There are no historical analogies. Nothing is ever exactly like anything that happened before. Most of all, nothing ever was exactly like what happened in the death camps of Central and Eastern Europe in the 1940s. That`s why the civilized world declared that it could happen ”Never Again.”
Still, it was disconcerting to hear Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic proclaim ”Never Again” the other day. The ”ethnic cleansing” over which he presides pales in comparison with the genocide of 50 years ago. But it is as close as the Western world has come since then.
Milosevic was referring to atrocities committed against Serbs during World War II. Those atrocities were real and terrible enough to have become part of every Serb`s inheritance. In the wars ruining what was once Yugoslavia, new anti-Serb atrocities no doubt rekindle that collective memory.
But this time, it is the Serbs committing most of the atrocities, and even if this is only because they have most of the guns, tanks and planes it ill behooves their leader to invoke that particular motto. According to the latest reports, Serbian terror against Croats and Muslims has progressed beyond mere random slayings and forced relocation to the establishment of organized centers for murder and rape, even forced impregnation.
All this has confused a world already confused, at the end of a year in which it has become harder to convince the children that totalitarianism is a bad thing and religion a good one. For all its horrors, totalitarianism did discourage people from casually murdering one another. For all its glories, religion has been inspiring just such murders from Sarajevo to India.
No part of the world seems more confused than the United States, which two years ago deluded itself into thinking it had freed itself of its
”Vietnam syndrome.” In fact, the gulf war, the current operation in Somalia and the indecision over Bosnia all confirm the lasting lesson of Vietnam: The U.S. will intervene only when convinced it can succeed quickly and easily, without the loss of very many troops. We will be the world`s policemen, but without patrolling the really bad neighborhoods.
This is probably the best policy, as long as we don`t fool ourselves about it. Meanwhile, the national debate about Bosnia reveals an old lesson:
policy is often subservient to prejudice, or at least to predisposition.
There are exceptions on both sides, but most of the advocates of intervention are the liberals who for the last 25 years have opposed intervention, while conservatives who would have sent the Marines against communism anywhere have turned pacifist in the face of non-ideological horror. Within this policy irony is an operational irony. The interventionists, who so recently dismissed the efficacy of air power, now say that bombing Serbian gun positions and supply lines will suffice. Their opponents, until now big fans of the Air Force, insist that bombing would be futile.
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Who`s right? Who knows? But the interventionists find their argument blunted by an absurd assumption that dominates the policymaking world. The assumption is that when a great power intervenes it must succeed, so that if bombing does not work, the U.S. will find itself on the ”slippery slope”
(policy scholars talk that way) to sending in the infantry.
This is the sort of nonsense that results when too much attention is paid to professors. It is a typical conclusion of ”policy analysts” who analyze policy as though it were an entity itself, divorced from any context.
But a truly great nation is one that is willing to fail. Besides, the answer to, ”What if air strikes don`t work?” is, ”What if they do?” And if the first stage is insufficient, perhaps military targets in Serbia itself can be bombed.
As the gulf war taught, some military targets-power plants and rail lines, for instance-are civilian targets, too. It is distasteful to think of denying creature comforts to millions of Serbs, many of them decent and honorable people (more of them, it seems, than Milosevic will allow to vote;
but election-rigging is among the least of his sins). But many Iraqis are decent, too, and we bombed their facilities though their government had done less harm than Milosevic`s.
Because he is so bland, the Serbian leader has escaped being perceived as the same kind of demented villain as the flamboyant Saddam Hussein or Moammar Gadhafi. But he is in their league, and there is no reason why he should not be subject to the same threats.
Perhaps neither threats nor actual bombs will persuade the Serbs to stop their terror. Then the effort would have failed. The consequences of this failure would be . . . failure. The consequences of doing nothing are disgrace. So far, the world has done little but pervert language. The real meaning of ”Never Again” is, ”Not until next time.”