Lessons from Kosovo and the Uses of Humanitarian Intervention
Preface and Introduction: Setting the Framework
We begin at the opening of the work, where Chomsky establishes the central question he will interrogate throughout: how the NATO intervention in Kosovo was framed as a *humanitarian intervention* and what that framing reveals about the actual exercise of power.
Chomsky opens by recalling the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade on May 7, 1999, an event that NATO attributed to “faulty maps” and “bureaucratic error.” He does not simply accept this explanation. Instead, he uses it to introduce a method: he will examine how powerful states characterize their own violence and how they characterize the violence of others. The Chinese embassy bombing, he notes, was quickly buried in the Western press, treated as an unfortunate accident rather than a deliberate act. He asks the reader to consider what would happen if a Serbian or Russian strike had destroyed a NATO embassy with similar precision — the response, he suggests, would have been entirely different. This asymmetry in the *perception* of violence is the thread he will pull throughout the work.
“The basic principle is simple: the powerful are entitled to commit crimes with impunity, and to define the crimes of others according to their needs.”
Chomsky then lays out the book’s structure. The first chapter examines the history of the term “humanitarian intervention” and its actual application by major powers. Later chapters analyze the specific case of Kosovo, the NATO bombing campaign, the Rambouillet negotiations, and the aftermath, including the international tribunals and the treatment of war crimes. He also explains his methodology: he will rely heavily on the Western press itself, particularly the *New York Times* and the *Washington Post*, to show how the narrative was constructed. He argues that by using the media’s own reporting — including reporting that was later suppressed or forgotten — he can demonstrate that the justifications for the bombing were hollow from the start.
What this opening accomplishes is to frame the entire inquiry. Chomsky is not writing a simple history of the Kosovo war. He is writing an analysis of the *discourse* of humanitarianism as a tool of power. The Chinese embassy bombing functions as a synecdoche for the larger argument: the same powers that claim the moral authority to bomb for human rights routinely commit acts that, if done by others, would be called war crimes. The question is not whether humanitarian values exist, but who gets to invoke them and for what ends.
Chapter One: The New Military Humanism — Part One (The Doctrine and Its Precedents)
In the first major section of Chapter One, Chomsky traces the origins of the doctrine of *humanitarian intervention* and its selective application by the United States and its allies. He is not offering his own definition; he is showing how the term has been used and abused in practice.
Chomsky begins by recounting the standard narrative that emerged around Kosovo: that NATO’s bombing was a necessary response to Serbian ethnic cleansing and that it represented a new, principled commitment to protecting human rights. He notes that this narrative was widely accepted across the political spectrum in the West, from liberals who saw it as a vindication of international law to conservatives who saw it as a demonstration of American power for good. He then asks a simple question: is this narrative consistent with the historical record of the very same powers now championing humanitarian intervention?
He turns to several cases. The first is East Timor, 1975. When Indonesia invaded East Timor shortly after Portugal’s withdrawal, the United States and the United Kingdom continued to supply arms to Indonesia, even as the invasion claimed tens of thousands of lives. Chomsky quotes the *New York Times* reporting from the time, which described the invasion as an act of “Indonesian expansionism” that was “ruthless” and “brutal,” but no humanitarian intervention was proposed. He compares this to the response to Serbia’s actions in Kosovo. The difference, he argues, was not the scale of the atrocity — in East Timor, the death toll far exceeded what occurred in Kosovo prior to NATO’s bombing — but the political alignment of the perpetrators. Indonesia was a Western ally; Serbia was not.
He then moves to Turkey. In the 1990s, Turkey waged a massive counterinsurgency campaign against Kurdish separatists that involved the destruction of thousands of villages and the displacement of millions of people. The United States, as Turkey’s NATO ally, continued to supply weapons and diplomatic support. Chomsky cites State Department and Defense Department reports that acknowledged the severity of the human rights abuses. Again, no humanitarian intervention was proposed.
“The selective invocation of the principle of humanitarian intervention is a standard device of the powerful to legitimize violence that conforms to their interests.”
Chomsky then turns to a more recent case: the bombing of the al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan in 1998, ordered by the Clinton administration. The plant was destroyed, killing workers and destroying a facility that produced half of Sudan’s essential medicines. The administration claimed the plant was producing chemical weapons. Chomsky notes that subsequent investigations — including by the CIA and the UN — found no evidence for this claim. He asks: why was this act not called a *war crime*? The answer, he suggests, is that it was committed by a powerful state, and powerful states define the terms.
What Chomsky is doing in this section is building a pattern. He presents case after case where violence was committed or abetted by Western powers, and no humanitarian intervention followed. The pattern demonstrates that the doctrine is not applied universally; it is applied selectively against enemies. The *principle* is not the protection of human rights, but the maintenance of power. This is the core of the “new military humanism”: a doctrine that claims moral authority while serving strategic interests, and that depends on a systematic amnesia about the actions of the powers that invoke it.
Chapter One: The New Military Humanism — Part Two (The Kosovo Narrative Unravels)
Having established the pattern of selective application, Chomsky now turns specifically to the Kosovo case and begins to deconstruct the official narrative. He focuses on three key elements: the nature of the Serbian action in Kosovo, the Rambouillet negotiations, and the effects of the NATO bombing itself.
