 100 hours to win, it took fifteen years.”^[245]  It was indeed the Carter administration that inaugurated this so-called revolution in military affairs.^[246]

12.  Aftermath of war

Having trounced the Iraqi army in Kuwait and sent it home, the U.S. had completed its official mission.  The Bush administration’s demonization of Saddam Hussein, however, led some to ask why, if Saddam was akin to Hitler, the U.S. did not invade Iraq and get rid of him.  Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney explained the dilemma:

If you’re going to go in and try to topple Saddam Hussein, you have to go to Baghdad.  Once you’ve got Baghdad, it’s not clear what you do with it.  It’s not clear what kind of government you would put in place of the one that’s currently there now.  Is it going to be a Shia regime, a Sunni regime or a Kurdish regime? Or one that tilts toward the Baathists, or one that tilts toward the Islamic fundamentalists?  How much credibility is that government going to have if it’s set up by the United States military when it’s there?  How long does the United States military have to stay to protect the people that sign on for that government, and what happens to it once we leave?^[251]

These were reasonable questions.  Any effort to topple Saddam would likely lead to a long and difficult, and probably unsuccessful occupation – which indeed is what happened when the U.S. invaded and occupied Iraq in 2003, pushed by Dick Cheney no less.

Kurdish (red) and Iraqi Shiite (green) regions

What the Bush administration did instead, in 1991, was to encourage Kurds in the north and Shiite Muslims in the south to rise up and overthrow Saddam.^[252]  In a speech at the Raytheon defense plant in Massachusetts on February 15, 1991, President Bush expressly encouraged “the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside.”^[253]  On March 1, one day after the war ended, Iraq exploded in rebellion.  According to one account by the political scientist Micah Zenko:

Beginning in Basra and spreading throughout Najaf, Karbala, and Nasiriyya, Shia rebels and Iraqi Army sympathizers attacked government security agents and regime targets.  On March 5, Kurdish rebels revolted against Iraqi Army divisions and Baath Party officials, detaining who they could and massacring resisters.  One month after Bush’s call to the Iraqi people to rise up, fourteen of Iraq’s eighteen provinces were surprisingly no longer under the control of the central government.

Despite encouraging the rebellion, the Bush administration refrained from helping the rebels.  It appears that Washington policymakers only wanted to weaken Saddam, not overthrow him.  As Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory wrote, “Bush doesn’t want the Shiite fundamentalist rebels to topple Saddam; that would make Iran the top dog in the Middle East.”  Overthrowing Saddam would likely lead to a Shiite-dominated government, which in turn would likely bond with Shiite Iran – a political victory for Iran.  The administration’s geopolitical strategy was described by Brent Scowcroft in his joint memoir with Bush.  “The trick here,” he wrote, “was to damage his [Saddam’s] offensive capability without weakening Iraq to the point that a vacuum was created, and destroying the balance between Iraq and Iran, further destabilizing the region for years.”^[254]  The practical result of this Machiavellian strategy was that General Schwarzkopf allowed Saddam’s forces to quell the rebellion.  As Zenco writes:

On March 3, 1991, commander of UN coalition forces, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, met with Hussein’s generals at the Safwan Airfield in Iraq to discuss the terms of the ceasefire … During the discussion, an Iraqi general asked Schwarzkopf for permission to fly helicopters, including armed gunships, to transport government officials over the country’s destroyed roads and bridges.  Believing it a legitimate request, and acting without Pentagon or White House instructions, Schwarzkopf replied, “I will instruct the Air Force not to shoot at any helicopters flying over the territory of Iraq where our troops are not located.” [Bush’s] memoir, coauthored by … his national security advisor, Brent Scowcroft, succinctly summarized what happened next:  “Saddam almost immediately began using the helicopters as gunships to put down the uprisings.”^[255]

Only after Saddam’s forces had thoroughly suppressed the uprisings did the Bush administration step in and provide a measure of protection to the Kurds and Shiites by instituting no-fly zones.

IV. New World disorder and “humanitarian intervention”

The ascension of the United States to the pinnacle of world power in the aftermath of the Cold War did not fulfill the promise of a new or better world order.  Old conflicts continued and new crises arose as Washington pursued its two major goals of military predominance and “free market” globalization.  There was, however, a growing expectation among some Americans that the U.S. should play a greater role in resolving global crises, an expectation heightened by America’s elevated status and by presidential speeches touting U.S. global leadership. “By the grace of God,” declared Bush in his State of the Union address on January 28, 1992:

America won the Cold War.  A world once divided into two armed camps now recognizes one sole and pre-eminent power – the United States of America.  And they regard this with no dread. For the world trusts us with power – and the world is right. They trust us to be fair, and restrained, they trust us to be on the side of decency. They trust us to do what’s right.^[262]

What was the right thing to do in response to famine in Somalia or to “ethnic cleansing” in Bosnia?  Many U.S. citizens, members of Congress, and opinion leaders, both conservative and liberal, judged that the president should take action, presumably in concert with the international community.

This early doctrine of “limited sovereignty” claimed to be inspired by purely humanitarian motives, while in reality the European powers of the time had their own “imperial” agenda vis-a-vis the Ottoman Empire.  Far from qualifying as disinterested actio popularis [a legal action in the public interest], humanitarian intervention in its actual practice in the 19th century was dictated by the geopolitical interests of the then European powers.  Those powers, in the course of their own colonial rule, violated each and every humanitarian principle they proclaimed to uphold …^[267]

Operation Restore Hope in Somalia, 1992-1994

Far beneath the surface of the tragic drama of Somalia, four major U.S. oil companies are quietly sitting on a prospective fortune in exclusive concessions to explore and exploit tens of millions of acres of the Somalia countryside.  That land, in the opinion of geologists and industry sources, could yield significant amounts of oil and natural gas if the U.S.-led military mission can restore peace to the impoverished East African nation.

According to documents obtained by The Times, “nearly two-thirds of Somalia was allocated to the American oil giants Conoco, Amoco, Chevron and Phillips in the final years before Somalia’s pro-U.S. President Mohamed Siad Barre was overthrown and the nation plunged into chaos in January, 1991.  Industry sources said the companies holding the rights to the most promising concessions are hoping that the Bush Administration’s decision to send U.S. troops to safeguard aid shipments to Somalia will also help protect their multimillion-dollar investments there.”^[281]

Political negotiations were making progress, even if they were slowed by painstaking attention to local sensitivities.  Faction leaders and community elders from all regions had endorsed the idea of a national conference to discuss national reconciliation.  Aidid, Ali Mahdi, and other power faction leaders had agreed to permit 500 UN peacekeepers to deploy in Mogadishu; the port had been reopened, and food distribution had commenced…. Sahnoun publicly criticized the provision of military supplies and money to Ali Mahdi’s forces in a UN plane, which contributed to Aidid’s mounting distrust of the UN; Sahnoun also opposed the increase of the UNOSOM I force to 3,500 troops, authorized in August [1992] without warning to Sahnoun or consultation with Somali leaders.  Irked by Sahnoun’s public criticisms and his willingness to work with Aidid, Boutros-Ghali dismissed his special representative in late October.  Sahnoun’s successors failed to garner the same degree of trust among Somalis, and efforts to thwart the rising tensions between the Ali Mahdi and Aidid factions fell apart, as did agreements that allowed the safe passage of relief shipments.^[286]

On July 12, 1993, the house of Aideed [Aidid] supporter Abdi Abdiid was targeted by U.S. forces on the grounds that it was an Aideed command center – and that a meeting of Aideed loyalists was taking place at the time.  In fact, some eighty people who were indeed meeting at the Abdi house are believed to have included elders drawn from a wide range of sub-clans, including the Habr Gedir, Ogadeni, Dir, Majerteen, Murosade, Sheikhal and others, who were apparently meeting to discuss mediation between UNOSOM and Aideed.

On Oct. 3, 1993, U.S. special forces (Task Force Ranger) began an operation that involved traveling through the streets of Mogadishu with the aim of capturing leaders of Aidid’s Habr Gidr clan [Alchetron]

Cobra helicopters of the independent U.S. command attacked the Abdi house in a morning raid with missiles and rockets…. which largely demolished the building.  The SNA – and other sources – have claimed it was a peace and reconciliation meeting.  The presence of elders of a broad number of sub-clans would tend to substantiate this, although the full roster of the dead has never been made public.  The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), estimated there were fifty-four dead and 174 wounded.  General Aideed’s SNA claimed the actual figure was seventy-three dead, including twenty-two women and ten children, with another 234 wounded…. Although no evidence is known to have been produced that the house was a defended military position, UNOSOM subsequently described the attack as flawless.^[290]

The debacle in Mogadishu put the Clinton administration on the defensive at home.  Public support for the president’s handling of the Somalia intervention shifted from 51 percent approval (and 21% disapproval) in polls taken June 21-24, to 54 percent disapproval (and 33% approval) in polls taken October 21-24.^[293]  Facing intense scrutiny, the White House decided to institute a phased withdrawal rather than escalate the war.  In his memoirs, Clinton intimated that he had not been fully informed about the mission:

What plagued me most was that when I approved the use of U.S. forces to apprehend Aidid, I did not envision anything like a daytime assault in a crowded, hostile neighborhood.  I assumed we would try to get him when he was on the move, away from large numbers of civilians and the cover they gave his armed supporters.^[294]

By the end of March 1994, all U.S. troops had been withdrawn, leaving some 19,000 UN peacekeepers to manage security in Somalia.  One senior UN official told the New York Times as the last U.S. troops departed, “The Americans and the U.N. came in with a kind of arrogance…. Their psychological operations were naive, their intelligence very poor.  They didn’t speak the language.  They met with few Somalis.  This has damaged the credibility of the U.N.”^[295]

Operation Uphold Democracy in Haiti, 1994-1995

Junta leader Raoul Cédras

President Bill Clinton, during his presidential campaign in the fall of 1992 and again in March 1993, declared his intention to restore Aristide to power.  New U.S. sanctions were imposed in June targeting the Haitian military leadership.  On July 3, Caputo succeeded in arranging a meeting at Governors Island, New York, in which Aristide and Raoul Cédras did not meet face-to-face but nonetheless signed a pact requiring Cedras to resign and Aristide to return by October 30, 1993.  To implement the provisions of the agreement, the UN established a United Nations Mission in Haiti (UNMIH) in September, in which the U.S. took the lead.

Lessons from Rwanda, 1994-1996

In April 1994, six months after the ill-fated Battle of Mogadishu in Somalia, a massive slaughter began in Rwanda, a small, central-east African nation with a population of six million.  The numerically dominant Hutu group, urged on by extremist militias such as the Interahamwe and Impuzamugambi, massacred hundreds of thousands of Tutsi and moderate Hutu (who refused to join in the slaughter) in a 100-day killing spree often described as genocide.^[310]  According to Jean-Marie Kamatali, a Tutsi who escaped the slaughter:

In Rwanda, neighbors did not kill neighbors in the first days of the three-month slaughter; that pattern developed only after officials decided that the presidential guards and Interahamwe were not killing fast enough.  So the officials organized meetings and took to a hate-spewing radio station to call on citizens to kill fellow citizens; this edict then went down a chain of authority so thoroughly that intimate murder, and deep societal trauma, became common.^[311]

In their drive for military victory and a halt to the genocide, the RPF killed thousands, including noncombatants as well as government troops and members of militia.  As RPF soldiers sought to establish their control over the local population, they also killed civilians in numerous summary executions and in massacres…. Evidence gathered thus far suggests that the death toll was highest in certain communes of Kibungo, southern Kigali, Butare and Gitarama. These indications, partial and tentative, point to a minimum death toll of 25,000 to 30,000 people.^[313]

Memorial to more than 11,000 Tutsi men, women, children murdered at Kibuye Andy Hall/The London Observer]

Though the Hutu massacre of Tutsi was far more extensive, the RPF wanted no UN assistance in putting an end to it; which is to say, no interference in its mission to take over the government.  Indeed, on April 30, the RPF leadership declared that it was “categorically opposed to the proposed UN intervention and will not under any circumstances cooperate in its setting up an operation.”  According to political scientist Filip Reyntjens, “At the time, the genocide was far from completed and hundreds of thousands of Tutsi were still alive, but the RPF feared the [UN] force might stand in its way to military victory.”^[314]

Dallaire’s fax to UN headquarters on Jan. 11, 1994, warned of Interahamwe plans three months before the massacre began

On April 21, the Security Council did as Albright proposed, voting to reduce Dallaire’s peacekeeping force to 270, effectively neutralizing the UN mission.^[316]  On May 5, Undersecretary of Defense Frank Wisner rejected a proposal by National Security Advisor Anthony Lake to jam Rwandan government radio broadcasts that were inciting Hutus to violence, suggesting instead that the U.S. assist Red Cross relief efforts.^[317]

In “British State Complicity in Genocide: Rwanda 1994” (2012), Cameron documents British and U.S. connections to the RPF:

Throughout the period of the civil war [1990-1994], the British government continued to provide military training to the Tutsi-dominated guerrilla force in Uganda, whilst the United States military transported the RPA leadership to the US for advanced military training…. One week after the start of the genocide Edward Clay, British High Commissioner Kampala, met with the RPF vice-president who was afforded the opportunity to put forth his views on the subject of withdrawal of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Rwanda (UNAMIR) from the country, a subject to be discussed at the following week’s meeting of the Security Council, New York.  In his reporting of the meeting, Clay advised London that “the RPF could take care of the current disorder and should be left to do so.”^[322]

The RPF invasion of Rwanda, April to July 1994

The withdrawal of UN peacekeepers, in other words, comported with British and U.S. geopolitical interests in securing an RPF military victory.  Cameron concludes that “the British government chose to support the RPF’s aspirations to defeat the Government of Rwanda without outside [UN] intervention.  Permitting the RPF to take full control of Rwanda advanced British interrelated goals of maintaining power status and ensuring economic interests in key areas of Africa.”  Rwanda was a chess piece in a great power game for control of central Africa’s mineral wealth.  Cameron quotes a former British government official who describes the RPF as the “cat’s paw of the British government,” having been groomed to overthrow the French-backed Habyarimana government.^[323]  French officials, for their part, did not disarm or arrest suspected Hutu war criminals or turn them over to UNAMIR forces.  Instead, they helped Hutu officials escape to Zaire, the Central African Republic, France, and other European countries, enabling them to evade prosecution for war crimes.

Hutu refugees wait for relief food from the Red Cross near the border between Rwanda and Tanzania, May 3, 1994 [Reuters / History Collection]

I can tell you from personal experience that the ICTR has totally failed to investigate fully and impartially the real causes of the Rwandan genocide.  It has failed to hold accountable all those responsible for the slaughter of an estimated 1,000,000 men, women and children in Rwanda in 1994.  It has prosecuted only the losers of the genocide [meaning the Hutu, having lost control of the government].  It has buckled to international pressure to keep secret the involvement of foreign powers in the events which led up the to slaughter.  There is overwhelming credible evidence suggesting prima facie that Paul Kagame and his armed forces were involved the in slaughter of many thousands of civilians in Rwanda in 1994 and 1995.  There is significant credible evidence on the public record linking President Kagame with the shooting down of the Rwandan presidential aircraft in 1994 killing the Presidents of Rwanda and Burundi and all others on board.

Paul Kagame and his regime in Rwanda has for many years now successfully denied these allegations in the press accusing any and all who touches on them as “genocide deniers.”… I am stunned at the way the West embraces Kagame and how universities flock to award him for his leadership in Rwanda.^[332]

James R. Lyons, an FBI agent who served with the New York Police Department’s Domestic Terrorism Task Force and had contracted with the U.S. State Department to assist the ICTR, also issued a statement on the plane incident:  “The world community had long attributed the attack to hard line Hutus close to the President but there was no evidence supporting that theory.  There was some speculation that the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) was responsible and there were bits of information to support that view.”^[333]  Lyons regarded Kagame as “America’s Man in the Great Lakes” and the “fair-haired boy of British intelligence and the CIA.”^[334]

According to Filip Reyntjens, the ICTR itself was “an embarrassing instance of victor’s justice.”  Only two low-level officers in the RPF were convicted of war crimes, being sentenced to five years in prison.  The tribunal nevertheless put on trial and convicted dozens of Hutu responsible for the mass slaughter of Tutsi.  Reyntjens continues:

Despite its shortcomings, the ICTR has contributed to the development of international humanitarian law, beyond the case of Rwanda.  It was the first international jurisdiction to prosecute and condemn genocide suspects, thus “giving life to the Genocide Convention for the first time since the treaty was adopted.”  It has also clarified the notion of an ethnic group as victim of genocide, and established that rape can be a weapon of genocide.  When closed, the ICTR had condemned 61 and acquitted 14 persons who all belonged to the losing side of the civil war.^[337]

The 545-page [UN] report on 600 of the country’s most serious reported atrocities raises the question of whether Rwanda could be found guilty of genocide against Hutu during the war in neighboring Congo, but says international courts would need to rule on individual cases…. The report presents repeated examples of times when teams of Rwandan soldiers and their Congolese rebel allies lured Hutu refugees with promises they would be repatriated to Rwanda, only to massacre them.^[342]

Americans at the time (1996-97) heard little about these atrocities by Rwandan forces under Tutsi leadership as the Rwanda was now a client state of the United States and Great Britain.  An Associated Press article in October 2010 noted:

The story of the 1994 genocide of more than a half million Tutsis slaughtered by Hutus in Rwanda has been told in the world’s press, in books and in movies such as “Hotel Rwanda.”  But the subsequent slaughter of Hutus in neighboring Congo is little known, and its perpetrators never have been brought to justice.  The discovery of mass graves prompted investigations that led to a controversial U.N. report published on Oct. 1 [2010], which accuses invading Rwandan troops of killing tens of thousands of Hutus in 1996 and 1997.^[343]

The lesson of the Rwanda genocide cannot be simply that the U.S. and UN must intervene to stop massacres.  In the case of Rwanda, Washington officials readily acknowledged and condemned the Hutu-instigated genocide in 1994 but found no cause for alarm in RPF aggression against the Rwandan government from 1990 to 1994, nor in RPF massacres of Hutus inside Rwanda during the interval, nor in the RPF invasion and slaughter in the Congo in 1996.  While there is a need for mechanisms to prevent or halt genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity, as envisioned in the Responsibility to Protect principle, there is far greater need for political accommodations to prevent these crises from occurring in the first place.  The U.S. and Great Britain, as strategic allies of the RPF and its Ugandan government backers, had the ability to cut off arms to the RPF and to curb RPF aggression, but they chose not to do so.

Crises in the former Yugoslavia, 1991-1999

The U.S. remained largely on the sidelines in the region until Bosnia declared independence in March 1992.  The following month, the U.S. joined the European Union in recognizing Bosnia along with Slovenia and Croatia.  All three republics were admitted to the UN in May.  European powers attempted to head off war in Bosnia by offering what became known as the Lisbon plan:  Bosnia would be divided into three semi-autonomous regions, with the total land area divided as follows:  Bosniak Muslims, 45 percent; Serbs, 42.5 percent; and Croats, 12.5 percent.  On March 17, 1992, all three groups agreed to the plan.  However, only one week later, the Bosnian (Muslim) government led by President Alija Izetbegović backed out, apparently believing that that Europeans and Americans would back him in any war with Serbia.  The Croats followed.  According to European Union diplomat David Owen, the U.S. offered absolutely no support for the peace plan.^[351]  Owen later wrote of U.S. policy:

Two US administrations [H. W. Bush and Clinton] neither pressurized nor even cajoled the parties to accept, let alone threaten to impose, any one of the four successive peace proposals:  the Carrington-Cutileiro plan of March 1992, the VOPP [Vance-Owen Peace Plan] of May 1993, the EU [European Union] plan in December 1993, and the Contact Group plan in July 1994.^[352]

With the Vance-Owen peace plan shelved, war broke out in Bosnia in April 1992.  The JNA-backed Serbs were initially the stronger force.  According to Gibbs:

As war began, Serb forces launched a major offensive in northeast Bosnia, taking over a series of villages of mixed ethnicity, and then expelling most non-Serb inhabitants by force.  By the end of 1992, Serb forces had overrun large portions of Bosnia-Herzegovina, and they controlled approximately 70 percent of the whole area of the country.  The process of ethnic cleansing for which the war became famous, had begun.^[354]

In the divided city of Sarajevo, according to a Human Rights Watch report, “Serbian forces, supported by the Yugoslav People’s Army at the start of the war, ruthlessly ‘cleansed’ the districts that came under their control . . . They used various forms of terror including rape, torture and the detention of many who were beaten and sent to work at the front lines under dangerous conditions.” At the same time, the report continued, “Abuses also occurred in the sector of the city that is under the control of the Bosnian government where some non-Muslims at the beginning of the war were harassed and abused by government-tolerated gangs.”^[355]

Gen. Charles G. Boyd, USAF

There were dissenting voices, however.  Perhaps the most notable was General Charles Boyd, Air Force deputy commander-in-chief of the U.S. European Command.  Writing in Foreign Affairs just after retiring on August 1, 1995, Boyd assailed the Bosnian government’s strategy of leaving its own civilians defenseless in order to gain public sympathy and prod NATO into action on its side.  “In the winter of 1993-94,” he notes, “the Sarajevo government stripped the capital’s defenses to release troops to fight against the Croats in central Bosnia, counting on their public diplomacy efforts to manage the risk to Sarajevo…. This spring and summer [1995] the Muslims excoriated the United Nations for failing to protect Sarajevo, or as one U.N. official privately put it, for failing to do their fighting for them.”  Boyd faulted U.S. policymakers for aiding a Bosnian Muslim victory rather than seeking peace.  “The United States says that its objective is to end the war through a negotiated settlement, but in reality what it wants is to influence the outcome in favor of the Muslims.”  He concludes:

At the end of the day the United States must face the reality that it cannot produce an enduring solution with military force – air or ground – only one that will last until it departs.  There is an alternative: proceed from the premise that all factions to the conflict have legitimate needs, not just Muslims and Croats.  Leverage Belgrade [Serbian government] and Zagreb [Croatian government] equally to stop the flow of arms to Bosnia.  Denounce the use of military force with equal indignation toward all perpetrators.  Pressure the Bosnians to negotiate in good faith or risk true abandonment.  Enlist the Russians both to represent and dampen Serb demands.  Enforce a ceasefire impartially.^[374]

Lieutenant Colonel John E. Sray, a U.S. Army military Intelligence officer who served as Chief of Intelligence for the UN command in Bosnia for six months, probed another aspect of the war in his study, “Selling the Bosnian Myth to America: Buyer Beware” (U.S. Army Foreign Military Studies Office, October 1995).  He writes, “Popular perceptions pertaining to the Bosnian Muslim government . . . have been forged by a prolific propaganda machine.  A strange combination of three major spin doctors, including public relations (PR) firms in the employ of the Bosniacs, media pundits, and sympathetic elements of the U.S. State Department, have managed to manipulate illusions to further Muslim goals.”  One of the PR firms, Hill & Knowlton, notes Sray, “managed the highly successful Kuwaiti public relations offensive prior to Desert Storm.  Its achievements included convincing the American public of the perverse fabrication that Iraqi troops had ejected Kuwaiti babies from incubators.”  Sray continues:

The successful efforts of these firms resulted in the portrayal of unilateral Serbian atrocities in such a way that future moral judgments were seriously corrupted. . . . Bosniac ethnic cleansing was ignored. . . . Bosniac military offensives (more frequent than Bosnian Serb Army attacks) went deliberately unreported. . . .

America need not succumb to the false messages which the Bosniacs are selling.  Our society must retain its perspective on all the warring factions and learn to recognize the tools of propaganda.  When this conflict began, cosmopolitan Sarajevan Muslims realized the importance of both perception management and the need to disseminate their message to the world.  This awareness, coupled with the expertise of their PR firms, resulted in a highly successful psychological operations campaign.  Meanwhile, the more rustic Serbs proved no match for this competition.  They relied on their Bolshevik slogans, recited them by rote, and were promptly dismissed by the international press.  While the U.S. and its allies must continue to pursue war criminals, no one should not condemn an entire nationality for their lack of erudition and finesse. . . .

All the groups in this country have been victims, and they all deserve our sympathy and best humanitarian efforts. Military support for any warring faction, however, remains another matter.  Such benefits should be withheld until all sides abandon their greed for more land, tire of killing each other, and permit the implementation of a just and lasting peace.^[375]

The views of Boyd and Sray appear to align with those of the International War Resisters League and the International Fellowship of Reconciliation.  An open letter concerning the situation in the Balkans by the two pacifist groups issued on June 29, 1992, stated, “Any use of military force – no matter how limited it is intended to be – introduces a different logic, a military logic offering a rationale for further, less limited use of additional military force.”^[376]

Kosovo was an autonomous province within Serbia in 1998-99, becoming independent in 2008

The collapse of Yugoslavia was not yet complete.  The province of Kosovo within the Republic of Serbia had been pushing for independence since 1991.  With a population 90 percent ethnic Albanian and 10 percent Serbian, Kosovo had been an Autonomous Province under Tito.  In 1989, Serbia rescinded that status and placed political control in the hands of the Serb minority.  Repressive measures ensued, including “mass dismissal of ethnic Albanians from professional, administrative, and other skilled positions in state-owned enterprises and public institutions,” and “the closure of Albanian-language mass media,” according to a UN General Assembly resolution in February 1994 that condemned the repression.^[377]  Albanians organized the Democratic League of Kosovo, led by literary scholar Ibrahim Rugova, to peacefully protest these indignities as well as to build parallel governing structures.  Violent resistance began in the mid-1990s led by the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA).

