A Botched Just War

COMMENTS & OPINIONS supporters around the world, see the fires for and give them the support they need. From a what they are: deliberately set, the work of ar- moral/political perspective, I don't think it sonists, aimed to kill, terribly dangerous. Of matters much if this particular fire isn't dan- course, every fire has a complicated social, gerous to me and mine. I can't just sit and political, and economic background. It would watch. Or rather, the price of sitting and be nice to understand it all. But once the burn- watching is a kind of moral corruption that ing begins something less than full under- leftists (and others too) must always resist. • standing is necessary: a will to put out the fire—to find firefighters, close by if possible, MICHAEL WALZER is co-editor of Dissent. Bogdan Denitch A Botched Just War HAVE SUFFERED much anguish over NATO's support for the attempted U.S.-backed invasion war in Yugoslavia. Unlike almost every U.S. of Cuba and his critical backing of the war in I military intervention of the past half cen- Vietnam. I opposed the landing of marines in tury, this is a just war—but badly and irrespon- Lebanon, the invasion of Panama, and the idi- sibly led. It was cowardly of the White House otic military adventure in Grenada. I have criti- to decide on high-altitude bombing in order cized both the bloated U.S. defense budget and to spare itself the painful decision to use the rigid assumptions on which it is based. ground troops. How reassuring to Milosevic And yet here I find myself not only defend- that no military expert believes the war can ing a NATO intervention, but defending a war be won by air power alone. against my country of origin, where many of The stand I have taken—favoring interven- my closest friends, comrades, and relatives tion and the use of ground troops (but oppos- live. This choice did not come easily but it did ing bombing cities)—horrifies my relatives, come logically. There was even a Marxist tra- longtime associates, and close friends in dition to draw on: the support of Marx and Belgrade. Most of them, even those who are Engels for the North in the U.S. Civil War, as staunch critics of the Milosevic regime, abso- well as their support for the unilateral action lutely oppose the NATO war. (Distressingly, of the British Empire to stop the slave trade. almost none of the opposition groups in Serbia For that matter, they backed the Allies against have tempered their condemnations of NATO Russia in the Crimean War. In none of those with real words of regret for the regime's eth- cases were the intervenors' hands clean or nic cleansing and war crimes in Kosovo.) Years motives pure. of friendship have melted in the face of this There is also plain common sense. As early disagreement, and I feel great personal loss. as 1991I advocated multilateral military intervention to prevent the breakup of Yugosla- Just and Unjust Interventions via from turning into full-scale wars of seces- My position was not easy to adopt. From my sion. A very modest intervention could have days in the left wing of the U.S. Young People's prevented a great evil. Clearly the Bosnia in- Socialist League, which I joined in 1948, I op- tervention of 1995 came very late indeed, but posed almost every war and military interven- it did provide a flawed peace that was better tion by the United States and its allies. In the than the murderous ethnic war that had been mid-1960s I broke off relations with my long- going on. Similarly, it seemed to me that the time political mentor Max Shachtman, over his 1992-1993 intervention in Somalia was wor- DISSENT / Summer 1999 n 7 COMMENTS & OPINIONS thy and failed in its aims only because the oblivious, more than a month after the NATO United States was unwilling to place its pro- attacks, of the genocidal nature of the Yugoslav fessional soldiers at risk. In still another case, army's campaign in Kosovo. a modest international intervention in Rwanda And genocide is not too strong a word. The could have prevented a genocide. To its eter- Convention on Genocide defines it as any of nal shame, the United States worked overtime the following acts committed with intent to at the UN to block intervention in Rwanda. destroy, in whole or in part, a national, eth- This policy is in good part explained by the nic, racial, or religious group, as such: fact that the people in question were African (a) Killing members of the group; and not European. (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to Some will ask: shouldn't NATO have given members of the group; the negotiating process more time to work be- (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group