Chomsky first examines the claim that Serbia was engaged in *genocide* or *ethnic cleansing* prior to NATO’s intervention. He notes that the language used by Western leaders was deliberately apocalyptic: “genocide,” “final solution,” “Auschwitz.” He then cites the actual numbers. Prior to the bombing, the death toll from the conflict in Kosovo was approximately 2,000, mostly in armed clashes between Serbian forces and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). He does not deny that atrocities occurred; he notes that Serbian forces did commit killings and forced displacements. But he argues that the scale was vastly inflated to justify the bombing. He quotes from the *New York Times* and the *Washington Post* reporting from early 1999, which described the situation as a brutal counterinsurgency campaign rather than an organized genocide.
He then turns to the Rambouillet negotiations of February-March 1999. The official narrative held that Serbia refused a reasonable peace agreement, forcing NATO to bomb. Chomsky presents the actual terms of the agreement. The key provision was Appendix B, which gave NATO forces “free and unrestricted access throughout the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, including Kosovo, and across the entire territory of the FRY.” This meant that NATO troops would be allowed to operate anywhere in Serbia, not just Kosovo, with no restriction and no obligation to report to Serbian authorities. Chomsky argues that no sovereign state could have accepted such terms. He quotes British diplomat Lord Carrington, who described the terms as “a capitulation” and noted that “no country in the world would have signed it.”
“The Rambouillet ‘accords’ were nothing of the sort. They were an ultimatum, and one that was designed to be rejected.”
Chomsky also notes that the KLA, which the West had designated a terrorist organization just months earlier, was included as a negotiating party, while the democratically elected government of Serbia was presented as the obstacle to peace. He argues that the entire negotiation was a charade: the real purpose was to provide a pretext for bombing, not to reach a diplomatic settlement.
Finally, Chomsky turns to the effects of the NATO bombing. He notes that while the bombing was justified as a humanitarian measure to stop ethnic cleansing, the actual result was the opposite. The bombing began on March 24, 1999. Immediately, Serbian forces escalated their attacks on Albanian civilians. The number of displaced persons skyrocketed, from approximately 230,000 before the bombing to over 1.8 million by the end of the campaign. Chomsky cites NATO commander General Wesley Clark, who acknowledged that the bombing had “accelerated” the ethnic cleansing. He also cites the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, who reported that the “vast majority” of the displacement occurred after the bombing began.
What this section does is systematically dismantle each pillar of the official justification. The pre-war death toll was too low to constitute genocide. The peace terms were designed to be refused. The bombing itself produced the very atrocities it claimed to prevent. Chomsky is not saying that Serbia was innocent; he is saying that the NATO intervention was not a humanitarian response but a military intervention that worsened the humanitarian situation, and that the humanitarian justification was a cover for other strategic goals — specifically, demonstrating NATO’s credibility and expanding its role as a global enforcer.
Chapter Two: The Framework of a New Militarism — The Doctrine in Practice
We are now in the first major section of Chapter Two, where Chomsky moves from deconstructing the Kosovo narrative to examining how the “new military humanism” functions as a broader doctrine, using the Kosovo case as a template for understanding the principles that govern contemporary interventionist policy.
Chomsky opens by identifying what he calls the “principle of consistency” — the standard by which any genuine humanitarian doctrine must be judged. He argues that if the declared principles of the new military humanism are to be taken seriously, they must be applied consistently across cases of similar or greater severity. The actual record, he contends, reveals a radical inconsistency that exposes the doctrine’s true nature. He presents a series of comparative cases: Turkey’s long-standing repression of its Kurdish population, which resulted in tens of thousands of deaths and the destruction of thousands of villages, yet provoked no NATO intervention; Israel’s occupation and settlement policies in the West Bank and Gaza, which have been met with unwavering US support; and the massive human rights abuses in East Timor, where the United States and its allies continued to supply weapons to Indonesia throughout the 1975-1999 occupation. In each case, the humanitarian rhetoric that was applied to Kosovo was conspicuously absent.
The key principle that emerges, Chomsky argues, is not humanitarian concern but “strategic subordination”: the US and its allies intervene when their strategic interests are served, and they invoke humanitarian justifications selectively to legitimize those interventions. He writes: “The doctrine is that force may be used to protect human rights, but the selection of cases is determined by strategic and economic interests, not the severity of the crimes.” This is not, he insists, a cynical observation but a straightforward reading of the historical record. The “new military humanism” is therefore a form of “humanitarian imperialism” — a phrase he uses to describe the marriage of moral rhetoric with military force, where the moral claims serve to obscure the power relations at work.
What Chomsky is doing here is establishing a theoretical framework that goes beyond the Kosovo case. He is laying out the structural logic that makes the new military humanism a coherent, if deeply problematic, doctrine. The inconsistency is not a bug but a feature: it allows the powerful to claim moral authority while pursuing their own objectives. The cases he lists are chosen because they are the most egregious examples of non-intervention, demonstrating that there is no genuine humanitarian threshold for action — only a political one. This section functions as the analytical core of the book, the place where the Kosovo narrative is elevated into a general critique of post-Cold War interventionism.
Chapter Two: The Framework of a New Militarism — The Logic of “Humanitarian” War
Having established the pattern of selective enforcement, Chomsky now turns to the internal logic of the new military humanism itself — the arguments its defenders make and the assumptions that underlie them. He focuses on the work of prominent Western intellectuals and policymakers who have articulated and defended the doctrine, including Michael Ignatieff, Bernard Kouchner, and the Blair administration’s “Chicago Doctrine.”
