"Bombs Away!"
By Immanuel Wallerstein
When I was young, I saw many a war film in which the heroic American
pilot, flying over hostile territory, shouted "bombs away!" The enemy was
destroyed, and peace restored. The good guys won. President Clinton sent U.S. and NATO
pilots on just such a mission against the Yugoslav government and its leader, whom Clinton
compared to Hitler. When a war breaks out, and this is a war, there are three levels at
which to judge it: juridically, morally, and politically.
Juridically, the bombing is an act of aggression. It is totally
unjustified under international law. The Yugoslav government did nothing outside its own
borders. What has been going on inside its borders is a low-level civil war into which the
U.S. and other powers intruded themselves as mediators. The mediation took the form of
offering both sides an ultimatum to accept a truce on dictated terms, to be guaranteed by
outside military forces. At first, both sides turned this down, which upset the U.S. very
much. They explained to the Kosovars that they couldn't bomb the Serbs unless and until
the Kosovars accepted the truce terms. The Kosovars finally did so, and now the U.S./NATO
are bombing.
National sovereignty doesn't mean too much in the real world of
power politics. The U.S. is not the first nor will it be the last state to violate some
smaller country's sovereignty. But let us cut the cant. Doing so is aggression, and
illegal under international law.
The juridical situation tells us nothing about the moral situation.
The U.S./NATO have justified their acts by asserting that the Yugoslav government is
violating fundamental human rights, and that they have a moral duty to intervene (that is,
to ignore the juridical constraints). So let us talk about the moral rights and wrongs.
I have no doubt myself that the Yugoslav government has been guilty
of atrocious behavior in Kosovo, as they has been previously, directly or via
intermediaries, in Bosnia-Herzogovina. To be sure, their opponents, the Kosovo Liberation
Army in this case, and the Croatians and Bosnians in the previous war, have also been
guilty of atrocities. And I for one am not going to do the arithmetic to figure out who
has done more atrocities than the other. Civil wars bring out the worst in peoples, and
the Balkan wars of the last five years are not unusual in that respect. But it does weaken
the moral justification for intervention when the immoralities are not one-sided.
Furthermore, if Serb behavior in Kosovo is to be reprimanded, then
the moral authorities who take it upon themselves to enforce moral law must explain why
they have been unwilling to intervene in Sierra Leone or Liberia, in northern Ireland, in
Chile under Pinochet, in Indonesia under Sukarno, in Chechnya, or even for that matter in
the Basque country. No doubt each situation is different from the other, and perhaps of
different dimensions, but civil wars abound and atrocities abound. And if we are to take
moral enforcers seriously, the least one can ask is that they are minimally consistent and
minimally disinterested.
So, in the end, we are thrown back on a political analysis. Who did
what for what reasons, and how much do particular actions aid in the reasonable solution
of the disputes? Let us start with the local participants in the conflict. In the
geographically and ethnically intertwined and overlapping zones of the Balkans, the former
Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was probably the optimal structure to ensure not only
internal peace but maximal economic growth. But it came apart.
This was not inevitable. There were some key turning-points. One was
in 1987 when Milosevic decided to build his political future on Serbian nationalism rather
than on Yugoslav nationalism/Communism and moved within two years to suppress Kosovo
autonomy. This gave the excuse for, and perhaps instigated, the wave of successions:
Slovenia, then Croatia, then Bosnia-Herzogovina, then the attempted secessions within
Croatia and Bosnia by the Serbs, then the Kosovars. No doubt, non-Balkan forces also
played a role, especially Germany in supporting, if not more than that, the idea of
Croatian independence.
Still, Milosevic's initial moves were a grievous long-term political
error. We now find ourselves in one of those nasty, violent struggles in which everyone is
afraid, paranoiac, and unwilling to contemplate any sort of real political compromise. And
the fascist Ustashi in Croatia and Chetniks in Serbia are once again a serious political
force. Nor will it end soon. The war in Northern Ireland went on for over twenty years
before anything was possible. The war in Israel/Palestine has gone on even longer.
Sometimes a civil war just has to exhaust itself before any one is rational.
But what about the politics of the U.S.? Why has the U.S. government
singled out this civil war for active intervention? In the case of the Gulf War, there was
at least the rationale of the importance of oil (and the defense of an invaded sovereign
state, Kuwait). But in economic terms, the Balkan zone is marginal. Nor can it be argued
that there are immediate geopolitical concerns, such as shoring up an area politically so
that some other power cannot take it over. This was the rationale, or at least one
rationale, for the U.S. support of South Korea. Behind North Korea, argued the U.S., lay
China or the Soviet Union. The rationale was that of the Cold War.
But Yugoslavia has no oil, and there is no longer a Cold War with
the Communist world. So why doesn't the U.S. ignore the situation the way it ignores the
Congo (at least these days)? To be sure, the U.S. doesn't really ignore any country, but
it does not intervene militarily in most situations. A curious argument has been made in
the last few months. It has been said that the U.S. had to bomb the Serbs, or else NATO's
credibility would be undermined. This is a curious argument because it is circular. If
NATO threatens something, and then doesn't do it, of course its credibility would be
undermined. But it didn't have to make the threat in the first place.
Or maybe it did. Perhaps the political issue for the U.S. is
precisely the need to justify the very existence of NATO, which no longer has an obvious
role as such now that the Russian army seems to be so much weakened. But why would the
U.S. want to have NATO at all? There seem to me to be two main reasons. One is that its
existence in turn justifies the current military expenditures and indeed build-up in the
U.S., which has economic and internal political advantages for the government. The second
is that NATO is necessary to prevent the west Europeans from straying too far from U.S.
control and above all from establishing an autonomous armed structure separate from NATO.
The Yugoslav imbroglio seems ideal for both purposes.
But will it work? If the Yugoslavs hold fast, and it seems likely
they will, further military action would involve ground forces. Can the U.S. afford a
second Vietnam? It seems doubtful. And will the west Europeans really continue to play the
game? There are rumblings in the NATO ranks already, and the war is only a week old.
We have all entered the bramble bush. The Yugoslavs will be bombed
until it hurts. The Kosovars will be driven out of their homes. Many will die. Neighboring
countries may be drawn into the armed conflict directly. And if the war is prolonged,
there will be internal social turmoil in the U.S. and western Europe. "Bombs
away" may have been worse than a crime; it may have been a folly.
Document compiled by Dr S D Stein