Recently a reader took me to task for
inconsistency. "You were a dove during the Kosovo war," she told me.
"Why are you a hawk on Iraq?"
Madam, I'm glad you asked.
I dislike war and oppose it as a matter of course
unless I'm convinced that avoiding war is more dangerous. This
definition fits military action to depose Saddam Hussein. It didn't
fit the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's campaign against
Slobodan Milosevic and his government.
For a start, whatever Milosevic did -- and he did
plenty -- he made no attempt to develop weapons of mass destruction.
Yugoslavia never had programs for nuclear, biological, or chemical
armaments. Unlike Saddam, the Balkan dictator had no plans to use
such weapons himself or make them available to international
terrorists.
Milosevic posed no threat to the West in general or
America in particular. He had no hostile designs on any NATO
country. He didn't want to export his thuggish rule, or even his
influence, outside the borders of the former Yugoslavia.
Saddam fancies himself a modern-day Saladin with
dreams of regaining Jerusalem for the Arab nation. Milosevic had no
comparable ambitions.
What Milosevic did want was distasteful enough. The
ex-Communist dictator, reincarnated as a Serb nationalist, wanted to
hold together the reluctant nations of the moribund Yugoslav
federation by brutal force. In the course of doing so, he may well
have committed crimes against humanity in Bosnia and Kosovo, for
which he's now being tried by an international tribunal.
The ethnic Albanian-Muslim majority of Kosovo was
unhappy in Yugoslavia. Some wanted autonomy for their province; most
wanted to secede, either to establish an independent state or to
unite with others in the region to form a state of greater Albania.
The Kosovo Liberation Army employed violence to achieve this goal,
to which Milosevic responded with reprehensible measures that
included attempts at ethnic cleansing.
Nasty as this was, it posed no threat to NATO. The
West had no stake in greater Albania anymore than in greater Serbia.
The Dayton accords specifically confirmed the territorial integrity
of what remained of Yugoslavia. When NATO's intervention came, it
was based partly on humanitarian considerations, and partly on
ideals of multiculturalism, dear to Western liberals, but rather
alien to both sides of the warring parties in Kosovo.
This seemed to me inadequate as a reason for going
to war. The West was interfering in a race in which it had no horse.
NATO didn't achieve multiculturalism either: The Albanian Muslims
returned to Kosovo, then ethnically cleansed most Serbs from
it.
When NATO attacked Milosevic, the Serb leader wasn't
in breach of 18 previous UN Security Council resolutions. He hadn't
been warned to disarm at the pain of "serious consequences" as UN
Resolution 1441 warned Saddam. The attack on Milosevic, far from
being authorized, hadn't even been canvassed at the United Nations.
NATO justified its action by saying it was pointless to ask the UN
for authority because the answer would be no.
I'd be the last to suggest that a sovereign nation
(or a military alliance) should never act without the blessing of
Kofi Annan's apostolic seat in New York. I only think it's
incongruous when liberal protesters, who cheered the flower
children's war against Milosevic without any UN blessing at all, now
find 18 such blessings insufficient. This week, if the Security
Council votes down the joint U.S.-UK-Spanish proposal -- or if
France and Russia exercise their veto -- it will be the United
Nations refuting its own authority. If , or rather when, the
U.S.-led coalition attacks Iraq it will be with the specific mandate
of Resolution 1441, a mandate the leaders of NATO didn't even seek
against Yugoslavia.
I called the Kosovo conflict the flower children's
war because it was Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Gerhard Schroeder,
Javier Solana, and their friends -- politicians who emerged from a
'60s generation of confused peaceniks, eco-freaks, draft resisters,
and flower children -- who, after a life-long opposition to NATO and
everything it stood for, hijacked NATO to act out their mushy
liberal fantasies of fitting every region into the Procrustean bed
of a multicultural dream.
Some, like Mr. Blair, have since seen the light.
Others, like Mr. Schroeder, are still in the dark.
As a leader, Milosevic was a nasty piece of goods,
but compared to Saddam the one-time communist apparatchik was Mother
Teresa. To go no further, if Saddam had ever submitted to a type of
election he could actually lose -- as Milosevic did -- the question
of Iraq would have been settled 12 years go.
In any genuine election involving the whole of Iraq
-- Kurds, Shiites and all -- Saddam would have been defeated after
the Gulf War in 1991 as surely as Milosevic was defeated after the
war in Kosovo. Of course, it's hardly surprising that Saddam didn't
expose himself to Iraq's voters. If he had, instead of sitting in
Baghdad, he might occupy a cell next door to Milosevic in the Hague.
The spectre of international prosecution doesn't encourage loathsome
leaders to relinquish their office voluntarily or to submit
themselves to the gamble of elections -- but that's another
story.
