Kosovo

...They articulate, from a variety of standpoints, the recurring themes of justifying or condemning intervention, limiting force, bringing about reconciliation, transforming the culture of the region...

...Albanian nationalism has challenged the stability and integrity of Macedonia...

...The war in Kosovo differs from the Gulf War in that it has been fought for Commonweal 27 September 14, 2001 the protection of the human rights of an imperiled minority, not for the defense of a sovereign state...

...Surroi sees the Kosovo war as the point at which "a whole century of totalitarian ideologies was about to enter into transition toward an expected century of the building of democracy...

...policy that he appends to the pieces contributed by Morton Hal* Commonweal 26 September 14, 2001 perin, director of the Policy Planning Staff in the State Department at the time of the Kosovo operation, and by General Wesley Clark, who was Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, during the crisis...

...The reader who works through such materials can build an understanding of the conflict which neither excuses nor demonizes the Serbs...

...The contrast here reminds us that while NATO's war in Kosovo was short and confined, it also brought back in a new form some of the oldest and broadest issues which confront us as a society that has both a history of separateness and global interests and responsibilities...

...A collection like this can have neither the merits nor the dangers that come from elaborating a single consistent argument...

...but it causes dismay to Henry Kissinger, who shows his customary wariness about according universal values or moral absolutes a determining role in the shaping of American foreign policy...

...Both the effort to justify the intervention and many of the criticisms of it rely on the categories of just-war thinking...

...The issues raised by the conflict can only be resolved in connection with the West's redefinition of its tasks after the end of the cold war and with the integration and interdependence achieved by the European Union...

...Kosovo is not regularly on the front page, but it is neither forgotten nor resolved...

...It is more like a book of reference, an anthology of political and moral reasoning, or a casebook on a complex topic...

...There is a very compressed but enlightening history of Serbia by Tim Judah, along with a self-justifying interview given by Milosevic...

...This is not a risk that the present volume, which was put together in the second half of 1999, completely escapes...

...The editor himself uses the just-war tradition as the basis for the pointed criticisms of U.S...

...To a very large extent the editor has worked with material that had already been published...

...But there are abundant compensations for the loss in temporal immediacy...

...several Serbs are scathingly critical of the West...

...For this is a collection that has an instructive variety of approaches clustered around its central topic...

...It is interesting that these are the only essays that receive this special attention, a reflection of the fact that the project has a dual focus: one on description and analysis of the conflict in Kosovo and the other on decision makers in Washington...

...John Langan Little more than two years ago the war waged by NATO against Serbia for the sake of Kosovo suddenly came to an end...

...Commonweal 28 September 14,1001...

...This, I would argue, goes handin-hand with a tendency to see the conflict in moral rather than political terms...

...This view of the conflict treats it as the aftermath of issues left unresolved by the great wars of the twentieth century rather than as the continuation of tribal and ethnic struggles going back to the Byzantine and Ottoman empires...

...This is a point that is welcomed by Vaclav Havel, in a characteristically humane and penetrating address to the Canadian parliament...

...The voices he draws on belong to Americans and Europeans, to Serbs and Kosovars, to participants and commentators...

...and the effect of reading them in quantity is wearisome...

...Seen in this way, the war in Kosovo is a hinge or "cardinal" conflict, which, we can reasonably hope, replaces the genocidal, totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century with a pan-European coalition of societies committed to human rights and European integration...

...Too many of the pieces are short-breathed...

...One of the unavoidable risks in writing about current and continuing conflicts such as Kosovo is that rapid changes and the passage of time will cause even the clearest analyses and the most persuasive arguments to seem obsolete or at least out of focus...

...The most provocative answer comes from Veton Surroi, an Albanian publisher and political activist, in one of the last essays in the book...

...Why then should we bother about a weighty book on a small crisis...

...this helps to give us a sense of the contours of the debate as it occurred, but as a result the opportunity for broader reflection which would naturally have occurred in some more extended interpretive articles, has been missed...

...John Langan, S.J., is the Joseph Cardinal Bernardin Professor of Catholic Social Thought at Georgetown University...

...It makes less surprising the occurrence of significant periods of harmony in the past, and it makes the separation of populations ("ethnic cleansing") less appealing as a solution...

...So it is a matter for regret rather than surprise that the only serious discussion of Russian interests and policy in the crisis is found in the essay by Zbigniew Brzezinski, who shows that his distrust of Moscow has not been lessened by the end of the cold war...

...He sees Serb practice in Kosova (the Albanian spelling) as the distillation of fascism, degenerate communism, and a form of apartheid imposed by Serbs on Albanians...

...The collection gives little attention to European perceptions of the crisis and to the tensions created by the differences in perception and reaction between the United States and its Western allies...

...Buckley has brought together sixtyseven pieces from eyewitnesses, public decision makers, historians, ethicists, human-rights activists, and others...

...But it is not surprising that the opinions presented cluster around qualified acceptance of Western policy and pointed objections to its belated and inconsistent implementation...

...Since then Slobodan Milosevic has lost power in Yugoslavia and is being tried as a war criminal...