News May 14, 1999
URL: <http://www.salon.com/news/feature/1999/05/14/left>
Give war a chance
American leftists could learn something from their European counterparts
-- war is the only way to stop Milosevic.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Ian Williams
While most of the world credits -- or blames -- President Clinton for
NATO's strike against Slobodan Milosevic in Yugoslavia, the real force
behind the decision to put a stop to ethnic cleansing has been the
social-democratic leadership of Western Europe. Europe's shift to the
left has been overlooked as an explanation for the decision to stand up
to Milosevic.
Earlier this decade, as Vukovar, Sarajevo and Srebrenica were suffering,
most of the major powers in Europe -- Britain, France, Germany and Italy
-- were controlled by conservative governments not always noted for their
internationalism or human rights concern. They dithered over what to do
about the Balkans, as did their American counterpart, President Bush.
Now all those countries have elected social-democratic or Labor
governments, and the world is finally taking steps to stop Milosevic. If
not for the leftward move in Europe, Madeleine Albright would stamp her
feet, the U.S. would act scary, the Serbs would act scared, the Kosovars
would be sold down the river and Clinton would declare diplomatic
victory.
Leftists in Europe and the U.S. are opposed to Clinton's handling of the
conflict but for different reasons. Many Europeans, particularly
Britains, think the prolonged NATO bombing is a Clintonian evasion of the
need for ground troops to finish the job. Meanwhile the American left
wrings its hands about Kosovar Albanians, but opposes all armed
intervention to help them. In Thursday's New York Times, a coalition of
peace groups led by the California Peace Action Education Fund took out a
full-page ad decrying the bombing of Belgrade.
While a small minority of reflexively anti-American European liberals and
leftists still see the New World Order looming in the dust of the NATO
bombing, others see that Clinton has been dragged into this by allies who
actually meant it when they said that the Serbs had gone too far this
time.
Since NATO runs on consensus, the new European leftist governments were
instrumental in dragging stragglers toward a military response once
diplomacy failed. Their socialism may be attenuated in this era of global
capital, but they have enough of an ideological core left to do the right
thing, without waiting for focus groups to digest the latest CNN clips of
refugees. And they have made it clear that their idea of doing the right
thing means getting Milosevic out of Kosovo, if not out of office.
One can see the contrast between the right and left in the United Kingdom
when looking at the positions of Douglas Hurd, the British Tory and
former Foreign Secretary and Robin Cook, his Labor successor. Hurd
famously dismissed ending the arms embargo for the Bosnians because it
would "simply level the killing fields." Hurd cared about level cricket
fields, of course, but as long as it was only Balkan people on the
killing fields, why bother? In contrast to their conservative
predecessors -- and indeed in stark contrast to President Clinton --
shortly after taking office the British Labor government ensured that its
troops involved in NATO peacekeeping forces in Bosnia actively pursued
indicted war criminals, even at the risk of sustaining British
casualties.
It does help that European leaders generally have more popular support
for military action than their American counterpart. That includes a
greater acceptance that military involvement may lead to casualties.
Europeans did not have to wait for "Saving Private Ryan" to restore a
collective memory of World War II. Many of them remember that pandering
to bloodthirsty dictators only postpones and prolongs the time of
reckoning. Blair evoked those memories last week when he said that the
Kosovar Albanians "are the victims of the most appalling acts of
barbarism and cruelty Europe has seen since World War II. We teach our
children never to forget what happened in that war. We must not allow
ourselves to become desensitized to accept what is happening in Kosovo
today."
In that vein, many Europeans calculate how much blood would have been
saved if NATO had acted resolutely against Milosevic when the genocide
against the Bosnians began in the early 1990s. And despite the best
efforts of British conservatives, it is difficult to be isolationist in
Europe. Britain and France declared war in 1939 on behalf of Poland, and
most British and French still remember with some gratitude the belated
arrival of American forces after 1941.
The Rambouillet talks, people forget, were about Milosevic's cynical
breach of the pledges he had made last October, which were the result of
negotiations, of course, and which had been enshrined in a binding
Security Council resolution -- the latest of more than 50 against him.
After promising to move troops out, he moved in some 20,000 more and
killed more than 2,000 people, making hundreds of thousands of others
homeless, and incidentally, chased unarmed Organization for Security and
Cooperation in Europe monitors away when they tried to investigate the
massacres. Only after its bluff was called did NATO take action. If NATO
had been serious about its threats, ground forces would already have been
introduced.
At the recent NATO summit in Washington, Tony Blair put pressure on
fellow NATO allies to toughen up the response and move toward ground
troops. (Blair once denounced me to a meeting of Labor Party
parliamentary candidates as a "wild man from Liverpool, badmouthing
President Clinton," after I had told him in 1992 that Clinton would sell
his grandmother on the streets to gain office. I feel doubly vindicated,
since Blair is now implying that he thinks his chum Bill is too wobbly
for words.)
The handwringers on both sides of the Atlantic call for NATO to stop the
bombing and, almost as an afterthought, for Milosevic to cease and desist
from his campaign against the Kosovars. They overlook the fact that the
bombing began precisely because the Serbs wouldn't stop killing, even as
the OSCE monitors looked on.
Laughably, the harder left on both sides regard Serbia as some form of
beleaguered workers' state facing off against global imperialism. Some
are outright apologists for Serb atrocities. At the New York Socialist
Scholars Conference this year, one or two referred approvingly to
Milosevic's socialist credentials. Others have suddenly become big fans
of the United Nations, insisting that NATO should have waited for U.N.
endorsement of action against Yugoslavia, even though most of them
opposed the United Nations when the Security Council endorsed the Gulf
War.
In the New York Times ad taken out by the CPAEF, the group listed a
possible violation of the U.N. Charter as one of their top ten reasons to
stop the bombing of Yugoslavia. They also pointed to the "double
standard" the bombing represents, pointing out the "brutal war" NATO
member Turkey has been waging against its Kurdish population.
Of course, loony-left voices are much stronger within the American left,
which has been pushed to the margins of American political discourse
because of its failure to develop a successful mass electoral movement.
Its members occupy their time with bizarre and quixotic causes: Mumia Abu
Jamal -- his trial may have been a travesty, but his icon status within
the American left makes no sense -- and support of Milosevic.
In Europe there is a genuine mass democratic left, with solid
achievements in securing universal access to health care, education and
social benefits. It has had power and responsibility, and so avoids the
twin perils of what passes for the American left: Clinton's covert
Republicanism vs. half-witted impotent sloganeering.
The European left is far from perfect. Tony Blair has learned too much
from his American "Third Way" cousin when it comes to domestic politics.
The British government's arms deals with Indonesia show it is not above
reproach. But in comparison to the current American left, even New Labor
looks radical and refreshing. And there is no doubt for whom the Kosovars
would vote at the moment. salon.com | May 14, 1999
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