From TELOS's print edition, #114 - Winter 1999
angelfire.com
(page 160)
Symposium on the Kosovo Crisis
Kosovo and the Critics
Russel A. Berman
When the initiation of the bombing campaign against Serbia did not lead to an immediate cessation of the attacks on the Kosovars, critics were quick to declare that NATO had failed. In fact, the apparent acceleration of Milosevic's assault in Kosovo and the efforts to pursue ethnic cleansing against the Albanian majority were interpreted as a direct result of the NATO campaign: as if the alliance and ultimately the US and Clinton were directly responsible for the displacements and killings. Now we know that this accusation was a textbook case of post hoc ergo propter hoc: Milosevic had long planned the purge; indeed, his participation in the Rambouillet negotiations probably only had the purpose of stalling and gaining time with which to pursue the purge more effectively. It was not the bombing that caused or accelerated the genocide; it was Milosevic. Nevertheless, critics leapt to point a finger of blame at Washington. Had it not considered that the likely consequence of bombing would be even more ethnic cleansing (even though the ethnic cleansing was already occuring)? Facing this question, US Secretary of Defense Cohen answered testily that, indeed, the consequences had been weighed, as had the consequences of doing nothing. The latter, standing by in the face of genocide without lifting a finger, was deemed worse.
Despite its heroic ring, the answer is not fully satisfying. Surely just doing anything, perhaps even something wrong that makes a situation worse, is not a desirable formula for policy. For there are some considerable failings in the US and NATO stance, discussed below. Still, Cohen's comment is right on the mark as an implicit response to the sort of criticism that began to emerge very quickly after the bombing began. Be it in the French Manifesto or elsewhere in the European press, or in radio interviews or printed comments by Chomsky, Cockburn, Said, Zinn and others in the US: the anti-war intellectuals claim to recognize the reprehensible nature of the Milosevic regime and its genocidal policies, but the conclusion they draw is that NATO and the US should do nothing.(1) So, aside from the many political and cultural issues around the war, some real, some imagined --the post-Communist complexities in Yugoslavia, the Ottoman legacies, Western vs. Orthodox Christianity, etc.-- the debate reveals a fundamental poverty of criticism. The stance of the critical intellectual, derived from Enlightenment postulates, including a commitment to cosmopolitan solidarity, turns into a whiny enervation and ultimately into an apathetic willingness to watch as a people is eradicated. They invoke high principles, they deploy grand rhetoric, they feign expressions of profound concern, and they do absolutely nothing. Worse: they tolerate nothing being done. Hamlets all, they recoil from the very sight of action. A half century ago, intellectuals said nothing about Warsaw; they don't care about Pristina today. Their message to the Kosovars is well captured by the title of Tadeusz Borowski's fiction, hardly fiction anymore, "this way for the gas, ladies and gentlemen."
The J'accuse that the intellectuals hurl against the US is the accusation that it has undertaken any action, for these are Nietzsche's "scholars," who would project their own incapacity and lack of will onto everyone else. This despair at action is evident in the three main arguments levelled against the bombing, each a pretext to do nothing. First, there is the call for negotiation, rather than for violence: could we not talk instead? could we not talk longer? perhaps for ever, before doing anything? Of course, no one (with the possible exception of Milosevic) would disagree that negotiations are preferable to a military assault. Furthermore, one can ask retrospectively if the negotiating skills of the US and the West European powers were deployed as effectively as possible. Yet, surely no one can have missed the fact of the nearly perpetual negotiations, from Dayton to Rambouillet. Perhaps they might have been conducted more effectively, or perhaps Milosevic only used them a a cover; perhaps some future historian of the Balkans will clarify this issue. In the meantime, negotiations collapsed, the genocide against the Kosovars continued, and Clinton warned Milosevic several times, in fact probably too often: he surely did not rush to start the bombing (to his discredit, some would add). One can always imagine keeping a conversation going longer, as intellectuals characteristically would prefer, but others understand that eventually the time for action comes. War becomes politics by other means. The absolute opposition to any war reveals a fundamental refusal of politics.
The second argument against the bombing points to inconsistencies in US policy. Because the US failed to intervene in other cases, it has no right to do so in Yugoslavia. Saul Landau takes this position, unwittingly, to its ad absurdum self-parody: because the US engaged in ethnic cleansing against Native Americans, it has no right to protest ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. It seems that the wrong conclusion is being willfully drawn in order to discredit any possible strategy to stop Milosevic. Of course, one could point to the same past to come up with a different result: the fact of terrible failure in the past might be taken to be a reason to get it right in the present. Yet, critics of US policy seem to insist that the US, wrong in the past, can consequently never get it right in the present or the future (they are, in effect, less liberal than advocates of the "three strikes and you're out" sentencing code, who at least concede the possibility of a second chance). Similarly: because the US failed to stop the Holocaust, it is hypocritical, some strangely conclude, for it to engage in the Balkans. Although not the first case of genocide, the Holocaust has become the symbol of attempts to exterminate a people. It is because of the Holocaust that there is at least a norm that genocide should not be tolerated. Yet, it is unclear why we should draw the conclusion that any resisance to genocide is wrong, because of inconsistent applications of the norm.
