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COMMENTARY
October 31, 2007
Remember Kosovo?
A reader writes: “Your solution to everything is, call in an air strike."Well, readers with exceptionally long memories will recall that I have not, in fact, been in favour of fighting every war offered, through my tenure in this space. I was, for instance, downright unenthusiastic about the NATO bombing of Serbia, at the end of the last century. Not because the late Slobodan Milosevic and company did not have it coming; but because it seemed the problems of ex-Yugoslavia, and even of Kosovo, were more complex than a straightforward bombing campaign would answer to; and that our pan-Western interests in both shorter and longer terms were broader than, “Serbs must not abuse Kosovars!” It looked, at the time, like a "clean kill," by Clintonesque standards. The Serbian state authorities retreated from Kosovo, leaving a number of their Serb countrymen as the new defenceless victims. The U.N. moved in to replace them, with its cumbersome and corrupt but comparatively non-murderous bureaucracy; and NATO acquired another debilitating policing function, essentially protecting the U.N.'s Interim Administration Mission. Milosevic fell from power, and was eventually dragged before an interminable war crimes tribunal in The Hague, which did not even have the power to hang him. There were almost no casualties on our side -- President Clinton could not conceive of a ground war, that would have taken some casualties, while hugely reducing the loss of human life overall -- and the dead were almost entirely Serbian civilians, whom the media, having demonized, were hardly even counting. All in all, the neatest little war since the Falklands (in which there were casualties, but almost no civilians). Nearly a decade later, we are still trying to decide what to do with Kosovo. Or rather, the decision is being made by default, and despite its terrible consequences. Kosovo will become another small dysfunctional independent state, depending abjectly on foreign aid. And with a bit of luck on the Islamist side, it may become a Palestine for Europe -- a territory moved beyond the reach of methodical outside intervention, where terrorists may enjoy safe haven. But long before that scandal has become perfectly obvious to the great and the good, they will have finished congratulating themselves on the masterpiece of diplomacy and statesmanship that delivered a tiny patch of Europe into the hands of Europe's most lethal adversary. A modest accomplishment, compared to the oft-proposed “two state solution” for Israel and Palestine. Meanwhile, we have become dimly aware that the blood feud between persons of Albanian and Serbian ethnicity had not one, but instead at least two dimensions. We have observed that the Kosovars were and remain quite as capable of doing to defenceless Serbs (to say nothing of defenceless ethnic Turks, Bosniaks, and Romani), what Serbs had been caught doing to defenceless Kosovars. This is incidentally a routine failure of the liberal imagination: to see that more than one side at a time is capable of evil. “Serbs bad, Kosovars good,” became one of those “media-gliberal” dogmas, just like the “men violent, women victims” dogma -- so untrue, that not even the opposite is correct. The present state of play, in negotiations to make Kosovo independent, is too tawdry to be really interesting, except in its immediate ramifications. We are creating problems not only with the Serbs, but with their Russian “big brothers” -- that we didn't need, given the number of other fronts on which we have no choice but to confront the latter. But the thing has the inevitability of a train wreck, given the “principled” refusal to apply the brakes, on U.N. Resolution 1244. And, fearing the immediate unpleasantness of denying the Kosovars the independence they'll declare on November 28th, more than the longer-term disaster of letting it happen, we can now expect the trains to collide on that day. The most common failure of imagination, in the politics of this world -- so common that it is not even restricted to people of the liberal political persuasion -- is the failure to grasp that things could always be worse. This cuts both ways on questions of war and peace. I am in favour of war when the reasonably foreseeable consequences of not fighting are even worse than those of the preferred mode of doing so. “No more war” is a prescription for tyranny and genocide: always has been and always will be. On the other hand, I am in favour of not intervening, when the consequences of wading in would be overall worse. That was my argument against bombing our way to Belgrade, even though I agreed the Serbs were behaving monstrously. Likewise it is my argument against, say, bombing our way into Darfur -- attractive as that proposition might seem, from a very great height. It must also be appreciated that all such decisions are messy, and necessarily messy, and horrible, and cannot be reduced to smug, trite slogans. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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