The central argument of these defenders, Chomsky writes, is that the end of the Cold War has created a new moral imperative: the international community, led by the Western powers, has both the right and the duty to intervene militarily in sovereign states to prevent or stop mass atrocities. This is presented as a progressive advance in international law and morality — a move beyond the narrow Westphalian system of state sovereignty toward a more cosmopolitan order where individual human rights take precedence. Ignatieff, in particular, is cited for his formulation that “human rights is the only universally available moral language” and that the West must be willing to use force in its name.
Chomsky’s response is to examine the practical consequences of this doctrine rather than its professed ideals. He notes that the defenders of the new military humanism rarely if ever apply their principles to cases where Western allies are the perpetrators of atrocities. He points to the explicit formulation of the Blair Doctrine — that intervention is justified when the “threat” is to “our interests and values” — and argues that this formulation collapses any distinction between the two. What counts as a “value” worth defending is determined by those who hold power, and those values are inseparable from their interests. The result is a doctrine that permits intervention anywhere, at any time, provided the intervening powers can plausibly claim humanitarian motives.
“The new military humanism is a doctrine tailor-made for the powerful. It allows them to define the crimes, to select the targets, and to decide the response — all while invoking the highest moral principles.”
What Chomsky is presenting is not a moral argument against humanitarian intervention in principle but an empirical argument against it in practice. He is showing how the doctrine’s internal logic — its insistence on the moral authority of the interveners, its selective application, its conflation of interests and values — makes it a mechanism for expanding Western power rather than protecting human rights. The defenders of the new military humanism, in his account, are not bad people with bad intentions; they are sincere believers in a doctrine that, when applied in the real world, serves the interests of the powerful. This is a crucial distinction: Chomsky is not accusing them of hypocrisy so much as of blindness to the structural forces that shape their own thinking.
Chapter Three: The Balkans Before the Bombing — A Prehistory of Disaster
We move now to Chapter Three, where Chomsky steps back from the immediate Kosovo crisis to examine the longer historical context of the Balkans conflict, particularly the role of Western policy in creating the conditions that led to the wars of Yugoslav succession. This chapter functions as a corrective to the official narrative that presented the Kosovo intervention as a response to a sudden, inexplicable outbreak of barbarism in the Balkans.
Chomsky begins with the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1991-1992 and the recognition policies of the European Community and the United States. He argues that Western recognition of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, pushed through by Germany in particular, was reckless and contributed directly to the escalation of violence. The logic: by recognizing secessionist republics without securing guarantees for minority populations, the West encouraged both the secessionists to pursue maximalist goals and the Serbian leadership to respond with force. He cites diplomatic historians and UN officials who warned at the time that premature recognition would lead to disaster.
The key case Chomsky examines is the arms embargo imposed on all of Yugoslavia by the United Nations in 1991. This embargo, he argues, had profoundly asymmetric effects. It froze in place the military advantage of the Serb-dominated Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA), which already controlled most of the heavy weaponry, while preventing the newly independent states from arming themselves. The result was that the Bosnian government, in particular, was left virtually defenseless against Serbian forces equipped with tanks, artillery, and aircraft. Chomsky quotes a Carnegie Endowment report that concluded: “The arms embargo has been the single most important factor in ensuring the Bosnian government’s inability to defend its territory and people.”
Chomsky also examines the role of the “Contact Group” powers — the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, and Russia — in shaping the diplomatic process. He charges that these powers consistently imposed terms on the Bosnian government that were favorable to the Serbs, most notably in the Vance-Owen plan and later the Contact Group plan, which would have created a highly decentralized Bosnian state with large areas under Serbian control. The Bosnian government was pressured to accept these terms while the Serbs were given free rein to continue their military campaign. This pattern, Chomsky argues, shows that Western policy was not driven by humanitarian concern for the victims but by a geopolitical calculus that sought to contain the conflict without confronting Serb power directly.
What this chapter accomplishes is a reframing of the entire Balkan crisis. The official narrative of the 1990s portrayed the wars as the result of ancient ethnic hatreds and Serbian aggression, with the West belatedly intervening to stop the bloodshed. Chomsky is arguing that this narrative is misleading in crucial respects: Western policy — the arms embargo, the recognition decisions, the diplomatic pressure — was not a neutral response to events but an active factor in shaping the course of the war. The humanitarian crisis that culminated in Kosovo was not a natural disaster or a spontaneous outbreak of evil; it was the product of a long chain of political decisions, many of them made in Western capitals.
Chapter Three: The Balkans Before the Bombing — The Road to Rambouillet
Continuing within Chapter Three, Chomsky now turns to the immediate diplomatic prelude to the NATO bombing: the Rambouillet negotiations of February-March 1999. These negotiations are central to his argument because the official story holds that Serbia’s refusal to accept the Rambouillet agreement left NATO with no choice but to use force. Chomsky aims to show that this account is, at best, incomplete and, at worst, a deliberate misrepresentation.
