The moral justifications of war against Milosevic
Walzer, Michael
AT THIS writing, the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia continues, and the Serbian destruction of Kosovar society also continues. Yes, the Serbian campaign must have been planned before the...
...But this isn't our building...
...Or rather, the price of sitting and watching is a kind of moral corruption that leftists (and others too) must always resist...
...This is an advance for Americans, since our political leaders cannot send soldiers into battle without convincing the country that the war is morally or politically necessary and that victory requires, and is worth, American lives...
...But they cannot claim, we cannot accept, that those lives are expendable, and these not...
...From a moral/political perspective, I don't think it matters much if this particular fire isn't dangerous to me and mine...
...And he should have been stopped by the European powers...
...I don't know what the expectations of NATO commanders were last March...
...You can't kill unless you are prepared to die, No doubt, that's a hard sentence —especially so because its two pronouns don't have the same reference (as they did when Albert Camus first made this argument, writing about assassination): the first "you" refers to the leaders of NATO, the second to the children of ordinary citizens...
...the British armed Tito's partisans...
...Germany fought a war in Yugoslavia...
...there is no argument about who can do it...
...Austro-Hungary carved out an empire there...
...That's what firefighters are for...
...But this is not a possible moral position...
...Americans can't be the world's firefighters...
...Many people on the left yearn for a world where the UN, and only the UN, would act in all such cases...
...Nor am I convinced that the world would be improved by having only one agent of international rescue...
...Of course, every fire has a complicated social, political, and economic background...
...Obviously, U.S...
...Some of these were unilateral military acts, some (the Nigerian intervention, for example, and now the campaign in Kosovo) were authorized by regional alliances...
...The truth remains, however, what it was before the inventions: soldiers with guns, going from house to house in a mountain village, can't be stopped by smart bombs...
...Still, these political leaders cannot launch a campaign aimed to kill Serbian soldiers, and sure to kill others too, unless they are prepared to risk the lives of their own soldiers...
...That doesn't make us the world's firefighters...
...More than that, we said, we can't do...
...But the countries involved in the NATO intervention are committed, for now at least, not to send in soldiers with guns...
...They can fight a war without using armies at all and so without convincing the country of the war's necessity...
...Why should we send in our firefighters...
...If you want to stop Milosevic, you can argue about how to do it...
...There is a long history of military intervention and diplomatic intrigue...
...I can't just sit and watch...
...national security is not at stake in Kosovo (nor is the security of any of the European nations, but I will focus now on the United States), and so it isn't possible to mobilize citizens to DISSENT / Summer 1999 5 defend their homes and families...
...But once the burning begins something less than full understanding is necessary: a will to put out the fire—to find firefighters, close by if possible, and give them the support they need...
...But though the United States is still, even increasingly, an inegalitarian society, no soldier's mother or father is without political clout...
...The Balkans is a European mess...
...They don't meet the requirements of either politics or morality...
...I suppose that had we been visibly ready in February or March to go into Kosovo on the ground, full-scale ethnic cleansing might have been forestalled...
...maybe NATO will eventually decide to send in troops...
...But it is true for now that no Kosovo intervention is possible without strong American involvement...
...But we are not ready to send American soldiers into battle...
...The promise wasn't made to Milosevic, obviously, but to the citizens of all the NATO countries: we won't send your children into battle...
...We are ready, apparently, to kill Serbian soldiers...
...But today Europe as a military force exists only in alliance with the United States...
...They can only be stopped by soldiers with guns...
...That's not an eternal truth, and people who believe in international pluralism and a balance of power can hope for the emergence of an independent European Union with an army that it can put into action on its own...
...It was the Vietnamese who stopped Pol Pot in Cambodia, the Tanzanians who stopped Idi Amin in Uganda, the Indians who ended the killing in East Pakistan, the Nigerians who went into Liberia...
...In some parts of Kosovo the harsh realities of ethnic cleansing were already visible before the decision to hit the Serbs with missiles and smart bombs was made...
...It would be nice to understand it all...
...This promise was probably a political prerequisite of the intervention, and it is only after a month and more of bombing has failed to move the Serbs that political leaders are trying to crawl out from under it...
...MICHAEL WALZER is co-editor of Dissent...
...There are good democratic and even egalitarian reasons for this...
...And given the Serbian record in Bosnia, and the mobilization of soldiers on the borders of Kosovo, and the refugees already on the move, military intervention seems to me entirely justified, even obligatory...
...those aren't our people...
...Are countries with armies whose soldiers cannot be put at risk morally or politically qualified to intervene...
...we are ready to risk what is euphemistically called "collateral damage" to Serbian, and also to Kosovar, civilians...
...But the initial form of the intervention raises a hard question...
...An easier path, which leads, however, to a moral anomaly: a new and dangerous inequality makes its appearance...
...We have armies that can't, or can't easily, be used...
...ordinary citizens in the United States and Europe were certainly led to expect that the bombing would solve the problem fairly quickly...
...Deterrence isn't effective unless the threat is plausible, and it's not clear at this moment that any of the Western democracies can pose a plausible threat...
...Once again, our faith in airpower is revealed as a kind of idolatry—we glorify the power of our own inventions...
...Maybe the bombing will eventually bring Milosevic down...
...They can try, they ought to try, to reduce those risks as much as they can...
...Well, I have no love of battles, and I fully accept the obligation of democratically elected leaders to safeguard the lives of their own people, all of them...
...the Italians invaded Albania...
...This is a familiar argument, and not implausible, even though it often comes from people who don't seem to believe in putting out fires at all...
...IF THE building is burning, and there are people inside, firefighters must risk their lives to get them out...
...But given the oligarchic structure of the Security Council, it's not possible to count on this kind of action: in most of the cases on my list, UN intervention would have been vetoed by one of the oligarchs...
...But that is too easy...
...Even with a just cause and the best of intentions, how can we use military force in someone else's country unless we are prepared to deal with the unintended consequences of our actions...
...But there is something wrong here, for neither of these ways of helping is helpful enough...
...I have heard it especially from people on the left (not only in America), and it is to them, especially, that I want to respond...
...We engaged ourselves, morally and politically, to provide the Kosovars with a technological fix, and if the fix didn't work, or didn't work quickly enough, we were ready (actually, as it turned out, not quite ready) to provide them with bread, blankets, and bandages...
...But the brutal emptying of Kosovo in the weeks since is still in some sense a response to NATO's air campaign, and the speed with which it has been carried out is obviously a response—an effort to create facts on the ground before (as Milosevic apparently believes) the bombing stops and negotiations resume...
...In other countries, in earlier times, wars in faraway places were fought by the lower orders or by mercenaries, people without political clout...
...The men and women in the burning building are probably better served if they can appeal to more than a single set of firefighters...
...But there is an easier path for these same leaders...
...Yes, the Serbian campaign must have been planned before the bombing began...
...Indeed, Milosevic should have been stopped years ago, when the first reports of ethnic cleansing came out of Bosnia...
...But what is most important for the future of the left is that our people, our activists and 6 DISSENT / Summer 1999 supporters around the world, see the fires for what they are: deliberately set, the work of arsonists, aimed to kill, terribly dangerous...
...the logistics of moving forty thousand soldiers are immensely complex...
...Ethnic cleansing is perfectly consistent with the air campaign, and is partly its consequence...
Vol. 46 • July 1999 • No. 3