condi- fore launching its strikes? Remember tions of life calculated to bring about its physi- Milosevic's track record. His regime is prima- cal destruction in whole or in part. rily responsible for three previous wars of ag- This clearly covers what the Milosevic re- gression in the region, as well as massive eth- gime is doing. The Albanian exodus from nic cleansing and mass murder of civilians and Kosovo was organized with great brutality and thousands of prisoners of war in Bosnia. It is was obviously planned long in advance. also clear that this is a regime that would con- Why has the democratic opposition in tinue its repression in Kosovo while negotiat- Serbia been so half-hearted in its condemna- ing. It would only back down if faced with tions of ethnic cleansing? Bear in mind that it credible force and it would only keep its agree- includes elements that are even more nation- ments if international troops were present to alist than the Milosevic camp. These elements enforce them. Even before the NATO attack oppose the regime for having "lost" the Krajina began, some twenty-five thousand Albanians to the Croats and the war in Bosnia. And then had been ethnically cleansed—that is, moved there are those who attack the regime as "left- with great brutality out of their homes. The ist" despite the fact that it is in a coalition with massacre of unarmed civilians in the village what is arguably the largest fascist party in of Racak took place before the bombing. Europe, Vojislav Seselj's Radicals. Very few The fury of "pure" American leftists with indeed opposed the regime over its intransi- my impermissible deviation was predictable gent insistence that Kosovo is an "eternal" part but not serious. They needed to know noth- of Serbia. Most have made a moral equiva- ing about Kosovo or the Milosevic regime. It lence between the misdeeds of the Serbian was enough that the United States and NATO police and army in Kosovo and the misdeeds were involved, and everything became crystal of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). clear. I sometimes envy that certainty and in- The KLA's democratic credentials are, to nocence, but alas, I choose to engage in poli- put it mildly, dubious. But the more respon- tics and not morality plays. sible wing of the Kosovar Albanians' move- ment—the decade-long nonviolent struggle The Disoriented Yugoslav Opposition under the leadership of Ibrahim Rugova—re- In Serbia, meanwhile, the democratic opposi- ceived almost no support either from the West tion has been seriously disoriented by the war. or from Serbian democrats. (The sole excep- With a very few exceptions, citizens' organiza- tion was the League of Social Democrats of tions long known for their courageous if inef- Vojvodina, whose two deputies were thrown fective opposition to the regime have united out of Parliament for their heresies.) Anger at as critics of NATO. They denounced the at- NATO has for the moment united almost all tack as a gross violation of international law of the public behind Milosevic. The April and the rights of sovereign nations. Very few murder of a leading opposition journalist, of them bothered to mention Milosevic's war Slavko Curuvlija, by what was probably a po- against the Kosovo Albanians or its earlier ag- lice death squad, helped silence those who gression in Croatia and Bosnia. They seemed might do otherwise. One cannot demand ir- 8 n DISSENT / Summer 1999 COMMENTS & OPINIONS rational heroism in the face of a ruthless re- Yugoslav democracy—whose statements gime. Nor is it difficult to understand that against the bombing also mention, if only tep- bombing makes people feel like victims. idly, Belgrade's war in Kosovo. These include What is hard to accept, however, is a per- the heroic Women in Black and some of the sistent tone in the messages coming over by democratic socialists and trade unionists. e-mail from Belgrade: shock and surprise that this should be happening to them. It is as if Democrats In Croatia and Bosnia the Milosevic regime were somewhere else, as Democratic activists in Croatia and Bosnia if they, the anguished correspondents, had ab- have reacted differently. For the most part, solutely no responsibility for what that re- they support the NATO campaign—albeit gime has inflicted on the whole region. It's true with reservations, and the bitter complaint that that many of those protesting NATO opposed this should have been done much earlier, when Milosevic's wars in Bosnia and Croatia, and tens of thousands of lives could have been his repression at home (with scandalously little saved, and millions spared ethnic cleansing.

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