For the record, the example of the Holocaust might well be cited as grounds for the bombing: the targets might have been better chosen, and the attacks might have started earlier. But the massive bombing of Germany in WWII could be seen to be a very close precedent (understanding that no analogy is exact) for bombing Serbia. At least in this case, the accusation of inconsistency does not hold very well. What are the other examples commonly cited? Said attacks the US for racism for not intervening in Rwanda: but it did intervene in Somalia, a counterexample that discredits the trivial accusation of racism, and surely, given history, it was arguably a French responsibility to play a role in the Rwandan catastrophe. (Alas, it was reported that [President] Mitterrand commented that one has to expect genocide in that part of the world). For decades, the left ignored Tibet, and only anti-communists pointed out the brutality of the Chinese occupation. Moreover, in the era of the high Cold War, US policy was certainly somewhat constrained by both Soviet and Chinese power, i.e., this is an example taken from another period in which a different constellation of power prevailed. Still, it was the US that was willing to lead the resistance to the Chinese invasion of Korea: another precedent, again disproving the inconsistency accusation. Finally, why should the US intervene on behalf of the Kosovars, so goes the challenge, if it won't do anything for the Palestinians? The analogy is absurd. As obstinate as aspects of Netanyahu's policy have been, it is delusional to see it as in any way comparable to Milosevic's. The Serb nationalism that Milosevic has inspired has led to the deaths of 200,000 in the former Yugoslavia, and to the displacement of three million people, as well as to extensive campaigns of genocidal rape. Netanyahu has supported a handful of settlers in the West Bank. The connection between the two cases is not convincing. Moreover, the US (and even more so Western Europe) has given political and material support to the Palestinians in a way that the Kosovars have never even imagined. Clinton visited Gaza, not Pristina.
Rwanda, Tibet, Palestine: under scrutiny, none of the cases for inconsistency really holds up. Of course, each case is different, with different political contexts and different internal textures. Each is particular, and the application of any principle always involves compromise, complexity, and accomodation. Differences necessarily characterize any empirical circumstance. But critics latch on to them in order to cast aspersion on the NATO action. In other words, what is at stake is much less real complexities of foreign policy than a rhetoric of hair-splitting and grasping at straws --not in order to clarify the situation, but to obscure it. So much for Enlightenment. The pedantic outrage over inconsistency turns out to be just another pretext for inaction. The underlying assumption is that, because of past failures, future successes are unacceptable: this pessimism is particularly noteworthy, since it reveals how much the verbal heroism of public intellectuals has renounced its own heritage of progress. Better to give up on the notion of progress than to imagine that the US might ever be its agent.
The third agrument levelled against the bombing campaign involves ulterior motives. The suggestion is that the humanitarianism is just a pretext or, even if it is sincere, it is contaminated by other goals: US national interest, finding a role for NATO, dismantling Yugoslavia (viewed by some on the Left as a final hold out against IMF policies), and so on. In this case, a platitude turns into an accusation. A principle might be pure, but the real-world pursuit of a policy that requires building consensus and utilization of actual resources necessarily requires multiple rationales. It is as if the critics of the policy would accept US intervention on behalf of potential victims of genocide if and only if the intervention took place expressly against US national interests. Indeed, not only with regard to politics, this psychological century surely understands that the motivation behind an action might be plural; those motivations should be discussed, but a bad motive alone hardly undermines a good one. The evaluation has to be based on the outcome which, at this point, is hard to foresee. The primary concern in the outcome has to involve the situation of the Albanian Kosovars.
Yet, a secondary concern is also the future of NATO and the relation of the US to European security concerns. Perhaps, if the European nations had shown some leadership in addressing the catastrophe in the Balkans, US involvement could be much smaller. In the end, however, the major European nations chose not to exercise such leadership. What then is the alternative to Milosevic? Do the critics really think that a Russian solution would be preferable, or even likely? Then Pristina could become Grozny. If there is any hope for a long-term improvement in Kosovo and the Balkans, it will require not only a military solution; some massive infusion of funds will have to flow into this poorhouse of Europe. Some have spoken of a "Marshall Plan" for the Balkans, and this discussion would again challenge the Europeans to take responsibility, as unlikely as that may be. One could imagine that, rather than a NATO predominance, the European Union, that consumer alliance of Western Europe, might provide the economic energy with which to lift the region out of its poverty. Could the European Union take on economic responsibility for Southeastern Europe, the way Germany has taken on the economy of East germany? The suggestion highlights the contradictions in Europe: while NATO is prepared to take on security responsibilities in Eastern Europe (with the recent expansion to include Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary) and to engage in Southeastern Europe, the European Union still maintains its own iron curtain against the East. Hamlet won't act, so Fortinbras arrives.