Two problems emerged with the agreement.  First, the Kosovo Liberation Army used the Serb restraint as an opportunity to launch a new offensive.  A key limitation of the Holbrooke agreement was that it made explicit demands only on the Serbs, while the KLA guerrillas, who rejected the accord, met no demands at all.  This loophole worked to the advantage of the KLA.  And once again, the guerrillas engaged their long-standing practice of attacking isolated Serb outposts as a strategy of provocation…. In short, it was the KLA, not the Serbs, who were undermining the Holbrooke agreement.^[380]

Washington policymakers regarded the NATO air war an overall success.^[391]  The Milošević government had been forced to pull its forces out of Kosovo and the U.S. had been instrumental in arranging a peace agreement, in keeping with its assumed global leadership role.  According to General Clark, the purpose of the NATO air war was “to halt or disrupt a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing.”^[392]  Yet the immediate effect of the NATO bombing was to exacerbate Serb attacks on Kosovo Albanians, resulting in a massive refugee crisis.  In the aftermath of the NATO victory, moreover, the KLA engaged in a reverse “ethnic cleansing” of Serbs.  According to David Gibbs:

The KLA used its newly privileged position to persecute the Serbs, as well as other minorities (notably the Roma) considered suspect by the Albanians.  The resulting atrocities were tracked by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe … By February 2000, between 400 and 700 Serbs were murdered, presumably by Albanian vigilantes.  These murders were effective in driving out most of the remaining Serbs…. All told, almost a quarter of a million people – including Serbs, Roma, and other disfavored groups – fled Kosovo during the period after the war ended.^[393]

• At the outset, the European Community and the U.S. could have given first priority to preserving the multicultural ethic upheld by the Yugoslav government for 45 years, rather than hurriedly backing independence movements in Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia, come what may.

• The U.S. and all outside powers could have remained neutral and not supplied arms to their favored parties, thereby encouraging those parties to negotiate rather than fight.

• Western European nations and especially the U.S. could have offered more support for the peace plans put forth; and the UN could have taken the lead in mediation, carrying out its mandate to prevent war instead of deferring to NATO.  With NATO running the show, there was a clear bias toward military “solutions” over negotiations.  Indeed, NATO was primed for fighting a war against a nation-state (Serbia) but poorly prepared for diffusing violence between three locally-based militias.^[394]

• With a clearer understanding of the roots of ethnic rivalries in the region, the international community could have initiated mediation and conflict resolution meetings at the local level, bringing people together to talk in a structured environment with the help of conflict resolution experts.  If coupled with practical negotiations over land disputes and perhaps economic incentives for successful agreements, such meetings on a massive scale might have produced positive results; and even if they failed in the immediate, they would have pointed the way to a lasting solution.  If the money spent on the war in Kosovo, estimated at $3 billion, were spent on conflict resolution rewards, every man, woman, and child in Kosovo – some two million people – could have received $1,500 in compensation for getting along with their neighbors.^[395]

• Had all of the above failed to prevent fighting, UN peacekeeping could have been strengthened.  This includes not only providing “safe areas” with adequate military protection, but also preventing militias from using these areas for attacks.  The UN secretary-general originally requested 34,000 troops to protect six “safe areas,” but the UN authorized only 7,600 and provided 5,000.^[396]

While this footnote hardly exonerates Milošević, it does indicate that the U.S. campaign to demonize the Serbian leader as the evil villain behind ethnic cleansing was fashioned out of a stereotypical Hitler image.  This demonic image skewed both the debate over intervention and the memory of it.  Senator Joe Biden, Democrat of Delaware and future president, for example, let it be known in a speech on December 13, 1995, that the U.S. intervened in Bosnia in order to prevent another Holocaust:

How many in this Chamber, like me, have gone to the Holocaust memorial events and heard the refrain, ‘Never again.’  Never again?  On the same continent, in the same proximity, the same death camps – it is happening again…. This time it was not Jews.  It was primarily Muslims…. I am here to take sides.  Karadžić, the leader of the Bosnian Serbs, is war criminal.  He is no better than [Heinrich] Himmler.  He is no better than [Joseph] Goebbels…. Milošević is also a war criminal…. What is the message we send to the world if we stand by and we say we will let it continue to happen here in this place but it is not in our interest?”^[400]

This ready-made historical analogy to Nazi Germany served to obscure the complex nature of ethnic rivalries in the former Yugoslavia.  The Serbs were identified as the only villain; negotiations were dismissed as “appeasement”; and forceful military action was deemed the best way to derail the “ethnic cleansing,” albeit of one party.  A more accurate and realistic analysis would arguably have encouraged more effort in the direction of peace negotiations and compromise.^[401]

Operation Provide Comfort and other missions in Iraq, 1991-2003

No fly zones imposed on Iraq by the U.S. and Britain

This brief humanitarian relief effort was overshadowed by U.S. and NATO military actions to “contain” Saddam.  The U.S. along with Britain and France engaged in a low-intensity air war in Iraq.  The three powers established two no-fly-zones, one north of the 36^th parallel (Northern Watch) in April 1991, and the other south of the 32^nd parallel (Southern Watch) a year later.  These no-fly zones were instituted without UN approval, although the great powers claimed to be enforcing UN Security Council Resolution 688, adopted in 1991, which demanded that Iraq cease its “repression of the Iraqi civilian population.”  Coalition warplanes attacked Iraqi air defenses, communication and control centers, and an occasional Iraqi MIG-25 that flew into a no-fly zone.  On June 27, 1993, the U.S. launched 23 Tomahawk cruise missiles into downtown Baghdad, destroying what was believed to be the headquarters of the Iraqi Intelligence Service.  President Clinton claimed that there was “compelling evidence” of “a plot to assassinate former President Bush.  And that this plot, which included the use of a powerful bomb made in Iraq, was directed and pursued by the Iraqi intelligence service.”^[402]

Great power geopolitical interests were evident in U.S. and British support for the Rwandan Patriotic Front, in taking sides in the Bosnian and Kosovo wars, and in seeking to oust Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq, all of which favored war over nonviolent conflict resolution.  The UN, to its discredit, turned from its initial humanitarian mission in Somalia to embrace an unrealistic and unsuccessful military undertaking.  On the other side of the coin, the UN was inhibited from protecting civilians in Rwanda and sidelined by the U.S. and NATO in Bosnia and Kosovo.  For the Responsibility to Protect principle to be valid, it must be carried out by the proper international agency under established international law, lest the great powers define and carry out “humanitarian interventions” as they see fit. Hans Köchler, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, writes of the implications for international order and collective security:

After the collapse of the bipolar balance of power at the beginning of the 1990s, the intervention of NATO had not only a destabilizing impact on international order, but it effectively undermined the United Nations Organization in the exercise of its mandate of collective security.  This unilateral use of force – not challenged, or reigned in, by the international community – was followed by a series of similar actions by the United States and her allies, as in the case of the invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 or the intervention in the Syrian civil war in the years after 2011.^[408]

Finally, the principle of Responsibility to Protect was misapplied in Haiti.  A clear distinction must be made between “crimes against humanity” and the panoply of lesser abuses that beset the world, including the denial of political, social, and economic rights (outlined in the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights and subsequent human rights treaties).  Should the denial of democracy become cause for international military interventions, a Pandora’s Box of wars and woes would be unleashed.  The struggle for human rights requires continuing work on many levels to establish collective norms, international treaties and courts, national policies and laws, and educational programs and activities designed to raise social and moral consciousness.

V. The failed American crusade to remake Russia in the 1990s

The Fall of the U.S.S.R. and American Policy Towards Russia

Time, Aug. 1991, hails Boris Yeltsin as the hero of a democratic Russian revolution

Boris Yeltsin, the first president of the post-Soviet Russian Federation, supported Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev’s economic liberalization (perestroika), though he said that the reforms did not go far enough.  In 1987, Yeltsin was the first to resign from the Communist Party’s governing Politburo, establishing his popularity as an anti-establishment figure.^[414]  This reputation was cemented when he helped rally public opposition to a coup attempt led by the head of the KGB, Vladimir Kryuchkov, and Vice President Gennady Yanyayev, against Gorbachev in August 1991.  Yeltsin made a memorable speech on the turret of a tank, which many Russians today believe was staged.  Gorbachev subsequently gave up without a fight and the Soviet Union was dissolved.^[415]

Privatization:  Harvard boys do Russia

Integral to the privatization plan was a voucher system in which every Russian citizen was allowed to purchase for a small fee a voucher worth 10,000 rubles that could be used to buy shares of newly privatized enterprises at auctions.^[446]  Most Russians were forced to sell their privatization voucher for quick cash on the black market at ridiculously low rates (10,000 rubles or a mere $7) in order to feed their families.  Others got nothing when they invested in voucher funds that failed to pay dividends or turned out to be pyramid schemes.^[447]  Most of the auctions were rigged by oligarchs and corrupt government officials.  Industries that were sold off were grossly undervalued, depriving the Russian people of billions of dollars in revenue.  The top six industrial giants were valued at least 20 times higher than the price for which they were sold in voucher auctions.  Political analyst William F. Engdahl wrote that “the entire Russian industrial system, including mines, oil companies, and factories, had a total valuation of under $12 billion. It was theft on a colossal scale.”^[448]  According to the historian Odd Arne Westad:

If many Russians felt robbed of a future, they were not wrong. Russia’s future was indeed stolen – by the privatization of Russian industry and of its natural resources.  As the socialist state with its moribund economy was dismantled, a new oligarchy emerged from party institutions, planning bureaus and centers of science and technology and assumed ownership of Russia’s riches.  Often, the new owners stripped these assets and closed down production.  In a state in which unemployment had, officially at least, been nonexistent, the rate of joblessness rose through the 1990s to peak at 13 percent.  All this happened while the West applauded Boris Yeltsin’s economic reforms.[449]

Economist Joseph Stiglitz called Russia’s reformers “market Bolsheviks” for their fondness for cataclysmic revolution and top-down policy formulations.^[450]  Large majorities of Russians – over 80 percent in some polls – continued to support fundamental economic features of the Soviet system such as public ownership of large-scale economic assets, a state-regulated market, guaranteed employment, controlled consumer prices and other standard of living subsidies, and free education and health-care.^[451]

Yeltsin’s autocracy and American election meddling

An exposé of U.S. manipulation of Russian elections was framed as a “rescue” of the U.S.-favored candidate, Boris Yeltsin, July 15, 1996 issue

Time magazine’s now famous cover story on the American meddling came with the brazen cover lead, “Yanks to the Rescue.”  It later inspired a Showtime film, Spinning Boris, about how American political consultants “saved Russia from communism.”  Correspondent Michael Kramer announced, “Democracy triumphed – and along with it came the tools of modern campaigns, including the trickery and slickery Americans know so well.”^[464]

• In the first years of the Chubais-Yeltsin privatization scheme, the life expectancy of a Russian male fell from 65 years to 57.5 years.  Female life expectancy in Russia dropped from 74.5 years in 1989 to 72.8 years in 1999.
• The number of people living in poverty in the former Soviet republics rose from 14 million in 1989 to 147 million in 1998.
• In the period from 1992 to 1998 Russia’s Gross Domestic Product fell by half – something that did not happen even during the German invasion in the Second World War.
• Capital flight totaled $1-2 billion per month during Yeltsin’s tenure.^[471]

Vladimir Putin, NATO Expansion and the New Cold War

About the authors

ENDNOTES

[1] Stanley Meisler, “Reagan Recants ‘Evil Empire’ Description,” Los Angeles Times, June 1, 1988.

[2] Reagan campaign speech, June 1980, cited in Barbara Farnham, “Reagan and the Borbachev Revolution: Perceiving the End of Threat,” Political Science Quarterly 116, no. 2 (2001): 227; and “Remarks at the Annual Convention of the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando, Florida,” March 8, 1983, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library & Museum, https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/research/speeches/30883b.

[3] Gorbachev’s watchwords for reform were “perestroika” (restructuring) and “glasnost” (openness).  The reforms heralded greater democratization of the political system, a modicum of individual enterprise, and a larger measure of personal liberties, including free speech.  Gorbachev served as general secretary of the Communist Party from 1985 until 1991.

[4] “Address by Mikhail Gorbachev at the UN General Assembly Session (Excerpts),” December 07, 1988, History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive, CWIHP Archive. https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/116224.  See also, Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick, The Untold History of the United States (New York: Gallery Books, 2012), 463-64.

[5] “Gambler, Showman, Statesman,” New York Times (opinion), December 8, 1988.

[6] U.S. Dept. of Defense, Soviet Military Power: An Assessment of the Threat, 1988 (Washington, DC, 1988), 8-13.  See also, Andrew Bacevich, The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2020), 28.

[7] Andrew Rosenthal, “The Malta Summit: Bush and Gorbachev Proclaim a New Era for U.S.-Soviet Ties; Agree on Arms and Trade Aims,” New York Times, December 4, 1989, A1.  For transcripts of the meeting by the U.S. and the Soviets, see Svetlana Savranskaya and Thomas Blanton, eds., “Bush and Gorbachev at Malta: Previously Secret Documents from Soviet and U.S. Files on the 1989 Meeting, 20 Years Later,” National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 298, posted December 3, 2009, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB298/index.htm.  The latter authors note:  “Throughout 1989, judging by the candid memoir authored by President Bush with his national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, the Bush mentality was marked by insecurity and anxiety that Gorbachev was more popular globally and had the initiative on proposing new departures in security policy – never quite recognizing that Gorbachev’s proposals might well be in the U.S. national security interest.”

[8] Victoria Graham, “URGENT General Assembly Condemns Panama Invasion 75-20,” AP News, December 29, 1989, https://apnews.com/f968dc18cc41ccc76a33b43baf4018b4.  The idea that the end of the Cold War presented a new opportunity to build a more cooperative world order was asserted continually during the 1990s by the Center for Defense Information in Washington, DC, a group headed by retired admirals Eugene J. Carroll and Gene R. La Rocque.  In a 1999 article in The Defense Monitor, “America’s Future: Confrontation or Cooperation?” (Vol. 28, No. 3), the authors write, “The answer to that depends on whether we attempt to perpetuate an American global hegemony as the world’s only military superpower – or if we seek to exercise constructive leadership as a cooperative member in a peaceful world community governed by the rule of law” (p.1).  Two decades later, with Washington policymakers having taken the former course of action, Stephen Wertheim, a research scholar of the Saltzman Institute for War and Peace Studies of Columbia University, wrote in the New York Times, “In theory, armed supremacy could foster peace.  Facing overwhelming force, who would dare to defy American wishes?  That was the hope of Pentagon planners in 1992; they reacted to the collapse of America’s Cold War adversary not by pulling back but by pursuing even greater military pre-eminence.  But the quarter-century that followed showed the opposite to prevail in practice.  Freed from one big enemy, the United States found many smaller enemies:  It has launched many more [overt] military interventions since the Cold War than during the ‘twilight struggle’ itself.  Of all its interventions since 1946, roughly 80 percent have taken place after 1991.”  Stephen Wertheim, “The Only Way to End ‘Endless War,'” New York Times, September 15, 2019, Sunday Week-in-Review (op-ed), p. 7.

[9] “Gorbachev Wants ‘Helsinki 2’ Summit,” Tallahassee Democrat, December 1, 1989.  Gorbachev laid out his vision for Europe in a speech given in France on July 6, 1989.  See James M. Markham, “Gorbachev Spurns Armed Aggression as Tool in Europe,” New York Times, July 7, 1989.

[10] “Record of conversation between Mikhail Gorbachev and James Baker in Moscow, February 9, 1990,” National Security Archive, document 6, in “NATO Expansion: What Gorbachev Heard,” https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2017-12-12/nato-expansion-what-gorbachev-heard-western-leaders-early.  The U.S. did not declassify records of the Baker-Gorbachev meeting until December 12, 2017.  This website contains a trove of primary documents attesting to the promises and indications made to Soviet and Russian leaders to not expand NATO into Eastern Europe. See also Joshua Shifrinson, “Deal or No Deal? The End of the Cold War and the U.S. Offer to Limit Expansion,” International Security, Vol. 40, no. 4 (Spring 2016): 7-44, https://www.belfercenter.org/sites/default/files/files/publication/003-ISEC_a_00236-Shifrinson.pdf.  [The issue became a hot topic of debate after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, with numerous U.S. political leaders and scholars challenging the idea that a “promise” had been made to the Soviets to not expand NATO into Eastern Europe.  The extension of NATO into Ukraine was the major point of contention raised by the Putin government, to which the Biden administration would not budge from asserting the right to expand NATO regardless of Russian security interests.  Though no treaty to prevent NATO expansion into Eastern Europe was signed in 1990, the U.S. and Germany offered at least a dozen private and public assurances to Soviet leaders between January and June 1990; these can be found on the National Security Archive website.  Additionally, on February 3, 1990, German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher and U.S. Secretary of State James Baker gave a press conference in which Genscher stated: “Perhaps I might add, we were in full agreement that there is no intention to extend the NATO area of defense and the security toward the East. This holds true not only for GDR, which we have no intention of simply incorporating, but that holds true for all the other Eastern countries.”  Cited in Marc Tractenberg, “The United States and the NATO Non-extension Assurances of 1990: New Light on an Old Problem?” International Security, Vol. 45, No. 3 (2021) – online copy, page 18, footnote 57, http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/faculty/trachtenberg/cv/1990.pdf.

[11] David E. Rosenbaum, “Spending Can Be Cut in Half, Former Defense Officials Say,” New York Times, December 13, 1989.  Lawrence J. Korb, a former assistant Defense Secretary in the Reagan administration, agreed with McNamara, saying that transferring funds to the domestic sector “can have a dramatic impact on our economic well-being and our competitive position in the world.”

[12] Michael Oreskes, “Poll Finds U.S. Expects Peace Dividend,” New York Times, January 25, 1990, B9.  The article noted poll data from a New York Times/CBS Poll taken January 13-15, 1990, indicating that 36 percent favored decreasing military spending, up from 24 percent just a year earlier.  Over half of Americans at that time did not think the Cold War had ended, indicating that the trend would continue as the Cold War thawed.

[13] James McCartney, “Are We Coming Out of the Cold?” Tallahassee Democrat, July 2, 1989.  According to the Center for Defense Information, based on constant, inflation-adjusted FY2000 dollars, U.S. military outlays dropped precipitously from $522 billion in 1946 to $97 billion in 1948 before rising rapidly to $428 billion in 1953.  Average military spending during the Cold War years was $324 billion.  During the Reagan years, military spending rose from $292 billion in FY 1981 to $402 billion in FY 1989, a 37 percent real increase.  Military spending decreased to a low of $274 billion in FY 1998 before rising again to $331 billion in FY 2005.  Center for Defense Information, 1999 CDI Military Almanac (Washington, DC: Center for Defense Information, 1999), 26.

[14] Michael Klare, “Beyond the Cold War: U.S. Intervention and Third World Poverty,” Fellowship (Fellowship of Reconciliation) 54, no. 10-11, Oct./Nov. 1990: 10-11; and “Violent Peace May Replace Cold War,” Tallahassee Democrat, March 5, 1990.

[15] The White House, “A National Security Strategy of Engagement and Enlargement,” February 1995, https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/policy/national/nss-9502.pdf, page 2.

[16] “Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, Interview on NBC-TV ‘The Today Show’ with Matt Lauer, Columbus, Ohio, February 9, 1998,” U.S. Department of State Archive,  https://1997-2001.state.gov/statements/1998/980219a.html.

[17] Andrew Bacevich, “False Security:  Donald Trump and the Ten Commandments (Plus One) of the National Security State,” October 31, 2019, TomDispatch, http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176623.

[18] “Military Domination or Constructive Leadership?” The Defense Monitor, 1998 (Center for Defense Information), Vol. XXVII, No.3, p. 5.  CDI produced summary reports and interpretive articles from the perspective that military force was the least desirable option for settling international disputes.

[19] See “America on the Sidelines,” New York Times (editorial), July 29, 2001; and United States Ratification of International Human Rights Treaties,” Human Rights Watch, https://www.hrw.org/news/2009/07/24/united-states-ratification-international-human-rights-treaties.

[20] Quoted in Andrew Bacevich, American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 73, 97.

[21] See World Inequality Report 2018, https://wir2018.wid.world, pp. 79.

[22] Michael H. Hunt, The American Ascendancy: How the United States Gained & Wielded Global Dominance (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 275.  In some areas, such as the Carolinas, the loss of textile factory jobs was replaced by foreign investments; in many other areas, both rural and urban, jobs were not replaced to the extent needed nor at the wages desired.

[23] Odd Arne Westad, “The Cold War and America’s Delusion of Victory, New York Times, August 28, 2017.

[24] President George H. W. Bush, “January 16, 1991: Address to the Nation on the Invasion of Iraq,” Presidential Speeches, University of Virginia Miller Center, https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/january-16-1991-address-nation-invasion-iraq.

[25] Preamble to the United Nations Charter, https://www.un.org/en/about-us/un-charter/preamble.  The theme of lost opportunity for a New World Order is evident in a number of studies, but in different ways.  Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznic, in The Untold History of the United States (2012, 2019) highlight the theme expressed in this Introduction – a lost opportunity to meet Gorbachev halfway and create a more peaceful and cooperative world order.  Andrew Bacevich, in The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2020), appears to share this view but focuses more particularly on Washington’s illusions regarding the efficacy of force.  Stephen M. Walt, in The Hell of Good Intentions: America’s Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), decries the loss of U.S. influence in the world in the decades following the end of the Cold War, citing overreach of U.S. foreign policies such as pushing NATO into Eastern Europe, but he retains the overarching realist belief that the U.S. should wield predominant power and that U.S. intentions are beneficent.  Another realist scholar, Richard Ned Lebow, in A Democratic Foreign Policy: Regaining American Influence Abroad (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), more insightfully explains that the loss of U.S. influence is due in large part to long-standing U.S. imperious policies, including support for undemocratic regimes.  He challenges realist doctrine in asserting that imperious policies and military predominance have undermined true U.S. leadership in the world, producing in Washington an illusion of influence while other nations seek opportunities to function outside the U.S.-orbit (e.g., linking up with China or asserting independence in the UN).

[26] David Johnston, “U.S. Admits Payments to Noriega, New York Times, January 19, 1991, p. 14.

[27] Ibid.

[28] Frederick Kempe, Divorcing the Dictator: America’s Bungled Affair with Noriega (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1990), 95, 204.

[29] David A. Graham, “The Death of Manuel Noriega – and U.S Intervention in Latin America,” The Atlantic, May 30, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/05/manuel-noriega-obituary-monroe-doctrine/518982; Guillermo St. Malo and Godfrey Harris, The Panamanian Problem: How the Reagan and Bush Administrations Dealt with the Noriega Regime (Los Angeles: The Americas Group, 1993), 25; and Kempe, Divorcing the Dictator, 94.

[30] Congressional Record – Senate, June 26, 1987, pp. 17768-69.

[31] Ronald H. Cole, “Operation Just Cause: The Planning and execution of Joint Operations in Panama, February 1988 – January 1990,” Joint History Office, Office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Washington, D.C., 1995, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB443/docs/area51_22.PDF, pages 7-8.

[32] “Message to the Congress Reporting on the National Emergency With Respect to Panama, October 14, 1988,” Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/research/speeches/101488e; and “Economic Sanctions: Reagan Steps Up Pressure on Panama,” Los Angeles Times, April 10, 1988.

[33] Kevin Buckley, Panama: The Whole Story (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991), 136.

[34] Lally Weymouth, “Panama: The May ’88 Option,” Washington Post, December 31, 1989.

[35] Lawrence Yates, The US Military Intervention in Panama: Operation Just Cause, December 1989– January 1990 (Washington, DC: US Army Center of Military History, 2014), 100.  Woerner confirmed this account in an interview with author, Brian D’Haeseleer, 23 June 2017.

[36] Stephen Engelberg With Jeff Gerth, “Bush and Noriega: Examination of Their Ties,” New York Times, Sept. 28, 1988, 1A; and Kempe, Divorcing the Dictator, 338.

[37] Doyle McManus, “Bush Orders Aid for Foes of Noriega: CIA Funds Election Efforts in Bid to Oust Panama Chief,” Los Angeles Times, April 23, 1989.

[38] Shannon Schwaller, “Operation Just Cause:  the Invasion of Panama, December 1989,” Army Heritage and Education Center, November 17, 2008, https://www.army.mil/article/14302/operation_just_cause_the_invasion_of_panama_december_1989.  The “Sand Fleas” operations were also described as “Freedom of Movement Drills.”  As an example of the tension they caused, Lt. Col. Nicholas E. Reynolds relates the story of an incident on May 23, 1989, in which Panamanian military police stopped a column of U.S. military vehicles.  The Panamanian officer in charge informed the Americans that their military vehicles required a Panamanian escort.  The U.S. platoon commander refused, insisting on his company’s right to “freedom of movement.”  He gave the Panamanian officer two minutes to sort it out.  The column was allowed to proceed, unescorted.  Lt. Col. Nicholas E. Reynolds, Just Cause:  Marine Operations in Panama, 1988-1990 (Washington, DC:  U.S. Marine Corps History and Museums Division Headquarters, 1996), 15.

