A Perfect Polemic: Blind to Reality on Kosovo

During the war over Kosovo, most criticism of NATO's efforts fell into two categories. Principled critics understood that important U.S. interests were at stake and that the cause was just but questioned the way NATO conducted the war. Rejectionist critics simply saw no reason to be concerned about the expulsion or murder of a whole people on NATO's doorstep. Since the war ended, the principled critics have largely shifted the focus of their skepticism to postwar challenges, urging the allies, appropriately, to make good on their pledge to seek a more tolerant Kosovo, a democratic Serbia, and a stable, integrated southeastern Europe. Most accept that President Clinton's strategy ultimately succeeded: ethnic cleansing was not only reversed but reversed in a way that kept NATO together, prevented the destabilization of neighboring countries, and kept Russia engaged without sacrificing NATO's stated goals.

But to the rejectionist critics, NATO's success remains an inconvenient fact that cannot be allowed to get in the way of preconceived notions. Michael Mandelbaum's article places him squarely in this category ("A Perfect Failure," September/October 1999). His broadside refuses to see the slightest redeeming feature in ending Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic's brutal and destabilizing campaign of atrocities. It is built on sweeping assertions that crumble on examination, unsupported assumptions about U.S. Kosovo policy, and predictable digressions on everything from NATO enlargement to Haiti to Iraq -- all leading to a bitter and overly personalized trashing of Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright. The only unifying principle I can discern in this attack is, "If the Clinton administration is for it, it must be wrong."

BETTER OFF AS WE ARE

Start with Mandelbaum's most fundamental assertion: that NATO failed because the people of Kosovo and the Balkans "emerged from the war considerably worse off than they had been before." This is a breakdown of logic so elemental that it boggles the mind. Imagine if Mandelbaum had been around to apply the same standard to the end of World War II: "Sure, the Nazis have been defeated," he might have written, "but millions are dead, half of Europe is under Soviet control, and most Europeans are a lot worse off than in 1939. What a perfect failure."

NATO's victory is not an occasion for joyful celebration; too many people have lost their lives and homes in Kosovo over the last year for that. And there is much hard work ahead to build a peaceful society that respects the rights of all its people. But the real question in judging success is not whether people are better off than they were before, but whether people are better off than they would have been had the West not acted. The answer to that question is clearly yes. Had NATO not acted, the Serbs would have continued their offensive; more than a million and a half Kosovars would today be sitting in camps or starving in the hills with no hope of return; Milosevic would be strengthened; and in a region with many unresolved ethnic tensions, potential dictators would have learned the lesson that massive violence will draw no response from the international community.

Mandelbaum writes that we will never know if Milosevic actually intended to expel the Kosovars until we have "access to such records as the Milosevic regime may have kept." But there is already a historical record of Milosevic's aims and methods: the record of his brutal campaigns against Croatia and Bosnia, both launched long before a single NATO bomb fell on his forces. The same paramilitary warlords who did the dirty work in those campaigns led the charge again in Kosovo, including the notorious Arkan and his "Tigers" and the "White Lions" of Serbian Deputy Prime Minister Vojislav

Seselj. What does Mandelbaum think these people were sent to Kosovo to do -- negotiate with Kosovar intellectuals over coffee and baklava? Does he really think they somehow needed to be incited by NATO to commit again the crimes they had committed so often before? Mandelbaum also conveniently forgets about the killings Serb troops committed in Kosovo well before NATO acted, including the January massacre in Racak, which took place despite the presence of monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). He forgets about the 40,000 troops and 300 tanks Milosevic massed around Kosovo as he pretended to negotiate for peace and about the tens of thousands of people they pushed from their homes in the five-day period between the end of the Rambouillet peace talks and the start of the bombing. Milosevic's goal may have been "simply" to crush the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) rebellion. But his method of crushing rebellions has long been well established: it is ethnic cleansing.

If Mandelbaum doubts all this, he can ask the very people for whom he affects such sympathy in his article: the returning Kosovar refugees, who would tell him that NATO rescued them from permanent exile. He can also ask the leaders of Romania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Albania, Bosnia, and Hungary. He would find that none of them blames NATO for Milosevic's decision to throw their region into turmoil, that all of them are grateful that NATO took a stand, and that all of them backed the alliance from beginning to end. He would find that real people get in the way of his hypothetical analysis.