Killing For Peace . . . As Mission Falters
Washington Times
May 20, 1999 Harry Summers
"An air raid which involves in its accomplishment the wholesale destruction of noncombatants cannot be justified or condoned," decreed a 1936 U.S. Army Command and General Staff School manual of warfare. "Any nation employing such methods will be condemned by the civilized world." With the massacre at Korisa last week of some 79 Kosovar refugees, the very people we are supposedly there to protect, those words are beginning to haunt the war the United States is waging in the Balkans.
The "condemnation of the civilized world" has been slow in coming, but as the attacks on innocent civilians continue to mount, the excuses from Washington and Brussels are beginning to sound increasingly lame. Even the euphemisms are wearing thin. With the heart-rending television picture of a baby's shoe abandoned in the street while civilian vehicles burn in the background, it is obvious that "collateral damage" means the cold blooded killing of noncombatant men, women and children.
Civilian casualties, like military casualties, are governed by the simple equation laid out by Carl von Clausewitz 160 years ago. It is the value of the objective for which war is waged that determines its value, and that value determines the sacrifices to be paid, not only in terms of friendly casualties but also the degree of violence to be visited upon the enemy.
In World War II, when the stakes were national survival, not only did the American people tolerate a million U.S. casualties, they turned a blind eye to the terror bombing of Dresden on Feb. 13-14, 1945, where the resulting firestorm burned 35,000 German civilians alive, and the March 9, 1945, firebomb raid on Tokyo, where 83,793 Japanese men, women and children were incinerated in a single night.
In Vietnam, by contrast, where the objective was never clear and the value of the war not established, U.S. activists marched in the streets to protest the notion that at Ben Tre during the 1968 Tet Offensive "we had to destroy the town in order to save it" and recoiled in horror at the so-called "Christmas bombing" of Hanoi in December 1972, when 1,318 North Vietnamese civilians were killed. Yet these self-same antiwar protesters, including President Clinton and most of his close advisers, are the very ones arguing they have to kill people in order to save them in Kosovo.
But the moral high ground Mr. Clinton claimed as the righteous protector of the Kosovo people from the horrors of Serbian fiend Slobodan Milosevic is slipping from beneath his feet. Conservatives have opposed the war from the beginning, arguing, as did Mr. Clinton's own then-Defense Secretary William Perry. in November 1994, that "to impose the outcome we want" would require a "level of blood and treasure that is not commensurate with our national interests." Now the liberals have begun to oppose it, as well. The Nation magazine, the very epitome of American liberalism, is now calling for NATO to stop the bombing, saying "the war intensifies without moral, strategic or legal justification."
That disenchantment was reflected in the recent votes in the House of Representatives refusing to endorse the bombing and ruling out the commitment of ground troops to the conflict. As Rep. Floyd Spence, South Carolina Republican, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, wrote last month on the eve of that vote, with this unplanned Balkan theater of war the United States "is putting at risk its ability to protect national interests in other critical regions of the world where the threat of conflict is high and the consequences are enormous."
As he went on to say, "The mismatch between NATO's evolving strategic objectives and its application of military force has put the credibility of the alliance in greater doubt than at any other time during its 50 years."
Evidence of this slippage is the call by his opposition for a "committee of inquiry" to look into British Prime Minister Tony Blair's handling of the war. And on May 13, 1999, the German Green Party, a major part of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's coalition government, called for a limited halt to the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. "The vote, a breach in the unity that NATO has been at pains to preserve," said the New York Times, "illustrated how the airstrikes are putting growing pressure on some European governments."
"We should face the facts," wrote retired Gen. Alexander Haig, the 1974-79 NATO commander and 1981-82 secretary of state in last week's Washington Post. "The administration's ineptitude is about to produce a defeat for the United States and NATO that will shake the foundations of the Western alliance."
Harry G. Summers Jr., a retired U.S. Army colonel, is a distinguished fellow of the Army War College and a nationally syndicated columnist. |
