Warmongering for Peace; D. Bandow

Potomac Principles ?( )( ~ ~ )(: \NAR IN THE BALKANS Warmongering for Peace by Doug Bandow .)(. )(: )* T he United States bestrides the world as a military colossus. By far the dominant global power, it is allied with every other major advanced industrialized state. Ameri ca's adversaries are poor, isolated, and pitiable: Cuba, Iraq, North Korea, and Yugoslavia. But apparently Washington policymakers can't stand the thought of living in peace. Tra ditionally, war has been considered a last resort. Yet this administration is implementing the most militaristic program in at least two decades. The President used U.S. troops to try to rebuild Somali society, bombed Serbian insurgents in Bosnia, warned of possible mil itary action against North Korea, occupied Haiti, sent troops to Macedonia and Bosnia, has undertaken military exercises around the world, is conducting regular attacks on Iraq, and inaugurated aggressive war against Yugoslavia.

Obviously the administration, filled with high hubris, believed Belgrade to be an easy target. Washington was apparently convinced that it could impose an outside solution on an ancient ethnic conflict, micromanage a guer rilla insurgency, and unleash the dogs of war without their running wild. The result was a disastrous miscalculation: the administration simultaneously magnified violence against ethnic Albanians and desta bilized neighboring states. Yet U.S. officials Doug Bandow, a nationally syndicated columnist, is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. This article draws on his testimony before the House Internation al Relations Committee in early March. 21 responded to the charge that they failed to foresee the risks of their strategy by saying, essentially, yes we did. If true, the President was criminally negligent: he expected further attacks on Kosovars, massive refugee flows, and Serb intransigence, but did nothing to prepare for those consequences. Even he, one would hope, could not be so irresponsible.

It has oft been said that the world is a dan gerous place, and it certainly is. But not par ticularly to the United States. Unfortunately, however, conflict does wrack many other countries around the world. There have been mass murders in Burundi, Cambodia, Rwan da, Sudan, and Uganda; brutal insurgencies in Angola, Congo, Ethiopia, Liberia, Mozam bique, Sierra Leone, and Sri Lanka; bloody wars between Armenia and Azerbaij an, Ethiopia and Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somalia, India and Pakistan; endless civil war in Afghanistan; violent separatist campaigns in Iraq (Kurds), Mexico (Chiapans), Northern Ireland (Catholics), Russia (Chechens), Spain (Basques), and Turkey (Kurds); and varying strife in Burma, Georgia, India, Indonesia, Tajikistan, and elsewhere. Then there is Kosovo. Without doubt, the situation is tragic. Yet the one constant of guerrilla insurgencies and civil wars is their brutality-by both sides. The Serbian govern ment has caused many civilian casualties in Kosovo, but its conduct does not exist in a vacuum. Last June a U.S. diplomat in Bel grade told me: "If you're a Serb, hell yes, the KLA [Kosova Liberation Army] is a terrorist organization." Even ethnic Albanians admit 22 THE FREEMAN/IDEAS ON LIBERTY • WAR IN THE BALKANS • JULY 1999 '" >( )( ~ >( )(;.: )( )( that the KLA had targeted Serb policemen and other government employees, Serbs viewed as abusing Kosovars, as well as Alban ian "collaborators." Each cycle of violence spawned another.

The resulting suffering of Kosovars was obvious. Yet at least until NATO intervened, the fighting in Kosovo barely rose to the sta tus of atrocity in today's world. It certainly did not constitute genocide, a term now tossed around with wild abandon. At least three times as many people died in January alone in Sierra Leone as in Kosovo last year. Nearly as many people died in one three-day battle between Tamil guerrillas and the Sri Lankan government last fall as in Kosovo in all of 1998. By any normal standard, events in Kosovo are less important than those in many other nations around the world, where tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and even millions have died. In 1991 the West encouraged the breakup of Yugoslavia. Then the United States and Europeans decided that Serbs were not enti tled likewise to secede from Croatia and Bosnia, the latter of which burgeoned into a particularly bloody conflict. NATO eventually lent its air force to Muslims in Bosnia and helped impose the bizarre Dayton accord, under which three antagonistic groups are supposed to live together in an artificial state ruled by international bureaucrats. The same hypocrisy is being played out in Kosovo Washington unreservedly supports Britain, Spain, and Turkey, for instance, in combating violent separatists, has placed no pressure on Macedonia to offer autonomy to its ethnic Albanians, and ignored massive ethnic cleansing of Serbs by Croats in 1995.

