By Brian Carnell

Friday, December 10, 1999

George Kenny reviews Noam Chomsky's latest work -- criticizing American actions in Kosovo -- and generally gives it good marks, though Kenny misses the boat a few times. For example he finds it odd that Chomsky leaves out an important part of the media take on Kosovo:

In fact, there was quite a lot of dissent brewing about the war. Even the mainstream media voiced doubts. Chomsky barely mentions this, doesn't make anything of it and maybe wasn't aware of it except unconsciously in a feeling of reproach: the public coming to the right conclusions for the wrong reasons.

Chomsky's problem with noting the rather prominent place given to those opposed to the war in Kosovo is that it contradicts his various theses about the media.

Based on the review by Kenny, Chomsky seems to be on the mark about the extremely disproportionate nature of the war in Kosovo and the intention by Western powers to use the war to solidify NATO's position in the post-Cold War era (though if that was the case, I'd say it blew up in their faces).

What does disappoint me about both Kenny's review and Chomsky's book is the continuing willful ignorance of the role that progressive politics plays in these interventions. As Kenny points out, the reason Clinton and other world leaders can get away with the Kosovo war (and, I would argue, the Persian Gulf War) is the popularity of "humanitarian intervention." As Kenny puts it humanitarian interventionism is

the notion that some doctrine of moral imperatives (or the illusion of such) may justify intervention.

But this sort of humanitarian intervention is precisely what much of the Left pushed for the United States' foreign policy to be, and now that Bill Clinton and others roam the world intervening in other countries based on appeals to humanitarianism, suddenly the Left is standing and wondering how we got to this point.

Wasn't it Leftists, after all, who under the flag of the Popular Front were willing to forgive and forget just about any crime so long as it furthered the anti-Fascism movement? The Left spent much of this century setting out a criteria for justifying military intervention and now complains when policy makers take that criteria seriously and the policy blows up in everybody's faces.

Source:

Kosovo: On Ends and Means. George Kenny, The Nation, December 27, 1999.

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