Why this Kosovo dove became an Iraq hawk
George Jonas
National Post
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Recently a reader took me to task for inconsistency. "You were a dove during the Kosovo war," she told me. "Why are you a hawk on Iraq?"
Madam, I'm glad you asked.
I dislike war and oppose it as a matter of course unless I'm convinced that avoiding war is more dangerous. This definition fits military action to depose Saddam Hussein. It didn't fit the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's campaign against Slobodan Milosevic and his government.
For a start, whatever Milosevic did -- and he did plenty -- he made no attempt to develop weapons of mass destruction. Yugoslavia never had programs for nuclear, biological, or chemical armaments. Unlike Saddam, the Balkan dictator had no plans to use such weapons himself or make them available to international terrorists.
Milosevic posed no threat to the West in general or America in particular. He had no hostile designs on any NATO country. He didn't want to export his thuggish rule, or even his influence, outside the borders of the former Yugoslavia.
Saddam fancies himself a modern-day Saladin with dreams of regaining Jerusalem for the Arab nation. Milosevic had no comparable ambitions.
What Milosevic did want was distasteful enough. The ex-Communist dictator, reincarnated as a Serb nationalist, wanted to hold together the reluctant nations of the moribund Yugoslav federation by brutal force. In the course of doing so, he may well have committed crimes against humanity in Bosnia and Kosovo, for which he's now being tried by an international tribunal.
The ethnic Albanian-Muslim majority of Kosovo was unhappy in Yugoslavia. Some wanted autonomy for their province; most wanted to secede, either to establish an independent state or to unite with others in the region to form a state of greater Albania. The Kosovo Liberation Army employed violence to achieve this goal, to which Milosevic responded with reprehensible measures that included attempts at ethnic cleansing.
Nasty as this was, it posed no threat to NATO. The West had no stake in greater Albania anymore than in greater Serbia. The Dayton accords specifically confirmed the territorial integrity of what remained of Yugoslavia. When NATO's intervention came, it was based partly on humanitarian considerations, and partly on ideals of multiculturalism, dear to Western liberals, but rather alien to both sides of the warring parties in Kosovo.
This seemed to me inadequate as a reason for going to war. The West was interfering in a race in which it had no horse. NATO didn't achieve multiculturalism either: The Albanian Muslims returned to Kosovo, then ethnically cleansed most Serbs from it.
When NATO attacked Milosevic, the Serb leader wasn't in breach of 18 previous UN Security Council resolutions. He hadn't been warned to disarm at the pain of "serious consequences" as UN Resolution 1441 warned Saddam. The attack on Milosevic, far from being authorized, hadn't even been canvassed at the United Nations. NATO justified its action by saying it was pointless to ask the UN for authority because the answer would be no.
I'd be the last to suggest that a sovereign nation (or a military alliance) should never act without the blessing of Kofi Annan's apostolic seat in New York. I only think it's incongruous when liberal protesters, who cheered the flower children's war against Milosevic without any UN blessing at all, now find 18 such blessings insufficient. This week, if the Security Council votes down the joint U.S.-UK-Spanish proposal -- or if France and Russia exercise their veto -- it will be the United Nations refuting its own authority. If , or rather when, the U.S.-led coalition attacks Iraq it will be with the specific mandate of Resolution 1441, a mandate the leaders of NATO didn't even seek against Yugoslavia.
I called the Kosovo conflict the flower children's war because it was Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Gerhard Schroeder, Javier Solana, and their friends -- politicians who emerged from a '60s generation of confused peaceniks, eco-freaks, draft resisters, and flower children -- who, after a life-long opposition to NATO and everything it stood for, hijacked NATO to act out their mushy liberal fantasies of fitting every region into the Procrustean bed of a multicultural dream.
Some, like Mr. Blair, have since seen the light. Others, like Mr. Schroeder, are still in the dark.
As a leader, Milosevic was a nasty piece of goods, but compared to Saddam the one-time communist apparatchik was Mother Teresa. To go no further, if Saddam had ever submitted to a type of election he could actually lose -- as Milosevic did -- the question of Iraq would have been settled 12 years go.
In any genuine election involving the whole of Iraq -- Kurds, Shiites and all -- Saddam would have been defeated after the Gulf War in 1991 as surely as Milosevic was defeated after the war in Kosovo. Of course, it's hardly surprising that Saddam didn't expose himself to Iraq's voters. If he had, instead of sitting in Baghdad, he might occupy a cell next door to Milosevic in the Hague. The spectre of international prosecution doesn't encourage loathsome leaders to relinquish their office voluntarily or to submit themselves to the gamble of elections -- but that's another story. |
