NATO air war is not the answer

By Alex Demille

America has always gotten into trouble when it tries to be the world's policeman. It means we have to pick our fights and pick them well. It means we have to know when to draft soggy peace treaties and when to fire cruise missiles. President Bill Clinton's, LAW '73, foreign policy—or lack thereof—has been called into question especially often. Why do we impose no-fly zones in Iraq to protect the Kurds while we ignore Rwanda? Why do we impose a trade embargo on Cuba while Chinese President Jiang Zemin gets to ring the bell on Wall Street amidst throngs of happy capitalists?

Now, a new bad guy looms on the horizon: Slobodan Milosevic. He's the fierce Serbian nationalist who was responsible for the offensive against Bosnia in 1995 and the subsequent murder of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Bosnians. The Dayton Peace Accords nominally ended that struggle, but Milosevic never ended his campaign of ethnic cleansing. Now he is fighting his own countrymen—the Albanian Kosovars. Serb troops are burning villages, shooting civilians, and forcing hundreds of thousands to flee their homes.

What to do? Diplomacy failed, and Milosevic refused to sign a treaty that would give Kosovo partial autonomy. He is not about to give up the huge southern portion of his country, the center of Serbian culture.

Meanwhile, Clinton scrambles for support for a "non-military operation" in Kosovo. But as the president himself admits, Americans are so apathetic that most can't even find Serbia on a map. His thinking seems to be, "Our people may be stupid, but our will is resolute." U.S.-led NATO forces plan to bomb Serbia until something happens. But all we seem to be doing is inciting violence we can't control and making enemies we don't need. Milosevic has quickened the pace of his offensive in Kosovo, while Russia has ceased all cooperation with NATO and is regularly condemning America and her allies.

This sends the message that the Serbians have two choices: make peace or watch the self-righteous alliance rain death from above. This is simply a policy of terror. Even if the NATO air raids have a practical purpose—eliminating Milosevic's ability to make war—they look bad in the eyes of the international community. NATO seems little more than a global bully, unleashing its might when its political and economic interests are at risk. We didn't do anything in Rwanda because we didn't care. Rwanda is of little political consequence, and there's not much oil in central Africa.

Serbia, on the other hand, is a political tinderbox. It was Serbia that lit the spark that started the first World War. While no one is expecting World War III anytime soon, it doesn't take a stretch of the imagination to envision the conflict in Serbia spreading to other parts of Europe. NATO nations will drop tons of explosives from the safety of their stealth fighters, but the idea of ground troops is something they would rather not think about. A ground war means casualties, and casualties mean NATO leaders had better come up with a good justification for their actions, something they are not prepared to give.

America and her allies are trying to isolate Milosevic to force him to sign the treaty, but their current strategy is doing exactly the opposite. Serbs are uniting against the U.S., strengthening Milosevic's resolve not to give in to NATO. We tried to stay on the good side of the Serb civilians, but telling a people "We have nothing against you" rings hollow when its cities are being rocked by NATO missiles.

If we really care about human suffering in the Balkans, we must do something significant to stop it, rather than launch a bombing campaign that does little more than save face for an alliance that peppered its diplomacy talks with weeks of empty threats. People are being driven from their homes. Albanians are being rounded up and shot. Death and destruction from the skies will not stop death and destruction on the ground. We must do something now to end the suffering.

Alex DeMille is a freshman in Timothy Dwight.

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