And now:Ish <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Date: Tue, 6 Apr 1999 23:28:29 +0100 (BST)
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Rob Green)
Message-Id: <v01540b08010246a2d174@[193.149.75.216]>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Precedence: bulk
Subject: Jim Carroll column
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
A lesson unlearned: War makes things worse
By James Carroll, 04/06/99
`The problem after a war is with the victor. He thinks he has just
proved that war and violence pay.
Who will now teach him a lesson?'' This question was put,
prophetically, in 1941 by A.J. Muste of
the Fellowship of Reconciliation (Howard Zinn is my source). The United
States was the victor,
first after World War II, and then after the Cold War. Each time it
seemed that the usefulness of
''war and violence'' had been vindicated. No one was there to teach us
otherwise.
After World War II, we were left with the illusion that bombing from
the air is a good way to
conduct warfare. Because the Nazis were so evil, and because we were
immediately thrust into a
dangerous contest with the Soviet Union, we never confronted the moral
meaning of our policy of
saturation bombing of cities. Our pursuit of victory had rolled into a
quest for vengeance, pure and
simple, which is why the vast majority of civilians killed by Allied
bombing died needlessly in the last
months of the war - a crime that was never adjudicated. The postwar
strategic bombing survey
exposed the limited military value of bombing, but the lack of an
equivalent moral survey left us
clinging to the myth that we could freely hurl thunderbolts from the
sky, like God.
After the Cold War, too, we failed to learn about the limited
usefulness of violence, even nuclear
violence. Hadn't our readiness to hurl the ultimate thunderbolt brought
us victory? We convinced
ourselves that it was the 1980s arms buildup that finally defeated the
Soviet Union. Thus we refused
to turn away from the narrowest notion of national security. Without a
military rival, we entered an
arms race with ourselves. Instead of dismantling NATO as an outmoded
structure of Cold War, we
expanded it, not imagining that such a reinvestment of treasure and
hope in war readiness would
bring its own momentum toward new conflict. Then we resuscitated ''Star
Wars,'' sending a sharp
signal around the world that missiles must still define national
self-worth.
Believing that military solutions are the only ones to trust, we
failed, when faced with the real
challenge of Slobodan Milosevic, to mobilize the moral force of true
diplomacy or serious economic
pressure aimed directly at him and his clique. Then, two weeks ago, in
a culmination of such
choices, we put our absolute faith in bombing again. And look what
happened. At last the
thunderbolt illusion seems to have burst.
A.J. Muste's question remains: Who will teach us the lesson that ''war
and violence'' make things
worse, not better? The answer is not Milosevic, whose faith in killing
exceeds ours. The teacher,
this time, is that mass of refugees who have been driven from their
homes by a perverse
combination of NATO bombing and Serbian brutality. Perhaps never before
have the limits of
warfare been made more apparent more quickly or more dramatically. At
the beginning of the
NATO bombing campaign, as I observed a week ago, the watch word was
''credibility'' - a sure
signal that bombs would be dropped to protect NATO's self-image instead
of the Kosovar
Albanians. Now we know that even US intelligence warned that bombing
might unleash Serb
forces against civilians, as it did. Their safety was never our
priority.
Now the word that defines NATO's purpose is ''victory.'' Half-panicked
NATO leaders speak of
doing whatever is necessary to ''win.'' Once more, the needs of the
men, women, and children in
the fields and valleys of Albania, at the borders of Macedonia, and on
the roads of Kosovo are
being given short shrift. ''Victory'' is the code word for vengeance.
Settling the score with the
ruthless Milosevic is taking priority over saving the lives of the
innocent masses. Their plight, finally,
must be our teacher here.
How do NATO choices affect the real situation of real people on the
ground? NATO airstrikes are
what enable Milosevic to keep his criminal program of ethnic cleansing
going. That is the first
reason to stop the bombing. The life-and-death needs of hundreds of
thousands of refugees must
be NATO's absolute priority. That is a second reason to stop the
bombing. NATO's enraged
determination to punish Serbia for the humiliation it has suffered
turns a moral mistake into a chosen
moral catastrophe, which is a third reason to stop the bombing. Stop
the bombing now.
Everything has changed. Once again, war has proven its
unpredictability. The motives, strategies,
and even good intentions of two weeks ago are irrelevant now. Questions
of winning and losing no
longer count. All NATO talk of ''perseverance,'' and ''persistence,''
and ''steadiness,'' disguise a
terrible failure that has already occurred.
At bottom, it is the failure to learn the one lesson this century has
been trying to teach. NATO must
face the tragic fact that it has inadvertently joined forces with the
heinous Milosevic in a war against
an innocent people. Whether Milosevic stops his part of that war will
not matter until NATO stops
its part. A million shivering, starving, frightened people are asking
us to forgo saving face for the
sake of saving them. Stop the bombing!
James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe.
This story ran on page A19 of the Boston Globe on 04/06/99.
� Copyright 1999 Globe Newspaper Company.
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Commander Robert D Green, Royal Navy (Retired)
Chair, World Court Project UK
NZ: Disarmament & Security Centre UK: 2 Chiswick House
PO Box 8390 High Street
Christchurch Twyford
Aotearoa/New Zealand Berkshire RG10 9AG
Tel/Fax: (+64) 3 348 1353 Tel/Fax: (+44) 1189 340258
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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Tsonkwadiyonrat (We are ONE Spirit)
Unenh onhwa' Awayaton
http://www.tdi.net/ishgooda/
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