[PEN-L:6656] (Fwd) 'Degrading' America - The Nation, May 24, 1999

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Subject:                'Degrading' America - The Nation, May 24, 1999

The Nation                                                                      May 
24, 1999

'Degrading' America

        By Stephen F. Cohen

[...]

Still more, the bombing and missile attacks are growing into an all-out
assault on the economic and other civilian underpinnings of Yugoslav
society. NATO sorties are literally demodernizing Serbia. Two or three
decades of its economic development-the foundation of the elementary
well-being of ordinary men, women and children-have already been destroyed.

Nor is this high-tech savagery against a small country inadvertent or
without zealous US advocates. The NATO command's cruel euphemisms about
"collateral damage" are common military obfuscation. But there is also the
"liberal" bloodlust of the May 10 New Republic, which features an article
cheering the assault on civilians on the basis of Serbian "collective
guilt," and of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, on April 23, who
demands a "pulverizing" of the "Serbian nation" back to 1950 ("We can do
1389 too"), including Belgrade teenagers "still holding rock concerts" and
families "going out for Sunday merry-go-round rides." Such demands, widely
echoed elsewhere in the media and even by the White House press secretary,
in effect call upon the United States to commit what are legally defined as
war crimes.

The Clinton Administration bombers and their apologists must not be allowed
to represent the rest of us. They have imposed a moral barricade on the
soul of America, and to that barricade Americans must go in moral
opposition. The pulverizers' purported morality rests primarily on a
fraudulent analogy-equating Serbian treatment of Kosovar Albanians with the
Nazi extermination of Jews. The analogy wantonly debases the historical
reality and memory of the Holocaust: Milosevic's reign of terror has turned
most Kosovars into refugees fleeing toward sanctuaries; Hitler gave most
European Jews no exit and turned them into ash. And even given Milosevic's
real atrocities, what has become of the American ethical axiom, Two wrongs
don't make a right? Or the central moral lesson of this awful political
century, that ends do not justify means?

In truth, US political and military leaders now care little about the
morality (or legality) of their actions in Yugoslavia, only the
"credibility of NATO." To this we must answer: We care more about the moral
reputation of America. In large parts of the world, it too has been
pulverized, certainly "degraded" much worse than Milosevic's capabilities.

Russia, which ought to be our greatest international concern, is the most
alarming example. Not long ago, millions of its citizens, particularly
young ones upon whom the Clinton Administration based its certitudes about
a pro-American Russia, saw the United States as an exemplar of civilized
political conduct. Now most of them see us as barbarians in the sky.

We must prove they are wrong by stopping the bombing of Yugoslavia before
the necessary political settlement is even harder to achieve, before the
only peace is that of the graveyard and moral redemption is impossible.