[39] Cole, “Operation Just Cause,” page 6.

[40] “Intensifying out Military Exercises, ND, Panama” (report), Panama Canal Commission Meetings [3], box 2, William T. Pryce Subject Files, National Security Council Records, George Bush Presidential Library; and James A. Baker, The Politics of Diplomacy: Revolution, War and Peace, 1989–1992 (New York: G.P. Putnam’s and Sons, 1995), 185.

[41] “Maxwell Reid Thurman, General, United States Army,” Arlington National Cemetery Website, http://www.arlingtoncemetery.net/mthurman.htm.

[42] Steven Kinzer, Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq (New York:  Henry Holt and Co., 2006), 253; and “Amateur Hour,” Newsweek, October 16, 1989.  Bush had been struggling to rid himself of the “wimp factor” label since before the presidential election of 1988.  It was an undeserved public branding, conveying the idea that Bush lacked the requisite machismo – think of Theodore Roosevelt with a big stick – to be president of the world’s strongest nation.  See Margaret Garrard Warner, “Bush Battles the ‘Wimp Factor,’” Newsweek, October 19, 1987; and Stephen Ducat, The Wimp Factor: Gender Gaps, Holy Wars, and the Politics of Anxious Masculinity (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2005).

[43] Lyle M. Koenig, Lieutenant Colonel, U.S. Air Force, “Strategy in Operation Just Cause: A Framework for Analysis,” Air War College, Air Education and Training Command, March 1994, https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a280810.pdf.

[44] National Security Directive 32, “Economic Sanctions Against Panama,” November 30, 1989.  The sanctions were not pushed by U.S. business leaders.  Ludlow Flower, Director of the Council of the Americas, expressed concern that the sanctions would “unfairly and disproportionately burden U.S. business interests.”  Ludlow Flower to Robert Gates, “Panama Sanctions: A Discussion Paper Representing the View of a Representative Organization of US Multinational Corporation with Interests in Panama.” 6 April 1989, Latin American Directorate Staff Files [2], box 1, William T. Pryce Files, National Security Council Files, George Bush Library.

[45] John Bushnell, telegram, “Panamanians Hope for a Successful Coup: Noriega Plans for a New Year in Power,” 13 Dec. 1989, Wikileaks, https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/89PANAMA8545_a. html.

[46] Sara Fritz, “U.S. Officer, Wife Beaten in Panama: Military alert: Bush reviews options for action in wake of fatal shooting. Cheney accuses Noriega of fostering violence,” Los Angeles Times, December 18, 1989; and Kenneth Freed, “Panama ‘Aggression’ – Sources Say Dead Marine Provoked Guards,” Los Angeles Times, December 22, 1990.

[47] This account is derived from Powell’s autobiography:  Colin Powell, My American Journey (New York: Ballantine, 1995), 412.

[48] United States Special Forces Command History, 1987– 2007 (Unknown City: United States Special Forces Command, 2007). Available at https://fas. org/irp/agency/dod/socom/2007history.pdf.

[49] Greg Grandin, ‘How the US Created a “Little Hiroshima” in Central America’, The Nation, 22 Dec. 2014.

[50] U.S. Congress, House Committee on Armed Services, “The Invasion of Panama: How Many Innocent Bystanders Perished?” 102nd Congress, 2nd session, 31–2. William P. Head makes the case that fire from AC-130 gunships ignited the inferno. See William Pace Head, Night Hunters: the AC-130s and Their Role in US Airpower (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2014), 175.

[51] Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick, The Untold History of the United States (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012), 473.

[52] John T. Correll, “A Small War in Panama,” Air Force Magazine (December 2009), 59.

[53] Noris Lyn McCall, “Assessing the Role of Air Power,” in Operation Just Cause: the US Intervention in Panama, edited by Peter Tsouras and Bruce Watson (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991): 115-122, 118; and Yates, The US Military Intervention in Panama, 283.

[54] Larry Rohter, “Panama and U.S. Strive To Settle on Death Toll,” New York Times, April 1, 1990, A12.

[55] Ramsey Clark’s Independent Commission of Inquiry on the U.S. Invasion of Panama, The U.S. Invasion of Panama: The Truth Behind Operation “Just Cause” (Boston: South End Press, 1991), 34. Some scholars, on the other hand, supported the Pentagon’s low estimates of Panamanian casualties, including Russell Crandall who believes that the U.S. over-reported civilian fatalities; see Crandall, Gunboat Diplomacy, 215.

[56] Greg Grandin, “How the US Created a ‘Little Hiroshima’ in Central America,” The Nation, 22 December 2014.

[57] Elisa Malo, phone interview with author, Brian D’Haeseleer, 23 July 2017.

[58] Inter-American Commission on Human Rights Report No. 121/18, Case 10.573, October 5, 2018, p. 10-11.

[59] Walter Soderlund, Ronald Wagenberg, and Ian Pemberton, “Cheerleader or Critic?  Television News Coverage in Canada and the United States of the US Invasion of Panama,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 27.3 (September 1994): 581-604; and Jonathan Mermin, Debating War and Peace: Media Coverage of U.S. Intervention in the Post-Vietnam Era (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 50.

[60] Sandra Dickson, “Understanding Media Bias: The Press and the US Invasion of Panama,” Journalism Quarterly 71.4 (Winter 1994): 809-819; and Jonathan Mermin, “Conflict in the Sphere of Consensus? Critical Reporting on the Panama Invasion and the Gulf War,” Political Communication 13 (1996): 181-194, 184.

[61] Soderlund, et. al., “Cheerleader or Critic?” 600.

[62] Jeff Cohen and Mark Cook, “How Television Sold the Panama Invasion,” Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, January 1, 1990, http://fair.org/extra/how-television-sold-the-panama-invasion.

[63] Buckley, Panama: The Whole Story, 258-59.

[64] Clarence Briggs, Operation Just Cause, Panama December, 1989:  A Soldier’s Eyewitness Account (Harrisburg: Stackpole Books, 1990), 95.

[65] Cohen and Cook, “How Television Sold the Panama Invasion.”

[66] “The Panama Invasion: a Newsweek Poll,” Newsweek, January 1, 1990. The poll sampled 500 adults over the phone on 21 December 1989.

[67]  Julian E. Zelizer, Arsenal of Democracy: The Politics of National Security in America from World War II to the War on Terrorism (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 358.

[68] Michael Frisby, ‘Dissonant Voices are Few as Congress goes Along,’ Boston Globe, December 21, 1989; and Jonathan Mermin, Debating War and Peace: Media Coverage of U.S. Intervention in the Post-Vietnam Era (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 66.

[69] William Branigin, “Pro-US Panamanians Cheer Visit by Quayle,” Washington Post, January 28, 1990.

[70] General Fred Woerner, phone interview with author, Brian D’Haeseleer, 23 June 2017; Richard H. Shultz Jr., In the Aftermath of War: US Support for Reconstruction and Nation-building in Panama Following Just Cause (Maxwell Air Force Base, AL: Air University Press, 1993), 16; and John T. Fishel and Richard Downie, “Taking Responsibility for Our Actions: Establishing Order and Stability in Panama,” Military Review (April 1992), 66–78, 66.

[71] The White House, “National Security Directive 33,” 24 January 1990, https://fas.org/irp/offdocs/nsd/nsd33.pdf; Richard Shultz, Jr., In the Aftermath of War: US Support for Reconstruction and Nation-Building in Panama Following Just Cause (Maxwell Air Force Base: Air University Press, 1993), 46; and John Fishel, “The Institutional Conversion of the Panamanian Defense Forces,” in Orlando Perez (ed), Post-Invasion Panama: The Challenges of Democratization in the New World Order (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2000), 11–27, 22.

[72] President Endara to President Bush, letter, ND, National Security Council Files, Eric Melby, “Panama (2) [1], George H. W. Bush Presidential Library, College Station, TX.

[73] William Head, “Gunships and ‘Ding-Bats’: US Military Operations During ‘Just Cause,’” Journal of Third World Studies, XXVIII.2 (2011): 87-105, 99.

[74] Buckley, Panama: The Whole Story, 258-259.

[75] Telegram, “September 30th Meeting with Endara,” Oct. 1989, Panama (General) January 1992– June 1992 [3], no box number, Charles Gillespie Files, National Security Files, George Bush Presidential Library.

[76] “Fighting in Panama:  The President; A Transcript of Bush’s Address on the Decision to Use Force in Panama,” New York Times, December 21, 1989, A19.

[77] Ibid.  General Woerner believed that American lives were in no immediate danger prior to the invasion.  Godfrey Harris, Invasion: The American Destruction of the Noriega Regime in Panama (Los Angeles: Penguin Printing, 1990).

[78] Excerpts from “Statement by Baker on U.S. Policy,” New York Times, December 21, 1989, A9.

[79] Ruth Wedgwood, “The Use of Armed Forces in International Affairs: Self-Defense and the Panama Invasion,” Yale Law School Faculty Scholarship series, 1991, https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/fss_papers/2273, pages 617-18, 626.  Supposedly, the soldiers who ran the blockade were among those frustrated by what they perceived as SOUTHCOM’s tepid response to Noriega.  Known as the “hard chargers,” some sources allege they were trying to provoke a response, and according to one, SOUTHCOM officers were aware of their activities.  See Luis Murillo, The Noriega Mess: The Drugs, the Canal, and Why America Invaded (Berkley, CA: Video Books, 1995), 772.

[80] Ved P. Nanda, “The Validity of United States Intervention in Panama under International Law,” The American Journal of International Law 84, no. 2 (1990), 497.  See also, Charles Maechling Jr., ‘Washington’s Illegal Invasion’, Foreign Policy, lxxix (Summer 1990), 113– 31; and John Quigley, “The Legality of the United States Invasion of Panama,” Yale Journal of International Law, Vol. 15, Issue 2 (1990), https://openyls.law.yale.edu/bitstream/handle/20.500.13051/6236/14_15YaleJIntlL276_1990_.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y.  Quigley writes, “International law permits one state to use force against another state only in certain narrowly defined situations.  A state may use force in self-defense in the event of an ‘armed attack’ by another state.”  For a contrary view, see Anthony D’Amato, “The Invasion of Panama was a Lawful Response to Tyranny,” The American Journal of International Law, lxxxiv (1990), 516–24.

[81] Nanda, “The Validity of United States Intervention in Panama under International Law,” 502.

[82] National Security Decision Directive Number 221, “Narcotics and National Security,” April 8, 1986, https://fas.org/irp/offdocs/nsdd/nsdd-221.pdf.

[83] Ted Galen Carpenter, Bad Neighbor Policy: Washington’s Futile War on Drugs in Latin America (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003), 32; and Jeffrey M. Jones, “In U.S., 65% Say Drug Problem ‘Extremely’ or ‘Very Serious,’” Gallup News, Social & Policy Issues, October 28, 2016, https://news.gallup.com/poll/196826/say-drug-problem-extremely-serious.aspx.

[84] Nancy Golden and Sherrill Brown Wells, eds., American Foreign Policy Current Documents: 1989 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1990).

[85] Dan Baum, Smoke and Mirrors: the War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1996), 286.

[86] Carpenter, Bad Neighbor Policy, 42.

[87] Telegram, 21 December 1989, ‘Security Council Meeting on Panama,’ Wikileaks, http://cables.mrkva.eu/cable.php?id=328.

[88] Some examples include Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies and the CIA in Central America (Berkley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991); Douglas Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of America’s War on Drugs (London & New York: Verso, 2004); and Alfred McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, Revised Edition (Chicago, IL: Chicago Review Press, 2003).

[89] Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy: A Report Prepared by the Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations of the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, December 1988), https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB113/north06.pdf, pages 79-100; and “Agent Who Arrested Noriega Sentenced on Theft Charge,” AP News, March 25, 1994, https://apnews.com/11d0abe184c71b44ae75fdede856c27a.

[90] John M. McClintock, “Panama leader’s bank is linked to drug money,” Baltimore Sun, October 23, 1990; and Robert T. Buckman, Latin America 2014: The World Today Series, 2014-2015 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), 335.

[91] George H. W. Bush, ‘Inaugural Address’, 20 Jan. 1989, http://www.presidency.ucsb. edu/ws/index.php?pid=16610.

[92] George H. W. Bush, ‘Remarks at the United States Coast Guard Academy,’ May 24, 1989.

[93] Abraham Sofaer, Draft Speech, “The United States Acted Lawfully in Panama,” no date, Boyden Gray Files, White House Counsel Files, “War Powers: Panama,” Box 1, George H. W. Bush Library, College Station, Texas; and Ronnie Ramos, David Lyons, and Martin Merzer, “He was U.S. prisoner #41586.  How Noriega landed in a Miami jail after invasion,” Miami Herald, May 30, 2017.  For historical background on the doctrine of “humanitarian intervention,” see Hans Köchler, The Concept of Humanitarian Intervention in the Context of Modern Power Politics (Vienna: International Progress Organization, 2001), http://hanskoechler.com/koechler-humanitarian-intervention.pdf.

[94] Zelizer, Arsenal of Democracy, 356.  Lindsey O’Rourke, in Covert Regime Change: America’s Secret Cold War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018), identifies 70 “regime change” U.S. interventions during the Cold War, of which 64 were conducted covertly through the CIA.  Of these 64, she writes, “The United States supported authoritarian forces in forty-four out of sixty-four covert regime changes, including at least six operations that sought to replace liberal democratic governments with illiberal authoritarian regimes.”  See Roger Peace, “Cold War interventionism, 1945-1990,” United States Foreign Policy History and Resource Guide website, 2019, http://peacehistory-usfp.org/cold-war.

[95] Nanda, “The Validity of United States Intervention in Panama under International Law, 501.

[96] George J. Church, ‘No Place to Run,’ Time, 8 January 1990.

[97] Powell, My American Journey, 421.

[98] David Samuels, “A Conversation with Colin Powell,” The Atlantic (April 2007), https:// www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2007/04/a-conversation-with-colin-powell/305873.

[99] “The Gulf War, Oral History: Colin Powell,” Frontline, Public Broadcasting Station, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/ pages/frontline/gulf/oral/powell/1.html.

[100] Robert Parry and Norman Solomon, ‘Behind Colin Powell’s Legend: Panama War’, Consortium News, 19 Dec. 2013.

[101] Lou Dubose and Jake Bernstein, Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency (New York: Random House, 2006), 99.

[102] See Carl T. Bogus, “The Invasion of Panama and the Rule of Law,” The International Lawyer, Vol. 26, No. 3 (Fall 1992): 781-87.

[103] Richard Boudreaux, “Combat in Panama: Top Latin Leaders Roundly Condemn U.S. Military Attack; Panama: Officials across the region assail the intervention. They predict a crisis unless American troops withdraw quickly.” Los Angeles Times, Dec. 21, 1989; and John M. Goshko and Michael Isikoff, “OAS Votes to Censure U.S. for Intervention,” Washington Post, December 23, 1989.

[104] Permanent Council of the OAS, Resolution CP/RES 534 (800/89), “Serious events in the Republic of Panama,” adopted on December 22, 1989.

[105] John M. Goshko and Michael Isikoff, “OAS Votes to Censure U.S. for Intervention,” Washington Post, December 23, 1989.

[106] OAS Charter, http://www.oas.org/en/sla/dil/inter_american_treaties_A-41_charter_OAS.asp.  Article 21 of the OAS charter states:  “The territory of a State is inviolable; it may not be the object, even temporarily, of military occupation or of other measures of force taken by another State, directly or indirectly, on any grounds whatever.  No territorial acquisitions or special advantages obtained either by force or by other means of coercion shall be recognized.”  Article 26 states:  “In the event that a dispute arises between two or more American States which, in the opinion of one of them, cannot be settled through the usual diplomatic channels, the parties shall agree on some other peaceful procedure that will enable them to reach a solution.”

[107] Victoria Graham, “URGENT General Assembly Condemns Panama Invasion 75-20,” AP News, December 29, 1989, https://apnews.com/f968dc18cc41ccc76a33b43baf4018b4; and General Assembly of the United Nations. Resolution No. 44/240 “Effects of the military intervention by the United States of America in Panama on the situation in Central America,” adopted on December 29, 1989.

[108] Civilian protections in Protocol 1, Additional to the Geneva Conventions, 1977, include the following:  Article 51, No. 1.  “The civilian population and individual civilians shall enjoy general protection against dangers arising from military operations.”  No. 4.  “Indiscriminate attacks are prohibited.”  No. 5.  Among others, the following types of attacks are to be considered as indiscriminate:  a.  an attack by bombardment by any methods or means which treats as a single military objective a number of clearly separated and distinct military objectives located in a city, town, village, or other area containing a similar concentration of civilians of civilian objects; an attack which may be expected to cause incidental loss of live civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated.”

[109] Americas Watch, “The Laws of war and the conduct of the Panama invasion,” May 10, 1990; and Americas Watch, “Human Rights in Post-Invasion Panama: Justice Delayed is Justice Denied,” April 7, 1991; cited in the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights Report No. 121/18, Case 10.573, p. 20.

[110] Physicians for Human Rights, “Operation Just Cause: The human cost of military action in Panama,” October 1991; cited in the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights Report No. 121/18, Case 10.573, p. 20.

[111] Telegram, “Security Council Meeting on Panama,” 21 Dec. 1989, https://wikileaks.org/plusd/ cables/89STATE405134_a.html; and Telegram, “US Presents its Case on Panama to the Organization of American States’, 21 Dec. 1989,” Wikileaks, https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/89STATE404719_a.html.

[112] Baker, The Politics of Diplomacy, 193.

[113] Editorial, “Civilization’s Limits,” Wall Street Journal, 21 December 1989; and Roger Peace, “’Yankee Imperialism,’ 1901-1934” (Section II), U.S. Foreign Policy History and Resource Guide website, 2018, http://peacehistory-usfp.org/yankee-imperialism.

[114] The UN Security Council voted to institute economic sanctions against Iraq on August 6, 1990, requesting all nations to block Iraqi imports and exports, excepting “supplies intended strictly for medical purposes, and in humanitarian circumstances, foodstuffs,” and to cease all financial payments and arms transfers. “Resolution 661 (1990), adopted by the Security Council at its 2933^rd meeting, on 6 August 1990,” United Nations Digital Library, https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/94221?ln=en.

[115] United Nations Security Council Resolution 678, adopted November 29, 1990, http://unscr.com/en/resolutions/678.

[116] The four days of ground war from February 24-28 does not include a two-day battle in the Saudi border town of Khafji on January 29, 1991.

[117] Thomas A. Keaney and Eliot A. Cohen, “Gulf War Air Power Survey, Summary Report,” Washington, DC, December 1993, https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a273996.pdf, 249.  Iraqi combat deaths in Kuwait are estimated at 21,000 by Keaney and Cohen.  Coalition combat deaths totaled 246, of which at least 44 were from “friendly fire,” meaning accidental killing by coalition troops.  The ratio, as such, is 21,000 to 202, or more than 100 to one.

[118] United Nations Charter, Chapter VII, https://www.un.org/en/sections/un-charter/chapter-vii/index.html.

[119] Middle East Watch, Needless Deaths in the Gulf War: Civilian Casualties During the Air Campaign and Violations of the Laws of War (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1991), https://www.hrw.org/legacy/reports/1991/gulfwar/INTRO.htm, section: “Introduction and Summary of Conclusions.”  Saddam Hussein’s complete name is Saddam Hussein Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti.  He is often called Saddam in the Western press, but is sometimes referred to as Hussein.

[120] Defense Intelligence Agency, A Chronology of Defense Intelligence in the Gulf War: A Research Aid for Analysts, July 1997, p. 3, access via William Burr and Jeffrey T. Richelson, editors, “Operation Desert Storm: Ten Years Later,” National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 39, document 16, published January 17, 2001, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB39/document16.pdf.

[121] H. Norman Schwarzkopf, Testimony before Congress, Senate Committee on Armed Services, Threat Assessment; Military Strategy; and Operational Requirements, 101^st Congress, 2^nd Session, February 8, 1990, 577-79.

[122] “OPLAN 1002 Defense of the Arabian Peninsula,” GlobalSecurity.org, https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/oplan-1002.htm; Defense Intelligence Agency, A Chronology of Defense Intelligence in the Gulf War, 4; and Keaney and Cohen, “Gulf War Air Power Survey, Summary Report,” 30.

[123] Keaney and Cohen, “Gulf War Air Power Survey, Summary Report,” 2.  According to another account, Air Force Col. John A. Warden III began preparing an offensive plan on August 5, “nicknamed “Instant Thunder,” designed to “incapacitate” the Iraqi forces by targeting “high-level bunkers, regime headquarters, official residences, air defenses, telecommunications, electrical power plants, oil plants, military production facilities and transportation links.”  See William M. Arkin, “Fog of War: Masterminding an Air War,” washingtonpost.com, 1998.

[124] Richard A. Clarke, “Mission to Jeddah,” August 7, 2015, https://mei.edu/publications/mission-jeddah.

[125] Defense Intelligence Agency, A Chronology of Defense Intelligence in the Gulf War, 16.  The Dhahran Air Field was built by the U.S. after World War II.  It was called an airfield rather than a base due to Saudi sensitivities about having U.S. troops on Saudi soil.  Under a 1948 agreement, the U.S. leased the airfield annually from Saudi Arabia.

[126] John Kifner, “Confrontation in the Gulf; Arab Vote to Send Troops to Help Saudis; Boycott of Iraqi Oil Is Reported Near 100%; Baghdad Isolated,” New York Times, August 11, 1990.  According to the article, “The vote essentially pitted pro-Western states, particularly those rich in oil, against the radicals.  In favor were Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Oman and Bahrain, all oil states, along with Egypt, Morocco, Somalia, Lebanon, Djibouti and Iraq’s longtime rival, Syria.  Sudan and Mauritania joined Jordan in voting to approve the resolution ‘with reservations.’ Tunisia was the only country in the league that did not attend. Algeria and Yemen abstained, and Iraq, the P.L.O. and Libya voted against the measure.”

[127] Edward Schumacher, “Tunis, Long Friendly to West, Bristles with Hostility to U.S. Gulf Moves,” New York Times, August 31, 1990.

[128] President George H.W. Bush, address to the nation from the Oval Office of the White House, August 8, 1990, transcript printed in “Gulf Crisis Grows into War with Iraq,” Congressional Quarterly Almanac 1990, 46th edition: 717-56 (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly, 1991), http://library.cqpress.com/cqalmanac/cqal90-1118567.

[129] Charles Paul Freund, “In Search of a Post-Postwar Rhetoric,” Washington Post, August 12, 1990, cited in Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick, The Untold History of the United States (New York: Gallery Books, 2012), 475-76.

[130] Joseph Carroll, “Americans on Iraq: Military Action or Diplomacy?” Gallup News, October 8, 2002, https://news.gallup.com/poll/6946/americans-iraq-military-action-diplomacy.aspx.

[131] “Troops to Saudi Arabia: Support Varies,” New York Times, September 8, 1990.

[132] Roger Peace, A Just and Lasting Peace: The U.S. Peace Movement from the Cold War to Desert Storm (Chicago: Noble Press, 1991), 169.

[133] George H. W. Bush, “September 11, 1990:  Address Before a Joint Session of Congress,” University of Virginia Miller Center, https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/september-11-1990-address-joint-session-congress.  According to the Oil & Gas Journal in BP Statistical Review of World Energy, 1990, at year-end 1989, the percentage of proven reserves in different countries and regions were as follows:  Kuwait 9.3%, Iraq 9.9%, Saudi Arabia 25.2%, all other Mideast 20.8%, and all other countries 34.7%; cited in Joe Stork and Ann M. Lesch, “Background to the Crisis: Why War?” Middle East Report, No. 167 (Middle East Research and Information Project), Nov. – Dec., 1990, 13.

[134] “Case Concerning the Military and Paramilitary Activities In and Against Nicaragua (Nicaragua v. United States of America),” International Court of Justice, https://www.icj-cij.org/en/case/70/judgments.  The court ruled against the U.S. on June 27, 1986.

[135] Joyce Battle, ed., “Shaking Hands with Saddam Hussein: The U.S. Tilts toward Iraq, 1980-1984,” National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 82, February 25, 2003, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82. The geopolitical maxim of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” also played out 20 years earlier when the Kennedy administration sought to woo Iraqi leaders away from their reliance on Soviet arms and bring them into the American camp. From June to November 1963, Iraq’s first Ba’thist regime conducted a ruthless war of pacification against insurgent Kurds in the north. Needing more arms for this campaign of repression, U.S. officials welcomed the opportunity to replace the Soviet Union as primary arms supplier. See Weldon C. Matthews, “The Kennedy Administration and Arms Transfers to Ba’thist Iraq,” Diplomatic History, Vol. 43, No. 3 (2019): 469-492.

[136] Ibid.; and “Gulf Crisis Grows into War with Iraq,” Congressional Quarterly Almanac 1990.  See also, Seymour M. Hersh, “U.S. Secretly Gave Aid to Iraq in Its War Against Iran,” New York Times, Jan. 26, 1992. Hersh notes that “the Reagan Administration had permitted Iraq’s allies in the Middle East to ship American-made arms to Baghdad,” thought to have begun in 1982.

