April 6, 1999
Dear ------,
Could the Yugoslavia situation be any
more of a mess? I support the strikes and would have preferred to
have seen them unleashed five years previously during the Bosnian
disaster. However, the reality on the ground today (as evidenced
by the waves of refugees) is such that we and the other NATO countries
are presented with bad and worse options. The Balkans is a rough
neighborhood, and I think Clinton is in over his head in dealing
with Milosevic. I myself was surprised how audaciously ruthless and
rapid Milosevic was in his rape of Kosovo, and I wonder if -- as
things stand now -- we have only made the situation worse. "The Butcher
of the Balkans" called Clinton's bluff with the air strikes and now
Slick Willy (and the United States) is unwilling to send in ground
troops; if you are going to play only half-way with such a psychopath,
you might as well not play at all. In its half-hearted response so
far, NATO looks feckless and foolish! We got into the Balkan mess
in order to prevent something from happening. It happened anyway.
Milosevic is playing for keeps. Is Clinton? You knock a wily-street
fighter like Milosevic to the ground, you had best cut his throat
before he gets back up and stabs at you in some sneaky, underhanded
way. Look at the legions of panicked refugees systematically terrorized
and turned out of their homes! "Go into the woods and die of hunger!" threaten
Milosevic's henchmen (their faces often concealed by masks) as Albanians
in Kosovo watch their villages go up in flames. "Let NATO save
you!" taunt the Serb paramilitaries, as they threaten to kill
(and often do kill!) those whom we sought to protect. This is no
good. This cannot stand.
Post-1945 Europe was supposed to be a
place where nation states no longer brutalized their own citizens
with impunity or penalized them for belonging to minority religions
or communities. This notwithstanding, we now witness the spectacle
of some 900,000 Kosovar Albanians fleeing for their lives at gunpoint
and being herded into railroad cars in mass deportations. We hear
chilling tails of what is going on in Kosovo, with no independent
observers on hand at all. Look at all the women and children in the
ranks of the miserable refugees -- but almost no men of "fighting
age"! I watched closely how the Serbs "ethnically cleansed" their
enemies during the Bosnian imbroglio; we can expect the worst in
Kosovo: mass graves, detention centers, widespread rape -- the works.
There are few crimes Milosevic would not commit to strengthen his
hand, few crises he would not create or exploit to consolidate his
grip on power; Milosevic's rump-Yugoslavia today is an outlaw state
run by neo-nationalists and gangsters! It all reminds one terribly
much of the darker moments of WWII. Kosovo burns. The world watches.
Do we Americans and Western Europeans
have shame and blood guilt on our heads for helping to bring this
about? The ethnic Albanians in Kosovo were already in big trouble
with Serb troops massing at the border, but have we made it worse
with these retaliatory attacks? Can we reverse the situation on the
ground by use of air power alone, as Clinton assures us? Do we kid
ourselves if we think we can, like Zeus, send thunderbolts down from
the sky until the little people on the ground bend to our will? Wars
are won by men with rifles occupying the contested ground, despite
comments by certain air force generals to the contrary. We need to
send in combat soldiers to do the job if we want the ethnic cleansing
stopped. But a ground war would be a giant bloody affair with unpredictable
consequences -- especially with the Russians! But to just watch the
Kosovar Albanians be abused and Milosevic and his Serb nationalist
cronies continue to get away literally with murder is an equally
unattractive option. Did we and our allies actually mean it when
we said that the Serbs had gone too far this time? The whole scenario
is depressing and dispiriting!
I see international affairs differently
than you. I see the world as basically a hostile place with historical
and irrational tensions seething below the surface, ready to burst
up. No amount of volunteering or check writing to refugee agencies
is going to stop a man like Milosevic at the head of an outlaw government;
there is no "humanitarian" solution to this humanitarian crisis!
No, the best you can do is contain Milosevic, and if that fails you
have to grab a big stick and hit him with it until he gives up. If
we Americans want to stop genocide in Rwanda or Kosovo or Kuwait,
then we need to be willing to shed American blood and slug it out
down in the mud with those responsible. Super-sophisticated stealth
bombers, aircraft carrier battle groups, and other advanced weaponry
orbiting the environs of Yugoslavia are not the cure for Milosevic's
ethnic cleansing carried out principally by guns and knives at ground
level in Kosovo. We lob missiles at Milosevic, and he throws refugees
back at us! This is not a winning formula! So far, the NATO campaign
has been singularly ineffectual in stopping Milosevic's systematic
emptying of Kosovar Albanians. That being said, what do we do now?
Is it worth the price? Why us?
The world badly needs a policeman, and
I tell myself we are not the world's policeman. Why is it our problem?
This Godforsaken corner of the earth far away from American shores?
