An excellent analysis that reveals the ideological quagmire wherein most (American) opponents to NATO's intervention in Kosovo are entangled......
Excerpted from Society, Volume 37, #1 - November/December 1999
Letters to the Editor
To the Editor:
In spirit and tone, Irving Louis Horowitz's recent article on the "Vietnamization of Yugoslavia" puts him in the company of such august intellectuals as Immanuel Wallerstein, Noam Chomsky, and Edward Said. Normally, this would be quite good company, except in this case, he and the above-mentioned intellectuals, have used the NATO war not to address the key issue of the relationship between state power and human rights, but as a stage to rehearse ideological critiques of America and American interventionism. Many prominent intellectuals, particularly those on the left, came out strongly against the NATO war, but since most of them had been little concerned with Yugoslav affairs before the breakup of the country, most of their responses were simply restatements of a deeply felt anti-American and anti-imperialist positions. Rather than consider the important question of whether or not human rights must be protected by force if necessary, some of the leading luminaries of the left found themselves willing to allow Milosevic to continue his butchery rather than find themselves in agreement with American policy.
The NATO attack might well have been an exertion of American power, but it was also designed to stop Milosevic and prevent a repetition of the mass murder that he perpetrated in Croatia and Bosnia. Indeed, I was shocked that his article did not mention even once the context of state-sponsored mass murder perpetrated by the Serbs in these places. That strikes me as a glaring omission given that the entire Western response was grounded in the recognition that Milosevic was prepared to do the same thing to the Kosovar Albanians that he did to the Bosnians, namely, to commit genocide against them. I was troubled by Horowitz's attempt to disqualify the use of the term genocide to describe the situation in Kosovo: I agree that this is a complex issue, but his own definition of genocide in his book Taking Lives; Genocide and State Power was expansive enough to include what happened to the Kosovars. In that work, he argued that genocide is the "structural and systematic destruction of innocent people by a bureaucratic state apparatus" and this is exactly what happened in Kosovo. In his treatment of the KLA in his article, it is clear that he doesn't consider the Albanians as entirely innocent, but the KLA doesn't speak for all Albanians and most victims of Serbian repression were innocent civilians. The NATO campaign actually succeeded rather well in its objectives which were to move the Serbian military out of Kosovo, to stop the ethnic cleansing, and to install a protection force to keep the killing from starting again. Horowitz claims that the NATO bombing actually accelerated the ethnic cleansing. It is certainly the case that Milosevic used the war as a pretext for stepping up his campaign against the Kosovars, a campaign that had long been in the works as anyone familiar with the last ten years of repression in Kosovo would know. Yet Milosevic, not NATO, bears the responsibility for this. I cannot imagine that he would blame the Allies for Hitler's stepping up of the campaign against Jews in response to Allied attacks.
So while military hegemony has been reestablished, the war was also a decisive victory for the protection of human rights in Europe. My own view is that universal human rights are not yet normative and under certain conditions they need to be enforced through force. I agree with Horowitz and others like Chomsky who argue that there is hypocrisy in American policy on human rights, that the US intervenes in some situations, but not in others and that this renders the NATO motives questionable. But I am a pragmatist on these matters. For reasons of politics and expediency, not all human rights violations can be responded to equally. One cannot fail to act in some cases because one cannot act in all cases. I would love to see the US act in a less hypocritical way in relation to human rights abuses, to bring pressure on the Turks, for instance, to stop abusing Kurds, to force the Chinese to stop abusing Tibetans. At the end of the day, however, this unified military action has at least stopped Milosevic's brutal campaigns. It was messy, innocent people suffered, but at the end of the day, after watching Milosevic kill for ten years and knowing that he was prepared to keep on killing, I could see no other alternative than to use force against him. The war brought suffering to many, including some of the Albanians whom it meant to help, but in the end, I take the utilitarian view that it alleviated more suffering than it caused. I wonder if Horowitz realizes that ordinary Albanians view NATO as their liberators and accept the fact that some of their own people had to die in NATO bombings in order to stop Milosevic.
