Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
we didn't stop Saddam in Kuwait, he would have next invaded Saudi Arabia, thereby con-
trolling the world's oil supply and taking human rights in the region to an unutterable level
of darkness. But it was the Serb onslaught on Croatia and then Bosnia, between 1991 and
1993—and the West's failure to respond—that really made Munich a charged word in the
international vocabulary.
The Munich analogy tends to flourish after a lengthy and prosperous peace, when the
burdens of war are far enough removed to appear abstract: the case in the 1990s, by which
time America's memories of a dirty land war in Asia, then more than two decades old, had
sufficiently dimmed. Munich is about universalism, about taking care of the world and the
lives of others. It would be heard often in reaction to the failure to stop genocide in Rwanda
in 1994. But Munich reached a fever pitch in the buildup to NATO's tardy yet effective mil-
itary interventions in Bosnia in 1995 and in Kosovo in 1999. Those opposed to our Balkan
interventions tried to raise the competing Vietnam analogy, but because quagmire never
resulted, it was in the Balkans in the 1990s where the phantoms of Vietnam were once and
for all exorcised—or so it was thought and written at the time.
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Military force, so hated during the Vietnam years, now became synonymous with hu-
manitarianism itself. “A war against genocide must be fought with a fury, because a fury
is what it is fighting,” wrote Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of
The New Republic
. “For the
purpose of stopping genocide, the use of force is not a last resort: it is a first resort.” Wies-
eltier went on to rail against the need for exit strategies in humanitarian interventions:
In 1996, Anthony Lake, his [President Bill Clinton's] tortured and timid national
security adviser, went so far as to codify an “exit strategy doctrine”: “Before we
send our troops into a foreign country, we should know how and when we're go-
ing to get them out.” Lake was making omniscience into a condition of the use
of American force. The doctrine of “exit strategy” fundamentally misunderstands
the nature of war and, more generally, the nature of historical action. In the name
of caution, it denies the contingency of human affairs. For the knowledge of the
end is not given to us at the beginning.
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As an example, Wieseltier cited Rwanda, where a million Tutsis perished in a holocaust
in 1994: a Western military quagmire, had we intervened to stop the killing, he wrote,
would surely have been preferable to what happened. Wieseltier, who, like Garton Ash,
was one of the most formidable and morally persuasive voices of the decade, was writing
in regards to the frustration he felt over the limited and belated NATO air war to liberate
Muslim Albanians in Kosovo from Milosevic's policies of expulsion and extermination.
The air war targeted Serbian towns and cities, where what was required, according to hu-
manitarian interventionists, was to liberate Kosovar towns with ground troops. Clinton's
hesitant way of waging war was complicit in large-scale suffering. “The work of idealism,”