He describes the Rambouillet process in detail. The negotiations were convened by the Contact Group, with the US and UK taking the lead. The proposed agreement called for a three-year interim period of substantial autonomy for Kosovo within Yugoslavia, followed by a final settlement based on the “will of the people” — a phrase widely understood to mean a referendum on independence. Crucially, the agreement included an appendix — Appendix B — that granted NATO forces “free and unrestricted access throughout the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, including the airspace and territorial waters.” This provision, Chomsky notes, effectively gave NATO a right of occupation over the entire country, not just Kosovo. It was, he writes, “a provision that no sovereign state could accept.”
Chomsky examines the diplomatic history to show that the Serbian delegation was under no illusion about the consequences of refusal: they knew that NATO would bomb. Yet they refused to sign, citing the sovereignty violations in Appendix B. What is more, Chomsky points out that the Kosovar Albanian delegation was also reluctant to sign, but was pressured by US negotiator Christopher Hill, who told them: “You must sign this or there will be no more US support.” The agreement was signed by the Kosovar delegation on March 18, 1999; the Serbian delegation refused. NATO began bombing on March 24.
The key question Chomsky asks is whether the Rambouillet terms were intended to be accepted or to be refused. He presents evidence from diplomatic sources suggesting that the US and UK expected the Serbs to refuse — indeed, they may have designed the terms to ensure refusal. He cites a report by the British journalist John Pilger, quoting a US diplomat who said: “We deliberately set the bar too high for the Serbs to accept. They needed some bombing, and that’s what they got.” Whether or not this specific quote is verifiable, Chomsky argues, the structure of the agreement speaks for itself: the Appendix B provision was a poison pill, an unacceptable demand that guaranteed the failure of the negotiations and provided the pretext for war.
“The Rambouillet agreement was not a genuine diplomatic offer; it was an ultimatum, drafted to be refused, so that the bombing could proceed under the cover of a failed negotiation.”
This section is crucial because it goes to the heart of the legal and moral justification for the war. If the Rambouillet process was a sincere effort to reach a negotiated settlement, then Serbia’s refusal can be blamed for the war. But if, as Chomsky argues, the terms were designed to be unacceptable, then the war was not a last resort but a planned intervention from the start. The distinction matters because the entire humanitarian justification depends on the claim that all peaceful means were exhausted before force was used. Chomsky is showing that this claim is false: the peaceful means were never meant to succeed.
Chapter Four: The Kosovo “Genocide” — The Fabrication of a Narrative
LOCATE: We are now in Chapter Four, where Chomsky turns to the central propaganda claim of the Kosovo war: that Serbian forces were committing “genocide” against the Albanian population, a claim that was used to justify the NATO bombing campaign as a humanitarian emergency.
PRESENT: Chomsky begins by examining the actual evidence for the claim that a “genocide” was underway in Kosovo before the bombing began. He notes that the term “genocide” has a specific legal definition under the 1948 Genocide Convention: the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. He then examines the reports from the two key international monitoring organizations on the ground: the Kosovo Verification Mission (KVM) , which was the OSCE mission that had been monitoring the region since October 1998, and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) , which was already investigating war crimes in the region.
What Chomsky finds is a striking divergence between the claims made by NATO leaders and the assessments of these professional monitoring organizations. He cites the OSCE report from March 1999, which stated that while there had been serious human rights abuses by Serbian forces, there was “no systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing” and “no evidence of a coordinated plan for genocide.” Similarly, the ICTY’s chief prosecutor, Louise Arbour, stated in a March 1999 interview that while she was investigating war crimes, she did not yet have evidence to support a charge of genocide. Chomsky quotes directly from the OSCE’s own assessment: the situation was “a serious human rights crisis” but not “a genocide in progress.”
The core of the chapter, however, is Chomsky’s argument about how the genocide narrative was constructed and deployed. He traces the public statements of NATO leaders in the weeks before and during the bombing. On March 24, 1999, the day the bombing began, U.S. Secretary of Defense William Cohen stated that Serbian forces were engaged in “a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing” and that “we have credible evidence of mass graves.” British Prime Minister Tony Blair spoke of “a genocide” and “a humanitarian catastrophe.” But Chomsky examines the actual intelligence that was available at the time. He notes that the CIA’s own intelligence assessments, which were later declassified, showed that before the bombing, Serbian forces had killed approximately 2,000 people over the course of the entire conflict since 1998 — a terrible number, but far from the scale of genocide. He also notes that the OSCE estimated that about 250,000 Albanians had been displaced within Kosovo before the bombing, a figure that is serious but not comparable to the mass expulsions that occurred during and after the NATO bombing.
Chomsky then makes a more specific argument about the timing of the alleged genocide. He notes that the greatest atrocities against the Albanian population — the mass expulsions, the systematic destruction of villages, the killing of perhaps 10,000 people — occurred not before the bombing but after it began. He cites the ICTY’s own findings that the pattern of ethnic cleansing intensified dramatically following the start of NATO’s air campaign. This is a crucial point: the humanitarian crisis that was used to justify the bombing was in large part created by the bombing itself. NATO’s response to a human rights crisis was to launch a military campaign that, according to the very monitors NATO claimed to be protecting, dramatically worsened the human rights situation.
“The bombing had been initiated to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe, but the humanitarian catastrophe was largely a consequence of the bombing.”
