Policy by Other Means.

Critics of "soft power" say it's useless without hard power to back it up. They agree with former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt who advised "Talk softly, but carry a big stick"

When the soft option of diplomacy doesn't work, the world community sometimes resorts to the "hard" option of war. What Carl yon Clausewitz said in the 19th century still applies: "War is the continuation of policy by other means."

So force was applied when Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein broke his promise to allow unrestricted inspections of banned weapons. Cooperate voluntarily, the United Nations warned,' or we'll send in military forces to make you cooperate. On 13 February 1998, Canada decided to support the U.S.-led attack force. Less than two weeks later, Saddam Hussein once again agreed to inspections and U.S. President Bill Clinton credited the move to the threat of military force. But, the weapons-inspection team continued to run into a string of obstructions and the diplomatic efforts to force Mr. Hussein to comply with Security Council resolutions on weapons inspection ended in December 1998. The U.S. and Britain went ahead with air attacks on Baghdad.

"If Saddam defies the world and we fail to respond, we will face a far greater threat in the future," explained U.S. President Bill Clinton in a television address after the bombing.

Opponents described the whole situation as barbaric. They argued that the bombing would only worsen the tragic lives of Iraqis who had already endured enormous suffering from years of international sanctions. Some said that President Saddam Hussein had hidden his weapons so well that even a sustained military assault would not alter his ability to make weapons of mass destruction. Others thought the attacks could even make Mr. Hussein a hero in the Arab world for standing up to the Americans.

And, as Globe and Mail columnist Jeffrey Simpson observed, even if the air strikes damaged key Iraqi military installations and factories, the underlying problem posed by Iraq remained: "... the continuation of the dictatorial regime of the ruthless Saddam Hussein, who has written the book on defying the rights of his own people and of international public opinion. This regime has not only invaded Kuwait but it has also tried to build nuclear weapons ... and to construct chemical and biological weapons."

Supporters argue that these are the very reasons why the West should be tough with leaders such as Saddam Hussein. They say that since the Gulf War, Mr. Hussein's men "have used every sort of lie, deception and evasion to keep UN inspectors from getting at Iraq's weapons program," as another Globe and Mail columnist, Marcus Gee, put it. "They have falsified documents, lied about the destruction of missile-launchers and hidden a program to develop nerve gases. In six years of playing cat and mouse, the Iraqis have issued more than 20 `full and final' declarations that their weapons programs had been wound up, none of them either full or final."

U.S. President Bill Clinton keeps pressing home his belief that outlaw nations have to be restrained. In a foreign-policy speech in February 1999 before the U.S. attacked Serb forces in Kosovo he said that, "... the more likely future threat to our existence is not a strategic nuclear strike from Russia or China, but the use of weapons of mass destruction by an outlaw nation or a terrorist group."

So, he said, the United States wasn't about to change its policy on Iraq, convinced that bombing the country regularly will continue to contain its leader. He also warned that Yugoslavian "President [Slobodan] Milosevic should understand that this is a time for restraint, not repression [and `ethnic cleansing' of Albanians in Kosovo] ... and, if he does not, NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) is prepared to act." And it did. But a lot of people don't think it should have.

The situation in Kosovo is a dilemma because it involves a conflict within national boundaries, which challenges the long-held belief in the sanctity of the nation state. It's an internal matter within the borders of the former Yugoslavia. There was no United Nations approval of the bombing so, in the traditionally accepted sense, the NATO action might be seen as illegal. Iraq was a little different during the 1991 Persian Gulf War because it was a case of one country (Iraq) invading another country (Kuwait). And, also because the United Nations, albeit under intense U.S. pressure, ordered the attack.

Before the United States attacked Yugoslavia, President Bill Clinton explained to questioning Americans that the Serb-dominated Yugoslav government, led by President Slobodan Milosevic, had been waging war on the ethnic Albanian population of the Yugoslav province of Kosovo. Mr. Clinton said that President Milosevic refused to sign a peace plan which Kosovo's ethnic Albanian rebels had grudgingly accepted. Mr. Clinton said: "If we don't act, the war will spread. If it spreads, we will not be able to contain it without far greater risk and cost ... I'm convinced that we'll be dragged into this thing [at a later time] under worse circumstances at greater cost if we don't act."

Opponents thought the initial attack in March 1999 was too early; that NATO should not have started bombing Serbia until the Serbs committed a more "significant massacre." Others said that no military action should be taken at all against a sovereign nation that had not attacked any NATO member state. But, some say that NATO should have acted sooner. In an article in The New York Times in March 1999, columnist Anthony Lewis pointed out that `the North Atlantic Treaty Organization repeatedly warned and threatened Slobodan Milosevic to stop his assaults on the people of Kosovo. For a year Mr. Milosevic treated the threats as bluffs. Mr. Lewis maintains that if NATO had acted with limited bombing a year earlier, when the killing in Kosovo started, the move would have stopped Mr. Milosevic.

Of course, that's all guesswork. We'll never know whether the bombing was too early, too late, or done at the right time; but it keeps a lot of think tanks and university professors busy trying to figure out an answer. Many of those foreign policy analysts still argue that military action is not the job of NATO: it is a defensive alliance. NATO was never intended to be an alliance that would attack another country that had not first threatened a member state. It's not supposed to be the world's police force.

