Abstract
The United States went to war in March, with the help of its NATO allies, against Slobodan Milosevic, the president of Yugoslavia. Milosevic is a classic rotten apple. As journalist Dick Longworth notes in his essay beginning on page 28, Milosevic has attempted to carry the ethnic antagonisms of the Middle Ages into the twenty-first century. His latest outrage: “cleansing” the Yugoslav republic of Kosovo of Albanian blood.
After seven years of temporizing with Milosevic, and after treating him as a man who could be trusted, NATO finally had had enough. The NATO bombing campaign began March 24 and it continued until June 10. As the Bulletin went to press in early June, it looked as if the first phase of the NATO-Yugoslav war had come to an end. Although peace was not quite at hand, it was perhaps in sight.
In academicese, the war was problematic. As Longworth notes, the United Nations was bypassed and the sovereignty of Yugoslavia violated. NATO simply appointed itself as Europe's policeman. What gave NATO that right? Answers to that question are often unpersuasive. And yet, I am among the many in the West who believe that something had to be done about Milosevic. More than a half century after the end of World War II, the world can no longer tolerate state leaders who brutalize and kill their own people. (And yes, I do not know where to draw the line regarding where and when to intervene and when not to. I suppose something akin to Realpolitik still determines that one.)
But one aspect of the U.S./NATO war is particularly troubling. It was designed by the Clinton administration to minimize U.S./NATO casualties, perhaps at the expense of the Kosovar Albanians and Serb civilians. I am not sympathetic to the commonly made leftish argument that it is somehow immoral for the United States to minimize casualties to its own forces. If the United States must go to war, it has a duty to minimize the harm that may befall its own men and women, insofar as possible.
And yet, in the United States at least, this was a largely invisible war. It was well covered by elite newspapers and magazines, to be sure, and it consumed hours of tv news time and it animated legions of Sunday-morning talking heads. But insofar as ordinary people were concerned, I have the sense that hardly anyone cared much about the war, one way or the other. It was over there, it didn't affect the stock market, and no Americans were being killed.
The White House ruled out the use of ground troops early on and the air campaign was conceived as a relatively immaculate operation. Some Serbian civilians inevitably would be killed, of course–unfortunate “collateral damage.” But if the United States were lucky, and if the planes flew high enough, no American forces would be killed.
So was it written, so was it done: no combat deaths as of early June. That says a lot about the quality of U.S. weapons and the training of the men and women who use them. But immaculate war-making has a vaguely chilling side, too. Has the United States progressed to the point where it can use devastating force against certain other nations with little or no risk? Is it now possible to prosecute “small” wars and interventions with scarcely any casualties, and with hardly anyone back home caring? Has the United States become too efficiently powerful for its own good–or for the good of the world?
Or will the United States use that good ol' Yankee efficiency with restraint, wisdom, compassion, humanity–and a little more restraint? We shall learn the answer to that in the next century.