CLARIFY: This chapter does not deny that serious human rights abuses occurred in Kosovo before the bombing. What it does is challenge the claim that these abuses constituted a “genocide” that required immediate military intervention. The distinction matters because the scale and nature of the atrocities determine whether the bombing was a proportional response to an imminent catastrophe or a disproportionate action that made things worse. By showing that the evidence for genocide was weak at the time of the bombing, and that the worst atrocities followed the bombing, Chomsky is arguing that the “humanitarian” rationale was either based on faulty intelligence or was deliberately exaggerated to justify a predetermined military intervention.
Chapter Four: The Kosovo “Genocide” — The Propagation of the Narrative
LOCATE: This is the second part of Chapter Four, where Chomsky demonstrates how the genocide narrative was systematically propagated by Western governments and media, and how it functioned as a weapon of propaganda to mobilize public support for the war.
PRESENT: Chomsky turns to the role of the media in disseminating the genocide narrative. He examines specific incidents that were presented as evidence of Serbian atrocities. One of the most famous was the Račak massacre of January 15, 1999, in which 45 Albanian civilians were killed. The incident was described by Western leaders and media as a “massacre” and a “crime against humanity,” and it was a key factor in pushing NATO toward military action. U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright called it “a deliberate massacre of innocent civilians,” and it was presented as evidence of the genocidal intent of Serbian forces.
Chomsky then examines the controversy surrounding Račak that emerged after the war. He notes that even at the time, the OSCE’s head of mission, William Walker, described it as a massacre, but that the Serbian account claimed the victims were killed in combat with security forces. Chomsky cites the investigation by Finnish forensic experts, led by Dr. Helena Ranta, which concluded that the victims had been executed at close range, but also noted that the scene had been tampered with and that some bodies had been moved. More significantly, Chomsky cites the later findings of the ICTY, which investigated Račak but ultimately did not include it in the indictment of Slobodan Milošević for genocide. He also notes that the independent journalist and researcher Paul Watson of the Los Angeles Times, who was an eyewitness to the aftermath of Račak, later wrote that the evidence was “not as clear-cut” as NATO claimed.
Chomsky’s broader argument is about the information environment in which the war was conducted. He documents how Western media outlets, which normally pride themselves on objectivity, became almost entirely one-sided in their coverage of Kosovo. The BBC, CNN, and major newspapers presented the NATO narrative virtually without challenge. When alternative perspectives were presented — such as the claims of the Serbian government, or the criticisms of the bombing by human rights organizations like Amnesty International — they were dismissed as “Serbian propaganda” or “appeasement.”
The chapter also examines the specific role of the U.S. State Department’s Office of Public Diplomacy, which Chomsky argues was engaged in a systematic campaign to shape public opinion. He cites internal documents showing that the State Department actively worked to suppress negative information about the NATO-backed Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), including evidence of KLA involvement in drug trafficking, terrorism, and human rights abuses. The KLA, Chomsky notes, had been designated a “terrorist organization” by the U.S. State Department itself as recently as February 1998, yet by March 1999 it was being described as “freedom fighters.” This shift, he argues, was not based on any change in KLA behavior but on a change in U.S. policy objectives.
“The preferred story was that the Serbs were committing genocide and NATO was acting to stop it. Any facts that complicated this story were systematically filtered out.”
CLARIFY: This section is not just about the Račak massacre or the KLA’s background. It is about the information control that made war possible. Chomsky is arguing that the public was not given the full picture: the actual evidence for genocide was weak, the history of the conflict was complex, and the KLA was not a purely benign liberation movement. By controlling the narrative, Western governments were able to present a simple moral story — good (NATO and the Kosovar Albanians) versus evil (the Serbs) — that made war seem not just necessary but morally imperative. This narrative control was essential for maintaining domestic support for a war that, as Chomsky will show, had very different motivations than “humanitarian” ones.
Chapter Five: The Humanitarian Intent — What the Bombing Actually Accomplished
We are now in the portion of the work where Chomsky moves from analyzing the rhetorical justifications for the war to examining what the bombing campaign actually achieved on the ground. This chapter directly tests the “humanitarian” claims against the observable outcomes of NATO’s intervention.
The central question Chomsky poses here is straightforward: if the stated purpose of the bombing was to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe, what actually happened after the bombing began? Chomsky presents the evidence in meticulous detail, drawing on reports from humanitarian organizations, journalists on the ground, and even NATO’s own assessments. The pattern he reveals is stark: before the bombing began on March 24, 1999, estimates of the number of displaced Kosovar Albanians ranged from approximately 200,000 to 300,000 — already a serious humanitarian crisis, but one that had developed over months of conflict. After the bombing began, the number of displaced persons exploded. Within the first week of the bombing, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees reported that 400,000 Kosovar Albanians had been forced from their homes. By the end of the bombing campaign, that number had risen to approximately 1.4 million — nearly two-thirds of the entire Kosovar Albanian population.
“The bombing was followed by a radical escalation of ethnic cleansing, including a sharp increase in atrocities, not because the Serbs decided to accelerate their program in response to the bombing — as was often claimed — but because the bombing provided the cover and the pretext for a campaign of ethnic cleansing that had been prepared well in advance.”
Chomsky is careful to note that he is not arguing the Serbs were innocent of atrocities before the bombing. He acknowledges that there was a pattern of repression and violence against Kosovar Albanians under the Milosevic regime. However, he insists that the scale and intensity of that violence was dramatically different before and after the NATO bombing. The pre-bombing period saw village-level violence, targeted attacks against KLA supporters, and a general climate of repression. The post-bombing period saw the systematic depopulation of entire cities — the forced removal of hundreds of thousands of people in organized operations using trains, buses, and military convoys. Chomsky presents this as a direct consequence of the bombing, not a pretext for it that was already underway.
