By Konstantinos K
The popular political satire of the 1990s "Wag the Dog" revolves around a President of the United States who, wanting to divert the public opinion from a scandal in which he is involved, orders the construction of a fake war scenario that the US forces found themselves in. The idea of something close to that taking place in the United States reminds the informed reader of the Kosovo NATO airstrike operation "Allied Force" that successfully drove the attention of the media and the public opinion away from Bill Clinton's scandal with Monica Lewinski. Regardless of the incidental similarities, we shall focus instead on what happened on the other side of the Atlantic as NATO, having controversially no United Nations Security Council jurisdiction to back up their move (Baker, 2015:82), move on with the bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) to prevent a humanitarian crisis from materializing in Europe. While doing so, we shall also examine whether the operation could be characterized as "justified" by any means.
Was such a move legal? If not legal, was it driven by a moral sentiment? The answer that is to be given to these questions is no. For the defence of that position we shall utilize mainly Diana Johnstone's work on the Kosovo War, "Fool's Crusade" and also the reports on the war produces by the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs of the UK Parliament. In examining more precisely why the Kosovo air bombings were deemed as illegal we shall look on the latter of our sources of information. The UN Charter, the closest thing the International Community has to a constitution, clearly prescribes when such an aggressive act of war can be justified that is only in self-defence or only when the United Nations Security Council has authorized to do so (House of Commons, 2000). It is clear to the reader that both necessary conditions were not fulfilled in the case of the NATO military intervention in Kosovo. As much as neoliberals and neoconservatives like to proclaim that the intervention was "not legal but moral" the situation would perhaps be quite different hadn't been for the United States unparallel power in the state of the global system's unipolarity in the late 1990s. Not only the intervention was illegal, but it can be considered as a dangerous precedent to the invasion of Iraq that similarly there was no UNSC declaration. One may argue that the context of these two events was different but the motives behind both were indeed allegedly humanitarian. While in the case of Kosovo, the NATO intervention produced some ambiguous results and deterred the Serbs under Milosevic to commit further ethnic cleansing, albeit putting the minority of Serbs throughout former Yugoslavia in a defenceless position, the invasion of Iraq had as a result an unprecedented power vacuum that gave rise to the unspeakable horror that was ISIS, elements of which Saddam had successfully suppressed under his secular Baathist regime.
Except for the intervention's status regarding its strict legality, the "moral" sentiment that was said to be present in NATO's bombing can also be challenged on the grounds of the distorted media image that the Western broadcasting stations had provided for Milosevic. Johnstone presents three subsequent cases of the Yugoslav wars in which the image of the media created did not reflect the reality in regard to the Serbs but rather a dangerous distortion of it. She describes the Manichean way in which the media operated in a short time to convey a relatively unknown to a largely uninformed media, The easiest way to do that given the situation was to cultivate the anti-Serbian sentiment that was created by the Slovenians and Croatians to legitimize their succession and draw parallels between Serbs and the Nazis, providing therefore to the people, a very familiar point of reference (Johnstone, 2002:65). Adding to that NATO's moral standpoint starts falling apart when one takes a more critical look at the operation that considers NATO-caused civilian casualties, such as the refugee convoy hit by NATO bombing in Dakovica (Baker, 2015:82). The KLA's further reprisals against the remaining Serbian population after the war ended and Albanian "liberation" achieved, lower further the moral standpoint of NATO in its "humanitarian" role in the operation (Fisk, 1999). While Milosevic was no saint, nor the Serbian militias that were subsequently held responsible for several genocidal atrocities throughout the course of the war, the image of evil Nazi-like Serbians wreaking havoc in the Balkans was not reinforced by the facts but was the result of a systemic media campaign to win hearts and minds across the world.
We conclude that the argument that the Kosovo war was justified in a legal and moral sense is a position that can be successfully challenged and taken down in light of the arguments provided. Whether the intervention was moral and necessary on normative grounds, despite its illegal nature, is very much still an ongoing debate that is better left to historians and not the average political observer.
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