MAIN EVENT. A Good Place to Get Started --- a.k.a "Table of Contents"
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MAIN EVENT. A Good Place to Get Started --- a.k.a "Table of Contents" |
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Journalists ought to concentrate on the salient and leave housekeeping to the historians. It will be many decades before the outcome of the NATO air assault on Kosovo can be fully assessed, and to attempt anything other than a survey of the salient before a single Serb soldier pulls out is nothing but self-promoting grandiloquence, already apparent in the commenting cadre.
First, it is a commonplace that the poor suffer most from war and it might be true in this case too, but what kept support for the air assault alive just long enough to trigger the train of events which led to the outline of the peace agreement was the sight of "people like us" on the television.
These were not warring African tribesmen and their desperate families, nor were they the anonymous inhabitants of the South-East Asian jungle, they were middle class, English speaking doctors, engineers and middle managers, turned out of their houses in well tailored clothes which tattered and splattered in fields of exile before our very eyes. They could not make us make our soldiers fight but we might have been forced to that extreme to save NATO's reputation.
Which leads to a discomfortingly untidy conclusion that what was started in an unusual, late but hopefully propitious outburst of united moral outrage became a matter of collective credibility; NATO went to war for the Kosovans but what mattered more as time went by was NATO itself.
It is not clear why it went to war for the Kosovans rather than for the Croatians or Bosnians just as it is not clear why we went to war for Poland rather than the Sudetenland but part of the reason, obscured by immediate events, was the growing recognition that Milosevic unchecked would stop at nothing, destabilising NATO's Southern flank. It would be cynical to say that the moral crusade was a pretext or even convenient, but at least it forced NATO to do what it ought to do; separating the moral outrage from strategic prudence is impossible.
It will be some time before tactical means, as opposed to strategic ends, can be assessed. The immediate feeling of shame that no NATO soldier died in a just cause will lead us to question in what circumstances democratic NATO will ever use ground forces.
Armies, as we know them are at least, are in danger, the extent of which will only become clear when air strike effectiveness can be fully assessed.
Most of the West's media was so busy reporting NATO bombing errors that it hardly noticed bombing successes.
Without a better understanding of the impact of the bombing it is folly to assert, as is almost universally the case amongst commentators, that it was the threat of ground troops which drove Milosevic finally to accept a peace he was offered before the bombing started. If air assault proves to have been disproportionately expensive and its inaccuracies disproportionately bad for public relations, and if it can ultimately be shown that the threat of ground troops was the clinching factor then armies will be safe for as long as they are confined to deterrence. The crunch will come when bluff is called and a threat of ground force is either converted into action or ignominiously declined.
The inquest into the waging of war by democratic powers in alliance will be much more tangled. By and large the media had a "good war" and was largely unmolested by politicians, but how could NATO have sustained a ground offensive if all the reports back home were confined to setbacks and never reported successes? This is as bad as state controlled media doing the opposite. Without a much more sophisticated reporting ethic, now virtually impossible in the context of global media empires, it is difficult to see how politicians and generals can be expected to operate their own sophisticated ethic in information disclosure.
One particularly glaring omission during the conflict was routine reporting of the politics of Serbia and Montenegro.
Milosevic is no doubt a wicked man but he is not a monster in the classic sense simply because, like Hitler before him (and this comparison is carefully made) he operates within a receptive political and moral environment.
Indeed, one of Milosevic's chief troubles, hardly reported until the Serb Parliament voted on peace terms yesterday (3 June, 99) was trying to survive when 1/3 of the Parliament is more extremely nationalist than he. So when he takes the blame for failure it is by no means certain that someone more doveish will succeed him; quite the opposite might happen in a culture which thrives on victimhood.
Yet the most likely outcome, on the basis of past experience, is that the prospect of massive assistance with reconstruction will suffocate the nationalist extremes.
Conducting an air assault on Kosovo might have been one of the stranger means to the achievement of a pan-Balkan settlement within a NATO and European Union framework but that will be the ultimate outcome because that is what the economics dictates. Which is why the status of the erstwhile gangsters of the KLA and the exact legal status of Kosovo hardly matter.
It has taken ten years for Western Europe to understand the political imperatives of the case for stabilising the Balkans but retreat is now unlikely. UK Prime Minister Blair may have made his peace with President Clinton but he, as the chief hawk and self-appointed provider of moral fibre to the Alliance, will be inclined to place more emphasis on the new EU mechanism for foreign policy co-ordination in the person of Xavier Solana and less on the mythical special relationship.
As for the people of Kosovo and Serbia, they will endure short-term suffering buoyed up by medium-term hope. If Germany, after six years of world war, could be rebuilt within a decade half a century ago, the current estimate of two decades for the reconstruction is plainly unhistoric and innumerate. The EU will prosper economically from the peace as it has prospered politically in the latter stages of the war, the central question now is whether the United States and the United Nations can come to terms with the new reality.
This is Mr. Carey's ninth piece for the G21. His most recent is on the election of Israeli Prime Minister Barak. Kevin Carey can be reached via e-mail at "humanity@atlas.co.uk".
© 1999, GENERATOR 21.
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