Should we be bombing the Serbs to stop them in Kosovo? That is the question that this important week in 1990s American history keeps presenting to the American people.
I must admit that, personally, I’m a little bewildered and taken aback even by the question. The entire situation seems so clear to me that I am mystified by all the sober discussion and by all of the quaking in our boots about the greatest military alliance the world has ever known bringing to heel a brutish Balkans tyrant whose power is slipping away from him more every day.
Of course, we should be stopping Slobodan Milosevic from killing again! Ideally, any rational policy would be to get rid of him because without question he is the author of eight years of civil war from Bosnia, Croatia and Slovenia to, now, Kosovo and perhaps Macedonia.
Yet, as awful as a quarter of a million deaths in this man’s Bosnian wars were–and as heinous as his continued and carefully calculated rampages in Kosovo are–there are larger and even more compelling reasons that the United States and NATO finally acted:
First, the first responsibility of the U.S. is and must always be Europe. Africanologists will not like this, nor will other area specialists, but it is true, because a savage, even genocidal, war on the edges of Europe directly and inexorably threatens all the institutional structures and processes so carefully constructed over, not years, but centuries (NATO itself, the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the many economic and trade bodies that are irregularly but systematically integrating the world).
In the early ’90s, when Europe balked at stopping the Serbs’ war against Bosnia, I used to visit Brussels often and speak to Manfred Woerner, then secretary general of NATO. Over and over, he would tell me in near despair of those who would not use NATO power against the Serbs: “They are going to destroy my organization.”
He was absolutely right, because NATO was being revealed, in its pacifism (the kind word) and cowardice (the not-so-kind word), as no longer capable of doing anything. Now, with NATO moving ahead and bombing, at least we’ll see.
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Second, decent people across the world today–involved through international organizations such as the United Nations and countless thousands of human-rights non-governmental organizations–are spreading the word to every corner of the globe, for the first time in history, that every single human being everywhere should have certain rights. This idea came from the U.S. Declaration of Independence, not incidentally.
Because we cannot strive to stop massacres everywhere, does that mean that we should not use our great, and responsibility-incurring, power to insist that they not be permitted in our zone of primary influence? I certainly think not.
Some Americans don’t seem to understand. One Republican lawmaker from Idaho was on TV this week warning vociferously against going into Kosovo. He likened Kosovo to Idaho and wondered what Idahoans would think if outside powers came in and started bombing.
Well, my friend from Idaho, I’ve been to Kosovo. I’ve never seen a worse police state. Since 1990, the Kosovars were under the whip hand of the brutal Serb police; schools and universities were closed; there was no medical care or banking, no remittances from abroad; and beatings, torture and murder by the police were too commonplace to excite much notice. But many in the West excused what was going on so long as the genocide was one inflicted on a people by its own leaders.
Why do I think somehow that Idahoans would not accept this?
Since the end of the Cold War, which we can date to the official end of the Soviet Union in December 1991, the West and, even more, the United Nations have dithered. They just couldn’t seem to figure it all out, couldn’t seem to rouse themselves from a lethargy that was half excessive good life and half sheer laziness.
Because of this lassitude, genocidal massacres did indeed erupt all across the globe, for nobody was watching the store.
Now, as the bombing has started, there remain dangers. It might be like Vietnam, so calibrated and so filled with diplomatic “pauses” that it will create its own ineffectiveness. That could be worse than doing nothing.
Yet, at the same time, it could mark the coming awake of the West and of the world. Surely, the comments of Gen. Wesley Clark, NATO’s supreme commander, immediately after the attacks were immensely hopeful. “We will attack, disrupt, degrade, devastate and, ultimately, unless President Milosevic complies, destroy their forces and their abilities and their support.”
After these nearly 10 slouching years of the “post-Cold War world,” I’m watching and holding my breath.