The US-led NATO campaign is a problematic response to the Milosevic regime. But it is the best current option. The public intellectuals denouncing it have no reasonable alternative except their own callousness. Much can be learned from about the psychology of intellectuals from this event. Yet, there are equally important criticisms that the US action calls for, and they might be summed up as follows: it should have started earlier and it should have been stronger. We did not have to wait until Kosovo to learn the nature of the Milosevic regime; there is no evidence of his being an honorable negotiating partner, and there is plenty of evidence demonstrating his willingness to encourage the worst brutality. However, there is also strong evidence that the US and NATO lacked appropriate military preparation, both in terms of material and in terms of focus. The bad weather over Yugoslavia is not Clinton's fault, but the evident absence of adequate Apache helicopters certainly is. In addition, the only reason to have promised Milosevic that he need not worry about NATO ground troops would be that Clinton felt he had to persuade a reluctant public, still hamstrung by the Vietnam syndrome. If that was the calculation, however, the alternative would have been to provide leadership, to make the case more forcefully, and to begin to explain the need for a ground force. There is a breathtaking reluctance to face the fact that war may be more than a computer game, that it may involve casualties, and that it surely involves fighting. The whole matter is, at this writing, still being presented to the public as if it could be restricted to the abstract distance of the bomber and will never require a genuine engagement.
Yet, the weakness on the American side is not just a matter of the psychology of a President who thinks he can stay in the air, and that he will never have to inhale. This delusional distance from reality recurs in the by now infinitely repeated truism that most Americans cannot find Kosovo on a map. The phrase is usually taken to mean that Americans, insular and isolationist, particularly after Vietnam, really don't care about Kosovo or its refugees. Yet, the initial public response seems to indicate a willingness to support the war (for whatever reasons), despite the imputed lack of geographical knowledge. The problem, therefore, is not at all a fundamental undercurrent of pacifist isolationism, but --they do not know where Kosovo is-- a deep-seated failure in the educational system. This includes the devastating vacuity of K-12 education that really does tech painfully little about the rest of the world, but it also includes the dismantling of teaching and scholarship about other areas of the world at the university level. The old model of "area studies" has disappeared, as the social sciences have moved toward forms of abstract modeling (rational choice) and the cultural fields have been decimated by the culture wars and ridiculous theoretical paradigms. In that context, fewer and fewer students learn about the real and complex social and cultural processes in distant parts of the world. The situation regarding language learning is even worse: Russian has nearly disappeared from the curriculum, so we can hardly expect anyone to be studying the languages of Yugoslavia. The point is twofold: the educational system is not educating the public to know about the rest of the world, nor are the universities training a cadre of specialists who might provide government and other key institutions with the sort of expert knowledge that is crucial in war or in peace. At one point around the beginning of the bombing, Clinton is reported to have said in a press conference that he is "beginning to read up on the history of the region." A far cry from the Brain Trust days.
US education drops the study of the rest of the world, replacing it with an obsessive focus on domestic US concerns, and that too gives way to a focus on the self and identity politics. This is the trajectory of the culture of narcissism: instead of training for political leadership, we teach political correctness. Students do not know where Kosovo or Rwanda is, but they learn all about eating disorders and non-traditional families. This Massenverdummung, this promotion of mass ignorance is precisely what the culture industry has been about. Instead of nuanced discussions about the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the past decade of activism for Kosovo autonomy or independence, we have been regaled with O.J., Jonbenet, and Monica. Thanks to American journalism, we have no idea where Kosovo is, but we know all about the stain on the dress. This is the same media that gives enormous play to the families of the American POWs, presumably of genuine "human interest," but that took years to consider touching the story about genocidal rape, for fear of being considered biased.
The US political leadership is miserably confused and shallow: both Clinton and the hopelessly opportunistic Republicans, who sorely want to criticize Clinton but cannot decide if they want to be hawks or doves. (They are probably waiting for the polls). This sorry state is no worse than the society it represents. Given the rampant obscurity, the lack of serious public discussion, the absence of clear political thinking, and the collapse of the educational system, the amazing result is this: that at this early stage the public appears to understand that it is important to take a stance against genocide and that, despite its critics and its flaws, the American position on Yugoslavia is the best one around.
(1) Chomsky in a Radio interview on the Pacifica network, April 7, 1999. [...]
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