[137] Geraldine Brooks, “Iranian Blood Is on Our Hands, Too,” New York Times, January 9, 2020, p. A23.

[138] “Defense Planning: Guidance FY 1994-1999,”April 16, 1992, https://www.archives.gov/files/declassification/iscap/pdf/2008-003-docs1-12.pdf, page 22.  For an overview of U.S. global strategy, see Andrew J. Bacevich, America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History (New York: Random House, 2016); and Douglas Little, American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East since 1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).

[139] Samantha Power, “A Problem from Hell” America and the Age of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 171-235.  Power notes that some 4,049 Kurdish villages were destroyed in the 18-month campaign against the Kurds that began in February 1988 (p. 232).

[140] Bush, “September 11, 1990:  Address Before a Joint Session of Congress.”

[141] “No Evidence of Iraqi Threat to Saudi Arabia,” St. Petersburg Times, July 9, 2015, cited in Project Censored, https://www.projectcensored.org/6-no-evidence-of-iraqi-threat-to-saudi-arabia/?doing_wp_cron=1573797080.7663838863372802734375.

[142] Keaney and Cohen, “Gulf War Air Power Survey, Summary Report,” 4; and George H. W. Bush, “October 1, 1990: Address to the United Nations,” Presidential Speeches, University of Virginia Miller Center, https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/october-1-1990-address-united-nations.

[143]  A. H. H. Abidi, “Origins and Dimensions of the Iraqi Claim Over Kuwait,” India International Centre Quarterly 18, no. 1 (1991): 129-43; Susan F. Kinsley, “Whatever Happened to the Iraqi Kurds?” Middle East Watch (a component of Human Rights Watch) report, March 11, 1991, https://www.hrw.org/reports/1991/IRAQ913.htm; and “Detroit honored Saddam 20 Years Ago,” The Michigan Daily, March 27, 2003.  An estimated 3.5 million Kurds lived in Iraq – out of a total Iraqi population of 17 million (circa 1990); another 12 million Kurds lived in Turkey, seven million in Iran, and one million or so in Syria and the Soviet Union.  The Kurdish minority is a non-Arab ethnic group, with its own language and ancient cultural identity.  The Kurds have long sought their own nation-state which has long been denied.

[144] “Gulf Crisis Grows into War with Iraq,” Congressional Quarterly Almanac 1990; and Stork and Lesch, “Background to the Crisis: Why War?”

[145] Little, American Orientalism, 254.

[146] Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, Behind the War on Terror: Western Secret Strategy and the Struggle for Iraq (East Sussex, UK: Clairview Books, 2003), 72-73.  See also, Michael Emery, “How Mr. Bush Got His War,” in Greg Ruggiero and Stuart Sahulka, eds., Open Fire (New York: New Press, 1993).

[147] “Confrontation in the Gulf; Excerpts From Iraqi Document on Meeting With U.S. Envoy,” New York Times, September 23, 1990.

[148] April Glaspie transcript, July 25, 1990, whatreallyhappened.com/ARTICLE5/april.html; and Flora Lewis, “Foreign Affairs; Between-Lines Disaster,” New York Times, September 19, 1990, A29.

[149] Roger Simon, “Was the U.S. Signal Red or Green on Kuwait?” Los Angeles Times, November 22, 1992.  See also, Glenn Kessler, “Ex-Envoy Details Hussein Meeting,” Washington Post, April 3, 2008; and Lloyd C. Gardner, The Long Road to Baghdad: A History of U.S. Foreign Policy from the 1970s to the Present (New York: The New Press, 2008), 73-77.

[150] “Setting the American Trap for Hussein,” International Herald Tribune, March 11, 1991, cited in Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, “The 1991 Gulf Massacre,” Voltairenet.org,  https://www.voltairenet.org/article162816.html#nh43.  Ahmed is a British investigative journalist.  On U.S. manipulation of Iraq, see also, Norman Solomon and Reese Erlich, Target Iraq: What the New Media Didn’t Tell You (New York: Context Books, 2003).

[151] Ramsey Clark, The Fire This Time: U.S. War Crimes in the Gulf (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1992), 22-23.

[152] Developments in the Middle East, July 1990, Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Europe and the Middle East of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, House of Representatives, 101^st Congress, Second Session, July 31, 1990, page 14.

[153] “The Iraqi Invasion; Kuwaiti Washington Embassy Embattled Too,” New York Times, August 6, 1990, A6.

[154] Ibid.  Native Kuwaitis constituted about one-third of the 2.1 million population in Kuwait in 1990.  Many of the rest were from Palestine, Egypt, or India.  Citizenship was reserved to those able to prove Kuwaiti ancestry prior to 1920, although this law was being contested.

[155] Stone and Kuznick, The Untold History of the United States, 476.

[156] John R. MacArthur, Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War (Berkeley/London: University of California Press, 1992), 49-50.

[157] Ibid., 54, 56.

[158] Human Rights Watch, Human Rights Watch World Report 1990 – Iraq and occupied Kuwait, 1 January 1991, https://www.refworld.org/docid/467fca3cc.html.

[159] Ibid., 58.  For a closer look at the incubator story and its influence in the political debate, see “To Sell A War: Gulf War Atrocity Propaganda,” a 28 1/2 minute documentary produced by InfoWars Recast, available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaR1YBR5g6U.  “To Sell A War” first aired in December 1992 on the Canadian Broadcasting Company’s newsmagazine, The Fifth Estate.

[160] Stone and Kuznick, The Untold History of the United States, 476.  According to John Oddo, in The Discourse of Propaganda: Case Studies from the Persian Gulf War and the War on Terror (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018), by October 23, Bush stopped “sourcing the allegations altogether … Thus, audiences are positioned to regard the narrative as categorically true and potentially worthy of being shared again” (89).

[161] MacArthur, Second Front, 62, 66.  Middle East Watch was wary of the incubator story.  In a letter dated January 6, 1991, MEW investigator Aziz Abu-Hamad noted:  “Because Iraq has refused to allow neutral observers and journalists to monitor the situation in Kuwait, rumors sometimes were the only source of information.  The incubator deaths may be one of these stories…. I wonder if AI [Amnesty International] has the names of any families of the reported 350-plus killed premature babies.  They have, as we do, names of people killed in other ways, and names of detainees, but I have yet to come across the name of one family whose premature baby was allegedly thrown out of an incubator.”  Cited in ibid., 68.

[162] Ibid., 68, 249.  Journalist Alexander Cockburn publicly challenged “the incubator myth” in an op-ed article in the Los Angeles Times on January 17, 1991, the first day of the war.

[163] Ibid., 74; and John Healey, “Amnesty responds to President Bush,” The Heights (The Independent Student Weekly of Boston College), January 28, 1991, https://newspapers.bc.edu/cgi-bin/bostonsh?a=d&d=bcheights19910128.2.41, page 13.

[164] MacArthur, Second Front, 76.  According to John Oddo in The Discourse of Propaganda: Case Studies from the Persian Gulf War and the War on Terror (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018), an American doctor named Mohammed Said traveled to Kuwait in early September 1990 and interviewed doctors who denied the incubator story.  Dr. Said took videos of the incubators which remained intact in Kuwaiti hospitals.  Though Said held press conference in Amman, Jordan, and Washington, DC, where he showed his videos to reporters, major news organizations declined to run the story.  “The best Dr. Said could get was local news coverage in his hometown of Seattle, Washington,” notes Oddo.  “Later, Dr. Said says, he contacted the office of Representative Tom Lantos to request that he be allowed to give a statement at the Human Rights Caucus, so he could set the record straight.  But, again, he received no reply.  Dr. Said says he even contacted Amnesty International to share his story, but no one there was interested either” (page 98).

[165] Oddo, The Discourse of Propaganda, 90-91.

[166] Gardner, The Long Road to Baghdad, 87.

[167] Tom Raum, “Bush Says Saddam Even Worse Than Hitler,” November 1, 1990, AP news service, https://apnews.com/c456d72625fba6c742d17f1699b18a16.  Notwithstanding President Bush’s partisan efforts in the 1990 Congressional elections, Democrats gained one seat in the Senate and seven seats in the House of Representatives.

[168] Andrew J. Bacevich, America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History (New York: Random House, 2016), 116.

[169] “Gulf Crisis Grows into War with Iraq,” Congressional Quarterly Almanac 1990.

[170] Joseph Carroll, “Americans on Iraq: Military Action or Diplomacy?”

[171] Ibid.; and Thomas L. Friedman, “Mideast Tensions; How U.S. Won Support to Use Mideast Forces; The Iraq Resolution: A U.S.-Soviet Collaboration – A special report,” New York Times, December 2, 1990, page 1A.

[172] John M. Goshko, “U.N. Vote Authorizes Use of Force Against Iraq,” Washington Post, November 30, 1990.

[173] John Quigley, “The United States and the United Nations in the Persian Gulf War: New Order and Disorder,” Cornell International Law Journal, Vol. 25, Issue 1 (Winter 1992), 27.

[174] According to law professor John Quigley:  “The danger in the [Security] Council’s failure to establish control became evident immediately after Resolution 678 was adopted.  The Council had no control over whether the Bush administration would negotiate with Iraq before launching a military invasion; once the administration attacked, it [the U.S.], rather than the Council, made all tactical decisions, including the decision to begin a ground war.  Further, once Iraq stated it would withdraw from Kuwait, the administration decided to continue fighting.  If the Military Staff Committee had controlled the action, it might well have decided to desist at that point.”  Ibid., 27-28.

[175] Ahmed, Behind the War on Terror, 83.

[176] “Gulf Crisis Grows into War with Iraq,” Congressional Quarterly Almanac 1990.  According to the State Department, rather than leave on evacuation flights, about 500 Americans choose to stay in Iraq or Kuwait because of dual citizenship or other reasons.

[177] Quigley, “The United States and the United Nations in the Persian Gulf War,” 10-11.

[178] In November 1967, following the Six-day War, the UN Security Council approved Resolution 242, calling on Israel to withdraw its armed forces from occupied territories, and encouraging all states in the region to negotiate a lasting peace.  United Nations Security Council, Resolution 242 of 22 November 1967, https://unispal.un.org/DPA/DPR/unispal.nsf/0/7D35E1F729DF491C85256EE700686136.  Another issue of contention centered on Israel’s not-so-secret development of nuclear weapons.  Washington officials said nothing about this while demanding that other states in the region refrain from developing nuclear weapons.  In 1981, Israel bombed an Iraqi nuclear power plant, suspecting that the plant would be used to manufacture nuclear bombs.  The UN Security Council subsequently passed a weak resolution (487) denouncing the attack – an act of war – but otherwise took no action against Israel.

[179] “Gulf Crisis Grows into War with Iraq,” Congressional Quarterly Almanac 1990; and Michael J. Mazarr, Don M. Snider, and James A. Blackwell, Jr., Desert Storm: The Gulf War and What We Learned (New York: Routledge, 1993), 81-86.

[180] Mazarr, Snider, and Blackwell, Desert Storm: The Gulf War and What We Learned, 71.  The choice between continued economic sanctions and war was not an absolute choice between peace and war, but rather between a plodding siege and a quick lethal attack.  In the view of social science professor Michael Walzer, the blockade “was technically and practically an act of war,” reminiscent of Medieval sieges, except that food and medical supplies were allowed to pass through “before people started dying in the streets.”  Sanctions nonetheless avoided outright war.  Michael Walzer, “Justice and Injustice in the Gulf War,” in David E. DeCosse, ed., But Was It Just?  Reflections on the Morality of the Persian Gulf War (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 4, 6.

[181] “Gulf Crisis Grows into War with Iraq,” Congressional Quarterly Almanac 1990.”

[182] Ibid., 72.

[183] Ibid., 71-72.  See also, Bacevich, American Empire, 63-64.

[184] Mazarr, Snider, and Blackwell, Desert Storm: The Gulf War and What We Learned, 73.

[185] “Gulf Crisis Grows into War with Iraq,” Congressional Quarterly Almanac 1990.

[186] Douglas Jehl, “12 Punished for Violating Liquor Rules,” Los Angeles Times, November 10, 1990; and “A Look Back at Desert Storm,” HQ Air Force Reserve Command Public Affairs, January 14, 2016, https://www.arpc.afrc.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/643429/a-look-back-at-desert-storm.

[187] “Gulf Crisis Grows into War with Iraq,” Congressional Quarterly Almanac 1990. On December 27, a group of 110 Democrats sent a letter to Bush urging military restraint.

[188] Joseph Carroll, “Americans on Iraq: Military Action or Diplomacy?”; Associated Press poll in “Should the U.S. Go to War?” Tallahassee Democrat, January 13, 1991; New York Times/CBS News poll in “Views on the Gulf,” New York Times, January 9, 1991; and Michael de Courcy Hinds, “Drawing on Vietnam Legacy, Antiwar Effort Buds Quickly,” New York Times, January 11, 1991 (analysis of recent polls). European public opinion was also divided, though the preference was to give sanctions a chance. See Eric V. Larson and Bogdan Savych, “Operation Desert Storm (Iraq, 1991),” in Misfortunes of War: Press and Public Reactions to Civilian Deaths in Wartime (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2007), 37.

[189] “Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution” (House Joint Resolution 77 and Senate Joint Resolution 2), passed on Jan. 12, 1991, and signed by President Bush on Jan. 14, reprinted in “Gulf Crisis Grows into War with Iraq,” Congressional Quarterly Almanac 1990; and Andrew Glass, “House approves military action against Iraq, Politico, Jan. 12, 1991, https://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/house-approves-military-action-against-iraq-jan-12-1991-233336. For background, see Gary R. Hess, “Presidents and Congressional War Resolutions of 1991 and 2002,” Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 121, No. 1 (Spring 2006): 93-118.

[190] “H.Res.86 – Impeaching George Herbert Walker Bush, President of the United States, of high crimes and misdemeanors,” 102^nd Congress (1991-1992), https://www.congress.gov/bill/102nd-congress/house-resolution/86/text. Rep. Henry Gonzalez had previously introduced resolutions to impeach President Ronald Reagan; one following the Grenada invasion (cosponsored by seven other representatives); another following the Iran-Contra scandal.

[191] David W. Moore, “Americans Believe U.S. Participation in Gulf War a Decade Ago Worthwhile,” Gallup News, February 26, 2001, https://news.gallup.com/poll/1963/americans-believe-us-participation-gulf-war-decade-ago-worthwhile.aspx.

[192] President George H. W. Bush, “January 16, 1991: Address to the Nation on the Invasion of Iraq,” Presidential Speeches, University of Virginia Miller Center, https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/january-16-1991-address-nation-invasion-iraq.

[193] Noam Chomsky, “Gull War Pullout, Z Magazine, February 1991, https://chomsky.info/199102.

[194] Peace, A Just and Lasting Peace, 169; and Vince Bielski, “A Marine No More,” San Francisco Bay Guardian, January 9, 1991.

[195] Charles F. Howlett and Robbie Lieberman, For the People: A Documentary History of the Struggle for Peace and Justice in the United States (Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, 2009), 292-94 (statement of Marine Corporal Jeff Paterson); Peter Applebome, “Epilogue to Gulf War: 25 Marines Face Prison,” New York Times, May 3, 1991; and U.S. Government Accountability Office, “Conscientious Objectors: Number of Applications Remained Small During the Persian Gulf War,” published Nov. 9, 1993; released Dec. 9, 1993, https://www.gao.gov/products/nsiad-94-35.  According to the New York Times:  “In the Persian Gulf war only a tiny fraction of military personnel applied for conscientious objector status, saying their moral and religious beliefs forbid them from fighting in a war. The War Resisters League, which did a nationwide survey of counseling groups, said that about 2,500 applications were filed and that about 150 applicants face charges, including unauthorized absence, missing a troop movement or desertion.”

[196] Leslie Cagan, “Mideast Organizing,” Z Magazine, Vol. 3, No. 11 (Nov. 1990), 30.

[197] The National Council of Churches resolution is quoted in Ari L. Goldman, “Council of Churches Condemns U.S. Policy in Gulf,” New York Times, Nov. 16, 1990, A10.

[198] “War is Not the Answer,” New York Times advertisement (Statement of the Delegation to the Middle East), January 7, 1991.

[199] “Gulf War Responses,” Z Magazine 4, no. 3 (March 1991): 31-32 (information furnished by the Public Eye, and educational project of the National Lawyers Guild); Larson and Savych, “Operation Desert Storm (Iraq, 1991),” 41-42; and Barbara Epstein, “The Antiwar Movement During the Gulf War.” Social Justice 19, no. 1 (47) (1992): 119.  The January 26, 1991, rally was videotaped by C-SPAN:  https://www.c-span.org/video/?16022-1/peace-rally-washington-dc.

[200] “List of rallies and protest marches in Washington, D.C.,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rallies_and_protest_marches_in_Washington,_D.C.

[201] Keaney and Cohen, “Gulf War Air Power Survey, Summary Report,” 7.

[202] United States Central Command, “Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm, Executive Summary,” July 11, 1991 (declassified), page 1, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB39/document6.pdf.  Large sections of the latter declassified document are redacted (blacked out); hence, much information regarding U.S. motives, strategy, and operations is lacking.

[203] General Charles Horner, “Fog of War: Baghdad Bombing,” washingtonpost.com, https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/longterm/fogofwar/analysis2.htm.

[204] William M. Arkin,  Gen. Charles Horner, and Rick Atkinson, “Fog of War: The 1991 Air Battle for Baghdad (Battle for Hearts and Minds),” washingtonpost.com, 1998, https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/longterm/fogofwar/vignettes/v8.htm.  Initial Iraqi estimates of civilian deaths in the Amiriyah bombing were in the 400-500 range, but by February 15, the total had been revised downward to 288.  Larson and Savych, “Operation Desert Storm (Iraq, 1991),” 44.

[205] In the two weeks preceding the Firdos bombing, U.S. warplanes had struck 25 targets in downtown Baghdad; in the two weeks after, they struck five, all reviewed by General Schwarzkopf.  Keaney and Cohen, “Gulf War Air Power Survey, Summary Report,” 219.

[206] Col. Harry G. Summers Jr., Persian Gulf War Almanac (New York: Facts on File, 1995), 225-26.

[207] Bacevich, America’s War in the Middle East, 120-21.

[208] United States Central Command, “Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm, Executive Summary,” 11.

[209] J. Michael Kennedy, “Allied Aircraft Pound Iraqis in ‘Turkey Shoot,’” Los Angeles Times, February 20, 1991.

[210] Mazarr, Snider, and Blackwell, Desert Storm: The Gulf War and What We Learned, 141-42.

[211] Keaney and Cohen, “Gulf War Air Power Survey, Summary Report,” 107; and Timothy J. McNulty, “Bush Warns Iraq on Chemical Arms,” Chicago Tribune, March 10, 1991.  The 60,000 Iraqi prisoners of war were quickly sent home after the war ended, as were 21 U.S. prisoners of war.

[212] Richard Randall, “’Like Fish in a Barrel,’ U.S. Pilots Say,” Washington Post, February 27, 1991, A28.

[213] Center of Military History, United States Army, War in the Persian Gulf: Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, August 1990-March 1991 (Washington, D.C.:  Center of Military History, U.S. Army, 2010), 56.

[214] Michael Kelly, “Highway to Hell,” The New Republic, March 31, 1991, https://newrepublic.com/article/119176/human-cost-high-tech-war-operation-desert-storm-kuwait.

[215] Bacevich, America’s War for the Greater Middle East, 118.

[216] “Meet the Press,” February 24, 1991, and “Sunday Today,” March 31, 1991, both quoted in Quigley, “The United States and the United Nations in the Persian Gulf War,” 13.

[217] Leonard Doyle, “U.N Has No Role in Running War,” The Independent (London), February 11, 1991, cited in Quigley, “The United States and the United Nations in the Persian Gulf War,” 28.

[218]  John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, “An Unnecessary War,” Foreign Policy, January-February 2003, 54

[219] R. W. Apple, Jr., “Another Gulf War?” New York Times, March 10, 1991, A16, quoted in Quigley, “The United States and the United Nations in the Persian Gulf War,” 13.

[220] Bacevich, America’s War for the Greater Middle East, 125-28; and Quigley, “The United States and the United Nations in the Persian Gulf War,” 15.

[221] Defense Casualty Analysis System, “U.S. Military Casualties – Persian Gulf War Casualty Summary Desert Storm,” https://dcas.dmdc.osd.mil/dcas/pages/report_gulf_storm.xhtml; Summers, Persian Gulf War Almanac, 90; Barton Gellman, “Gulf War’s Friendly Fire Tally Triples,” Washington Post, August 14, 1991; and Richard H. P. Shia, “Friendly fire cited in 13% of U.S. losses,” The Baltimore Sun, August 10, 1991.

[222] New York Times, February 3, 1991, quoted in Margot Norris, “Military Censorship and the Body Count in the Persian Gulf War,” Cultural Critique, No. 19, The Economies of War (Autumn, 1991), 224.

[223] Keaney and Cohen, “Gulf War Air Power Survey, Summary Report,” 249.  The report also cited a Baghdad government report claiming that 2,248 Iraqi civilians had been killed as a direct result of the war (p. 22).

[224] Ibid., 158; and Larson and Savych, “Operation Desert Storm (Iraq, 1991),” 21.

[225] Philip M. Taylor, War and the Media: Propaganda and Persuasion in the Gulf War (New York: Manchester University Press, 1998), 178-81.

[226] Edmund L. Andrews, “Census Bureau to Dismiss Analyst Who Estimated Iraqi Casualties,” New York Times, March 7, 1992.  Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark and his Commission of Inquiry, which traveled to Iraq, argued that both Iraqi military and civilian casualty figures were exponentially higher.  “Commission research, hearings, documentation, and analyses indicate between 125,000 and 150,000 Iraqi soldiers were killed,” the group noted.  “Experience reason, and actual counts completed make the 150,000 minimum civilian deaths in Iraq since the beginning of the war until early 1992 a very conservative number.”  The Commission cited various statements by government and media spokespersons and Beth Daponte’s Census Bureau report, but offered no independent analysis.  Clark, The Fire This Time, 209.

[227] Middle East Watch, Needless Deaths in the Gulf War, section: “Introduction and Summary of Conclusions.”

[228] Ibid.

[229] Ibid.

[230] “After the War; Excerpts From U.N. Report on Need for Humanitarian Assistance in Iraq,” New York Times, March 23, 1991; Adam Roberts, “The Laws of War in the 1990-91 Gulf Conflict,” International Security, Vol. 18, No. 3 (Winter, 1993-1994), 157; Quigley, “The United States and the United Nations in the Persian Gulf War, 18; and Louise Cainkar, “The Gulf War, Sanctions and the Lives of Iraqi Women,” Arab Studies Quarterly 15, no. 2 (1993): 15-51.

[231] See Barry S. Levy and Victor W. Sidel, War and Public Health (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

[232] “Protection of the Civilian Population,” Article 51, Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts (Protocol I), 8 June 1977, International Committee of the Red Cross, online: https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/applic/ihl/ihl.nsf/Article.xsp?action=openDocument&documentId=4BEBD9920AE0AEAEC12563CD0051DC9E.

[233] Clark, The Fire This Time, 266-69.

[234] “Report on Iraqi War Crimes (Desert Shield/Desert Storm): Unclassified Version, Prepared under the Auspices of Secretary of the Army,” January 8, 1992.  The bogus incubator story was allegedly confirmed by an investigation of Kuwait City medical records.

[235] Roberts, “The Laws of War in the 1990-91 Gulf Conflict,” 162.

[236] Human Rights Watch News, “Landmines in Iraq: Questions and Answers,” https://www.hrw.org/legacy/campaigns/iraq/iraqmines1212.htm.

[237] See Nick Cohen, “Radioactive Waste Left in Gulf by Allies,” The Independent on Sunday (London), November 10, 1991, pp. 1-2; and Eric Hoskins, “With Its Uranium Shells, Desert Storm May Have Sown Death,” International Herald Tribune (London), January 22, 1993, p. 4.  According to the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health:  “Depleted uranium (DU) is an emerging environmental pollutant that is introduced into the environment primarily by military activity.  While depleted uranium is less radioactive than natural uranium, it still retains all the chemical toxicity associated with the original element.  In large doses the kidney is the target organ for the acute chemical toxicity of this metal, producing potentially lethal tubular necrosis.  In contrast, chronic low dose exposure to depleted uranium may not produce a clear and defined set of symptoms.”  Wayne Briner, “The Toxicity of Depleted Uranium,” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, January 2010, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2819790.

[238] Quoted in Taylor, War and the Media, 114-15.

[239] Barbara Koeppel, “U.S. Nerve Gas Hit Our Own Troops in Iraq,” Newsweek, March 27, 2015, https://www.newsweek.com/how-us-nerve-gassed-its-own-troops-then-covered-it-317250.

[240] Patrick G. Eddington, Gassed in the Gulf: The Inside Story of the Pentagon – CIA Cover-Up of Gulf War Syndrome (Lincoln, NE: iUniverse.com, 1997), xxi; and Barbara Koeppel, “U.S. Nerve Gas Hit Our Own Troops in Iraq.”