But then some atrocity happens and if we don't do anything, nothing
gets done. We are the last superpower, and all that: we have the
means, if not always the will, to stop murder when it happens en
masse around the world, and nobody else does. But we are damned
if we intervene and damned if we don't! If one goes to stop a murderer,
it often means one must kill the man to stop him. This murderer has
a mother, family, and friends, too. Nobody likes the police. Their
business is often a dirty, thankless one. I would not ascribe to
John Kennedy's "go anywhere and do anything" around the world
in the name of our democratic ideals and then have us jaunt off like
Don Quixote on Rocinante crusading in search of evils to combat and
doing more harm than good in the process. On the other hand, I would
support action where a great wrong is clearly occuring, the area
proves important to us, our military bases are located nearby, and
events give us time to study the issues and debate the alternatives.
Kosovo is clearly all these. Convenient it would be to pass off the
crisis in Kosovo to another well-intentioned superpower of the future
or some international political body with the power and will to enforce
a peace, but such does not exist at the moment. Some argue the United
Nations should handle this affair; but in its astonishingly inept
handling of the Bosnian war with their worthless "peacekeepers" in
baby blue helmets being bullied by all sides, the U.N. as a player
to be taken seriously in the Balkans has disqualified itself in the
eyes of every direct participant in the current fracas. If we don't
stand up and take the lead in Kosovo, nothing will change. The carnage
will continue. Indefinitely.
But still! A part of me would like to
wash my hands of the region which used to be known as Yugoslavia
and be done with that corner of the world and its ancient, irrational
ethnic bloodlettings. On the cusp of the 21st century, these people
act as if they were living at the end of 1300's! "Let them marinate
in their own unsavory juices!" I am tempted to say in witnessing
the slaughterhouse of medieval animosities which is the Balkans today.
They have been butchering each other since long before our time,
and most likely they will be butchering each other long after we
are dead, buried, and forgotten. On the other hand, I can hardly
tolerate the thought of watching another Sarajevo or Srebrenica-style
massacre on the news evening after evening. I would almost support
the NATO strikes and a land invasion of Kosovo on purely humanitarian
grounds, but this would only bring more suffering and death -- at
least in the short-term -- and would be a decidedly grim affair.
As someone who has seen violent death, I find little joy even in
winning a battle like that -- lots of young American soldier's wives
and mothers getting phone calls, "We regret to inform you..." But
when someone comes to murder your neighbor and no help is available,
you grab your shotgun and go yourself outside! Imagine the uproar
if NATO did nothing but watch Milosevic ethnically cleanse his opponents
in Kosovo, as he did in Bosnia! If we let the Serbs pursue a policy
of brutalizing and banishing an entire people from a territory, if
individuals can be raped and murdered with impunity in the name of
someone else's ancient historical grievance, if they can be stripped
of all their possessions and declared persona non grata, if
we just let all this happen out of indifference, complacency, and
short-term political convenience, then it appears we have not learned
the lessons this 20th century has to teach us on the European continent.
But damned if we do, damned if we don't! To stop the Serbs on the
ground in Kosovo will be bloody, grinding work! Yet that the work
be bloody and grinding does not mean it shouldn't be undertaken.
You will note my unease and ambivalence. You will note also my frustration.
Hard decisions are called for now from
leaders with backbone, and I think Clinton (and especially certain
West Europeans like the Italians!) is in way over his head; the ethnic
Albanians are the ones who will pay the consequences. We and the
other NATO countries will most likely bomb Yugoslavia for another
couple of weeks, and the Serbians will exit this affair only more
impoverished and even more of a pariah state isolated from the rest
of the world than they are today. We will quarantine the Serbs economically
and bomb Yugoslavia into the pre-industrial age of a very poor Third
World country (as we did to Iraq in 1991) and still Milosevic will
defiantly let his people pay for the folly of his policies; nothing
will change much on the ground in Kosovo. We and the West Europeans
will pick up the bill for much of the refugee clean-up, re-settlement,
etc. Their will be no justice, and Milosevic and his gangster cronies
will have gotten away with enormous crimes once again. The ethnic
Albanians who survive Milosevic's inferno will have to make new lives
for themselves in foreign countries. They will lose everything, except
maybe their lives. NATO will pick up the shards of its credibility
and limp into the future sans integrity or self-respect.
I suspect only a ground war will stop
this; as the army states its mission: close with and destroy the
enemy. If we fear so much a country the size of Ohio with only 10
million persons armed with antiquated Russian weaponry, then we deserve
all the scorn and shame the Albanian Kosovars can heap on us for
having involved ourselves in the region in the first place! May history
damn us if our response to Milosevic's ethnic cleansing of Kosovo
is merely to provide material and emotional relief to desperate refugees
and -- unwilling to bear the labor of undoing it -- accept the status
quo Milosevic has achieved by effectively banishing nearly a million
people from their country! Look at all the NATO soldiers feeding
refugees and palliating their suffering rather than working to bring
it to its conclusion! Thus they simply contribute to the problem
rather than strike at its root! The vocation of an army is to kill,
not do social work! We cannot avoid the dirty, grim work which need
to be done in Kosovo with spin management and the politics of denial!