The argument here is that the bombing did not interrupt an ongoing ethnic cleansing campaign — it triggered the full implementation of one. Chomsky points to the testimony of OSCE monitors who were on the ground before the bombing. They reported that while there were serious human rights abuses, there was no evidence of a systematic plan for the mass expulsion of the entire Kosovar Albanian population. That plan, Chomsky suggests, was activated precisely because the bombing gave the Serb leadership both a justification (national defense against foreign aggression) and a window of opportunity (while the world’s attention was on the bombing itself rather than the ground war happening underneath it).
Chomsky then turns to the question of whether the bombing could have been expected to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe. He notes that the advocates of the war often claimed that the bombing was a last resort after diplomacy had failed. But he argues that this framing is misleading. The actual choice was not between bombing and continued diplomacy — the actual choice was between bombing and the deployment of a ground monitoring force that the Kosovar Albanians had proposed and the Serbs had, at various points, indicated they might accept. The Rambouillet accords, which the Serbs rejected, included provisions that no sovereign state could accept — the right of NATO forces to operate anywhere in Yugoslavia without restriction, including in the rest of Serbia, not just in Kosovo. Chomsky presents this as a deliberate provocation, designed to ensure rejection and thus provide a casus belli.
The clarification here is crucial: Chomsky is not defending Milosevic or the Serb regime. He is arguing that the humanitarian intervention narrative is internally inconsistent. If the goal was to prevent ethnic cleansing, the bombing was the worst possible strategy — it predictably led to the acceleration of exactly the outcome it was supposed to prevent. The fact that NATO knew this, or should have known it based on the evidence available at the time, means that the “humanitarian” justification cannot be taken at face value. There must have been other reasons for the bombing — reasons that had nothing to do with protecting Kosovar Albanians.
Chapter Five: The Humanitarian Intent — The Doctrine of “Humanitarian” War
This section continues the examination of the bombing’s consequences, but shifts focus to the broader doctrine of humanitarian intervention that the Kosovo war was supposed to exemplify. Chomsky asks: if this is the model for future humanitarian interventions, what exactly is the model?
Chomsky begins by noting that the advocates of the Kosovo war presented it as a precedent — a demonstration that the international community was willing to use military force to stop genocide and ethnic cleansing, even without UN Security Council authorization. This was the “new military humanism” in action: the claim that human rights could and should trump state sovereignty, and that the use of force for humanitarian purposes was not only justified but morally required. The war was thus framed as a breakthrough in international relations, a departure from the cynical realpolitik of the past.
But Chomsky argues that the actual practice of the war reveals a very different pattern. He points to the selective application of the “humanitarian” doctrine. Why Kosovo? Why not East Timor, where Indonesia was engaged in a brutal occupation that killed approximately 200,000 people? Why not Turkey, where the government was engaged in a war against Kurdish separatists that displaced millions and killed tens of thousands? Why not Rwanda, where the international community had stood by during the genocide of 1994? The answer, Chomsky suggests, is not to be found in the severity of the human rights abuses — by many measures, the situation in East Timor or Turkey was as bad or worse than Kosovo. The answer lies in geopolitical interests.
“The consistently selective application of the ‘humanitarian’ principle — applied only where it does not conflict with the strategic and economic interests of the powerful — reveals that the principle itself is not the real motivation. It is a cover for something else.”
Chomsky then examines the specific case of East Timor in detail, comparing the international response to that crisis with the response to Kosovo. In East Timor, Indonesia invaded in 1975 and the occupation was met with near-total international silence. The United States and the United Kingdom provided military aid to Indonesia throughout the occupation, including during the massacres of 1999. Only after the Indonesian government decided to withdraw — under pressure from the Asian financial crisis and internal political changes — did the international community intervene. And even then, the intervention was a peacekeeping force, not a bombing campaign. Chomsky argues that the difference in response cannot be explained by the nature of the crimes — both were cases of mass violence against civilian populations — but only by the nature of the perpetrators. Indonesia was a Western ally; Serbia was not.
The clarification here is about the doctrine itself: the “new military humanism” is not a new commitment to human rights. It is a new justification for military intervention that is applied selectively and opportunistically. The doctrine serves to legitimize the use of force by the powerful against the weak, as long as that use of force can be framed in humanitarian terms. Chomsky is not arguing that humanitarian intervention is never justified — he is arguing that the actual practice of “humanitarian intervention” by Western powers is determined by strategic interests, not humanitarian concern, and that the humanitarian language is a cloak for those interests.
Chomsky then turns to the question of legality. The Kosovo war was conducted without explicit UN Security Council authorization — Russia and China, both permanent members with veto power, opposed it. The advocates of the war argued that it was still legal because it was “humanitarian” and therefore fell under an exception to the UN Charter’s prohibition on the use of force. Chomsky argues that this is a dangerous doctrine because it allows any powerful state to claim a humanitarian justification for military action. If the United States can bomb Yugoslavia without UN authorization because it claims humanitarian motives, why can’t Russia bomb Chechnya on the same grounds? Why can’t China bomb Tibet? The doctrine of humanitarian intervention, applied unilaterally, undermines the entire framework of international law that was built after World War II precisely to prevent great powers from using force against smaller states.
