Proving that hawks never seem to learn, John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and the other usual suspects are advocating more substantial U.S. involvement in the civil wars convulsing such places as Iraq, Syria, and Ukraine. Before we head down that road again, we ought to insist that proponents of U.S. military crusades defend the results of their previous ventures. That exercise would cause all except the most reckless interventionists to hesitate.
It’s not merely the catastrophic outcomes of the Afghan and Iraq wars, which were pursued at enormous cost in both blood and treasure. The magnitude of those debacles is recognized by virtually everyone who is not an alumnus of George W. Bush’s administration. But even the less notorious interventions of the past two decades have produced results that should humble would-be nation builders. The current situations in Kosovo and Libya are case studies in the folly of U.S. meddling.
The United States led its NATO allies in a 78-day air war against Serbia to force that country to relinquish its disgruntled, predominantly Albanian province of Kosovo. In early 2008, the Western powers bypassed the United Nations Security Council and facilitated Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence. But today’s Kosovo is far from being a success story. In the past few months, there has been a surge of refugees leaving the country, fleeing a dysfunctional economy and mounting social tensions. Despite a massive inflow of foreign aid since the 1999 war, a third of the working-age population are unemployed, and an estimated 40 percent of the people live in dire poverty. Tens of thousands of Kosovars are now seeking to migrate to the European Union, ironically by traveling through arch-nemesis Serbia to reach European Union member Hungary.
Economic misery is hardly the only problem in the independent Kosovo that the United States and its allies helped create. Persecution of the lingering Serb minority and the desecration of Christian churches, monasteries, and other sites is a serious problem. Kosovo has also become a major center for organized crime, including drug and human trafficking.
Yet Kosovo is an advertisement for successful U.S.-led military crusades compared to the outcome in Libya. The Obama administration boasted of its “kinetic military action” (primarily cruise missile strikes) as part of the NATO mission to help insurgents oust dictator Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. Today, Libya is a chaotic mess. Once a major global oil producer, the country’s pervasive disorder has so thoroughly disrupted production that Libya faces financial ruin. Not only is Libya teetering on the brink of full-scale civil war, much of the country has become the plaything of rival militias, including an affiliate of ISIS. Journalist Glenn Greenwald concludes correctly that the Libyan intervention, which was supposed to show the effectiveness of international military action for humanitarian goals, has demonstrated the opposite.
Such sobering experiences confirm that U.S.-led interventions can often make bad situations even worse. Serbia’s control of Kosovo was hardly an example of enlightened governance, and Gaddafi was a corrupt thug who looted Libya. But as bad as the status quo was in both of those arenas, Western military meddling created far worse situations. That is the lesson that should be kept firmly in mind the next time armchair warhawks in Congress or the news media prod Washington to lead yet another ill-conceived crusade.