Indeed, contrast U.S. policy toward Turkey. Slobodan Milosevic is a demagogic thug. But the behavior of his government toward Albanians looks a lot like that of Turkey, a NATO member and U.S. ally par ticipating in the assault on Yugoslavia, toward the Kurds. An oppressed people, the Kurds are seeking the right of self-determi nation. In response, Ankara destroys Kurdish villages and ruthlessly restricts civil liberties and political freedoms of Kurdish sympathizers. Some 37,000 Kurds have died over the last decade. But the administration has voiced no out rage, proposed no bombing, demanded no occupation. To the contrary, Washington sup plies the weapons Turkey uses to repress Kur dish separatists and apparently helped Ankara capture rebel head Abdullah Ocalan. There is much to criticize about Ocalan's Kurdistan Workers' Party, of course, but one could make similar judgments regarding the KLA. Hypo critical is perhaps the most charitable charac terization of the administration's policy.

Although Washington need not act every where if it desires to implement a policy of humanitarian intervention, surely some objec tive standards are necessary. The administra tion has articulated none. In practice, Wash ington seems prepared to use military force under three conditions: • those being killed are white Europeans; • the perceived aggressor is not a U.S. ally; and • there is saturation media coverage of the conflict. This makes a mockery of the humanitarian pretensions advanced by Western leaders. Nor is there anything compassionate about send ing others off to fight. It's one thing to ask young men (and now young women) to risk their lives for their own political community. It is quite different for armchair warriors to treat them like gambit pawns to be sacrificed in some international chess game. The administration's faux humanitarianism creates severe practical problems as well. In particular, it encourages intensification of local conflict. Guerrillas like the KLA often undertake strikes in order to spark retaliatory atrocities that might bring outside interven tion. Kosovar leaders long sought to influence media coverage. One activist admitted to me last summer that the prospect of NATO inter vention "depends on how we look on CNN."

Washington needs to return to the foreign policy of a republic, not an empire. It should be a shining city on a hill, an example to oth ers, not the dictatress to the world. D VVAR IN THE BALKANS Isolationism by Frank Chodorov I solationism has been turned (by our politi cians, our bureaucracy and its henchmen, the professorial idealists) into a bad word. And yet, isolationism is inherent in the human makeup. It is in the nature of the human being to be interested first in himself, and second in his neighbors. His primary con cern is with his bread-and-butter problems, to begin with, and then in the other things that living implies: his health, his pleasures, the education of his children, wiping out the mortgage on the old homestead, and getting along with his neighbors. If he has the time and inclination for it, he takes a hand in local charities and local politics. If something hap pens in his state capital that arouses his ire or his imagination, he may talk to his neighbors about the necessity of reform; that is, if the reform happens to engage his interests. Taxa tion always interests him. But events and movements that occur far away from his immediate circumstances or that affect him only tangentially (like inflation or debates in the U.N.) either pass him by completely or, if he reads about them in the newspapers, con cern him only academically. A Minnesotan may take notice of a headline event in Florida, as a conversation piece, but he is vitally inter ested in what has happened in his community: a fire, a divorce case, or the new road that will pass through. How many people know Frank Chodorov (1887-1966) was editor ofThe Free man in 1954 and 1955. This is excerpted from his autobiography Out of Step (Devin-Adair, 1962).