PEACE IN OUR TIME
KAPLAN, LAWRENCE F.
PEACE IN OUR TIME by Lawrence F. Kaplan THE LILLIPUTIANS HAVE US ON THE RUN. Worse, they're crowing about it. Saddam Hussein's lieutenants tweak the Clinton administration mercilessly, boasting...
...Convinced by the president's hesitation to use force on the Korean Peninsula in 1994 that he will not do so in 1998, North Korea recently attempted to launch its own Sputnik and once again denied inspectors access to nuclear installations...
...Opting for shame, he said, it would get war...
...The president no doubt understands this sensitivity to reflect a heightened moral awareness...
...It owes something to the ineptitude of the White House national-security team, but more to President Clinton's tendency to advertise his fear of wielding military power as if indecision were a virtue...
...Nor is the script, whereby bluster precedes diplomatic carrots and capitulation, unique to the standoff with Saddam Hussein...
...I didn't want some person who was a nobody to me, but who may have a family to feed and a life to live and probably had no earthly idea what else was going on there, to die needlessly...
...In the Balkans, for instance, American timidity incurred a much higher cost than the alternative: Two years of fruitless shuttle diplomacy, coupled with hollow military threats, conduced to a near crack-up of the NATO alliance, an emboldened Slobodan Milosevic, and the needless death of over 100,000 Bosnians...
...An earlier generation would have acted sooner...
...There remain values and aims worth defending, and occasions where a failure to confront malfeasance by force, when one has the means to do so, is plainly unjustifiable...
...In that case, the president at first evaded military action by adopting his predecessor's argument that the bloodletting there was a European problem, what secretary of state Warren Christopher called "a humanihundreds, perhaps even thousands, of lives...
...Taking seriously the now-derided lessons of Munich, foreign-policy makers of the postwar era were persuaded that aggression, if left unchecked, would invite emulation...
...The administration's reluctance to acknowledge this costly truth explains, in large measure, why it finds itself lurching from crisis to crisis, rolled by one tinpot dictator after another...
...retreat...
...Which brings us back to Munich...
...White House rhetoric notwithstanding, in neither of these instances did an American decision to defer military action "defuse" a crisis...
...Lawrence F. Kaplan is a fellow in strategic studies at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C...
...The alacrity with which friend and foe ignore the will of the Clinton administration is, of course, hardly news...
...But these are practical arguments...
...But some ends do require violent means...
...If so, his scruples are misapplied...
...The administration's unwillingness to prevent mass murder in Bosnia was such a case...
...Even in conflicts widely seen as legitimate, he seems consumed by the question of who may be killed in the pursuit of a particular aim...
...Likewise rewarded for his execrable conduct, Saddam Hussein grows bolder with every U.S...
...North Korean representatives dismiss the United States as "a bluffing paper tiger," cautioning that President Clinton "is seriously getting on our nerves...
...That conviction pervades White House thinking...
...To judge by his words and deeds, President Clinton defers more to moral considerations when he chooses to back down in times of crisis...
...White House officials announced that they were "going to give it to [Saddam] with both barrels" and that "appeasement is not an option for the United States," then proceeded to embrace precisely that option, throwing open the floodgates to future challenges...
...This is a president, after all, who declares at every turn that "diplomacy is always preferable to using force," that averting confrontation is always "the best outcome...
...Its propitiation of Saddam Hussein is another...
...So, too, in all likelihood, will we...
...A contemporary of Neville Chamberlain remarked that England confronted a choice between war and shame...
...I was here on this island up till 2:30 in the morning trying to make absolutely sure that at that chemical plant there was no night shift," President Clinton confided to an audience on Martha's Vineyard after ordering a missile attack against Sudan...
...Whatever the explanation, this much is evident: The president appears not to accept that sometimes both practical and moral considerations demand a determined use of force...
...Thus, the New York Times reported that it was the possibility of thousands of Iraqi casualties that persuaded him to retreat from the brink on November 14...
...Consider, then, where this maxim has taken us...
...Most recently, there was the latest fiasco in the Persian Gulf, where the administration once again found itself caught in a bind of its own devising...
...Saddam Hussein's lieutenants tweak the Clinton administration mercilessly, boasting that Iraq "no longer pays attention to these empty threats...
...For their successors, however, the lessons of Munich were long ago superseded by the lessons of Vietnam, which advise that almost no circumstance warrants the large-scale use of force...
...Yet it is hardly shared by America's adversaries, who still subscribe to the older verities, measuring a nation's power by its ability to compel others to do its will...
...It was apparent in the administration's two-year effort to avoid using force in Bosnia...
...The same mindset underlies the administration's preference, when it does use force, for precision-guided-missile strikes intended to hurt things, not people...
...To be sure, the use of force carries with it the possibility of unnecessary destruction, and it is better to be too cautious in using it than too free...
...Serb officials politely decline to halt their depredations in Kosovo, explaining that the United States "won't dare to bomb us...
...Rather, an accounting was merely postponed...
...Indeed, the administration had already traveled this route with Iraq last February and, before that, in 1994, 1995, and 1996...
...For at some point, we pass a threshold where a resort to violence becomes the lesser evil, ineffectual diplomacy the greater...
...These regimes discern in the president's temporizing over military action not evidence of his humanity, but sheer weakness and irresolution, a green light to flout previously enforced norms of international conduct...
Vol. 4 • November 1998 • No. 12
