Can We Be “A Force For Good”?

In the Washington Post Josh Rogin profiles Eliot Engel:

Engel entered Congress in 1989, in the last days of the Cold War. His interest in foreign policy came from his father, a union iron worker and fervent anti-communist. When asked to rank his top three preferred committee assignments as a freshman, Engel wrote “foreign affairs” on all three lines. “I figured they would get the hint,” he said.

Engel’s role since that time has been to champion a center-left, neo-liberal interventionist foreign policy, one that has fallen out of fashion on both the American right and left — but he still believes in it. The example of its success he points to is the one he helped to shape: the NATO-led intervention in Kosovo in 1999 against Serbia, which stopped the ethnic cleansing of Muslims and birthed a new state, where he is still venerated.

“With Kosovo, this was working against a genocide in the heart of Europe,” Engel said. “And as someone who is very knowledgeable about the Holocaust, I thought we couldn’t just leave it where people in Kosovo would just be slaughtered.”

He admits and laments the mistakes made in other U.S. interventions, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria. But Engel believes that the United States must use its power and influence to ameliorate suffering where possible.

His long activism to protect Syrian civilians was driven by the accounts of Syrian atrocity victims, and the evidence smuggled out of Syria by the military defector known as Caesar, who testified before Engel’s committee in 2014. “You look at those pictures,” Engel said. “They were like the Holocaust.”

I think he’s slandering Germany’s Jews in that statement. Syria was “like the Holocaust” if German Jews had been preparing to slaughter ethnic Germans. IIRC that was Hitler’s claim about the Jews—they were determined to benefit at the expense of Germans. But it wasn’t the reality and the reality in Syria is that the radical Sunni Islamists who opposed the Assad government were quite willing to slaughter those who opposed them, especially Syria’s Alawites. What we did in Syria, just as we had in Libya, was to intervene in a civil war in which there were no good guys.

The same was the case in Kosovo. Yes, the Serbian Kosovars were engaging in ethnic cleansing. So were the Kosovo Albanians. At least that’s what Human Rights Watch and the Kosovo government says.

Unless we’re willing to remain as conquerors, the only moral stance is to butt out of such civil wars. And given a choice between butting out and becoming a colonial power, I’ll choose butting out every time. If Mr. Engel prefers that the U. S. be a colonizing power, let him say so. Otherwise he’s just fantasizing. Intervening on one side or another and leaving a just, liberal society behind when we leave is just that: a fantasy.

The only good war is a war of self-defense.