[241] Gregg Easterbrook, “Robowar: The Day the Weapons Worked,” The New Republic, February 11, 1991, 17-20; H. Bruce Franklin, Vietnam and Other American Fantasies (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000), 150.

[242] Statement of the Honorable Les Aspin,” In “Performance of High-Technology Equipment in Operation Desert Storm,” April 22, 1991, Hearings Before the Committee on Armed Services, House of Representatives, 102nd Congress, 1^st Session (Washington, D.C: U.S. G.P.O., 1991).

[243] George and Meredith Friedman, The Future of War: Power, Technology and American World Dominance in the 21st Century (New York: Crown Publishers, 1996), x.

[244] See Max Boot, War Made New: Weapons, Warriors and the Making of the Modern World (New York: Avery, 2007), 330-331; Richard P. Hallion, Storm Over Iraq: Air Power and the Gulf War (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1992); Eric Prokosch, The Technology of Killing: A Military and Political History of Antipersonnel Weapons (London: Zed Books, 1995), 180; Keith L. Shimko, The Iraq Wars and America’s Military Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Annie Jacobsen, The Pentagon’s Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America’s Top Secret Military Research Agency (Boston: Little & Brown, 2015); William D. Harwood, Raise Heaven and Earth: The Story of Martin Marietta People and Their Pioneering Achievements (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), 551.

[245] Andrew Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 35.

[246] See Jeremy Kuzmarov “The Improbable Militarist: Jimmy Carter, the Revolution in Military Affairs and Limits of the American Two-Party System,” Class, Race and Corporate Power,  6 :2 (2018).  Under the direction of President Carter’s Defense Secretary Harold Brown, heavy investment was made in the development of Laser-guided bombs (LGBs – or “smart bombs”), space-based satellite systems, and fighter planes equipped with complex avionic systems consisting of large radars to detect enemy planes and computerized fire control.  Funding for missiles increased $485 million or 63.5 percent, leading to the development of the Phased Array Track Intercept of Target (Patriot) missile, the world’s most advanced air missile defense system, along with Tube-launched, optically tracked, wire-guided (TOW) antitank and “Tomahawk” cruise missiles built by General Dynamics.  The latter were said to be accurate within a 100-foot range from 1,500 miles and possessed on-board computer guidance systems that allowed it to duck around hills and make necessary course corrections while eluding enemy radar.  Secretary of Defense Harold Brown was the Air Force Secretary during the Vietnam War (1965-1969), former president of the California Institute of Technology, and former director of the Livermore nuclear weapons laboratory at Berkeley.

[247] Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 633, 650.  The point was emphasized by Theodore A. Postol of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, testifying before the House Armed Services Committee in April 1991.  According to the New York Times, “Professor Postol cited the video recording by an ABC News crew of four Patriots launched against incoming Scuds over Tel Aviv on January 25.  The videotape showed that one Patriot self-destructed in midair while two others skimmed rooftops and then crashed into residential areas and the fourth climbed and then dived into a warehouse district.” Statement of Professor Theodore A. Postol, Center for International Study MIT in “The Impact of the Persian Gulf War and the Decline of the USSR on How the U.S. Does its Defense Business,” Hearings Before the Committee on Armed Services, House of Representatives, 102^nd Congress, 1^st Session, February-June 1991, 425.  See also, Patrick Tyler, “After the War: Did Patriot Missiles Work? Not So Well, Scientists Say,” The New York Times, April 17, 1991; Tim Weiner, “Patriot’s Success a Myth, Israeli Aides Say,” The New York Times, November 21, 1993; Fred Kaplan, “Patriot Games: The Missile Didn’t Really Work in 1991. Is it Working Now?” Slate, March 3, 2003; and Seymour Hersh, “Missile Wars,” The New Yorker, September 26, 1994.

[248] “Testimony of Pierre Sprey, former special assistant to assistant secretary of defense,” in “Performance of High Technology Equipment in Operation Desert Storm,” April 22, 1991, Hearings Before the Committee on Armed Services, House of Representatives, 102nd Congress, 1st Session (Washington, D.C: U.S. G.P.O., 1991), 550, 572; Pierre M. Sprey, “Evaluating Weapons: Sorting the Good from the Bad,” in The Pentagon Labyrinth, ed. Winston Wheeler, Pierre Sprey and George Wilson (Washington, D.C.: Center for Defense Information, 2011), 111; Keith L. Shimko, The Iraq Wars and America’s Military Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Andrew Cockburn, Kill Chain: The Rise of the High Tech Assassins (New York: Henry Holt, 2015), 4.

[249] John Ismay and Thomas Gibbons-Neff, “Trump’s Pentagon Embraces Weapons 164 Nations Ban, New York Times, February 8, 2020, A5.

[250] Douglas Kellner, The Persian Gulf TV War (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992); Triumph of the Image: The Media’s War in the Persian Gulf – A Global Perspective, ed. Hamid Mowlana, George Gerbner and Herbert I. Schiller (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992).

[251] Timothy Noah, “Dick Cheney, Dove,” Slate, October 16, 2002, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2002/10/more-on-why-cheney-didn-t-want-to-go-to-baghdad-the-last-time.html.  See also, Gardner, The Long Road to Baghdad, 122-23.

[252] According to a post-war report commissioned by the U.S. Air Force, “Coalition planners believed from the outset that if Saddam Hussein’s forces were decisively defeated, the Iraqi leader would not long survive the war in power.”  Keaney and Cohen, “Gulf War Air Power Survey, Summary Report,” 76.

[253] R. W. Apple Jr., “After the War: Politics; Another Gulf War? New York Times, March 10, 1991.

[254] Mary McGrory, “Bush’s Peace Problems,” Washington Post, March 26, 1991; and George Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed (New York, 1998), 383-84.  See also Bacevich, America’s War for the Greater Middle East, 132.

[255] Micah Zenko, “Remembering the Iraqi Uprising Twenty-Five Years Ago,” Council on Foreign Relations, March 5, 2016, https://www.cfr.org/blog/remembering-iraqi-uprising-twenty-five-years-ago.

[256] Human Rights Watch, Human Rights Watch World Report 1992 – Kuwait, 1 January 1992, https://www.refworld.org/docid/467fca5a23.html.

[257] McNulty, “Bush Warns Iraq on Chemical Arms.”

[258] Mary Jordan and DeNeen L. Brown, “On the Mall, the Celebration Linters,” Washington Post, June 10, 1991; David Fitzgerald, “Support the Troops: Gulf War Homecomings and a New Politics of Military Celebration,” Modern American History (2019), 2: 14-16; and Mark Sussman, “Celebrating the New World Order: Festival and War in New York.” TDR (The Drama Review) 39, no. 2 (1995): 156.

[259] Fitzgerald, “Support the Troops: Gulf War Homecomings and a New Politics of Military Celebration,” 15.

[260] George C. Herring, “The War That Never Seems to Go Away,” in David L. Anderson and John Ernst, The War That Never Ends: New Perspectives on the Vietnam War (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007), 335.

[261] Lance Morrow, “Desert Storm’s Troops: Triumphant Return,” Time, March 18. 1991; cited in Bacevich, America’s War in the Greater Middle East, 128.  For a non-nationalistic critique of the Persian Gulf War, see John Marciano, Civic Illiteracy and Education: The Battle for the Hearts and Minds of American Youth (Chapter 6), 1997, republished in Counterpoints, Vol. 23: 145-176, https://www.jstor.org/stable/42975127.

[262] President George H. W. Bush, State of the Union Address, January 28, 1992, Congressional Record, 102^nd Congress (1991-1992), http://webarchive.loc.gov/congressional-record/20160506153134/http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/F?r102:6:./temp/~r102RvAOMM:e0:.

[263] United Nations Treaty Collection, Chapter IV, Human Rights, 1. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Paris, 9 December 1948, https://treaties.un.org/Pages/ViewDetails.aspx?src=IND&mtdsg_no=IV-1&chapter=4&clang=_en.

[264] In the year 2000, Canada convened the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty to draw up guidelines for humanitarian intervention.  The panel’s report, “The Responsibility to Protect,” was released in December 2001.  See Charles Homans, “Responsibility to Protect: A Short History,” Foreign Policy, October 11, 2011, https://foreignpolicy.com/2011/10/11/responsibility-to-protect-a-short-history; and United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect, “Responsibility to Protect,”  https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/about-responsibility-to-protect.shtml.

[265] “Erasing History: Ethnic Cleansing in Kosovo,” Report released by the U.S. Department of State, Washington, DC, May 1999, https://1997-2001.state.gov/regions/eur/rpt_9905_ethnic_ksvo_exec.html. If applied to the past, this definition would condemn the U.S. Indian Removal Act of 1830 and resulting actions as a crime against humanity.

[266] E. H. Carr, in The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919-1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), argues that what passes for morality in international relations is often defined by the hegemonic powers of the era, consistent with their perceived national interests.  On the cooptation of human rights rhetoric to serve U.S. hegemonic designs, see James Peck, Ideal Illusions: How the U.S. Government Co-opted Human Rights (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010). The U.S. State Department routinely cites the human rights abuses of U.S. geopolitical rivals while ignoring those of friends and allies. One example in 2020 is Secretary of State Mike Pompeo naming China, Cuba, Iran, and Venezuela as violators of human rights while turning a blind eye to abuses by Saudi Arabia (murder of a dissident), Turkey (press censorship), and Indonesia (attacks on a minority group). “We pray for a day when Cubans, Venezuelans, Chinese, Iranians and all peoples can speak and assemble freely without fear of their own governments,” Pompeo told journalists at the State Department. Lara Jakes, “Pompeo’s List of Top Human Rights Scofflaws Focuses on Trump Targets,” New York Times, March 12, 2020, A8.

[267] Hans Köchler, The Concept of Humanitarian Intervention in the Context of Modern Power Politics (Vienna: International Progress Organization, 2001), http://hanskoechler.com/koechler-humanitarian-intervention.pdf, p. 2.  See also, Richard Betts, “The Delusion of Impartial Intervention,” Foreign Affairs, November/December 1994.

[268] President William McKinley, “Message to Congress Requesting a Declaration of War with Spain,” April 11, 1898, The American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=103901.  For historical context, see Brian D’Haeseleer and Roger Peace, “The War of 1898 and the U.S.-Filipino War, 1899-1902,” United States Foreign Policy History and Resource Guide website, 2016, http://peacehistory-usfp.org/1898-1899.  On the debilitating effects of U.S. Cold War policies, see Edward Pessen, Losing Our Souls: The American Experience in the Cold War (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1993); Jeremy Kuzmarov, Modernizing Repression: Police Training and Nation-Building in the American Century (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012); and Roger Peace, “Cold War interventionism, 1945-1990,” United States Foreign Policy History and Resource Guide website, 2019, http://peacehistory-usfp.org/cold-war.

[269] Samantha Power, in “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide (New York: HarperCollins, 2002) identifies these and other arguments in relation to U.S. interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo, Chapters 11 and 12.

[270] James R. Ayers (Major, US Air Force), “Military Operations Other Than War in the New World Order: An Analysis of Joint Doctrine for the Coming Era,” Graduate Research Paper, Air Force Institute of Technology, Air University, May 1996, p. 15, https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a309987.pdf.

[271] “U.S. Armed Forces Abroad: Selected Congressional Votes Since 1982,” Congressional Research Service, Updated January 9, 2020, https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/RL/RL31693, p. 7.  The February 1994 vote was but one of a number of votes approving humanitarian-related missions.  The Somalia mission at this time was being phased out, following a botched raid in October 1993 that led to the deaths of American servicemen.

[272] United Nations Security Council Resolution 688, approved 5 April 1991, https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/110659?ln=en.

[273] The White House, “A National Security Strategy of Engagement and Enlargement,” 12-13.

[274] “Joint Doctrine for Military Operations Other Than War” (Joint Pub 3-07), 16 June 1995, https://www.bits.de/NRANEU/others/jp-doctrine/jp3_07.pdf.

[275] The White House, “A National Security Strategy of Engagement and Enlargement,” iii-iv.

[276]  Samantha Power’s bestseller, “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide (2002), has had a major influence in shaping the debate over military interventionism for humanitarian concerns, recounting the hesitancy of U.S. political and military leaders to prevent mass killings in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Kosovo, and urging military interventionism.  Rajon Menon, in The Conceit of Humanitarian Interventionism (Oxford University Press, 2016), points out flaws in Power’s approach, writing (p. 3), “The moral fervor of humanitarian interventionists is admirable, but it produces in them unwarranted confidence, even hubris.  They seem to believe that if the objective is good, the outcome will be as well, and that their critics either lack ethical commitment or represent states that want the freedom to engage in repression without outside interference.  One does not, alas, follow from the other:  criticism of humanitarian intervention does not necessarily stem from cold-heartedness; not all of its opponents are brutal despots or apologists for them.”  Menon identifies critics of the idea of “humanitarian intervention” as being in the minority.  These include David Chandler, Noam Chomsky, Anne Orford, and David Rieff.  Others critics have focused on specific interventions.  See, for example, David N. Gibbs, in First Do No Harm: Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2009).

[277] Walter S. Poole, The Effort to Save Somalia, August 1992-March 1994, (Washington, DC:  Joint Chiefs of Staff History Office, 2005), 1-2.  See also, Walter E. Kretchik, Robert F Baumann, and John T. Fishel, Invasion, Intervention, “Intervasion”: A Concise History of the U.S. Army in Operation Uphold Democracy (Fort Leavenworth, Kansas: U.S. Army Command and General Staff College Press, 1998).

[278] Each clan-based faction had a military leader who could draw on clan members and a locational base in Somalia:   Ali Mahdi Mohammed of the Abgal clan which dominated North Mogadishu and Middle Shebelle Region; General Mohammed Aidid of the Habr Gedir clan whose control extended over South Mogadishu and areas south; General Siad Hersi Morgan, formerly a chief commander of Siad Barre’s army, of the Somali Patriotic Movement and Harti sub-clan that controlled the port of Kismayu; and Col. Ahmed Omar Jess of the Ogadeni sub-clan that also operated in the Kismayu area.  Human Rights Watch, “Somalia Faces the Future: Human Rights in a Fragmented Society,” Human Rights Watch Report Somalia, Vol. 7, No. 2 (April 1995), https://www.hrw.org/reports/1995/somalia.

[279] Peter Woodward, U.S. Foreign Policy and the Horn of Africa (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2016), 25-26; Elizabeth Schmidt, Foreign Intervention in Africa after the Cold War: Sovereignty, Responsibility, and the War on Terror (Athens: Ohio University Research in International Studies, 2018), 75; and Helen Chapin Metz, ed., Somalia: A Country Study (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1992), “Relations with the United States” section, http://countrystudies.us/somalia/80.htm.  Before 1977, Somalia had been allied with the Soviet Union.  When Somali forces invaded neighboring Ethiopia, the Soviet Union aligned instead with Ethiopia.  Though Somalia was clearly the aggressor, the U.S. allied with Somalia and provided it with “defensive” arms.  U.S. loans to the Barre government also came with strings attached – International Monetary Fund requirements to reduce the public sector and expand opportunities for international investment.

[280] Ismail Einashe and Matt Kennard, “In the Valley of Death: Somaliland’s Forgotten Genocide,” The Nation, October 22,2018, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/in-the-valley-of-death-somalilands-forgotten-genocide.

[281] Mark Fineman, “The Oil Factor in Somalia: Four American petroleum giants had agreements with the African nation before its civil war began. They could reap big rewards if peace is restored,” Los Angeles Times, January 18, 1993, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-01-18-mn-1337-story.html.

[282] Human Rights Watch, “Somalia Faces the Future”; and “Somalia – UNOSOM 1 Background,” United Nations, https://peacekeeping.un.org/mission/past/unosom1backgr2.html. This report provides much of the background in the foregoing discussion.

[283] David N. Gibbs, “Realpolitick and Humanitarian Intervention: The Case of Somalia,” International Politics, 37 (March 2000), https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Realpolitik-and-humanitarian-intervention%3A-The-case-Gibbs/7b239fc370ed7c65de068cd78856b6103ec1497e#citing-papers, p. 45, 46, 49. As tension increased between the international mission and Aidid, Conoco oil company, the largest U.S. investor in Somalia, distanced itself from Aidid.

[284] Kenneth B. Noble, “400 U.S. Marines Attack Compound of Somali Gunmen,” New York Times, January 8, 1993, A1.

[285] Charles Trueheart, “Canadian Guilty of Killing Somali,” Washington Post, March 18, 1994. See also, Colonel Dennis P. Mroczkowski (U.S. Marine Corps Reserve, Retired), Restoring Hope: In Somalia with the Unified Task Force, 1992-1993; U.S. Marines in Humanitarian Operations (Washington, DC: U.S. Marine Corps History Division, 2005), especially pp. 98-102, “Morale and Restraint,” which discusses the difficulty of winning over the population and notes a number of unwarranted killings by U.S. and Canadian troops.

[286] Schmidt, Foreign Intervention in Africa after the Cold War, 78.  See also, Mohamed Sahnoun, Somalia: The Missed Opportunities (Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace, 1994); and John L. Hirsch and Robert B. Oakley, Somalia and Operation Restore Hope: Reflections on Peacemaking and Peacekeeping (Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace, 1995). Oakley was a U.S. special envoy to Somalia during the first phase of the mission, a political advisor to the relief effort.  He was sharply critical of the shift in emphasis to military operations.

[287] Human Rights Watch, “Somalia Faces the Future.”

[288] Ibid.

[289] Ibid.; and Art Pine, “U.N. Forces Attack Somali Weapon Sites : Africa: U.S.-led assault targets clan leader Aidid’s radio station, compounds and warehouses in retaliation for the ambush-killing of 23 Pakistani peacekeepers,” Los Angeles Times, June 12, 1993, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-06-12-mn-2381-story.html.

[290] Human Rights Watch, “Somalia Faces the Future.”

[291] Michael R. Gordon, “U.S. Troops Fire on Somalis; Death Toll May Reach 100,” New York Times, September 10, 1993, https://www.nytimes.com/1993/09/10/world/us-troops-fire-on-somalis-death-toll-may-reach-100.html.

[292] A photo of the dead American soldier being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu taken by Paul Watson of the Toronto Star won a Pulitzer Prize.  It may be viewed, with discretion, on the Alchetron website here.

[293] Matthew A. Baum, “How Public Opinion Constrains the Use of Force: The Case of Operation Restore Hope,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 34, No. 2, June 2004, 216.

[294] Bill Clinton, My Life: The Presidential Years (New York: Random House, 2004), 114.

[295] Donatella Lorch, “Last of the U.S. Troops Leave Somalia; What Began as a Mission of Mercy Closes With Little Ceremony,” New York Times, March 26, 1994.  Some UN relief agency officials credited the UN-U.S. mission with saving lives. “Was it necessary and was it needed?” asked Staffan de Mistura, director of the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in Somalia. “Definitely yes. It all began with the images of tens of thousands of dying children.”  Besides distributing food, UNICEF vaccinated 753,000 children, built 3,700 wells, and enrolled 62,000 children in school, though a UN military mission was not needed to accomplish these.

[296] Human Rights Watch, “Somalia Faces the Future.”

[297] Poole, The Effort to Save Somalia, 69.

[298] Mark Bowden, Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War (New York: Grove Press, 2001), 10, 345. For a critique of the movie Black Hawk Down, see Mickey Kaus, “What Black Hawk Down Leaves Out,” Slate, January 21, 2002, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2002/01/what-black-hawk-down-leaves-out.html.

[299] William Blum, “Haiti 1986-1994: Who Will Rid Me of This Turbulent Priest?” (section), Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1998), 373, 376, online: https://williamblum.org/chapters/killing-hope/haiti.  See also, Jim Mann, “CIA’s Aid Plan Would Have Undercut Aristide in ’87-’88: Haiti: But Senate panel stymied agency’s effort to boost candidates, counter his call for vote boycott,” Los Angeles Times, Oct. 31, 1993.

[300] Stephen Engleberg, “A Haitian Leader of Paramilitaries Was Paid By the CIA,” New York Times, October 8, 1994.  The article notes that the “disclosure of Mr. Constant’s ties to the C.I.A. was first reported by The Nation magazine and detailed further in today’s Washington Post…. In the Nation article, Mr. Constant was quoted as saying he was encouraged to form Fraph by Col. Patrick Collins, an American military officer who served as defense attache at the United States Embassy in Port-au-Prince.  Mr. Constant also charged that Colonel Collins and the C.I.A. station chief were inside the headquarters of the Haitian military when the anti-Aristide coup unfolded in 1991.  An Administration official said that Colonel Collins has denied both charges. Colonel Collins could not be reached for comment.”

[301] “Haiti:  Efforts to Restore President Aristide, 1991-1994,” EveryCRSReport.com, May 11, 1995, https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/95-602.html; and Kenneth Roth, “Haiti and Clinton,” The New York Review of Books, March 4, 1993.

[302] Engleberg, “A Haitian Leader of Paramilitaries Was Paid By the CIA,” New York Times, October 8, 1994.  According to the article, “Emmanuel (Toto) Constant, the head of the organization known as Fraph, was on the C.I.A.’s payroll in October 1993, when his group organized a violent demonstration that prevented the docking of the Navy ship Harlan County, the [U.S. government] officials said…. While refusing to confirm that Mr. Constant was on the C.I.A. payroll, Walter Slocombe, Undersecretary of Defense for policy, reminded Congress today that the United States frequently buys information from shadowy figures.” Haitian paramilitary forces were also on the loose; assassins killed a prominent Aristide supporter, Antoine Izmery, on September 12, and Aristide’s Minister of Justice, Guy Malary, on October 14. See also, “National Emergency with Respect to Haiti,” Journal of the House of Representatives of the United States, Part 1, 103^rd Congress, Second Session, April 26, 1994, pp. 39.9-39.11.

[303] United Nations Security Council, “Resolution 940: Authorization to form a multinational force under unified command and control to restore the legitimately elected President and authorities of the Government of Haiti and extension of the mandate of the UN Mission in Haiti,” http://unscr.com/en/resolutions/940.

[304] Steven Greenhous, “Clinton Policy Toward Haiti Comes Under Growing Fire,” New York Times, April 15, 1994.  Reps. Dellums and Obey had both voted in January 1991 against authorizing the president to go to war against Iraq.  For a critique of humanitarian interventionism from the left, see Anthony Fenton, “’Legalized Imperialism’: ‘Responsibility to Protect’ and the Dubious Case of Haiti,” Global Policy Forum, December 3, 2005, https://archive.globalpolicy.org/empire/humanint/2005/1203haiticoup.htm. 

[305] Douglas Farah, “U.S. Assists Dictators’ Luxury Exile,” Washington Post, October 14, 1994; and “Intervention in Haiti, 1994-1995,” Office of the Historian.

[306] Rachael Bunyan, “25 Years After ‘Operation Uphold Democracy,’ Experts Say the Oft-Forgotten U.S. Military Intervention Still Shapes Life in Haiti,” Time, September 24, 2019.

[307] Jean-Bertrand Aristide and Laura Flynn, Eyes of the Heart: Seeking a Path for the Poor in the Age of Globalization (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 2000).

[308] When U.S. troops marched into Haiti in 1915, sparking resistance and a brutal counter-insurgency war in which over 3,000 Haitians were killed, democracy was not a concern for the invaders.  In the spring of 1917, the Haitian National Assembly refused to pass an American-drafted Constitution that allowed for foreign ownership of land.  U.S. authorities responded by issuing a decree signed by puppet President Dartiguenave that dissolved the National Assembly.  The Haitian legislature did not meet again until 1929.  For background on this period, see Roger Peace, “’Yankee Imperialism,’ 1901-1934” (Section IV. Case studies), United States Foreign Policy History and Resource Guide website, 2018, http://peacehistory-usfp.org/yankee-imperialism; Mary A. Renda, Taking Haiti, 1915-1940: Military Occupation & the Culture of U.S. Imperialism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Paul Farmer, The Uses of Haiti (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1994); and Peter Hallward, Damning the Flood: Haiti and the Politics of Containment (London: Verso, 2012).

[309] Jose de Cordoba and Greg Jaffe, “Aristide Leaves Haiti Amid Chaos; Hundreds of U.S. Marines To Depart for the Country, Joining Peacekeeping Force,” Wall Street Journal, March 1, 2004; Lydia Polgreen and Tim Weiner, “Haiti’s President Forced Out; Marines Sent to Keep Order,” New York Times, February 29, 2004; and Amy Wilentz, “Coup in Haiti,” The Nation, March 22, 2004.  For background and details on the 2004 coup, see Jeb Sprague, Paramilitarism and the Assault on Democracy in Haiti (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012).  The U.S. foreign policy establishment’s antipathy toward Aristide is clear in Daniel Whitman’s account, A Haiti Chronicle: The Undoing of a Latent Democracy, 1999–2001 (Victoria, Canada: Trafford, 2004), which views the ouster of Aristide in February 2004 as a just response to the thuggery of Aristide’s supporters.  Whitman was the Counselor for Public Affairs at the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince in 1999-2001 and, according to Sprague, an investigative journalist, played a role in spreading false rumors about Aristide, including an alleged psychiatrist’s report finding Aristide “psychotic” (Sprague, 360).  See Sprague’s online photos and brief history of Haitian politics:  http://jebsprague.blogspot.com/2013/01/paramilitarism-in-haiti-photo-montage.html.

