Would bombing work?
Garvey, John
PF SEVERAL WIMPS John Garvey WOULD BOMBING WORK? FIRST, A FEW QUESTIONS here is, at the time of this writing, an agreement that NATO will start using air strikes against the combatants in...
...My problem with the idea that bombing will help is certainly not based on any feeling that the Serbian cause has been misunderstood...
...The examples of Afghanistan and Vietnam are somewhat misleading (because they were products of the cold war, a straggle between communism and anticommunism, and this is even more complicated) but not completely inappropriate...
...Should we have done that...
...Is it in our interest to ensure peace everywhere...
...What would have been the consequences...
...Unless we are prepared to deal with the possibility of a much wider war and ground troops, or with a little bloody garland of bombs and nothing more, we should be prepared not to intervene...
...Although these comparisons make some sense, there are other questions which have been waved away, dismissed as if they were little distractions in the face of the truly important questions...
...Do we have a number at which the ugliness compels intervention...
...Are sixty civilians in one shot too few, seventy-five a green light...
...Are our interests economic (as they were in the Gulf...
...What we should not imagine is that a little bombing will end a horror that goes too deep into the human heart to be bombed away...
...The possibilities of Greek, Albanian, and Turkish involvement (if the war expands into Macedonia and Kosovo) are real, as is the strengthening of the worst nationalist impulses in Russia and the former Russian territories...
...We should (interventionists argue) never again allow another genocide to occur, and they point to the Nazi-like behavior of the Serbs...
...If Sarajevo, why not Burundi...
...Does television's ability to make us all part of a global village also allow the people with the cameras (who have the power to decide where they will not point) to determine for us the areas with which we must be militarily concerned...
...Why were they not so eager to go after Pol Pot...
...Why not Chiapas...
...If we do act, will we involve ourselves in another Vietnam (where our involvement was defended by comparisons with Munich), and are we really prepared to do that...
...6...
...But we have to understand that we cannot drop some bombs and then stop doing anything, if the bombs don't "work...
...Will we be compelled to intervene in South Africa if, in a few weeks, the election results lead some people to take up arms against others, and the slaughter turns Ugly...
...Or moral...
...Are we talking about oil, open markets, or the morality of freeing people from oppression...
...Is it simple racism...
...And if both, why not everywhere...
...These questions are essential, however, to the question of the morality of intervention by bombing, which is to say intervention by turning other human beings into various forms of ground meat...
...It could be that a prolonged, Vietnam-like conflict is just what is called for here...
...But we also have to ask why this conflict, and not all or most or some of the equally horrifying things that happen elsewhere, should eat our children...
...American interests" as a reason for intervention make a good, cold-sounding reason for being or not being involved, but it really isn' t as clear as it might seem...
...And if not Burundi, why not...
...The Nazi comparison is a little too compelling, however, as is the other misleading model, Vietnam...
...This is much like the sort of analysis that knew for sure that the Vietnamese and the Afghans couldn't possibly withstand the might of American and Soviet military technology...
...FIRST, A FEW QUESTIONS here is, at the time of this writing, an agreement that NATO will start using air strikes against the combatants in Bosnia, to force them into peace talks, if they have not moved their heavy weaponry away from Sarajevo...
...The desire to do something, when we see the horrors visited upon the people of Sarajevo, is understandable...
...The horrors that go on are as horrible, but we have had our cameras and our sympathies trained elsewhere, for reasons that are cultural, not accidental...
...One thing that has not changed is the desire for solutions that are simpler than a complex world may allow...
...I do think racism is involved here: Burundi and Liberia don't feel as much like part of our common heritage as Sarajevo does, even though the slaughtered aged, women, and children in those countries are just as human as Bosnians...
...The post-cold-war world is, as many have commented, a more complex place (or at least this new complexity is the reigning journalistic cliche and must be honored...
...Or do they have to do with threatened and, at this post-cold-war point, not very clear "spheres of influence...
...Tibet...
...It is all too clear, and can be dismissed, just as the Nazi need for "living space" could be dismissed...
...Most interventionist rhetoric is based on the notion that the Serbs are cowards who will beg for mercy at the sound of the first explosion...
...Or do we let people with all the moral discernment of George Bush and Bill Clinton decide which of these causes will move us to action, and which will not...
...This is not to say that we should be paralyzed in the face of all these questions...
...What would be the consequences of a policy which is from one point of view obviously moraK and an extension of this logic—one which would have us militarily involved in Bosnia, Burundi, Liberia, Mexico, those areas where Kurds are threatened, ready to move into South Africa...
...Can we...
...Why were we not compelled to intervene in Cambodia, during that genocide...
...Why—if the horrors that have been done in and to Sarajevo compel all decent people to support intervention—are we not also compelled to intervene in Burundi and Liberia...
...The two questions most often offered are these: If we do not act, will we be guilty of the sort of inaction that allowed Hitler his early victories and prepared us for a world war...
...We are not allowed to do this lightly, as people who are commanded to love our enemies, to do good to those who hate us, who must love one another as God has loved us...
...We should, in any event, be more cautious than the newly converted liberal hawks seem to know how to be...
...Or do they have to do with a compelling national need to respond to the most moving TV journalism...
Vol. 121 • March 1994 • No. 5