I am no fan of military power, but the situation was drastic and demanded drastic measures. The Milosevic regime has proven time and again, in Bosnia, and elsewhere, that it does not respond to negotiation: time and again, he has waged war against the powerless while the West was negotiating with him. As Stjepan Mestrovic and I argue in our edited volume, This Time We Knew: Western Responses to Genocide in Bosnia (NYU Press, 1996) it was clear very early on in Bosnia that Milosevic would only respond to force and, thus, it was clear that negotiating with him would have disastrous consequences: he was adept at using negotiation as a cover for the acceleration of ethnic cleansing. [...]
As for the assertion that the NATO support of the KLA is similar to the American support of the Thieu regime, this is false. The Thieu regime and the KLA both have shadowy dimensions, but the Thieu regime was representative of a state whereas the KLA was a military faction mobilizing against one of the most oppressive regimes in contemporary Europe, a regime that had systematically abused Kosovar Albanians for ten years (and which had explicitly stated intentions to engage in the ethnic purification of the province). That difference is essential, yet Horowitz fails to recognize it. He must surely recognize that there is a fundamental difference between the KLA and the Vietnamese regime. I should point out that his view of the KLA is dangerously close to that of the Milosevic regime itself: one will recall that Milosevic grounded his campaign in the ideology that he was fighting "Muslim terrorists" who were threatening "innocent" Serbs. This view swayed many people and the fact that so many people bought into it by aping it in different venues is deeply troubling to me and indicative of a failure of the moral responsibility of intellectuals to distance themselves from the positions of fascists. Horowitz knows, of course, that Hitler claimed that the Sudetenland Germans needed his "protection" against hostile enemies. Any critical intellectual writing at that time would have been obligated to point out the ideology strategy of domination which masks itself as "protection."
Unlike Professor Horowitz, I was a child during the Vietnam War and it did not stamp my consciousness like it did his and others of his generation. I understand that the Vietnam experience left a strong impression on his generation and that the event is an ongoing reference point for the interpretation of ongoing events. That experience cut across political lines and this explains why he and people like Chomsky, Said, and Wallerstein, who are very different politically, can offer such strikingly similar views of the NATO war. The habit of being suspicious of American power is deeply stamped in Horowitz's generation and it has guided his interpretations in the present war. Indeed, what is so striking is that so many Western intellectuals have used the NATO attack as a pretext for rehearsing ideological shibboleths and platitudes of a previous era. He and others have used the Vietnam analogy, but good analogies have to be grounded in specific historical facts. That the NATO war was not Vietnam is evident: in contrast to Horowitz's assertion, the objectives of the action were painstakingly clear from the outset and the military action to achieve them was decisive. NATO won the war. It did not drag on for ten years as in Vietnam or cost 50,000 American lives, and the war was a unified action by the NATO alliance rather than a unilateral action on the part of America, as was the case in Vietnam. [...]
My own view is that Professor Horowitz, and many other intellectuals of his generation who have written about this war, have projected negative views which they gained as a result of their common experience of Vietnam. I don't question for a moment that his views are deeply felt and even courageous. Yet, I still think what has happened is a projection of those generationally conditioned ideas onto the present. [...]
I would be the first to admit that my own lack of generational experience with Vietnam might make me less of a critic of America than I should be. But I think that one can be critical of American policies without letting defenseless people die. The strong have an obligation to the weak. Speaking for myself, I can recognize that Vietnam was a fiasco, but I also recognize that there are other reference points against which American actions can be interpreted. The most significant is World War II: American intervention in that war stopped Hitler. It saved the Jews from almost certain destruction. Milosevic is, to be sure, no Hitler and what happened to the Kosovars is not analogous to what happened to the Jews. I was, like Elie Wiesel, against the comparison of Kosovo with the Holocaust precisely because it was a metaphorical and emotional comparison put forth for ideological reasons rather than for reasons of doing good historical analogy. But like Wiesel, I felt what was happening to the Kosovars, whatever we might choose to call it, had to be stopped. I wish it had happened another way, but history puts tough choices in front of us and no politics is pure.
Thomas Cushman
Whitehead Associate Professor of Critical Thought
Associate Professor of Sociology
Editor, Human Rights Review
Wellesley College
Wellesley, Massachusetts
wellesley.edu |
