[PEN-L:6319] (Fwd) A WAR AGAINST ALL OF THE SERBS

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Date sent:              Fri, 30 Apr 1999 13:32:25 -0700
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Subject:                A WAR AGAINST ALL OF THE SERBS

The Chicago Tribune                                                     April 29, 1999

A WAR AGAINST ALL OF THE SERBS

        It's hard to justify a policy whose chief achievement — and possibly    its
main purpose — is to make life miserable, frightening and       dangerous for
people who have no control over what is going on in     Kosovo.

        By Steve Chapman

        War is to morality what the desert is to fish: a uniformly 
inhospitable clime. That's true even if the war is small and limited. 
The air campaign in Yugoslavia was conceived as a brief, surgical 
strike on Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic and his murderous 
military and paramilitary forces. But in five short weeks, it has 
expanded into a war on one group of his victims: the Serbian 
people. After bombing and re-bombing all the strictly military sites 
it could find, without inducing Milosevic to surrender, NATO 
expanded its list to include facilities whose destruction will do the 
most harm to civilians. NATO Allied Supreme Commander Gen. 
Wesley Clark, an advocate of what is known as "bringing the war 
home to Belgrade," finally got permission to take out mainstays of 
the Serbian economy, including the nation's electric power grid.
        Purely economic facilities were originally off-limits, but The 
Wall Street Journal reports that this "restriction is slipping almost 
daily." NATO is also planning a naval blockade to cut off Serbia's 
oil supplies.
        Even many of the attacks on "military" targets have had far less 
effect on Milosevic's campaign of terror than on the daily life of his 
long-suffering populace. Rail lines have been severed, industrial 
plants flattened and bridges demolished. Often, bystanders have 
found themselves classified, posthumously, as "collateral damage." 
Travel is hazardous, and just getting to work can be nearly 
impossible. Last week, at least 10 employees were killed when 
allied warplanes blasted a most unmilitary target--the official state 
television station in Belgrade. Why? Because "it has filled the 
airwaves with ... lies over the years," said a NATO spokesman. 
Well, so has Bill Clinton, but NATO hasn't fired any cruise missiles 
at the White House.
        The alliance deserves some credit for clearly going out of its 
way to minimize direct civilian casualties. It also can be excused if 
some strikes unavoidably kill non-combatants. But it's hard to 
justify a policy whose chief achievement--and possibly its main 
purpose--is to make life miserable, frightening and dangerous for 
people who have no control over what is going on in Kosovo.
        The apparent goal is to inflict so much pain as to force 
Milosevic to change his policies or to force his people to change 
rulers. "We're holding civilians hostage," says DePaul University 
political scientist Patrick Callahan, an expert on just-war theory.
        He may not get an argument from German Gen. Klaus 
Naumann, chairman of NATO's military committee, who says 
Yugoslavia has been set back economically by 10 years and figures 
that the air campaign could eventually turn the clock back half a 
century. Naumann warns that if Milosevic doesn't retreat, "he may 
end up being the ruler of rubble." NATO, in short, plans to reduce a 
country that is home to 10 million people to a huge pile of 
worthless debris.
        New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, the most fervent 
supporter of the air war, endorses that approach, telling the Serbs, 
"Every week you ravage Kosovo is another decade we will set your 
country back by pulverizing you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. 
You want 1398? We can do 1398, too." Why stop at 1398? Why 
not revive the idea, proposed but never adopted in Vietnam, of 
bombing the enemy all the way back to the Stone Age?
        If the aerial onslaught continues month after month, as 
threatened, some civilians will be blown up, but many more will be 
endangered by the secondary effects--food shortages, lack of fuel, 
loss of medicines, destruction of water, sewage and sanitation 
systems, poorly functioning hospitals, and the like. In Iraq, the 
international economic embargo already has had these 
consequences, causing some 90,000 deaths a year, by United 
Nations estimates.
        In Yugoslavia, as in Iraq, it's unlikely that punishing the villain's 
subjects will advance our larger purpose. Disrupting transportation 
hasn't stopped or even slowed the Serb offensive in Kosovo: 
Milosevic has more soldiers there today than he did when the 
bombing began. Interrupting state TV didn't weaken his grip. 
Curtailing oil supplies will cause no more than modest 
inconvenience to Serbian military forces: They'll get whatever fuel 
is available, while civilians will do without. All we are doing is 
uniting the Serbs in justified hatred of the West.
        Torturing or killing innocents in order to further a political goal 
is normally regarded as terrorism. But deliberately and needlessly 
inflicting pain on the people of Serbia, while creating conditions 
that promise to spawn disease and death, is seen by NATO as a 
perfectly legitimate strategy. Americans are highly attuned to the 
risks of losing soldiers and pilots in combat, but we need to beware 
of the bigger danger of this and every war: coming to resemble the 
enemy.