...new day in the post-cold war world, when American invasions were not automatically synonymous with supporting some Latin American caudillo or South East Asian despot.

With the exception of the isolationist Right, virtually every voice in the political spectrum cheered the policy of "liberal intervention." The use of American power to make good things happen was a heady drug.

Unfortunately, an addictive one.

Although there is no question that the 1994 intervention was good for Haiti, military intervention has turned out to be fraught with problems, particularly when it is wielded by one country.

Liberal Interventionism Ran Off the Rails

It is tempting to pin the problematical aspects of the policy on the Bush administration and its coterie of aggressive, neocon policymakers. But the fissures in "liberal intervention" began showing up long before the Republicans took control of the White House.

The Yugoslav war is a case in point.

On the surface the rationale for an intervention seemed straightforward. Serbia's President, Slobodan Milosevic was a thug who was oppressing Albanians in the Serbian province of Kosovo. Or at least that was how the war was sold. On the ground things were a little more complex, as they often are in the Balkans.

Milosevic was certainly a thug, but so was Croatia's President, Franjo Tudjman, and we were fine with him. Milosevic did, indeed, oppress Albanians in Kosovo, but the Kosovo Liberation Army was hardly representative of goodness and democracy. Many KLA members--including most the leaders--were no less thuggish than Milosevic, and according to Interpol, deeply engaged in Europe's largest drug ring.

Was there cause for military intervention? Could there have been a resolution short of war? We will never know, because the Serbs were presented with an ultimatum at Rambouillet designed to start a war.

The Americans demanded that Serbia surrender its sovereignty, exactly what the Austro-Hungarian Empire demanded of Serbia following the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand in 1914. Back then the Serbs said no and the Austrians launched World War 1.

"Rambouillet," argues Dan Goure of the conservative Center for Strategic and International Studies, "was not a negotiation, it was a setup, a lynch party."

Was Yugoslavia "liberal intervention" like Haiti? Questionable. There was a human rights crisis in Kosovo, but it was the war that kicked off the worst aspect of it, the forced expulsion of Albanians from Kosovo. And unlike Haiti, in Yugoslavia the U.S. and NATO went for the...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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