Chapter Five: The Humanitarian Intent — The Milosevic Indictment
This section examines the legal case against Slobodan Milosevic — specifically the indictment by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) — and how this case was used to justify the war.
Chomsky notes that the ICTY indicted Milosevic for crimes against humanity and war crimes committed in Kosovo, including the deportation of Kosovar Albanians and the murder of civilians. The indictment was presented by Western leaders as proof of the justice of their cause — the man they were bombing was a war criminal, and the bombing was therefore legitimate. Chomsky does not dispute that Milosevic committed serious crimes. But he raises a question about the timing and selectivity of the indictment.
“The indictment of Milosevic was announced in May 1999, two months into the bombing campaign. It is worth asking why the indictment came so late — and why it covered only Kosovo, not the wars in Croatia and Bosnia where far more extensive atrocities had been committed.”
Chomsky’s point is that the indictment was politically convenient. It came after the bombing had already begun, and it provided retrospective justification for an action that had been taken without UN authorization. By criminalizing Milosevic, the Western powers made it impossible to negotiate with him — anyone who argued for a diplomatic solution was now, in effect, arguing for negotiating with a war criminal. The indictment thus closed off the possibility of a negotiated settlement and ensured that the war would continue until Milosevic’s complete defeat.
Chomsky also notes the selectivity of the ICTY’s focus. The tribunal had not indicted Milosevic for his role in the wars in Croatia and Bosnia, where many more people had been killed. The indictment for Kosovo came only when it was politically useful for the Western powers. This is not to say that Milosevic was innocent of crimes in Kosovo — he was not — but the timing and selectivity of the indictment suggest that it was driven by political considerations, not purely legal ones.
The clarification here is about the use of international law as a weapon. Chomsky argues that international law is not applied neutrally; it is applied selectively, in ways that serve the interests of the powerful. The indictment of Milosevic was a legitimate legal step, but it was also a political act — a way of delegitimizing the Serb leadership and justifying the bombing. The same legal standards were not applied to leaders of Western-allied states who had committed comparable or worse crimes.
Chapter Six: The Ethics of Humanitarian Intervention
We move to the final major chapter of the work, where Chomsky steps back from the specific case of Kosovo to examine the broader ethical questions raised by humanitarian intervention. This is where the work’s title — “The New Military Humanism” — finds its full meaning.
Chomsky begins by framing the ethical dilemma: on one hand, there is a genuine moral impulse to stop atrocities when they occur. On the other hand, the use of military force, even for humanitarian purposes, inevitably causes death and destruction. The question is: who decides when humanitarian intervention is justified, and on what basis? In the Kosovo case, the decision was made by NATO, a self-selected group of powerful states, without UN authorization. This raises the question of whether such unilateral intervention can ever be legitimate.
Chomsky presents the argument of the “liberal hawks” — writers and intellectuals who supported the Kosovo war on humanitarian grounds. Their argument was that the Cold War was over, and with the threat of superpower conflict removed, it was now possible to use military force for genuinely humanitarian purposes. The United States and its allies, as the dominant powers, had both the capability and the responsibility to intervene to stop genocide and ethnic cleansing. This was a new kind of warfare — warfare conducted not for national interest but for universal human rights.
“The new military humanism claims to have transcended the old politics of power and interest. It claims to be motivated by universal moral principles, not by strategic calculations. But the evidence from Kosovo — and from other interventions — suggests that this claim is false. The motives are the same as they ever were: the extension of power and influence, the protection of strategic assets, the maintenance of a particular world order.”
Chomsky then examines the consequences of the intervention from an ethical standpoint. If the goal was to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe, the intervention failed spectacularly — it caused the very catastrophe it was supposed to prevent. If the goal was to punish the perpetrators of ethnic cleansing, it punished the victims instead — the Kosovar Albanians who were bombed and displaced. If the goal was to establish a precedent for humanitarian intervention, it established a precedent for unilateral action by the powerful, which could easily be used for non-humanitarian purposes.
Chomsky also addresses the question of collateral damage — the inevitable civilian deaths that occur in any bombing campaign. He notes that NATO went to great lengths to present itself as a precise, humane force that avoided civilian casualties. But he cites figures from NATO’s own assessment, as well as from independent investigations, showing that the bombing killed hundreds of civilians — possibly as many as 1,500 — in Serbia and Kosovo. These deaths were the result not only of “mistakes” but of the deliberate targeting of infrastructure — bridges, power plants, water systems — that NATO knew would have severe humanitarian consequences for the civilian population.
Chapter Six: The Ethics of Humanitarian Intervention — The Responsibility to Protect
This section of the chapter engages with the emerging doctrine of the “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P), which was being formulated in the wake of the Kosovo war and the Rwandan genocide. Chomsky examines whether this doctrine provides a coherent framework for humanitarian intervention, or whether it merely provides new language for old power politics.
The Responsibility to Protect doctrine holds that states have a responsibility to protect their own populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity. If a state fails to fulfill this responsibility, the international community has a responsibility to intervene, by force if necessary. This doctrine was intended to address the problem of state sovereignty — the principle that had been used to prevent intervention in cases like Rwanda. But Chomsky argues that the doctrine, in practice, reproduces the same problems that it was supposed to solve.
