America Abroad

At first the winners of the gulf war congratulated themselves for re- establishing the taboo against aggression: invade a neighboring state, and you'll be sorry. But now the loser in the war has exploited an awkward corollary: stay on your own territory, wrap yourself in the cloak of sovereignty, and you can do anything you want. Having been punished for violating the sanctity of borders, Saddam Hussein has found protection behind that same principle as he commits atrocities against his own citizens.

The problem here is not just George Bush's double cross of the Iraqi rebels. Once again the world community has defined its interests and obligations too narrowly, concerning itself with what happens between and among nations rather than what happens inside them.

Before and during the war, Bush constantly compared Saddam with Adolf Hitler. Now critics are asking why the Butcher of Baghdad -- and Karbala and Kirkuk -- is still President of Iraq. The answer is that since withdrawing from Kuwait, Saddam has been playing by accepted rules; his abominations are once again in the category of internal affairs. Which suggests a disturbing line of speculation about Hitler himself: What if the Fuhrer had resisted the temptations of conquest and been content with the real estate of the Weimar Republic to build the Third Reich, complete with gas chambers and ovens? Would the world have done anything about him?

There is reason for doubt. In the 1970s Pol Pot slaughtered as many as 2 million Cambodians. But he was a stay-at-home Hitler, so the world merely tut- tutted. When Vietnam finally invaded Cambodia in 1978 and evicted the Khmer Rouge from Phnom Penh, the United Nations in effect judged intervention to be an evil greater than genocide. During the cold war, geopolitics often overrode morality and common sense alike. Vietnam was a Soviet ally; therefore its thrust into Cambodia was perceived, and condemned, as part of the Kremlin's global offensive.

Now that the cold war is over, intervention need no longer be quite so suspect as a cynical gambit on the East-West chessboard. The concept of benevolent interference is already coming back into fashion. Last year, while Liberia was in the throes of its tribal self-immolation, five European envoys in Monrovia pleaded for the U.S. to send in troops to stop the killing. "The interdependence of nations," said an Italian diplomat, "no longer permits other nations to sit idle while one country plunges into anarchy and national suicide." Or, he might have added, mass murder at the hand of its leader.

Last week Lord Hartley Shawcross, who was the chief British prosecutor at the Nazi war crimes trials at Nuremberg, warned that "international law will be a dead letter unless we give criminal jurisdiction to the International Court of Justice and set up a mechanism for enforcing its judgments." The use of force against monster regimes will be easier to justify if sanctioned and undertaken by a multilateral body, presumably the U.N. As Desert Storm showed, the U.S. is as well suited to the role of a sheriff leading a posse as to that of the Lone Ranger.