One Canadian diplomat says that logic doesn't apply in Kosovo. That's because the conflict within its borders had the potential of spilling over to other countries including Albania, Bulgaria, and possibly even Greece and Turkey. Former Canadian ambassador to Croatia, Graham N. Green wrote in an article in the Globe and Mail two days after the bombing started in March 1999 that, "With diplomatic options exhausted, the only alternative to prevent a wider Balkan war was to intervene militarily. Russian and Chinese opposition, however, prevented NATO from securing authority for its attacks from the UN Security Council ... The main reason for the bombing remains the need to try to keep the conflict in Kosovo from spreading. Otherwise, a wider war would erupt in Southern Europe and NATO would have to intervene anyway, but in much more difficult conditions and with a much higher probability of allied casualties ...

"... Ottawa should make it clear that this does not create a precedent for Canadian intervention in other conflicts around the world that do not pose such a direct threat to our national interests."

Clearly, "hard power" produces mixed results. The Gulf War pounded Iraq back to the Middle Ages; the embargo has cost the country $120 billion in lost revenue; late in 1999, it was still subjected to daily bombing; yet, Saddam Hussein remained in power.

A week into the NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia and opponents were calling it a disaster not just for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, but for the very people the bombing was meant to protect. It didn't move President Slobodan Milosevic to the peace table quickly. Observers said the move actually intensified the mass murder and the flood of refugees.

In the end, NATO bombing brought the Yugoslav government to the peace table. The hundreds of thousands of Kosovo Albanian refugees will be able to go home eventually. But, for most of them, their homes are rubble. What the NATO bombing didn't destroy, the Yugoslav army did. Now, NATO troops will have to protect the Kosovo Albanians into the foreseeable future. And, the Western world is faced with an enormous reconstruction bill.

In the end, was Canadian participation in the Kosovo and Iraq attacks an appropriate foreign policy option? In what way does dropping bombs reflect Canada's cherished values of compromise, acceptance of differences, and mediation? Do we have to throw those values out of the window when confronted by bullies such as Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic? Is Canada's role as the world's leading peacekeeper compromised by its active participation in war? Or does our exercise of "policy by other means" earn us respect?

SUGGESTED ACTIVITIES:

1. In a speech to high school students in Winnipeg in February 1998, Prime Minister Jean Chretien defended Canada's decision to send Canadian soldiers to serve as technical support for a potential U.S.-led military strike against Iraq. He said: "If you want peace, you have to be ready for war." A few days earlier, when Mr. Chretien announced the support role Canada intended to take, he said.' "If we do not act, if we do not stand up to Saddam, that will encourage him to commit other atrocities. "Discuss.

2. One analyst makes the point that in World War II Americans accepted 100,000 military deaths a year without complaint; in Korea 24,000 deaths a year were tolerated; by Vietnam, 7,000 deaths a year caused outrage. If Western, and that means predominantly American, forces are to be used as some sort of global police force, then it has to be done without casualties. Discuss.

FACT FILE

In March 1999, Canada announced that it planned to contribute $10 million in humanitarian aid to help refugees from Kosovo.

RELATED ARTICLE: NATO - GOOD GUY OR BAD GUY?

During a visit to Princeton University, New Jersey, in April 1999, Foreign Affairs Minister Lloyd Axworthy said that the end of the Cold War and globalization both have changed the world dramatically. Both have also led to a new view of global peace and security. "The well-being of individuals - human security - is increasingly front and centre in how we define peace and security, where the threats originate, and what our responses are," he said. "The crisis in Kosovo is a concrete expression of this human security dynamic at work."

Mr. Axworthy went on to say that NATO's response to Kosovo "demonstrates how the defence of human security has become a force for global action ... NATO's recourse to air strikes was precipitated by evidence that the regime of repression by the [Yugoslav] government was on the rise and accelerating ... The misery to which we are all witness is the direct consequence of a decade of bullying, criminality, and an increasingly vicious spiral of violence against Kosovo's population by the government in Belgrade. NATO did not provoke this tragedy - it responded to it."

That isn't the way Michael Mandel sees it. He's a law professor at York University in Toronto and he thinks the NATO leaders, including Prime Minister Jean Chretien, should be charged as war criminals. Mr. Mandel says the war crimes of mass murder and expulsion against Kosovo's Albanians didn't start until after NATO's bombing began, so the atrocities cannot be used as a justification for starting the aerial attack.

He says this doesn't excuse the appalling behaviour of the Serbs, but that doesn't change the fact that NATO acted illegally. Mr. Mandel says the victors should be charged with war crimes as well as the losers. If they're not, he says, it will prove that international law is "nothing more than an instrument of the powerful countries - a modern version of `might is right.'"

RELATED ARTICLE: TESTY RELATIONS

Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji is one leader who has made it clear that he is very much against a foreign policy that promotes intervention in another country's affairs. The Premier has no time for anyone critical of China's poor human-rights record. He feels the outside world has no business involving itself with his country's struggle with Tibet, where there is an independence movement, or Taiwan which continues to resist mainland Chinese domination. These are internal disputes, he says. In April 1999, there were reports that he was considering cancelling the U.S. segment of his scheduled North American visit because of the bombing in Yugoslavia and anti-China sentiment. He went in the end, saying, "We hope we can do something to soften this anti-China current and also to keep the momentum of growth of U.S.-China relations ..."

Websites

North Atlantic Treaty Organization http://www.nato.int/home.htm

Canadian Institute for International Affairs http://www.ciia.org/ciia.htm