This has been the policy we have chosen, to our great disgrace, in
the recent past! Empty saber-rattling and sluggish indifference has
gotten us nowhere in the shattered corpus of what used to be Yugoslavia!
Bosnia was a warning and a prelude to Kosovo that we and our European
allies, along with the United Nations, ignored for four years. "They
will come to tire of this action and sooner or later seek an accommodation
with me," concludes Mr. Milosevic, with good reason. "NATO
will sell the Kosovar Albanians down the river and Clinton and I
can both declare diplomatic victory." With air strikes NATO will
make symbolic gestures and noises to save face but will supposedly
prove unwilling to shoulder the necessary costs to un-do on the ground
what has been done in Kosovo. The United States supposedly cannot
tolerate combat losses and Americans have no stomach for war. "Thus
having largely accomplish my goals, I will throw the West a bone,
sign an agreement with them mostly favorable to myself, and laugh
up my sleeve at what fools and dupes they be -- exactly as I did
with Bosnia in the Dayton Accords." It might still happen! Milosevic
has played us like a champ since the Bush Administration; he will
try to ride out this latest storm, experience having given him no
reason to believe NATO is ultimately to be taken seriously. Such
is the unhappy position in which we have placed ourselves after years
of reactive, pusillanimous policy towards Milosevic and his aggression.
The bill has come due to be paid, with interest! In basic training
a 19-year old private soldier learns not to point a rifle at the
enemy unless he is prepared to pull the trigger and do the job. With
so much more formal education and life experience, President Clinton
learns this lesson awfully late in the day.
So I say this with grave reservations
but I say it anyway: Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war! Let
the Serbs learn to fear us! Milosevic (for many years now!) has gotten
way too big for his britches. It is past time for him to be taken
down a notch or two, in my opinion. Let it happen. Give the air war
more time to effect results, but don't let that scoundrel Milosevic
weasel his way out of this one! I pity the innocent Serbs who will
be ground up in this war, but such is the end of the reckless, perilous
path Mr. Milosevic (the Serbian leader) has chosen for his country:
his people will pay the costs. The Serbs know very well how they
have suffered in the past, and it enables them to fail completely
to recognize the evil they are doing today: Milosevic first took
power 10 years ago precisely by playing up national mythologies in
Kosovo, and now Serbia is fairly saddled with him, his persecution
complex, and where it has so bloodily led the region. Having thought
they had embraced certain essential human rights and peaceful relations
in the latter part of this century as opposed to the widespread and
virulently widespread political violence of earlier decades, the
Europeans have discovered they are living in the same slaughterhouse
they have always inhabited; and to nobody should this be more apparent
than to the Serbs.
The Serb people themselves might yet
be rid of Slobodan Milosevic: there is an educated base of citizenry
in Serbia who are aware of the choices available and what is at stake.
Xenophobic nationalism and ancient grudges nursed into fresh mutinies
need not be the cornerstone of post-Tito Yugoslavia! One hopes the
Serbian people are not akin to miserable Iraq: a population able
to be single-handedly cowered into submission by a reckless strongman
able to mesmerize a nation and willing to sacrifice it entire on
the alter of vanity and ambition! Iraq today is a country subsumed
by the despotism of Saddam Hussein; there dwells in that land no
force of any consequence independent of his eye or contrary to his
will. In Belgrade the Milosevic's socialists and the associated crony
capitalists hold power opaquely and largely divorced from the general
public -- backed up as they are by true-believer extremists in the
Serbian Radical Party and the scorched-earth nationalist hotheads
bred among the refugees and paramilitary groups from Bosnia. Indeed
it is as Plato is purported to have claimed: "The penalty good
men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil
men." But as "evil men" have brought Serbia to its current perilous
state of affairs, there exists also in Serbia a semblance of a civil
society independent of Milosevic and real democrats in the liberal
democratic tradition: there is a basis for some kind of alternative
regime in Belgrade that could help the place evolve into a "normal" country.
As opposed to other areas of the world,
we and our Euro-Atlantic allies have the power and the resources
to set a different tenor for what happens in our backyard. "We
kid ourselves if we think we can end hundreds of years of ethnic
animosity in the Balkans and their tribal politics of blood and soil," a
friend exclaimed to me. "The Serbs will simply wreak revenge on
the Albanians at some future date, and the cycle will continue." That
we cannot end these ancient animosities I have no doubt; but if the
West gets its way in Kosovo the Serb authorities won't be wreaking
any more "revenge" there for many years to come: the place will be
a NATO protectorate. Perhaps might cannot make right, but it can
restrain evil. "We have lost the goodwill of many Serbs who previously
had idealized the Western values of freedom and democracy!" continued
my friend. Considering the events in Bosnia over the past ten years
and more recent circumstances in Kosovo, the goodwill of the Serbs
is something with which we in the West can live without. The international
centers of power seated in Berlin, Paris, London, and Washington
D.C. will survive just fine without the approval or support of Belgrade,
thank you very much.
