No reason to wage war on Milosevic
by Don Feder
Wednesday, April 28, 1999
The NATO air campaign against Yugoslavia is now in its fifth week. Call me old-fashioned, but - unless you're an aggressor - I thought a hostile act by the enemy was a necessary prelude to going to war.
The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. In World War I, the Germans engaged in unrestricted submarine warfare. South Vietnam was an American ally that was being subverted by the North.
What has Slobodan Milosevic done to us?
The reasons for our intervention in the Balkans are many and fatuous. We are urged to act to avert (reverse?) a humanitarian catastrophe - a disaster that wouldn't have happened if we hadn't tried to force the Serbs into the de facto surrender of their sovereign territory, and which can't be rectified at this late date.
That aside, has there been a year in this century without a similar tragedy somewhere in the world?
We did not intervene to stop the tribal slaughter in Rwanda, the civil war in Sri Lanka, Turkish efforts to suppress the Kurds or Mexico's war against Indian peasants to stamp out the Zapatista rebellion.
But the Balkans are in Europe, knee-jerk interventionists plead. Marginally.
Commentator Mark Helprin notes: ''The Balkans are . . . a backwater separated from the European heartland by mountain ranges and salt water, they are entirely unastride the major routes of communication or axes of invasion, and they are strategically and economically inessential.''
To distinguish Kosovo from other mass expulsions and massacres, The Wall Street Journal dramatically discloses, ''No world war ever started in Rwanda.''
Right. And which great powers, driven by fear or territorial greed, are formally allied with Yugoslavia or the Kosovar Albanians?
Sarajevo was the spark that ignited Europe in 1914 only because of a series of alliances that drew Germany, Russia and France into what should have been a regional conflict.
Did philosopher George Santayana say anything about those who instead of failing to learn the lessons of history consistently misapply them?
It's argued that now that we're in the conflict, America must win it to remain credible. By 1973, we had lost 55,000 Americans in Vietnam, which gave us far more of a stake there than we have in Kosovo.
If we'd applied this do-or-die logic to the war in Southeast Asia, we would still be slugging it out in the rice paddies and the Vietnam memorial would be a far more imposing structure.
I know, I know, if we don't take Belgrade and display Milosevic naked in a cage, malefactors and evildoers from Baghdad to Pyongyang will view us as a paper tiger.
But if I were Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong Il or the Chinese politburo, I'd like nothing better than to see America wasting its limited military resources (very limited, thanks to our anti-defense commander in chief) in the Balkans.
Think of how thrilled Hitler would have been if, in the spring of 1939, England had decided to begin bombing Liechtenstein.
''NATO cannot survive if it now abandons the campaign without achieving its objective,'' insists Henry Kissinger.
Who says NATO has to survive?
The alliance was formed to stop the advance of Soviet communism. It was designed to defend borders, not redraw them, and to counter a dire threat to Western civilization, not to act as an International Red Cross with Apache helicopters.
Half a century after NATO's birth, the Iron Curtain is a rust heap. Eastern Europe and the Baltic states are free. So, why NATO?
Presumably, if NATO loses credibility, it will limit the alliance's ability to pull us into future abysses. Wouldn't that be a pity?
If the president achieves his objective in the Balkans, be afraid - be very afraid. With Haiti, Somalia, Bosnia and Kosovo under his belt, hubris will dominate a personality unstable to begin with, and he will be itching to add to his laurels and heedless of the cost in American lives.
Secessionist movements throughout the Third World would be encouraged to ratchet up their conflicts and provoke their adversaries into committing widespread atrocities, in the hopes that NATO will intervene and give them a country.
The armed forces of the United States aren't the legions of the Roman Empire. The soldiers of a republic shouldn't be walking endless foreign battlements in a deranged and futile attempt to enforce a pax Americana.
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