This War is
Immoral, and There Is an Alternative
By JONATHAN
POWER
April 7th, 1999
LONDON- By one of those quirks of opportunity I was able
to spend most of the morning of Good Friday talking with
Jose Saramago, last year's winner of the Nobel Prize for
Literature, near neighbour to my daughter's home in the
Canary Islands. The writer, who left his native country,
Portugal, because of the outcry over his book, "The Gospel
according to Jesus Christ", was outraged at the bombing of
Yugoslavia, angry in particular at those who tried to put a
moral gloss on it. "We are in the hands of inconsequential
people. Sensible people have little influence in the world.
We do what we can, we can't do much". "What irony", I
replied, "that an anti-Vietnam war protestor who went to
Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship should have re-ignited the
Cold War".
As usual in war time, the anti-war faction is in a
minority. It is painful to see how the relatively cultured
(never have there been so many good books read) and now very
broadly educated western peoples still rally instinctively
to their leaders' call to war, for no better reason than
their chauvinistic juices are being stirred. If only
patriotism were the last refuge of scoundrels such as
Slobodan Milosevic, but sadly all over western Europe and
North America war is making a lot of people's blood run
faster. It was the same at the onset of the war in Vietnam,
a state of affairs seemingly wiped from the consciousness of
our present leaders, as were their own early dallyings with
sex and dope and all the other trimmings of the defining
nineteen sixties and early seventies. Never has a generation
so quickly taken on the sins of the fathers, despite having
been nurtured on their mistakes. Are we no better than those
human beings whom Erasmus chided for being worse than
animals "who don't in packs hunt their own kind"?
The lesson of millenia of war-making is that it doesn't
take us very far: that the cost in the blood of our loved
ones is rarely commensurate with the outcome. Who today can
put up a case for the First World War or Vietnam or the
three wars between India and Pakistan? World War 2 still
remains the only defensible war of this bloody century (in
which the Anglo-Saxons have fought more than anyone
else)--because of the concentration camps which, in point of
fact, were nothing to do with the initial reasons for
declaring war. Hitler at first was merely applying a
larger-than-life version of the Wilsonian principle of
self-determination for German minorities outside the Reich.
Only when it came to Hitler trying to reclaim Danzig and the
West Prussian corridor from Poland did Britain say
"enough".
President Bill Clinton, Prime Minister Tony Blair and,
not least, "Green" German foreign minister Joschka Fischer,
have all in their time struggled against the kind of
war-making they are now authorizing. But once in office they
have discarded their beliefs in the face of the juggernaut
of "professional" foreign policy advice, over-awed by the
sophistication, knowledge and self-confidence of this class
when meeting them face to face in a sustained way for
perhaps the first time in their lives. It is true that the
intellectuals of the foreign policy establishment, whether
they be Zbigniew Brzezinski, Pierre Lellouche or Pauline
Neville-Jones, are no fools. There is nothing wrong with the
size of their brains or their skill (the "fatal felicity")
in presentation. Yet they are all profoundly both amoral and
philosophically short-sighted. Amoral because although they
may appeal to moral sensibilities by underlining the
humanitarian crisis brought on by the growing numbers of
refugees, they discount the appalling consequences of going
to war--the obliteration of much of Vietnam and Cambodia,
leading in the latter case to creating the conditions in
which the genocidal Khmer Rouge thrived, or the suffering of
the children in contemporary Iraq. Not to mention, with the
fall out from Vietnam, the social disturbances that are
still at work in the U.S. today--the drug taking culture,
the destabilised families, the sophistication of the gun
culture, all of which, of course, had antecedents but which
were given an enormous boost by the war.
For all their academic self-discipline, these foreign
policy professionals and their friends in the
military-industrial complex and the intelligence services
are often incapable of taking the long view either forward
or historical. Just to take the most obvious casualty of the
war with Belgrade--can there be any good reason for
discarding the central and most important policy aim of post
Cold War Europe, to integrate Russia fully into the western
world?
How do we get out of the hole we have dug for ourselves?
The first law of holes is to stop digging. Nato would
compound the mistakes it has already made if it were to
commit ground troops--although if helping refugees were its
real concern that would actually make much more practical
sense than the Yugoslav-nation-uniting aerial
bombardment.
The second would be to understand that a new peaceful
Kosovo, where the lion and the lamb lie down together, is no
longer feasible. We must accept, as we once were forced to
accept for Cyprus, a divided Kosovo. We have to work with
Albania--and Macedonia too--once a divorce of the Serb and
Albanian areas has been agreed, to build a greater Albania,
as an Albanian rump in ex-Kosovo is not a viable national
state.
Given Albania's quasi-anarchic, precarious state of being
this will be difficult. If the prize for Albania is a
greater Albania then they should be prepared in return to
allow themselves to be run for some years as a European
Union protectorate. The vast sums of money that Nato today
spends on a war should go instead to putting a new Albania
on its feet. There is a precedent: Bosnia today is
effectively an international protectorate.
Of course, Milosevic may get too much if we compromise,
and also live to do damage another day. But we always have
to keep his malevolence in perspective, asking ourselves a
hundred times over, do the means justify the end? Are we
making a bad situation worse? What price are we paying for
the policies we self-righteously pursue? And, most
important, how what we do will look in the cold light of
twenty years hence?
Copyright © 1999 By JONATHAN POWER
I can be reached by phone +44 385 351172 and e-mail:
JonatPower@aol.com
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