So let us see what we Americans and our
European allies can do. If Milosevic and his policies should prevail
in Serbia and by extension in Kosovo we can make it so he, his country,
and its power hardly matter anywhere beyond the few miles surrounding
Belgrade. If after a decade of ethnic conflicts, international sanctions,
and economic decline the Serbian people because of fear or inertia
have become resigned to authoritarian rule and consequently choose
to fail to oppose Milosevic and the path he has chosen for them and
their future, they still have made a choice. In one direction lies
closer integration with the powerful economies and political stability
of the Euro-Atlantic Alliance and peace and prosperity. On the other
side lies Milosevic and war, misery, and poverty. The blood-red scourge
of the war-god Ares walks with Milosevic like fleas follow a dog:
he is responsible for the deaths of some 250,000 people and the displacement
of 4 million others in the four Yugoslav wars he has provoked and
then pursued. Serbia is at risk of joining Syria, Cuba, Lybia, Algeria,
Iraq, North Korea, and the many African states that reside almost
entirely outside the global economy and are weak enough and small
enough so that the larger world hardly notices their absence. Even
more than in overwhelming military might, the true power animating
the 19-nation alliance prosecuting this war against Serbia is economic
in nature. Make no doubt about it: people die of poverty.
We wished the problem simply to go away
by itself; it has been almost ten years now, however, and the problem
is more acutely painful than ever. Nevertheless, if Milosevic scrapes
for a fight with all the major powers of Europe and North America,
then time is ultimately very much against him. But in the short-term
we cannot avoid dealing with the crisis as currently it is; the situation
in Kosovo needs be resolved, the "ethnic cleansing" has to be reversed,
and a new modus operandi in Europe must arise Phoenix-like
from the ashes. This should be accomplished by peaceful means if
Milosevic will give in to NATO demands. It should otherwise, in my
opinion, be effected by invasion and violent, wholesale removal of
Serbian military forces from Kosovo. The province of Kosovo is the
size of metropolitan Los Angeles; a reinforced armored column backed
up by massive air support could cut through it in weeks if not days.
We can arm the Kosovar Albanians and let them defend what we have
won for them. We have the power. Do we have the will? For nearly
a decade and to the tune of several hundred thousand lives lost the
open wounds which are the Yugoslav wars have run red. It is time
for them to stop. No more half measures. No more putting off today's
problem (ie. Milosevic and aggressive Serbian nationalism) until
tomorrow by making short-term accommodations which lead to the long-term
deepening of crises. Let the work begin in earnest. Strike decisively
and incessantly at Serbian military forces and infrastructure this
spring and into the summer. If the Serbs don't give in to NATO conditions
for peace in Kosovo and a return of the refugees, then make the preparations
this fall and winter for a ground invasion next spring.
Yes, a ground war will cost us Americans
much in treasure and, much more importantly, in blood. We will take
combat dead. We Americans in earlier generations could suck it up
and be tough enough to sacrifice; I wonder about this country today,
made soft by affluence and a lucky streak in foreign policy for many
years now. Clinton symbolizes much of that for me, even as I voted
for him twice and have no regrets today (well, not too many regrets).
These are times requiring clarity of vision, inspired leadership,
and decisiveness. It is, in the main, Clinton's call how to prosecute
this war. The stakes are high, the situation complex; history is
watching, history will judge. The shape of tomorrow depends on our
decisions today.
Reflecting on these "decisions" I can
easily imagine unhappy outcomes to all possible choices! There are
phantoms around each corner and pitfalls in every direction! What
to do? Indeed! But nations cannot afford to play Hamlet, debating
alternatives indecisively and indefinitely: "...the native hue
of resolution / Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought." Choices
must be made, a course charted, so that the ship of state might arrive
at its destination. To waver and to drift fecklessly is to be lost.
Would that air power were enough to garner a negotiated settlement
to this war! Enough to end the cancer that has eaten away for so
long at the former Yugoslavia! Would that I could be more sure in
knowing which way we should step! Unsure, I look to President Clinton
for leadership. Let him rise to the occasion.
Mr. Clinton, this is no time to go wobbly.
You risk gaining the hatred of those you attack, as well as the contempt
of those who conclude you are unequal to the challenges of your office.
See to the end that which you started.
Very Truly Yours,
Richard