[310] The UN Outreach Programme on the Rwanda Genocide, https://www.un.org/en/preventgenocide/rwanda/historical-background.shtml, states that “more than 800,000 people are estimated to have perished,” without clarifying the proportion of Tutsi to Hutu.  That figure was disputed by Christian Davenport and Allan Stam, in “What Really Happened in Rwanda?” Pacific Standard, October 6, 2009; updated June 14, 2017, https://psmag.com/social-justice/what-really-happened-in-rwanda-3432.  The authors examined Tutsi population figures and arrived “at an estimated total of somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 Tutsi victims.”

[311] Jean-Marie Kamatali, “Following Orders in Rwanda,” New York Times (op-ed), April 4, 2014.  Kamatali served as dean of the National University of Rwanda School of Law before becoming assistant professor at Ohio Northern University Pettit College of Law.

[312] U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Intelligence and Research, Intelligence Assessment, “Roots of the Violence in Rwanda,” April 29, 1994, “The U.S. and the Genocide in Rwanda: Evidence of Inaction,” ed. William Ferroggiaro, National Security Archive, August 20, 2001, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB53/index.html.  RPF units were also stationed in Kigali, the capital, and sporadically fought with Hutu militias until the RPF victory on July 4, 1994.

[313] Human Rights Watch, “Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda,” March 1999, section on “The Rwandan Patriotic Front,” https://www.hrw.org/reports/1999/rwanda/Geno15-8-03.htm#P713_229872.

[314] Filip Reyntjens, “Rwanda 25 Years On: International (Non-)Response to Genocide,” July 17, 2019, available at https://filipreyntjens.jimdofree.com (list of publications).  Reyntjens, Emeritus Professor of Law and Politics at the University of Antwerp, spent years in the Great Lakes region and has published numerous works on the Rwandan genocide.

[315] “Inside the UN Security Council: April-July 1994,” National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 472, edited by Michael Dobbs, June 2, 2014, document 5, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB472.

[316] Guy Martin, in “Review: Readings of the Rwandan Genocide,” African Studies Review, Vol. 45, No. 3 (Dec. 2002), p. 21, offers a cogent summary of UN Security Council resolutions and actions:  “UNSC resolution 872 of October 5, 1993, created the UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) to help implement the Arusha Accords.  By December 1993, 1,428 UNAMIR peacekeepers (out of a total authorized force of 2,538) were in place in Rwanda. Following the assassination of ten Belgian peacekeepers from UNAMIR – and of the Rwandan prime minister, Agathe Uwilingiyimana – on April 7, 1994, the Belgian peacekeepers were withdrawn and the UNAMIR force was reduced to 270.  Increasing pressure from the international humanitarian lobby resulted in UNSC resolution 918 of May 17, which authorized UNAMIR II with a beefed-up peacekeeping force of 5,500 men and a broadened mandate.  However, due to persistent U.S. delaying tactics, UNAMIR II was never deployed.  Finally, UNSC 925 of June 8, followed by resolution 929 two weeks later, authorized the French, through Operation Turquoise, to set up ‘safe humanitarian zones’ in southwestern Rwanda just as the genocide was subsiding and the RPF was progressively taking control of the country.  The UN Security Council approved Resolution 918 on May 17, 1994, which authorized a phased expansion of UNAMIR II to a force level up to 5,500 troops, but the additional troops did not arrive until June.”

[317] Frank G. Wisner, Under Secretary of Defense, “Memorandum for Deputy Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, National Security Council; Subject: Rwanda: Jamming Civilian Radio Broadcasts,” May 5, 1994, declassified document available from the National Security Archive, “The US and the Genocide in Rwanda 1994, Evidence of Inaction,” edited by William Ferroggiaro, August 20, 2001, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB53/rw050594.pdf.

[318] Department of Public Information, United Nations, “Rwanda—UNAMIR: United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda,” September 1996; and Schmidt, Foreign Intervention in Africa after the Cold War, Chapter 6.  An Organization of African Unity (OAU) investigative report, Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide (July 2000, faulted the UN Security Council, France, Belgium, and the United States for failing to prevent the genocide and for failing to hold the RPF as well as Hutu extremists accountable for the slaughter.  The responsibility of the French, being allied with the Hutu-dominated Rwandan government, is the focus of a number of studies:  Daniela Kroslak, The French Betrayal of Rwanda (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008); Andrew Wallis, Slient Accomplice: The Untold Story of France’s Role in the Rwandan Genocide (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2006), and Arnaud Siad, ed., The Rwandan Crisis Seen through the Eyes of France, part one, “Leadup to the Genocide,” National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book no. 461, March 20, 2014, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB461. 

[319] “At Last, Rwanda’s Pain Registers,” New York Times editorial, July 23, 1994.

[320] Lt. General Roméo Dallaire (Force Commander of the UN Assistance Mission to Rwanda, 1993-94), Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2003).  Samantha Power is described by the writer Dexter Filkins as “a kind of Joan of Arc for humanitarian intervention.”  Dexter Filkins, “Damned If You Don’t,” The New Yorker, September 16, 2019, p. 20.  In her study, “A Problem from Hell”, Power urges the protection of refugees and civilians by “well-armed and robustly mandated peacekeepers, airpower, or both,” and states that “the United States must also be prepared to risk the lives of its soldiers in the service of stopping this monstrous crime” (514).

[321] Studies by Hazel Cameron (University of St. Andrews Lecturer) include Britain’s Hidden Role in the Rwandan Genocide: The Cat’s Paw (London: Routledge, 2013); “British State Complicity in Genocide: Rwanda 1994,” State Crime Journal, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2012: 70-87; and “The French Connection: Complicity in the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda,” African Security, Vol. 8, Issue 2, 2015: 96-119.  Helen C. Epstein is the author of Another Fine Mess: America, Uganda, and the War on Terror (New York: Columbia Global Reports, 2017); and “America’s secret role in the Rwandan genocide,” The Guardian, September 12, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/sep/12/americas-secret-role-in-the-rwandan-genocide.  See also, Schmidt, Foreign Intervention in Africa after the Cold War; Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and Genocide in Rwanda (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2001); Wayne Madsen, Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa, 1993-1999 (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1999); Edward S. Herman and David Peterson’s The Politics of Genocide (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010); and Judi Rever’s In Praise of Blood: The Crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (Toronto: Random House Canada, 2018).

[322] Cameron, “British State Complicity in Genocide: Rwanda 1994,” 76-77.

[323] Ibid., 84; and Cameron, Britain’s Hidden Role in the Rwandan Genocide: The Cat’s Paw, 80.

[324] Epstein, “America’s secret role in the Rwandan genocide.”

[325] André Guichaoua (translated by Don E. Webster), From War to Genocide: Criminal Politics in Rwanda, 1990-1994 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2017), x-xi; and Power, “A Problem from Hell”, 82-83.

[326] Human Rights Watch, “Genocide: Ideology and Organization,” April 2006, https://www.hrw.org/legacy/backgrounder/africa/rwanda0406/4.htm#_ftn13.  See also, Human Rights Watch and the International Federation of Human Rights Leagues, Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1999).

[327] Reyntjens, “Rwanda 25 Years On.”

[328] “Rwanda: The Failure of the Arusha Peace Accords,” National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 469, May 32, 2014, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB469; Schmidt, Foreign Intervention in Africa after the Cold War, 142-48; Catharine Newbury, “Background to Genocide: Rwanda,” Issue: A Journal of Opinion, 1995, Vol. 23, No. 2, 15-16; and “Rwanda: UNAMIR background,” https://peacekeeping.un.org/en/mission/past/unamirS.htm.

[329] Raymond Bonner, “Unsolved Rwanda Mystery: The President’s Plane Crash,” New York Times, November 12, 1994.

[330] Katrin Bennhold, “French judge seeking to bring Rwandan president before UN tribunal,” New York Times, October 21, 2006; and Bruce Crumley, “French Inquiry Clears Rwanda’s Kagame Of the Attack That Sparked a Genocide,” Time, January 11, 2012.

[331] Carla de Ponte, Madame Prosecutor: Confrontations with Humanity’s Worst Criminals and the Culture of Impunity (NY: The Other Press, 2009).

[332] Michael Hourigan,  “To the Editor,” The Guardian, London, UK, 15 June 2010, republished in http://hungryoftruth.blogspot.com/2010/06/michael-hourigan-former-ictr.html.  See also, “Rwanda’s Untold Story Documentary,” a 59-minute documentary film aired by the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) in 2014, available for viewing at https://vimeo.com/107867605.

[333] “A former FBI investigator accused Paul Kagame:  Prepared Statement of Mr. James R. Lyons; Statement regarding the April 6, 1994 assassination of the Presidents of Rwanda and Burundi in addition to all others on board the Presidential Aircraft,” April 2001, https://hungryoftruth.blogspot.com/2009/05/on-who-killed-habyalimana-and.html?m=0.

[334] Jeremy Kuzmarov, “Exposing the Crimes of the CIA’s Fair-Haired Boy, Paul Kagame, and the Rwandan Patriotic Front,” Counterpunch, December 7, 2018, https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/12/07/exposing-the-crimes-of-the-cias-fair-haired-boy-paul-kagame-and-the-rwandan-patriotic-front.  See also, Philip Gourevitch, We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998), 212.

[335] Guichaoua, From War to Genocide, 145-46.

[336] Peter Erlinder, “The Great Rwanda ‘Genocide Coverup,’” Global Research, February 20, 2008, https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-great-rwanda-genocide-coverup/8137; “Rwanda’s Untold Story” (documentary series, one hour), British Broadcasting Company, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04kk03t; and Martin Ngoga, “Why we’re prosecuting Peter Erlinder,” The Guardian, July 3, 2010.

[337] Reyntjens, “Rwanda 25 Years On”; and Guichaoua, From War to Genocide, 313-16.  Reyntjens writes that no Tutsi were put on trial or convicted, but, in fact, belatedly in October 2008, two captains were tried and sentenced for killing 14 persons, including ten priests and a child, at Kabgayi on June 5, 1994.  Their commanding officers were acquitted, as the military tribunal in Kigali established that the killings were “an accident” involving “personal decisions of soldiers acting without orders.”  Meanwhile, those responsible for massacring over 5,000 civilians at Byumba stadium on April 23, 1994, were never tried at all.  The trial of the captains, as such, was designed to show the world that justice was being carried out, whereas in reality, it served to put out of mind the larger number of massacres carried out by the RPF.

[338] Robert E. Gribbin, In the Aftermath of Genocide: The U.S. Role in Rwanda (New York: IUniverse, 2005), 168, 170; Michael Wines, “U.S. Sending Force of 200 to Reopen Rwandan Airport,” The New York Times, July 30, 1994; and Madsen, Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa 1993-1999.

[339] Remegius Kintu, “The Truth Behind the Rwandan Tragedy,” Presented to UN Tribunal on Rwanda, Arusha, Tanzania, March 20, 2005,” http://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/bitstream/handle/2152/4486/3588.pdf?sequence=1, 27.  Defense Secretary Perry wrote another letter to Kagame on November 6, 1995, emphasizing joint U.S.-Rwandan military exercises:  “I am confident that Rwandese officers and soldiers will enjoy the fruits of formal training alongside American soldiers at U.S. military schools next year.  We have also arranged for our European Command to offer you a Joint Combined Exercise for Training (JCET) for next year in Rwanda.”

[340] On the counterinsurgency campaigns targeting Hutu refugees and their brutality, see Marie Beatrice Umutesi, Surviving the Slaughter: The Ordeal of a Rwandan Refugee in Zaire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004).

[341] “Rwanda, Human Rights Developments,” Human Rights Watch, World Report 1999, https://www.hrw.org/legacy/worldreport99/africa/rwanda.html.

[342] Howard W. French, U.N. Congo Reports Offers New View on Genocide, New York Times, August 27, 2010.  See also, “Leaked UN report accuses Rwanda of possible genocide in Congo,” The Guardian, August 26, 2010; and Human Rights Watch, “DR Congo: UN Report Exposes Grave Crimes,” October 1, 2010, https://www.hrw.org/news/2010/10/01/dr-congo-un-report-exposes-grave-crimes#.

[343] Michelle Faul, “A second Rwanda genocide is revealed in Congo: U.N. report ties Tutsi soldiers to deaths of thousands of Hutus,” Associated Press, October 10, 2010, http://www.nbcnews.com/id/39603000/ns/world_news-africa/t/second-rwanda-genocide-revealed-congo/#.XkRM32hKhPY.  As of September 2020, the Kagame government was still in power.  According to an in-depth New York Times article, “‘In the Belly of the Beast’: How Savior of Rwanda Fell Into a Strongman’s Trap” (September 20, 2020), Paul Kagame was re-elected in 2017 “with 99 percent of the vote.”  In addition to skewing elections, Kagame ordered the assassination of a number of his political opponents.  “In at least six countries, Rwandan exiles have been harassed, assaulted or killed, as part of an apparent covert campaign targeting Mr. Kagame’s most nettlesome detractors.”  In September 2020, Kagame set a trap and kidnapped Paul Rusesabagina, the hero of the film “Hotel Rwanda” (Rusesabagina was played by Don Cheadle), who sheltered hundreds of Hutus and Tutsis in his Hotel des Mille Collines during the genocide of April 1994.  In November 2005, President George W. Bush awarded Rusesabagina the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest U.S. civilian award.  After criticizing the authoritarian Kagale regime, however, Rusesabagina received death threats, which led him to flee Rwanda with his family.  His kidnapping – by tricking him to take an airplane back to Rwanda – was accompanied by trumped up charges of aiding murder, arson, and terrorism.  See also, Michela Wrong, The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad (New York: PublicAffairs, 2021), which focuses on the assassination of former Rwanda spy chief Patrick Karegeya by Kagame’s henchmen.  Wrong, a former journalist who covered Rwanda, also discusses the Kagame regime’s “deplorable record on human rights abuses” and asserts that the Kagame regime “has also been caught red-handed attempting the most lurid of assassinations on the soil of foreign allies, not once but many times,” and that Western countries have continued to supply aid to the government regardless.  Howard W. French, “Power Trip: The dark underside of Rwanda’s model public image,” New York Times Book Review, April 18, 2021, page 15.

[344] Multiculturalism has been a fact of life in many empires in the past.  From 1918 to 1929, Yugoslavia – meaning “Land of the South Slavs” – was officially called the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.  Regarding theories of why the former Yugoslavia descended into ethnic-political wars in the 1990s, see Randy Hodson, Dusko Sekulic, and Garth Massey, “National Tolerance in the Former Yugoslavia,” American Journal of Sociology 99, no. 6 (1994): 1534-558.  Multiculturalism is again solidly embraced by all cultures; see Scott Gardner and Jonathan Evans, “Most in former Yugoslavia favor multicultural society, although some tensions remain,” Pew Research Fact Tank, May 22, 2017, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/05/22/most-in-former-yugoslavia-favor-multicultural-society-although-some-tensions-remain.

[345] These personal accounts (names withheld) were shared with the author Roger Peace.

[346] David N. Gibbs, in First Do No Harm: Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2009), 92.  All twelve European Community member countries formally recognized Slovenia and Croatia as independent states on January 15, 1992.

[347] Ibid., 99.

[348] Ibid., 102.  During the 1980s, the U.S. pressed Yugoslavia to accept IMF structural adjustment reforms.  According to Gibbs, “Adjustment was intended to dismantle statist economic systems to make them more accessible to multinational investors.”  Yugoslavia’s adoption of the IMF program worsened economic conditions which in turn contributed to “the political and ethnic conflicts that ultimately resulted in the disintegration of the country” (56).

[349] Ibid., 87.

[350] Chuck Sudetic, “Cease-Fire Stills Gunfire in Croatia,” New York Times, January 4, 1992.

[351] Gibbs, First Do No Harm, 109.  Gibbs asserts that U.S. Ambassador Warren Zimmerman encouraged the Izetbegović government to reject the Lisbon plan (108), and that Washington officials were motivated by a desire to “oppose European efforts to achieve foreign policy independence” and assert U.S. “predominance” (113).  Zimmerman publicly denied such charges in a letter to the New York Times (“Bosnian About-Face”) on September 15, 1993.

[352] David Owen, Balkan Odyssey (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1995), 221, 399, cited in Gibbs, First Do No Harm, 276.

[353] Gibbs, First Do No Harm, 144; and Ben Fowkes, Ethnicity and Ethnic Conflict in the Post-Communist World (London: Palgrave, 2002), 88.

[354] Gibbs, First Do No Harm, 122.  For a detailed review of the history of the Bosnian conflict, see Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, “Srebrenica – A ‘Safe’ Area: Reconstruction, Background, Consequences, and Analyses of the Fall of a Safe Area,” April 2002, https://www.niod.nl/en/srebrenica-report.

[355] Human Rights Watch, “Bosnia-Hercegovina: Sarajevo,” Vol. 6, No. 15, October 1994, https://www.hrw.org/reports/1994/bosnia3.  See also, Andrew Higgins, “It Was a Rape Camp.  Now It’s a Spa That Depends on Amnesia,” New York Times, November 25, 2020, A9.  The article cites a 2011 UN report indicating that the Vilina Vlas spa in eastern Bosnia “had been commandeered by a gang of Serb nationalist thugs who called themselves the White Eagles and the Avengers.”  Many of their captives, mostly Bosnian Muslim women but also some men, were raped and murdered.  Bakira Hasecic, who was raped three times at a nearby police station, later founded the Association of Women War Victims, interviewed survivors, and testified before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.  The spa later reopened as a health resort with all indications of its past removed.

[356] Power, “A Problem from Hell”, 271-72, 277, 274.

[357] Gibbs, First Do No Harm, 47; and David Rohde, Endgame: The Betrayal and Fall of Srebrenica: Europe’s Worst Massacre Since World War II (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997), 374. Some Serbs also carried an older vendetta against Islamic Turks (Muslims) dating back six centuries. Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević gave a famous speech to some one million people on June 28, 1989, marking the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo in which Serbian forces fell to the Ottoman Turks. The speech called for Serbian ethnic unity, but it also elevated the principle of multi-ethnic unity rather than fan the flames of ethnic hatred. “Slobodan Milosevic’s 1989 St. Vitus Day Speech, Gazimestan – June 28, 1990,” https://cmes.arizona.edu/sites/cmes.arizona.edu/files/SLOBODAN%20MILOSEVIC_speech_6_28_89.pdf.

[358] According to Human Rights Watch, “The primary aim of ‘ethnic cleansing’ is the capture or consolidation of control over territory by forcibly displacing, killing, mistreating or otherwise terrorizing members of the ‘enemy’ ethnic group(s) in the area.” Human Rights Watch, “Bosnia-Hercegovina: Sarajevo.”

[359] Power, “A Problem from Hell”, 272.

[360] United Nations, “Former Yugoslavia – UNPROFOR,” https://peacekeeping.un.org/en/mission/past/unprof_b.htm; Chuck Sudetic, “Serbs Attack Two of U.N.’s ‘Safe Areas’ in Bosnia,” New York Times, June 7, 1993; and Anthony M. Schinella, Bombs Without Boots: The Limits of Airpower (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2019), 14.  Following the shelling of Sarejevo’s Markale Market Square in February 1994 and again in August 1995, killing 68 and 37 civilians, respectively, UN Protection Force commander Lieut. Gen. Rupert Smith quickly concluded that the Serbs were responsible.  After the latter shelling, however, foreign correspondent David Binder interviewed four UNPROFOR specialists (a Russian, a Canadian, and two Americans) who challenged that conclusion.  “The Canadian specialist,” wrote Binder, “an officer with extensive service in Bosnia, said in a telephone interview that the UN report, which he’d seen, was ‘highly suspect.’  He cited ‘anomalies with the fuse’ of the mortar shell recovered from the marketplace crater.  Unlike the fuses of four other shells that hit Sarajevo that morning, this one, he said, ‘had not come from a mortar tube at all.’  He added that he and fellow Canadian officers in Bosnia were ‘convinced that the Moslem government dropped both the Feb. 5, 1994, and the August 28, 1995 mortar shells on the Sarajevo markets.’”  Binder asked rhetorically, “Why would the Bosnian government kill its own people?”  Noting that “the Muslim leadership [had previously] loudly demanded NATO air attacks but General Smith refused to call them in,” he suggested that pressuring NATO to enter the war on its side could have been a motive.  David Binder, “Bosnia’s Bombers,” The Nation, October 2, 1995, https://swprs.files.wordpress.com/2019/12/bosnias-bombers_david-binder_the-nation-1995.pdf.  See also, Ceese Wiebes, Intelligence and the War in Bosnia, 1992-1995 (London: LIT Verlag, 2003), 68; and Lt. Col. John Sray, “Selling the Bosnian Myth to America: Buyer Beware,” U.S. Army Foreign Military Studies Office, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, October 1995, https://community.apan.org/wg/tradoc-g2/fmso/m/fmso-monographs/244588.

[361] Gibbs, First Do No Harm, 153.

[362] Power, “A Problem from Hell”, 295-302, 308.  In January 1994, the UN Security Council condemned Croatian interference in Bosnia, citing 3,000 to 5,000 Croatian regular army personnel in Bosnia.

[363] Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, “Srebrenica – A ‘Safe’ Area; and Gibbs, First Do No Harm, 151.  The U.S. General Accounting Office, in a May 1995 report, noted, “In December 1994, the U.N. Commission of Experts on the former Yugoslavia reported on the killing of civilians, mass gravesites, rapes, torture, ethnic cleansing, and prison camps.  The Commission concluded that all parties had committed grave breaches of international humanitarian law.  But most violations were committed by Serbs against Bosnian Muslims.  Croats were the second largest group of victims.  Serbs were also victims, but to a much lesser extent than the others.”  U.S. General Accounting Office, “Peace Operations: Update on the Situation in the Former Yugoslavia,” May 1995, https://www.gao.gov/assets/80/79002.pdf, p. 29.

[364] Michael O. Beale, Bombs over Bosnia: The Role of Airpower in Bosnia-Herzegovina (Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama: Air University Press, August 1997), 44.  Air Force Major Beale writes:  “From the spring of 1993 until February 1994, the Croats, Muslims, and Serbs were essentially fighting against and allied with each other at various points throughout the country. In Bihac, it was Abdic’s Muslims allied with Serbs, fighting Bosnian government soldiers.  In Mostar, it was Croats fighting Muslims; in north central Bosnia, it was Serbs and Croats fighting Muslims; and in Croatia, it was Krajina Serbs fighting Croats.  This was in addition to Serbs and Muslims fighting in eastern and northern Bosnia.  The battlefield maps and intelligence scenario changed daily.  Frustrated NATO and UN personnel kept searching for solutions” (24).

[365] Gen. Charles G.Boyd, “Making Peace with the Guilty: The Truth about Bosnia,” Foreign Affairs 74, no. 5 (Sept.-Oct. 1995), 32; and Sara Flounders, “Bosnia Tragedy: The Unknown Role of the Pentagon,” in NATO in
the Balkans: Voices of Opposition, edited by Ramsey Clark, Sean Gervasi, Sara Flounders, Nadja Tesich, Thomas Deichmann, and others (New York: International Action Center, 1998), 59.

[366] United Nations, “Former Yugoslavia – UNPROFOR”; and Gibbs, First Do No Harm, 159, 163-64.  Military Professionals Resources, Inc. trained the security forces of numerous authoritarian regimes, including Equatorial Guinea in a contract that was approved by the State Department after dictator Teodoro Obiang granted concessions for off-shore drilling to Exxon-Mobil. It also trained Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) and Ugandan fighters linked to major human rights abuses in Congo. A senior embassy staffer described the program there as “killers training killers.”  See Jeremy Kuzmarov, “’Distancing Acts’: Private Mercenaries and the War on Terror in American Foreign Policy, The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 12, Issue 52, No. 1, December 21, 2014, https://apjjf.org/2014/12/52/Jeremy-Kuzmarov/4241.html.

[367] James Risen and Doyle McManus, “U.S. OK’d Iranian Arms for Bosnia, Officials Say,” Los Angeles Times, April 5, 1996.

[368] NIOD, “Srebrenica – A ‘Safe’ Area,” press release April 10, 2002.  On the Srebrenica massacre, see also Rohde, Endgame: The Betrayal and Fall of Srebrenica; Seema Jilani, “Srebrenica Revisited,” New York Times (Sunday Review), July 10, 2015; and David N. Gibbs, “How the Srebrenica Massacre Redefined US Foreign Policy,” Class, Race and Corporate Power, Vol. 3, Issue 2 (2015), 2. The number of people executed by the Serbs has been the subject of some dispute. Gibbs and many others cite the figure of 8,000 people killed, “overwhelmingly males sixteen and older.” Phillip Corwin, the UN chief political officer in Sarajevo in 1995, however, writes that “the figure of 8,000 killed, which is often bandied about in the international community, is an unsupportable exaggeration. The true figure may be closer to 800.” Philip Corwin, “Forward,” in Edward S. Herman, ed., The Srebrenica Massacre: Evidence, Context, Politics (Srebrenica Research Group, June 2011), online: https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-srebrenica-massacre-evidence-context-politics/25112). Nevertheless, in his own memoir, Dubious Mandate: A Memoir of the UN in Bosnia, Summer 1995 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), Corwin does not address the issue of the number killed at Srebrenica. In a follow-up investigation, the International Commission on Missing Persons collected 22,268 blood samples from Srebrenica survivors and matched them to 6,827 buried bodies that were found, indicating roughly 7,000 killed at Srebrenica. See Thomas Parsons, “How DNA profiling helped unravel the horror of Bosnia’s genocide,” International Commission on Missing Persons (March 31, 2016), https://www.icmp.int/news/how-dna-profiling-helped-unravel-the-horror-of-bosnias-genocide..