“The Responsibility to Protect is a noble principle. But like all principles, it must be applied consistently to be meaningful. If it is applied only against weak states that are enemies of the powerful, and never against powerful states or their allies, then it is not a principle at all — it is a weapon.”
Chomsky points out that the NATO intervention in Kosovo was cited as a precedent for R2P. But he argues that this precedent was deeply problematic. The intervention was unilateral, not authorized by the UN. It involved the use of force against a sovereign state without clear evidence that genocide was occurring. It caused a humanitarian catastrophe far worse than the one it was supposed to prevent. And it set a precedent that could be used by other powers — Russia, China, India — to justify their own interventions.
The clarification here is that the R2P doctrine, as it was applied in Kosovo, does not solve the problem of selectivity. It simply provides a new justification for the same kind of selective intervention that has always characterized great power politics. The question is not whether the principle is good — it is. The question is who decides when the principle applies, and on what basis. In the Kosovo case, the decision was made by NATO, a military alliance with its own strategic interests. The result was an intervention that served those interests, not the interests of the people it was supposedly designed to protect.
Chapter Six: The Ethics of Humanitarian Intervention — The Role of Intellectuals
The final substantive section of the work turns to the role of intellectuals and opinion-makers in constructing the narrative that justified the war. Chomsky is particularly interested in the liberal intellectuals who supported the war — people who had previously opposed the Vietnam War, who identified with the left, and who saw themselves as defenders of human rights.
Chomsky identifies several prominent intellectuals who vigorously supported the Kosovo intervention, including Christopher Hitchens, Michael Walzer, and others. He notes that these intellectuals generally accepted the NATO narrative about the war: that it was a response to genocide, that diplomacy had been exhausted, that the bombing was precise and humane, and that the alternative to intervention was a continuation of the ethnic cleansing. Chomsky argues that this acceptance was not based on a careful examination of the evidence — the evidence that he has presented in the book suggests that the NATO narrative was false on every point.
“The intellectuals who supported the Kosovo war were not fools. They were intelligent, well-informed people who had access to the same information that I had. But they chose to believe the official story, because it was a story they wanted to believe. It told them that the United States, the country they lived in, was capable of acting for good — of using its overwhelming power to stop atrocities, not to commit them.”
Chomsky argues that this is a form of self-deception — a willingness to accept a flattering narrative about one’s own country and its leaders. The intellectuals who supported the war did so because they wanted to believe that the United States could be a force for justice in the world. They did not want to believe that their government was lying to them, that the war was causing more harm than good, that the humanitarian justification was a cover for strategic interests. Chomsky presents this as a cautionary tale about the dangers of power — the power of a state to construct a narrative, and the willingness of intellectuals to accept that narrative because it serves their own psychological and political needs.
The clarification here is not simply about the Kosovo case. It is about a recurring pattern in Western intellectual life — the tendency of intellectuals to support their own state’s wars when those wars are presented as humanitarian or liberating. The same intellectuals who opposed the Vietnam War, Chomsky notes, often supported the Kosovo war, the Iraq war (initially), and other interventions. The pattern suggests that the issue is not war itself, but the justification for war. When war is presented as a defense of universal values — freedom, democracy, human rights — intellectuals are more willing to accept the official narrative and to silence their critical faculties.
Chapter Six: The Ethics of Humanitarian Intervention — The Meaning of Kosovo
The work concludes by reflecting on what Kosovo means — not just for the Balkans, but for the broader project of humanitarian intervention and the future of international relations.
Chomsky argues that the Kosovo war was a turning point. It established the principle that the powerful could use force without UN authorization, as long as they could claim humanitarian motives. This principle was then invoked in subsequent interventions — in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Libya. In each case, the same pattern repeated: a crisis was constructed, a narrative was developed, a bombing campaign was launched, and the consequences were far different from what was promised.
“Kosovo was not an aberration. It was a model — a demonstration of how the new military humanism works in practice. The pattern is clear: identify a target, construct a narrative of genocide, ignore or distort contrary evidence, launch a bombing campaign, and then claim victory when the target’s government falls. The human costs — the dead, the displaced, the destroyed infrastructure — are simply written off as collateral damage.”
Chomsky does not offer a simple solution to the problem of how to respond to atrocities. He acknowledges that there are cases where military intervention might be justified — though he argues that such cases are rare and that the burden of proof should be extremely high. What he offers instead is a warning: the language of humanitarian intervention can be, and has been, used to justify wars that have nothing to do with humanity. The lesson of Kosovo is that we must be deeply skeptical of any claim that war is being fought for humanitarian reasons. We must examine the evidence for ourselves, ask who is making the claim and what their interests might be, and resist the temptation to believe the official story because it is comforting or flattering.
The work ends with Chomsky’s characteristic call for intellectual responsibility: the responsibility to tell the truth, even when the truth is uncomfortable; the responsibility to oppose the machinery of propaganda; the responsibility to stand with the victims of power, not with the powerful. The final paragraphs of the book are a reminder that the people who suffer most from these wars are not the leaders who make the decisions — they are the ordinary people on the ground, the Kosovar Albanians who were bombed in the name of saving them, the Serbs who lost their water and electricity in the name of humanitarian intervention, the refugees who were forced to flee their homes and returned to find nothing. Their suffering is not an abstraction. It is the reality that the “new military humanism” seeks to obscure.
