WORLD ANARCHY v. WORLD PEACE.

Deliver Us from Evil
Peacekeepers, Warlords, and a World of Endless Conflict
William Shawcross
Simon & Schuster, $27.50, 447 pp.

In the aftermath of the successful NATO bombing campaign against Serbia, a triumphant President Bill Clinton promulgated the doctrine that came to bear his name: "If somebody comes after innocent civilians and tries to kill them en masse because of their race, their ethnic background, or their religion, and it is within our power to stop it, we will stop it."

One may be forgiven for squinting to detect the fine print of the Clinton Doctrine, and not merely in response to its namesake's unfortunate tendency to inflate a half-truth or tell the occasional whopper. William Shawcross's grim account of international peacekeeping and "endless conflict" in the nineties suggests all manner of unspoken qualifications and loopholes lurking in Clinton's post-Kosovo proclamation.

To date, the "somebody" deserving of punishment has included Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein--deserving, to be sure--but the comeuppance, such as it was, occurred after the dictator in question had presided over the slaughter of many thousands of noncombatants. Moreover, it has yet to be demonstrated that the "innocent civilians" of nations and regions standing outside the sphere of U.S. or European national interests--inhabitants of places like Algeria, Angola, Rwanda, Congo, Burundi, Sudan, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, East Timor, Chechnya, and Cambodia--can expect timely and effective intervention when they are targeted on the basis of their race, ethnic background, or religion.

What is clear from the Kosovo conflict is that when it came to making war, "we" (as in "we will stop it") meant the powerful NATO alliance, but when it came to managing the peace, "we" became the understaffed, logistically challenged, and financially dependent United Nations.

Finally, one might reasonably infer from Kosovo that "when it is within our power" is Clintonspeak for "whenever we can minimize casualties by relying solely on low-risk air strikes." This unwillingness to "cross the Mogadishu line"--to risk American lives in a peacekeeping operation that does not clearly serve U.S. national interests or preserve "international peace and security"--became a fixation in Washington, Shawcross reports, after the pursuit of Somali warlord Mohammed Aideed resulted in the death of eighteen American soldiers in October 1993. (One young man's body was dragged through the streets of the city, a gruesome scene shown repeatedly on American television.) The event and its fallout further eroded any lingering American ambition to play policeman to the world.

Deliver Us from Evil is both instructive and odd because it attempts to argue, in effect, that the world needs a UN-friendly version of the Clinton Doctrine, even while presenting case after case that illustrates, with depressing redundancy, the formidable obstacles to its realization and the heavy odds against its success. Shawcross, the British journalist who made his name with Sideshow, an expose of Nixon's clandestine bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War, demonstrates that each of the key concepts informing his current project--"humanitarian intervention," "peacekeeping," and "the international community"--has earned its scare quotes. During the civil wars raging in Sudan, Sierra Leone, and dozens of other trouble spots, humanitarian intervention--the provision of food, medicine, and medical care to battered and displaced populations--often prolonged and deepened the conflict. Frequently the supplies fell into the hands of black marketeers and predators; refugee camps became breeding grounds for extremism and retaliatory violence; the provision of aid without security enabled people to survive just long enough to become victims of the next raid.

Unintended and tragic consequences befell UN peacekeeping as well. Unarmed or lightly armed peacekeepers, deployed piecemeal by reluctant member nations that needed cajoling to fulfill their commitments (and often reneged on them), found themselves wholly unprepared for the hostilities they faced. Unable to maintain the peace where one or more parties to a conflict resented their presence, they were certainly unequipped to enforce the peace. Too frequently they became pawns--and in some cases, hostages--rather than peacekeepers.

The "international community," according to Shawcross, is perhaps the greatest fiction underlying the UN's mandate and mission. Time and again, the members of the Security Council passed resolutions in the name of the "international community," but acted in their own national interests. The secretary general received an assignment (for example, prevent the outbreak of Tutsi vs. Hutu violence in Rwanda), but not the resources or the actual authority needed to fulfill it. Repeatedly, the world's remaining superpower, acting independently and sometimes in defiance of the majority of member nations, worked at cross purposes to the United Nations. (In addition, the United States refused to pay $1.5 billion in overdue UN dues and assessments for peacekeeping operations, and the Clinton administration was instrumental in denying Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali a second term.)

The seemingly intractable ethnic, religious, tribal, and border wars of the post-cold-war era do not lend themselves to short-term solutions. Accordingly, attempts by the international community--invariably short-term in nature--to prevent, manage, and resolve these conflicts produced a litany of blunders that provoked finger-pointers of every persuasion. Shawcross wants to defend the UN and Secretary General Kofi Annan, whose perspective is privileged throughout the book. Thus Shawcross directs his attention to the United States, France, Russia and other members of the Security Council who occasionally manipulated and undermined the UN, thereby making a mockery of its advertised role as the world's conscience and defender of universal human rights.

Shawcross's detailed reports of Annan's globe-trotting diplomacy nevertheless provide undeniable evidence of the UN's inadvertent complicity in several of the diplomatic and operational failures. Annan's commitment to neutrality and his overwhelming desire to prevent or end violence at any cost--characteristics that mark him as a man of peace--did not always serve the cause of peacemaking in a world of dictators, warlords, and amoral gangs of young thugs armed with machetes and guns. In dealing effectively with the villains on the international scene, one must first see them as villains; in such encounters, neutrality has a dangerous tendency to degenerate into appeasement. Smashing "cultures of impunity," a goal Annan and many world leaders have embraced as essential to genuine peace, requires unflinching moral judgments enforced by nation-states willing to make the necessary sacrifices, up to and including the lives of their own citizen-soldiers.

Shawcross acknowledges as much in the epilogue, which envisions "a new global architecture" emerging through the establishment of the International Criminal Court and the ad hoc war crimes tribunals for Bosnia and Rwanda. It will come from wiser forms of humanitarian intervention, and what Tony Blair calls "progressive wars"--wars fought less on grounds of realpolitik or national self-interest than "for a fundamental principle necessary for humanity's progress: that every human being, regardless of race, religion, or birth, has an inalienable right to live free from persecution."

Though he quotes Annan, approvingly, to the effect that the United Nations, if given the means, could break these cycles of violence, Shawcross fails to identify the precise role of a chastened and more effective UN. Does it accumulate the military might necessary to reduce or eliminate its dependency on nation-states? How should it redefine the diplomatic role played by the secretary general and his deputies? Does the ultimate contribution of the UN lie in forging dynamic educational and civic partnerships with nongovernmental, intergovernmental, cultural, and religious organizations? The author leaves such questions hanging in the air.

A UN-friendly version of the Clinton Doctrine might deserve to have the loopholes eliminated, the double talk dropped. Efforts to build a coalition of nation-states willing to fight "progressive wars" might merit and attract the support of Catholics committed to the church's defense of human rights and support of the UN, its challenge to developed nations and especially the United States to assume moral leadership, and its abhorrence of wars and the unimaginable human suffering they cause.

Shawcross does not help much in evaluating such possibilities. In dutifully chronicling the woefully mixed record of humanitarian intervention and peacekeeping, Deliver Us from Evil seeks to stir hope for meaningful reform in the way we pursue peace. The history it recounts, however, provides precious little warrant for optimism.

R. Scott Appleby teaches history and directs the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame. His most recent book is The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence, and Reconciliation (Rowan & Littlefield).