[369] Corwin, Dubious Mandate, 189.

[370] Stephen Engelberg and Time Weiner, “Massacre in Bosnia; Srebrenica: The Days of Slaughter,” New York Times, October 29, 1995; Sheila Zulfiqar Ahmad, “The UN’s Role in the Bosnian Crisis: A Critique.” Pakistan Horizon 51, no. 2 (1998): 83-92; and Gibbs, First Do No Harm, 166.

[371] Gibbs, First Do No Harm, 166; and Col. Robert C. Owen, Deliberate Force: A Case Study in Effective Air Campaigning; Final Report of the Air University Balkans Air Campaign Study (Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama: Air University Press, January 2000), 280, 491, 522; Eric Schmitt, “NATO Shifts Focus of Its Air Attacks on Bosnian Serbs,” New York Times, September 11, 1995; and International Committee of the Red Cross, “ICRC Report on Certain Aspects of the Conduct of Hostilities and the Consequences from a Humanitarian Point of View of NATO Air Strikes,” November 1994.

[372] John S. Brown (Chief of Military History, U.S. Army), Bosnia-Herzegovina: The U.S. Army’s Role in Peace Enforcement Operations, 1995-2004, https://history.army.mil/html/books/070/70-97-1/cmhPub_70-97-1.pdf, p.168. U.S. forces gradually declined to less than 1,000 soldiers by 2004.

[373] Edward Morgan-Jones, Neophytos Loizides and Djordje Stefanovic, “20 years later, this is what Bosnians think about the Dayton peace accords,” Washington Post, December 14, 2015.

[374] Boyd, “Making Peace with the Guilty: The Truth about Bosnia,” 31, 33, 38.

[375] Sray, “Selling the Bosnian Myth to America,” 1-3, 15, 17.  Beyond duping the American public, Lt. Col. Sray was concerned that the Bosnian government would facilitate the spread of radical Islam, if only because militants were coming to Bosnia to buttress Bosnian Muslim forces.  He writes (p. 8):  “Approximately 4000 Mujahedin, supported by Iranian special operations forces, have been continually intensifying their activities in central Bosnia for more than two years.  Detachments of Mujahedin have assisted in training selected Bosniac army elements and began to spearhead many tactical-level attacks against the BSA [Bosnian Serb Army] during the summer of 1994.  The potential for this organization to escalate its activities remains high and could threaten regional stability despite any future agreements.  Funding for the Mujahedin has been provided by Iran and various other Islamic states with an interest in expanding extremism into Europe.  International radical groups, such as Hizbollah, have also been included on the suspected list of sponsors.  Bosnian government sources only grudgingly acknowledge the presence of the Mujahedin but publicly intimate that they have accepted their presence as a “necessary evil” to maintain the flow of aid from international Islamic contributors.  This ‘aid’ has been distributed in forms ranging from hard currency to clandestine arms shipments.  As time progresses, these professional ‘holy warriors’ will likely divert their attention to politicizing the Muslim population and attempting to establish an Islamic republic obedient to fundamentalist doctrine.”  The latter scenario, however, did not take root in Bosnia.

[376] Leonard Desroches, Allow the Water: Anger, Fear, Power, Work, Sexuality, Community – and the Spirituality and Practice of Nonviolence (Ottawa: Dunamis, 2003), 207-08.

[377] Gibbs, First Do No Harm, 177-78.

[378] Sam Pender, How Did It Come to This: America’s Experience in the New World Order (College Station, TX: Virtualbookworm.com, 2004), 115; and Gibbs, First Do No Harm, 182.  In Hearings before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on April 20, 1999, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was questioned about Ambassador Gelbard’s statement that the KLA was a terrorist organization.  She responded, “We do not consider them a terrorist group.”  Asked “What has changed the opinion?”  The secretary replied, “I never called them a terrorist group…. I cannot speak to what he said.  We consider them the military arm of the Albanians … They do have some arms, as we know, and we have not approved of all the actions that they have taken, but they have pledged themselves in the [Rambouillet] agreement that they signed to disarm.” Senate Hearing 106-265, “The War in Kosovo and a Postwar Analysis,” April 20, September 28, and October 6, 1999,” https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-106shrg57452/html/CHRG-106shrg57452.htm.

[379] United Nations Security Council Resolution 1160, 31, March 1998, https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/252117?ln=en.

[380] Ibid., 185-86; and BBC Interview with Hajdin Abazi, “How I met Holbrooke,” December 14, 2010, BBC Albanian.com, http://www.bbc.co.uk/albanian/regionalnews/2010/12/101214_kos_kla_holbooke.shtml.  The KLA attracted various radical Muslim groups from other countries, including al Qaeda, but such groups gained little influence.  According to Marko Attila Hoare, the “fundamentalist version of Islam … was rejected by ordinary Muslims in Bosnia, Kosova, Albania and Macedonia and by their political leaders, and was out of keeping with their native tradition.”  Marko Attila Hoare, “Three Books on al-Qaeda in Bosnia” (review), Democratiya 13 (Summer 2008), 56.

[381] Gibbs, First Do No Harm, 186, 184.  Investigative reports on U.S. support for the KLA ran in the Sunday Times (London) on March 12, 2000, and in the Wall Street Journal on November 1, 2001.  See also, Amos Chapple, “Operation Allied Force: The NATO Bombing of Yugoslavia,” March 24, 2019, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty website, https://www.rferl.org/a/operation-allied-force-before-after/29831978.html.  The latter, a U.S. government website, notes instances of KLA terrorism followed by Serbian authority repression:  (1) “In the summer of 1998, KLA fighters killed dozens of Serb police and civilians.  Yugoslav-backed authorities responded by rolling on villages with armored vehicles and driving ethnic Albanians from their homes and setting houses ablaze.”  (2) “In January 1999, after KLA fighters killed four Serbs in an attack on a police post, Yugoslav government forces cordoned off the nearby village of Racak.  When international observers were able to enter, they found the aftermath of a massacre: 45 ethnic Albanian civilians dead, including women and a child.”

[382] Appendix B of the Rambouillet text stated:  “NATO personnel shall enjoy, together with their vehicles, vessels, aircraft, and equipment, free and unrestricted passage and unimpeded access throughout the FRY including associated airspace and territorial waters.  This shall include, but not be limited to, the right of bivouac, maneuver, billet, and utilization of any areas or facilities as required for support, training, and operations.”  Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger published his comments in a Daily Telegraph article on June 28, 1999, stating:  “The Ramboiillet text, which called on Serbia to admit NATO troops throughout Yugoslavia, was a provocation, an excuse to start bombing.  Rambouillet is not a document that an angelic Serb could have accepted.  It was a terrible diplomatic document that should never have been presented in that form.”  Cited in Peter Lee, “Tony Blair and Military Intervention,” in David Whetham and Bradley J Strawser, eds., Responsibility to Protect: Perspectives in Theory and Practice (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill Nijhoff, 2015), 66-67.

[383] “A Kosovo Chronology,” Frontline, Public Broadcasting Station, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/kosovo/etc/cron.html.

[384] The NATO air war offered a showcase for modern weaponry, including long-range stealth warplanes delivering satellite guided bombs released from an altitude of 40,000 feet, GPS-guided all-weather air-and-sea launched cruise missiles, Apache attack helicopters equipped with heat detecting sensors and video cameras capable of transmitting aerial pictures from a mile away to command posts within 90 seconds, and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for eavesdropping, surveillance, and jamming Yugoslav communications.  A live feed from the drones was set up in CIA director James Woolsey’s 7^th floor Langley office enabling him to monitor events on the ground while communicating through an early form of chat software.  See Andrew Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Michael G. Vickers, “Revolution Deferred: Kosovo and the Transformation of War,” in War Over Kosovo: Politics and Strategy in a Global Age, ed. Andrew Bacevich and Eliot A. Cohen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 195, 196; and Richard Whittle, Predator: The Secret Origins of the Drone Revolution (New York: Henry Holt, 2014).

[385] John A. Tirpak, “Washington Watch: Victory in Kosovo,” Air Force Magazine, July 11, 2008, https://www.airforcemag.com/article/0799watch.

[386] Ibid; Capt. Gregory Ball, “1999 – Operation Allied Force,” Air Force Historical Support Division, https://www.afhistory.af.mil/FAQs/Fact-Sheets/Article/458957/operation-allied-force; and “Civilian deaths ‘necessary price,'” BBC News, May 31, 1999, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/357355.stm.

[387] Human Rights Watch, “The Crisis in Kosovo,” in Civilian Deaths in the NATO Air Campaign, Vol. 12, Number 1, February 2000, https://www.hrw.org/reports/2000/nato/Natbm200-01.htm; and United National International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, “Final Report to the Prosecutor by the Committee Established to Review the NATO Bombing Campaign Against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia,” https://www.icty.org/en/press/final-report-prosecutor-committee-established-review-nato-bombing-campaign-against-federal#IVA5.  See also, Steven Erlanger, “Dozens of Civilians Are Killed as NATO Air Strikes Go Awry,” New York Times, June 1, 1999.

[388] “Amnesty International accuses NATO of illegal bombing raids,” Baltimore Sun (New York Times news service), June 8, 2000.

[389] See Timothy William Waters, “Unexploded Bomb: Voice, Silence, and Consequence at the Hague Tribunals: A Legal and Rhetorical Critique,” Journal of International Law and Politics, Vol. 35 (2003): 1015-1131.  Waters argues that the justice was not served by the Tribunal’s refusal to merely inquire into whether NATO’s actions crossed the line on war crimes.

[390] “Military Technical Agreement between the International Security Force (‘KFOR’) and the Governments of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the Republic of Serbia,” June 9, 1999, NATO’s Role in Kosovo, Basic documents, https://www.nato.int/kosovo/docu/a990609a.htm.

[391] See, for example, Richard Holbrooke (Assistant Secretary of State for European and Canadian Affairs from 1994 to 1996, To End a War (New York: Modern Library, 1999).

[392] Human Rights Watch, “The Crisis in Kosovo”; and Fred Abrahams, “Justice Gap for Kosovo 20 Years On,” Human Rights Watch, June 13, 2019, https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/06/13/justice-gap-kosovo-20-years.

[393] Gibbs, First Do No Harm, 201-202.  Kosovo population statistics indicate a drop of 486,000 people from 1997 to 2000.

[394] Richard Holbrooke, Assistant Secretary of State for European and Canadian Affairs from 1994 to 1996, was nonetheless convinced that NATO military action was the key to maintaining peace, writing, “The best chance to prevent war would have been to present Yugoslavia with a clear warning that NATO airpower would be used against any party that tried to deal with ethnic tensions by force.  The United States and the Europeans could then have worked with the Yugoslav parties to mediate peaceful (although certain contentious and complicated) divorce agreements between the republics.”  Richard Holbrooke, To End a War (New York: Modern Library, 1999), 28.  Given the context, would NATO bomb all three warring factions to keep the peace?

[395] “Comparative Analysis of the Wars in Kosovo and Iraq,” Economists for Peace and Security newsletter, March 2008, http://www.epsusa.org/publications/newsletter/2008/march2008/petkova.pdf.

[396] NIOD, “Sebrenica Report,” Press release; and Corwin, Dubious Mandate, 191.

[397] United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, https://www.icty.org/en/about/tribunal/achievements; and Patrick Kingsley and Gerry Mullany, “Kosovo Leader Is Indicted Over Murders In 1990s War,” New York Times, June 25, 2020.  The latter article notes that, while the larger of number of casualties in the Kosovo-Serbian war were committed by Serbian troops, more than 2,000 Serbs and other groups were killed by either NATO bombs or the Kosovo Liberation Army.

[398] See Jessica Stern, My War Criminal: Personal Encounters with an Architect of Genocide (New York: Ecco/HarperCollins, 2020).

[399] United Nations International Tribunal for the Prosecution of Persons Responsible for Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law Committed in the Territory of the former Yugoslavia since 1991, “Prosecutor v. Radovan Karadžić,” 24 March 2016, https://www.icty.org/x/cases/karadzic/tjug/en/160324_judgement.pdf, page 1,303.  See also, Andy Wilcoxson, “The Exoneration of Milosevic: the ICTY’s Surprise Ruling,” Counterpunch, August 1, 2016, https://www.counterpunch.org/2016/08/01/the-exoneration-of-milosevic-the-ictys-surprise-ruling.

[400] Naza Tanović-Miller, Testimony of a Bosnian (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2001), 224-25.

[401] On the UN role in mediation, conflict resolution, and peacekeeping, see A. V. Suleymanov, “United Nations Role in Resolution [of] International Conflicts,” Vetnik Rudn, International Relations, Vol. 17, No. 1 (2017): 86-94,  https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316466844_United_Nations_role_in_resolution_international_conflicts.

[402] “Raid on Baghdad; Clinton’s Address:  Message is ‘Don’t Tread On Us,'” New York Times, June 27, 1993; Gordon W. Rudd, Humanitarian Intervention: Assisting the Iraqi Kurds in Operation Provide Comfort, 1991 (Washington, DC: Department of the Army, 2004), 226; Capt. Gregory Ball, “1991 – Operation Provide Comfort and Northern Watch”; and “Operation Provide Comfort,” GlobalSecurity.org, https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/provide_comfort.htm.  In 1993, the Clinton administration adopted a policy of “dual containment,” intended to isolate and disempower the governments of both Iraq and Iran.  With respect to Iraq, “regime change” was often mentioned as the goal, but caution was voiced as Iran could well become the beneficiary, given that a majority of Iraqis were Shiite Muslim, as in Iran.

[403] Tom Roberts, “Sharp Jump in Child Deaths in Iraq,” National Catholic Reporter, August 27, 1999, https://natcath.org/NCR_Online/archives2/1999c/082799/082799h.htm.

[404] “Democracy Now! Confronts Madeleine Albright on the Iraq Sanctions: Was It Worth the Price?” July 30, 2004, https://www.democracynow.org/2004/7/30/democracy_now_confronts_madeline_albright_on; and Tom Raum, “Albright Meets With Iraq Opposition,” Washington Post, September 20, 1999.

[405] “Were 1998 Memos a Blueprint for War?” ABC News, January 6, 2006, https://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/story?id=128491&page=1.

[406] “Iraq Liberation Act of 1998,” Public Law 105-338 – Oct. 31, 1998, https://www.congress.gov/105/plaws/publ338/PLAW-105publ338.pdf.

[407] The destruction of Iraq’s chemical weapons was overseen by the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC). Director Hans Blix told the UN Security Council in March 2003 that its inspectors “had found no evidence of the continuation or resumption of programmes of weapons of mass destruction.” United Nations Security Council press release, “UN Inspectors Found No Evidence of Prohibited Weapons Programmes as of 18 March Withdrawal, Hans Blix Tells Security Council,” 5 June 2003,https://www.un.org/press/en/2003/sc7777.doc.htm. During President Bush’s first seven months in office, his administration opted not to participate in an agreement signed by 178 other nations to cut the emission of greenhouse gases; demanded that a treaty limiting illegal trafficking in small arms be watered down; “un-signed” President Clinton’s signature on a Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty; announced that it was abandoning a UN draft accord to enforce a 29-year-old treaty against germ warfare; refused to send the International Criminal Court treaty to the Senate for ratification; and declared that the U.S. intended to build a missile defense shield despite strong opposition from the rest of the world. Steven Thomma and Warren P. Strobel, “Bush sets lone world strategy for U.S.,” Tallahassee Democrat, July 26, 2001.

[408] Hans Köchler, “The NATO War of 1999 and the Impotence of International Law,” Lecture delivered at Institute of International Politics and Economics in Belgrade, 22 March 2019, published in Global Research, April 5, 2019, https://www.globalresearch.ca/nato-war-1999-impotence-international-law/5673730.

[409] See David Foglesong, The American Mission and the “Evil Empire:” The Crusade for a “Free Russia” Since 1881 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Stephen Cohen, Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001), 7-10; and Jeremy Kuzmarov and John Marciano, The Russians are Coming, Again: The First Cold War as Tragedy, the Second as Farce (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2018).  On the 1917 Midnight War, see Jeremy Kuzmarov, “The Wilson administration’s war on Russian Bolshevism,” United States Foreign Policy History & Resource Guide, http://peacehistory-usfp.org/ww1-russia.  On the Cold War, see Roger Peace, “Cold War interventionism, 1945-1990,” United States Foreign Policy History & Resource Guide, http://peacehistory-usfp.org/cold-war.

[410] Peter Reddaway and Dmitri Glinski, The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms: Market Bolshevism Against Democracy (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Institute of Peace Press, 2001); and Vladislav Zubok, A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War From Stalin to Gorbachev (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 333.  Zubok estimates that only 15 percent of Russians supported democratization.

[411] Fritz Ermath, “Seeing Russia Plain: The Russia Crisis and American Intelligence,” The National Interest, Spring 1999, 5-14; available at: https://lists.h-net.org/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=h-diplo&month=9906&week=a&msg=SL740S46TBgGo7IIL%2BCzlQ&user=&pw=

[412] Historian David M. Kotz and journalist Fred Weir corroborate this view, arguing that the Soviet system was swept away in a bloodless revolution from above in which the elites switched sides owing as much to opportunism as any ideological conviction. ; David M. Kotz and Fred Weir, Russia’s Path from Gorbachev to Putin: The Demise of the Soviet System and the New Russia (New York: Routledge, 2007), 147, 148.  See also David Marples, The Collapse of the Soviet Union, 1985-1991 (UK: Pearson, 2004).  Marples writes that the fall of the Soviet Union resulted from a “coup from within” by Yeltsin, a view also promoted by Stephen Cohen.

[413] “Putin: Soviet Collapse a Genuine Tragedy,” Associated Press, April 25, 2005; Engdahl, Manifest Destiny, 29.  One reason it was a catastrophe was that Russia’s borders were rolled back to what they had been in 1613 while the GDP in all the former Soviet Republics (excepts the Baltic States) plummeted.  In one poll taken in the early 21^st century, 80 percent of Russians regretted the Soviet Union’s abolition.  Stephen F. Cohen, “Was the Soviet System Reformable?” Slavic Review, 63, 3 (Autumn 2004); Klebnikov, Godfather of the Kremlin, 78.

[414] Leon Aron, Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life (New York: St .Martin’s Press, 2000); Timothy J. Colton, Yeltsin: A Life (New York: Basic Books, 2008); Steven Otfinoski, Boris Yeltsin and the Economic Rebirth of Russia (Brookfield, CT: The Milbrook Press, 1995); Kotz and Weir, Russia’s Path From Gorbachev to Putin, 127, 128.

[415] Aron, Yeltsin, 453, 454; Marples, The Collapse of the Soviet Union, 1985-1991, ch. 5, 6; Zubok, A Failed Empire, 333.

[416] Colton, Yeltsin, 191.

[417] Reddaway and Glinski, The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms, 203.  There are suggestions in some sources (i.e., Engdahl, Manifest Destiny) that the CIA paid the coup plotters, and thus helped stage the coup as a means of facilitating the collapse of the U.S.S.R.  This charge is yet to be verified with declassified documents.  Andrei Kozyrev, a top aide to Yeltsin reported that during the crisis, the Western embassies “in effect began to work for us; through them, we received and passed on information.” In John Dunlop, The Rise of Russia and the Fall of the Soviet Empire (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1993), 216.

[418] See James Mann, The Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet (New York: Penguin Press, 2006).  Defense Secretary Dick Cheney advocated for the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. and breakaway of Ukraine and other former Soviet Republics, which he felt would be geopolitically advantageous to the United States.  Brent Scowcroft, a longtime associate of Henry Kissinger and National Security Council advisor under Bush I, argued for a more moderate position within the administration.

[419] James M. Goldgeier and Michael McFaul, Power and Purpose: U.S. Policy Towards Russia after the Cold War (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2003), 29, 30.

[420] Goldgeier and McFaul, Power and Purpose, 90, 91, 93, 213.

[421] Richard M. Nixon, “How to Lose the Cold War,” March 1992, reprinted at Richard Nixon Foundation website, https://www.nixonfoundation.org/artifact/how-to-lose-the-cold-war;  and Strobe Talbott, The Russia Hand: A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy (New York: Random House, 2002), 46.   On deep rooted Russophobia – which is evident in Nixon’s writings – see Guy Mettan, Creating Russophobia: From the Great Religious Schism to anti-Putin Hysteria (Atlanta; Clarity Press Inc., 2017).

[422] Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007), ch. 7.  Sachs believed in free markets, though backed by debt relief and generous aid.  His anticommunist and anti-socialist views may have derived from his wife, Sonia Ehrlich, a pediatrician who fled Communist Czechoslovakia with her family when she was twelve.  According to a Spanish newspaper, Sachs personally edited Yeltsin’s decrees.  As in Russia, Sachs’ economic austerity program in Bolivia was implemented by fiat without popular consent, in this case by Bolivian President Victor Paz Estenssoro who had ironically overseen the nationalization of Bolivia’s tin mines and land redistribution policies after leading Bolivia’s 1952 revolution.  The protests were violently crushed by Estenssoro’s government, with many killed.  Many Bolivians were forced subsequently to work as coca growers.  Sachs’ key counterpart, Gonzalo Sanchez de Losada (Goni) later became president of the country where he oversaw the renewed massacre of protestors opposing privatization initiatives.

[423] David E. Hoffman, The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia (New York: Public Affairs, 2002), 84-92; Peter Passell, “Dr. Jeffrey Sachs, Shock Therapist,” The New York Times, June 27, 1993; C.J. Chivers and Erin E. Arvedlund, “Head of Russian Electricity Monopoly Survives Ambush,” The New York Times, March 18, 2005. Born in Belarus, Chubais’ father Boris had been a commissar, or political indoctrinator of the troops. Anatoly said that his father “sincerely believed in Soviet power, its ideas, in the communist power, in Stalin.” After leaving the government, Chubais became an oligarch in his own right and worked to break up the national electric power monopoly, of which he was appointed director. Described by journalist Paul Klebnikov as “cold blooded, clear headed and decisive,” this rainmaker to Russia’s new financial elite lived in an expensive dacha in a wealthy suburb of Moscow and traveled in an armor-plated BMW. Paul Klebnikov, “Power Struggle,” Forbes, March 3, 2003.

[424] Alessandra Stanley, “Russian Reformer’s Credibility Undercut by Scandal,” New York Times, November 17, 1997.

[425] David McClintick, “How Harvard Lost Russia,” Institutional Investor Magazine, January 24, 2006, https://www.almendron.com/tribuna/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/how-harvard.pdf.

[426] Steve Liesman and C. Anne Roberts, “Aborted Mission: How an Aid Program Vital to the New Economy of Russia Collapsed,” The Wall Street Journal, August 13, 1997, A1.

[427] Liesman and Roberts, “Aborted Mission;” Paul Klebnikov, Godfather of the Kremlin: Boris Berezovsky and the Looting of Russia (New York: Harcourt Inc., 2000), 115, 116.  An audit by the Russian Chamber of Accounts revealed serious misappropriations at the Russia Privatization Center, a private nonprofit linked to Chubais and funded by Western aid money.  Much of the money was distributed directly to Chubais’ cronies and to key political bosses in return for their support for market “reforms.”  In 1997, Soros purchased 24 percent of Sviazinvest, a telecommunications giant, in partnership with Vladimir Potanin.  It was later learned that shortly before this purchase, Soros had tided over Yeltsin’s government with a backdoor loan of hundreds of millions of dollars.  According to Wall Street Journal reporter Anne Williamson, the American assistance program in Russia was rife with such conflict of interest involving HIID advisers and Chubais’ allies.  HMC managers favored Russian bankers, Soros and insider expatriates.

[428] Janine R. Wedel, “The Harvard Boys Do Russia,” The Nation Magazine, May 14, 1998; Maxim Boycko, Andrei Shleifer, Robert W. Vishny, Privatizing Russia (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995); Passell, “Dr. Jeffrey Sachs, Shock Therapist.”

[429] McClintick, “How Harvard Lost Russia.” In Indonesia, HIID helped revise the tax system and liberalize financial markets. It also had been active in Colombia, Kenya, Pakistan and Zambia.  Russia was its biggest and most important project.  Other notable professors who worked with Sachs to promote privatization included Graham Allison of the Harvard Kennedy School, Anders Aslund, David Lipton, and Marshall I. Goldman.

[430] Liesman and Roberts, “Aborted Mission;” Reddaway and Glinski, The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms, 297.  Summers was one of Harvard’s youngest ever tenured professors and later became its president.

[431] See David Halberstam’s classic book, The Best and the Brightest, rev ed. (New York: Ballantine Books, 1993)

[432] Reddaway and Glinski, The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms; Marshall I. Goldman, The Privatization of Russia: Russian Reform Goes Awry (New York: Routledge, 2003), 31.

[433] Liesman and Roberts, “Aborted Mission.”

