Indeed the international community and, for the first time, both the United States and the Soviet Union collaborated in expelling Iraq from Kuwait. They even went so far as to establish safe areas under international military control for Iraq's Kurdish and Shiite communities. This was followed by international sanctions against Iraq in an attempt to force that country into an unconditional surrender of its program to build weapons of mass destruction. The international community had united to enforce global norms and standards.
In April 1999, members of the newly-enlarged NATO gathered in Washington to celebrate fifty years of peace-maintenance by the collective defense organization―when the alliance was engaged in an offensive war against a non-member. Rueful Russians could be forgiven for concluding that, after all, the Warsaw Pact had contained the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), rather than the reverse.
To supporters, NATO cured Europe of the Milosevic-borne disease of ethnic cleansing. The specter of racial genocide had come back to haunt Europe from the dark days of the Second World War. The challenge to the humane values of European civilization had to be met, and met decisively. To critics, however, "the NATO cure greatly worsened the Milosevic disease."3 The trickle of refugees before the war turned into a flood during it, and afterwards the Serbs were ethnically cleansed by the Albanians in revenge attacks. By the end of 1999, a quarter of a million Serbs, Romanies, Slavic Muslims and other minorities had fled from Kosovo. The Serbian population of Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, had dwindled from around 20,000 to 800 mainly elderly people too infirm to escape.4
Can a just order be secured in the midst of collapsing pillars of the international order? NATO's actions in Kosovo, and the strong affirmation of a new world role for it proclaimed at the fiftieth anniversary meeting, suggest that regional organizations can reinterpret, on a case-by-case basis, the UN's prerogative to sanction the international use of force. This is an important step for an organization that has been redefining its own purpose from that of being a collective defense alliance to that of global perhaps, but certainly out-of-area, peace enforcer.
While, on the one hand, it will be easier to initiate humanitarian interventions and other regional security operations under regional mandates and operational control, this also suggests a devolution of the UN's previous domain to authorize the use of force. If NATO's intervention in Kosovo was legitimate, a similar course of action could then also be justified by organizations such as the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS, with its hegemon Russia), the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS, with Nigeria as the hegemon), or the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC, with India as the hegemon). Would NATO leaders be comfortable with a parallel situation where the Arab League claimed the commensurate right to determine on its own, without UN authorization, that Israel was guilty of gross human rights atrocities against its Palestinian citizens and therefore the Arab League would intervene with military force in their defense? To say that they lack the power or military capacity to do so is to say that might is right. Similarly, would we accept former or present Israeli leaders being put on trial for crimes against humanity by a tribunal that was set up essentially by the Arab League, funded by them and dependent on them for collecting crucial evidence through national intelligence assets and for enforcement of arrest warrants?
