America is a great power, militarily, economically, politically-the greatest in the world today, perhaps the greatest ever to exist. Like all great powers, we have fallen into the trap of dreaming ourselves to be omnipotent. We have come to equate GNP with Godlike wisdom, and military power with moral authority. As witness Kosovo.
With astonishing hubris, our captains of state swaggered into the Balkans, pronounced a peace that neither Serbia nor Kosovo found acceptable, and proceeded to stamp their feet and whine when they couldn't get their way. Fumed one administration crusader, "Here is the greatest nation on Earth pleading with some nothing-balls to do something entirely in their own interest...and they defy us!"
The Kosovars were ultimately brought around to see the light; the Serbs have shown an infuriating disinterest in playing by our rules.
Milosevic has outmaneuvered and embarrassed us, and is succeeding in doing everything we ordered him not to do (most of Albanian Kosovo is uprooted or expelled after just one month of Cruise Missile Diplomacy). Though it stings to admit that we were outplayed by this subhuman thug, this is precisely what has happened-none of the pinpoint bombing has "degraded" one iota of Serbia's ability to exercise its horrible will in Kosovo.
And now, as our ridiculous air war (intercontinental bombers targeting paramilitary goons with rifles) drags on without hint of success, NATO is skidding and stumbling towards the ground war we once unequivocally swore we would not fight.
We have to stop and think before that happens. Why are we getting in to this war? What do we hope to achieve? And, most important of all, what cost will we have to pay, in order to win this fight?
By now, everyone agrees that the situation in Kosovo is a humanitarian disaster. Slobodan Milosevic has been likened to a miniature Hitler-a soulless and indiscriminate killer, an ultra-nationalist xenophobe, an evil dictator, a threat to the lives of any people he dominates. These are not indefensible claims; certainly, Milosevic is a Very Bad Man of the highest degree.
The mere presence of a humanitarian disaster is not enough to justify going to war. A war is itself a humanitarian disaster, by definition: people are killed, lives torn apart, homes destroyed and infrastructure ravaged. If you wish to wage one, you should be prepared to show (a) your war is not going to make the current disaster worse, and (b) your war is going to make the current disaster better-and so much better, that it is, on balance, worth the cost of the war. NATO can show neither of these things.
Our stated aims in this war are embarrassingly absurd. We are going to war with Milosevic, not to liberate the Kosovars from his bloody rule, but merely to win them "substantial autonomy" for an interim period, further negotiations to follow. That is a perversion: we are going to war with the explicit goal of not resolving anything. Better still, our non-solution is based on the idea of both the Serbs and the Kosovars throwing down their guns and deciding, this time, to resolve their disputes peacefully.
If they both wanted to do that, we wouldn't be in this mess.
And then, of course, we have to consider the price of this war, payable in dead American soldiers.
Eighteen dead soldiers were all it took to drive us out of Somalia. This does not indicate squeamishness or a lack of resolve on the part of the American people-it simply indicates an unwillingness to throw away American lives on fools' errands.
When I was younger, and still opinionated and headstrong, a veteran shared with me a piece of wisdom about choosing your fights. He said, "When you're about to make a stand, you've got to ask yourself, 'Is this the hill you want to die on?'"
And so we ask: is it? If we haven't gone to war over East Timor, or Tibet, or Chechnya, or Sudan, or the Turkish Kurds, or the Iraqi Kurds, or in response to dozens of other humanitarian crises in civil wars, why now? What is there that makes Yugoslavia a more likely prospect for success and stability?
Sadly, it is that kind of clear-headed inquiry that has been lacking in our foreign policy.
There is still one point that must be considered as we lurch toward war. If we launch an invasion of Yugoslavia, we will do so under the leadership of exactly the same crowd of bumblers who have erred so often, and so badly, in bringing us to the current crisis. Clinton, Blair, Solana and the rest could not even manage diplomacy successfully. Their strategies to date, at the negotiating table and in the skies, have been nothing short of abject failures. Why should we assume now that they will be able to manage a full-blown war? The same flawed thinking, the same poor vision that has characterized our efforts in Kosovo to date will surely pervade any war yet to come.
Our Congress is already setting aside an incredible 12 billion dollars to fight this war. I'd like to close with a little pocket-calculator musing on that number. That sum, instead of buying more 2,000 pound bombs to drop on Belgrade, could be spent as 6,000 dollars for every Kosovar Albanian man, woman and child, for relocation, settlement, food, medical treatment, and infrastructure. That figure is well in excess of the average annual income in Albania, Macedonia, Kosovo...and Serbia, for that matter. Fashioning such a package of true humanitarian aid, however, would scarcely cross the minds of our humanitarian war-hawk leaders. Perhaps we should wonder why.
Craig is a featured columnist for Athenstown.com and can be reached for comment at Craig Bryant
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