[434] Anne Williamson, “Russia’s Fiscal Whistleblower: Chief Auditor Venyamin Sokolov Says Western Loans Are Hijacked by the Corrupt Yeltsin Government,” Mother Jones, June 16, 1998.  Sokolov said that giving more loans to the Yeltsin government was comparable to “giving a drug addict a fresh supply of narcotics.”

[435] Goldman, The Privatization of Russia, 31.

[436] Wedel, “The Harvard Boys Do Russia.”

[437] Wedel, “The Harvard Boys Do Russia;” Liesman and Roberts, “Aborted Mission.”  Hay and his father also allegedly used inside information to invest profitably in Russian government bonds.

[438] McClintick, “How Harvard Lost Russia.”  A USAID audit found that Pallada had been given unfair advantage.

[439] McClintick, “How Harvard Lost Russia;” Wedel, “The Harvard Boys Do Russia;” Liesman and Roberts, “Aborted Mission.”

[440] McClintick, “How Harvard Lost Russia.” Shleifer and his wife also invested in Russian government debt.

[441] United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Front Lines (newsletter), September 2004, p. 2.

[442] Wedel, “The Harvard Boys Do Russia”; Liesman and Roberts, “Aborted Mission”; McClintick, “How Harvard Lost Russia”; Zachary M. Seward, “Harvard to Pay $26.5 million in HIID Settlement,” Harvard Crimson, July 29, 2005; David Warsh, “Judge Finds Against Shleifer, Hay and Harvard,” Economic Principals, July 4, 2004; “Russia Case (and Dust) Settle,” Harvard Magazine, November-December 2005. In 2013, Russian President Vladimir Putin publicly identified Shleifer and Hay as CIA agents. Whether this is true or not is uncertain.

[443] McClintick, “How Harvard Lost Russia;” Klein, The Shock Doctrine, 235; Seward, “Harvard to Pay $26.5 Million in HIID Settlement;” Edward Spannaus, “DOJ Sues Harvard Over Russia-USAID Scam,” Lyndon Larouche News Service, October 13, 2000; Kotz and Weir, Russia’s Path from Gorbachev to Putin, 229, 230 (quote from David Cohen, a Rhodes Scholar).  HIID also misappropriated government funds, using them to support fancy tennis lessons and memberships, huge housing allowances, ghost jobs for girlfriends and vacation boondoggles for Harvard employees, their Russian girlfriends and spouses.  It also carried out tax evasion. Rather than suffering any career setbacks, Shleifer remained a tenured Harvard professor, received a prestigious endowed chair, and was invited to give lectures all around the world.  Indeed, he lectured at Princeton in April 2015 on “Instability from Finance,” a theme on which he was well-versed.  Hay meanwhile became a partner at a prestigious London law firm and later resurfaced as founder of the Ukrainian branch of the Polish “free market” Centre for Social and Economic Research (CASE) during the coup d’états backed by the U.S. in Kiev in 2014.

[444] Cohen, Failed Crusade; Ron Ridenour, The Russian Peace Threat: Pentagon on Alert (New York: Pinto Press, 2018); Goldman, The Privatization of Russia, 2, 3; and “Life expectancy at birth, male (years) – Russian Federation,” The World Bank (Data), https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.MA.IN?locations=RU.

[445] F. William Engdahl, Manifest Destiny: Democracy as Cognitive Dissonance (Wiesbaden: Mine Books, 2018), 29-69; and Representatives Christopher Cox, Ben Gilman, Porter Goss, et al. “Russia’s Road to Corruption: How the Clinton Administration Exported Government Instead of Free Enterprise and Failed the Russian People,” Members of the Speaker’s Advisory Group on Russia, U.S. House of Representatives, Washington, D.C., September 2000 (286 page report), https://fas.org/irp/congress/2000_rpt/russias-road.pdf, page 107.

[446] For description of the privatization program, see Maxim Boycko, Andrei Shleifer, and Robert Vishny, “Privatizing Russia,” Brookings Paper on Economic Activity 2: 1993, 150.  Some 151 million privatization vouchers were distributed.  The idea was that every Russian would have a stake in the new economy.  Two-thirds of Russian industry was privatized by July 1, 1994.

[447] Reddaway and Glinski, The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms, 248; Klebnikov, Godfather of the Kremlin, 127, 138. $325 million in U.S. taxpayer dollars funded the privatization voucher system.

[448] Engdahl, Manifest Destiny, 59; David Hoffman, The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia (New York: Public Affairs, 2011), 202; Klebnikov, Godfather of the Kremlin, 135.  The Yeltsin-connected oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky got a 78% share in Yukos Oil, worth about $5 billion, for a mere $310 million, and Boris Berezovsky got Sibneft, another oil giant worth $3 billion, for about $100 million.  Russia was also plundered through the sale of its natural resources.  In a typical scheme, a seller, aided by corrupt government officials, sold Russian commodities overseas for higher prices than was reported to the government and pocketed the difference.  Illegal profits are estimated to have exceeded $10 billion.  David E. Kaplan and Christian Caryl, “The Looting of Russia,” U.S. News & World Report, August 3, 1998.

[449] Odd Arne Westad, “The Cold War and America’s Delusion of Victory, New York Times, August 28, 2017.

[450] Klein, The Shock Doctrine, 224.  See also Reddaway and Glinski, The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms.

[451] Cohen, “Was the Soviet System Reformable?” 465; Kotz and Weir, Russia’s Path from Gorbachev to Putin, 132, 133.

[452] Klein, The Shock Doctrine, 226; Amy Knight, Orders to Kill: The Putin Regime and Political Murder (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2017), 79.

[453] Klebnikov, Godfather of the Kremlin. Berezovsky held a Ph.D. in mathematics and had worked at the prestigious Russian academy of sciences and in the Soviet space program. He made his first fortune running a car dealership with the help of Chechen organized criminals. His takeover of formerly state-run industries was marred by assassinations and accidental deaths of key players including a popular TV host that were never properly investigated.  Berezovsky first became close to Yeltsin after Yeltsin sought him out in order to finance publication of his memoirs. Subsequently he took over Russia’s number one television network after it was privatized and gained control of Aeroflot and the Rosneft oil company. Later, Yeltsin named him Deputy Secretary of the National Security Council, a prestigious post.

[454] Reddaway and Glinski, The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms, 370, 424; Aron, Yeltsin, 498, 499, 501, 524, 552. The Russian government said that 187 people were killed in the conflict, including 12 soldiers, at least 9 of which were accidentally killed by their own men.

[455] Klein, The Shock Doctrine, 228, 229; Aron, Yeltsin, 498, 499, 501, 524, 552; James DeFronzo, Revolutions and Revolutionary Movements, 5^th ed. (New York: Routledge, 2014), 60; Colton, Yeltsin, 278, 279.  Economic genocide quote from Otfinoski, Boris Yeltsin and the Economic Rebirth of Russia, 82.  Margaret Shapiro, “Yeltsin’s ‘Essential’ Crackdown Provokes Charges of Expediency,” The Washington Post, October 16, 1993.

[456] Sean Guillory, “Dermokratyia, USA,” Jacobin, March 13, 2017; Foglesong, The American Mission and the “Evil Empire,” 208.

[457] Svetlana Savranskya and Tom Blanton, “Yeltsin Shelled Russian Parliament 25 Years Ago, U.S. Praised ‘Superb Handling,’” National Security Archive, October 4, 2018, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2018-10-04/yeltsin-shelled-russian-parliament-25-years-ago-us-praised-superb-handling.  Few members of Congress opposed Yeltsin’s actions or urged the Clinton administration to renounce them.  Senator Robert Dole (R-KS) was among the few to question on national television whether it was wise for the United States to urge countries like Russia to impose shock therapies.  Congressman Bernie Sanders (Ind.-VT) also opposed the shock therapy policies.  Reddaway and Glinski, The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms, 425.

[458] Fogelsong, The American Mission and the “Evil Empire,” 208; Aron, Yeltsin, 498, 499, 501, 524, 552; Reddaway and Glinski, The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms, ch.7.  Many leaders of the opposition in parliament came from the close-knit group of comrades-in-arms who supported Yeltsin’s countercoup in August 1991.  Yeltsin’s strongest supporters in the U.S. were cold warriors such as Harvard University Sovietologist Richard Pipes and columnist William Safire.  A U.C. Berkeley Russian “specialist” compared Yeltsin to Peter the Great, John Locke, and Thomas Jefferson.  For the pattern of media and academic distortion and apologia for Yeltsin, see Cohen, Failed Crusade.  In a New York Times review of the book, Robert D. Kaplan wrote, “Cohen’s thesis is that Yeltsin, rather than Russia’s first democratic leader, was a new-czarist bumbler who destroyed a democraticzation process thatn, in fact, should be credited to Mikhail Gorbachev. . . . Cohen is particularly scathing toward American journalists, whom he depicts as overly influenced by the prosperity of a small, rapacious upper class in the major Russian cities, and who seldom ventured out into the countriside to see the terrible price of the reformers’ handiwork.”  Cohen received his doctorate in Russian Studies from Columbia University in 1969.  Robert D. McFadden, “Stephen F. Cohen, 81, Professor and Influential Historian of Russia, Is Dead,” New York Times, September 20, 2020, p. 31.

[459] Michael Kramer, “Rescuing Boris: The Secret Story of How Four U.S. Advisers Used Polls, Focus Groups, Negative Ads and all the Other Techniques of American Campaigning to Help Boris Yeltsin Win,” Time Magazine, July 15, 1996.

[460] Yeltsin in return for the loan said he would exempt the exports of Arkansas-based Tyson Chicken (a longtime Clinton donor) to Russia – then a $700 million annual business – from a threatened 20 percent import tariff increase.  Engdahl, Manifest Destiny, 63.  Germany also loaned Russia $2.7 billion, three quarters of which was given without condition on its use.

[461] Talbott, The Russia Hand, 205.  Clinton gave directions that the United States had to go all out in helping Yeltsin [to win.]

[462] Peter Beinart, “The U.S. Needs to Face Up to Its Long History of Election Meddling,” The Atlantic, July 22, 2018; Guillory, “Dermokratyia, USA;” Eleanor Randolph, “Americans Claim Role in Yeltsin Win,” Los Angeles Times, July 9, 1996; Kramer, “Rescuing Boris;” Fred Weir, “Betting on Boris,” Covert Action Quarterly (Summer 1996): 38, 41.  George Gorton and Joe Shumate were the other consultants, along with Steven Moore, who worked in public relations in the United States and Felix Braynin, a Russian expatriate.

[463] Ibid. The consultants went on to help elect Arnold Schwarzrenegger (R) as Governor of California.

[464] Kramer, “Rescuing Boris” (Cover title:  “Yanks to the Rescue:  The Secret Story of How American Advisers Helped Yeltsin Win,” Time magazine, July 15, 1996); and Gerald Sussman, “The Myth of ‘Democracy Assistance:’ U.S. Political Intervention in Post-Soviet Eastern Europe,” Monthly Review, December 17, 2006.  See also, Steven Kinzer, “How to Interfere in a Foreign Election,” Boston Globe, August 19, 2018.

[465] Guillory, “Dermokratyia, USA.”

[466] Wedel, “Harvard Boys Do Russia;” Klebnikov, Godfather of the Kremlin, 220, 221.  In keeping with Russian laws at the time, Zyuganov spent less than three million dollars on his campaign.   Estimates of Yeltsin’s spending, by contrast, range from $700 million to $2.5 billion, a clear violation of the law.  A portion of the money derived from illicit black-market operations and was paid in the form of a bribe or as a form of payback for the state’s selling off privatized industry at pennies to the dollar.

[467] Alexander Zaitchik and Mark Ames, “How the West Helped Invent Russia’s Election Fraud: OSCE Whistle-Blower Exposes 1996 Whitewash,” The eXile, November 20, 2007, https://www.twn.my/title2/resurgence/2011/255-256/world3.htm.  An independence movement in the southern republic of Chechnya began in the late 1980s and gathered force in the early 1990s.  In December 1994, the Russian military invaded and heavily bombed the city of Grozny to suppress the secession. Because Yeltsin was regarded as a U.S. ally, “U.S. policymakers, from President Clinton on down, referred to the war in Chechnya as an ‘internal matter’ and compared it to the U.S. civil war, implying that all-out war, with massive civilian casualties, was fully justified to preserve the country,” according to the National Security Archive.  The Clinton administration took the exact opposite position in relation to the breakaway republics of the former Yugoslavia. The historical parallel in that case was the American Revolution of 1776.  Rather than abiding by any principle, U.S. policy depended on whether or not U.S. leaders liked the government facing secessionist movements.  “Chechnya, Yeltsin, and Clinton: The Massacre at Samashki in April 1995 and the US Response to Russia’s War in Chechnya,” National Security Archive Briefing Book #702, published April 15, 2020, edited by Svetlana Savranskaya and Matthew Evangelista, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2020-04-15/massacre-at-samashki-and-us-response-to-russias-war-in-chechnya?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=9f5cae93-a368-4390-9f4a-233aa40a0c34#_ednref13.

[468] Klebnikov, Godfather of the Kremlin, 325; James Risen, “Gore Rejected CIA Evidence of Russian Corruption,” The New York Times, November 23, 1998; David Ignatius, “Who Robbed Russia? Did Al Gore Know About the Massive Lootings?” The Washington Post, April 25, 1999.  Gore had taken the lead on U.S.-Russia policy in the Clinton administration.  Other suppressed reports detailed the corruption of Anatoly Chubais who was a close U.S. ally.

[469] Ermath, “Seeing Russia Plain;” Klebnikov, Godfather of the Kremlin, 325.  See also, Cox, Gilman, Goss, et al., “Russia’s Road to Corruption.”  This well-grounded, 286-page Congressional report details the Clinton administration’s failed policies in Russia and the widespread destitution and corruption that it caused.  The report also discusses the unwillingness of Clinton administration officials – notably key architects of Russia policy, Vice President Al Gore, Strobe Talbott, special advisor to the Secretary of State and an old Oxford classmate of Clinton’s, and Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers – to recognize their failings.  The report echoes Ermath’s conclusion and others in the CIA about the prevalence of group think – a psychological process of “wishful thinking, shaky premises and tendency to develop facts at odds with the cognitive underpinnings of the course of action to which groups were committed.”  This, the report states, “led to flawed decision making and policy-failures [regarding Russia].  Decision makers were unable to admit to their own errors and in turn became trapped in a tangled muddle of self-justifiable denial and distortion” (p. 115).

[470] Klebnikov, Godfather of the Kremlin, 320.  Because of the wide corruption, democracy became a curse word, referred to on the streets of Moscow as “shitocracy,” while privatization was referred to as “grab-it-ization.”

[471] Markar Melkonian, “US Meddling in the 1996 Russian Elections in Support of Boris Yeltsin,” Global Research, November 11, 2017, https://www.globalresearch.ca/us-meddling-in-1996-russian-elections-in-support-of-boris-yeltsin/5568288.  See also Cohen, Failed Crusade; Klein, The Shock Doctrine, 237, 238; Reddaway and Glinski, The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms; and Klebnikov, Godfather of the Kremlin.

[472]  In Sight, CNN transcript, October 7, 2002, http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0210/07/i_ins.01.html; Melkonian, “US Meddling in the 1996 Russian Elections in Support of Boris Yeltsin.”

[473] See Stephen Cohen, War with Russia? From Putin and Ukraine to Trump and Russia Gate (New York: Hot Books, 2019).

[474] Ibid., and Tony Kevin, “The Devolution of U.S.-Russia Relations,” Consortium News, September 13, 2019, https://consortiumnews.com/2019/09/13/the-devolution-of-us-russia-relations.

[475] United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, “U.S. Senator Ben Cardin Releases Report Detailing Two Decades of Putin’s Attacks on Democracy, Calling for Policy Changes to Counter Kremlin Threat Ahead of 2018, 2020 Elections,” January 10, 2016, https://www.foreign.senate.gov/press/ranking/release/cardin-releases-report-detailing-two-decades-of-putins-attacks-on-democracy.  See also, Jeremy Kuzmarov, “Cardin’s Senate Report Repeats Russophobic Charges,” The Huffington Post, January 12, 2018.

[476] Robert Donaldson and Vidya Nadkarni, The Foreign Policy of Russia: Changing Systems, Enduring Interests (New York: Routledge, 2019), 261.

[477] Joshua R. Itzkowitz Shifrinson, “Deal or No Deal? The End of the Cold War and the U.S. Offer to Limit NATO Expansion,” International Security, 40, 4 (Spring 2016), 7-44; Goldgeier and McFaul, Power and Purpose, 184, 185; Talbott, The Russia Hand, 93.  Neoconservative writers affiliated with Ivy League institutions such as Mark Kramer and Anne Applebaum deny that Baker made this promise, though it was confirmed by written documents and reported on by government officials.

[478] Clinton was apparently influenced by the arguments of Czech President Vaclav Havel and Polish President Lech Walesa at the opening of the Holocaust museum in Washington, D.C. that if the world wanted to avoid another European catastrophe, Central Europe should be integrated into Western structures; cited in Anglea Stent, The Limits of Partnership: U.S.-Russian Relations in the 21^st Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 40.  Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, a child of the Cold War whose family had been expelled from Czechoslovakia in a 1948 Soviet backed coup, was among the most fervent supporters of NATO expansion, stating she felt the Central European case for admission “in my bones and in my genes.”  Talbott, Russia Hand, 223.  In 2004, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania and Slovenia joined NATO, and Albania and Croatia joined in 2009, followed by Montenegro in 2017.  The U.S. was also trying to expand NATO into Georgia and Ukraine.  See Jonathan Marshall, “NATOs Strange Addition of Montenegro,” Consortium News, February 28, 2017.

[479] John Dumbrell, Clinton’s Foreign Policy: Between the Bushes, 1992-2000 (New York: Routledge, 2009), 125.  See also M.E. Sarotte, “How to Enlarge NATO: The Debate inside the Clinton Administration, 1993–95,” International Security 44:1 (Summer 2019): 7-41.  In a review of Sorotte’s article, Joe Burton writes that “Sarotte focuses on three decision-making ‘ratchets’ in the 1990s . . . The first was President Bush’s decision to block alternatives to NATO’s continued dominance in Europe and to expand the alliance to a reunified Germany.  This set a historical precedent for enlargement that was difficult to ignore.  The second was the Clinton administration’s creation of the PfP [Partnership for Peace] in 1994, which provided a steppingstone to full NATO membership for Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, among others.  The third was the decision in 1994 to move beyond the PfP to a full-guarantee expansion.”  H-Diplo / ISSF Article Review 133 on Sarotte, “How to Enlarge NATO: The Debate inside the Clinton Administration, 1993–95,” by Joe Burton, University of Waikato; published by International Security Studies Forum (ISSF), April 1, 2020.

[480] George F. Kennan, “A Fateful Error,” The New York Times, February 5, 1997; and Bruce W. Nelan, “NATO: The Alliance Expands,” CNN/Time, July 14, 1997, https://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1997/07/07/time/nato.expand.html.  See also Branco Marcetic, “The Mysteriously Vanished NATO Critique,” Jacobin, July 16, 2018; and Dombrell, Clinton’s Foreign Policy, 1992-2000, 125.  New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman parlayed Kennan’s views to the U.S. public in an op-ed on May 2, 1998:  “His voice is a bit frail now, but the mind, even at age 94, is as sharp as ever.  So when I reached George Kennan by phone to get his reaction to the Senate’s ratification of NATO expansion it was no surprise to find that the man who was the architect of America’s successful containment of the Soviet Union and one of the great American statesmen of the 20th century was ready with an answer.  ”I think it is the beginning of a new cold war,’ said Mr. Kennan from his Princeton home. ‘I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies.  I think it is a tragic mistake.  There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else.  This expansion would make the Founding Fathers of this country turn over in their graves.  We have signed up to protect a whole series of countries, even though we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so in any serious way.  [NATO expansion] was simply a light-hearted action by a Senate that has no real interest in foreign affairs. . . . What bothers me is how superficial and ill informed the whole Senate debate was,’ added Mr. Kennan, who was present at the creation of NATO and whose anonymous 1947 article in the journal Foreign Affairs, signed ‘X,’ defined America’s cold-war containment policy for 40 years.  ‘I was particularly bothered by the references to Russia as a country dying to attack Western Europe.  Don’t people understand?  Our differences in the cold war were with the Soviet Communist regime.  And now we are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime.  ‘And Russia’s democracy is as far advanced, if not farther, as any of these countries we’ve just signed up to defend from Russia,’ said Mr. Kennan, who joined the State Department in 1926 and was U.S. Ambassador to Moscow in 1952.  ‘It shows so little understanding of Russian history and Soviet history.  Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are – but this is just wrong.'”  Thomas L. Friedman, “Foreign Affairs: Now a Word from ‘X,'” New York Times, May 2, 1998.

[481] Though official and popular interpretations continued to blame Putin for the deterioration of US-Russian relations in the 21^st century, some “realist” internationalist scholars (concerned with maintaining American hegemonic power) such as Stephen M. Walt have recognized NATO expansion as a major strategic error.  According to Walt:  “Relations with Russia deteriorated largely because the United States repeatedly ignored Russian warnings and threatened Moscow’s vital interests.  The most important step was the decision to expand NATO eastward, beginning with the admission of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic in 1999; the subsequent entry of Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia in 2004; and the U.S. proposal to invite Ukraine and Georgia to prepare ‘action plans’ for NATO membership in 2008…. A similar disregard for Russian concerns led President George W. Bush to withdraw from the U.S. -Soviet Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002 and announce plans to deploy ballistic missile defenses in Eastern Europe, triggering Russian fears of a possible U.S. first strike capability…. The United States bombed Serbia during the 1999 Kosovo War (without prior authorization by the UN Security Council), toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003, backed the ‘Orange Revolution’ in Ukraine in 2004, and ousted the Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.  This last step was especially significant because Moscow had gone along with the UN Security Council Resolution 1973 – which authorized military action ‘to protect civilian life’ but not to topple the Libyan government – only to see the United States and its allies use the resolution as an opportunity to remove a leader they had long despised.  As former secretary of defense Robert Gates later acknowledged, ‘the Russians felt they had been played for suckers on Libya,’ which helps explain why Russia later backed the Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad so firmly and blocked UN action against him.”  Stephen M. Walt, The Hell of Good Intentions: America’s Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), 32-33.

[482] Donaldson and Nadkarni, The Foreign Policy of Russia, 264; Hal Brands, From Berlin to Baghdad: America’s Search for Purpose in the Post-Cold War World (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2008), 208; Talbott, The Russia Hand, 234, 238.

[483] Thomas W. Lippman, “Clinton, Yeltsin Agree on Arms Cuts and NATO,” The Washington Post, March 22, 1997, A1.  Earlier, Yeltsin had stated that “it would be an important part of Russia’s security to associate with the only military alliance in Europe [NATO].”  Goldgeier and McFaul, Power and Purpose, 48, 49.

[484] Luis José Rodrigues Leitao Tomé, “Russia and NATO’s Enlargement,” NATO Research Fellowship Program, 1998-2000, Final Report, June 2000, https://www.nato.int/acad/fellow/98-00/tome.pdf; Lippman, “Clinton, Yeltsin Agree on Arms Cuts and NATO”; Talbott, The Russia Hand, 243; and Stent, The Limits of Partnership, 25.

[485] Donaldson and Nadkarni, The Foreign Policy of Russia, 251, 252; and Goldgeier and McFaul, Power and Purpose, 48.  See also, Peter Conradi, Who Lost Russia? How the World Entered a New Cold War (London: Oneworld, 2018), which identifies exploitative privatization schemes combined with aggressive NATO expansion as the source of the new cold war.

[486] Walt, The Hell of Good Intentions, 32-33.

[487] Ben Judah, Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell in and Out of Love with Vladimir Putin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 57.

[488] Anne Garrels, Putin Country: A Journey Into the Real Russia (London: Picador, 2017), 11, 12, 19; Chris Miller, Putinomics: Power and Money in Resurgent Russia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018); Andrey P. Tsygankov, “The Dark Double: The American Media Perception of Russia as a Neo-Soviet Autocracy, 2008-2014,” Politics, April 2016, Cohen, War With Russia, 4.  A former IMF director said that Putin’s economic team does “not tolerate corruption” and that Russia now ranked 35^th out of 190 in the World Bank’s Doing Business Ratings.  Miller found that Putin “skillfully managed Russia’s economic fortunes.”

[489] Personal Interview (Jeremy Kuzmarov), Alex Krainer, November 2017.

[490] Andrei Nekrasov and Torstein Grude, The Magnitsky Act: Behind the Scenes (Piraya Films, 2016); Alex Krainer, The Killing of Bill Browder: Deconstructing Bill Browder’s Dangerous Deception (Monaco: Equilibrium, 2017); Luci Komisar, “The Man Behind the Magnitsky Act: Did Bill Browder’s Tax Troubles in Russia Color Push for Sanctions,” 100 Reporters, October 20, 2017.  Other forceful advocates of economic sanctions were funded by exiled Russian tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, whom Putin had jailed.  Knight, Orders to Kill, 279.

[491] John A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (London: James Nisbet & Co. Ltd., 1902 reprinted by Cambridge University Press, 2010), 83.