Michael Hirsh At War with Ourselves, Why America Is Squandering Its Chance to Build a Better World (2004)

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. )�� On March 15, 1999, the KLA finally gave a grudging, condi-tional okay to the plan.That was a small victory, but at a huge price: TheU.S.had effectively made allies of a group of guerrillas whose goals itactively and resolutely opposed. The price of saving Rambouillet, con-ceded one U.S.official right afterward, was to tie ourselves more andmore closely to the Albanians.Milosevic could scarcely believe the Americans were taking the side ofa group that they, like him, once dismissed as terrorists.He refused tomake a deal.He was then subjected to a seventy-eight-day bombing cam-paign that left NATO in tenuous command of Kosovo for what may wellbe decades.A year and a half later, the weakened Serb dictator was top-pled in a tumultuous popular uprising, to be replaced by the democraticand not as virulently nationalist Vojislav Kostunica.But the Kosovoimbroglio is still festering today, even as it has faded from the front page.And the main reason is that, even now, no one can agree on the politicalfuture for the province��especially the NATO allies who spent billions ofdollars to save it.Indeed, the new Yugoslavia under Kostunica is nowworking with NATO to suppress a new generation of Kosovar guerrillas��or terrorists, perhaps.The Kosovars still want independence, but theNATO countries still don t want to give it to them for the same reasons.Yet in going to war for the Kosovars against Milosevic �� who was laterWhen Ideas Bite Back 169actually placed on trial as a war criminal in the Hague��NATO robbed itsown position of much of its moral legitimacy.Independence looks to bein the cards eventually, and other guerrillas and independence move-ments around the world will be watching the outcome and drawing les-sons from the way the Americans stepped in on the side of the Kosovarsat Rambouillet.Wesley Clark, the NATO supreme commander who directed the cam-paign in Kosovo and was summarily dismissed from his post after thewar, described the outcome best in his memoirs: Though NATO hadsucceeded in its first armed conflict, it didn t feel like a victory.Even inthe end, many were questioning what had been accomplished. ��How This Is Different from the Cold WarU.S.policy makers, of course, have long been aware of the ideologicalPandora s box created by Wilson s pledge of self-determination at thebeginning of the last century.After Wilson declared in May 1915 that every people has a right to choose the sovereignty under which they shalllive, his estranged secretary of state, Robert Lansing, lamented that theterm self-determination is simply loaded with dynamite.It will raisehopes which can never be realized.It will, I fear, cost thousands of lives.Lansing proved to be right, most dramatically in the 1990s, when the dis-integration of the Soviet bloc and Yugoslavia reawakened old ethnic con-flicts frozen in place during the superpower standoff.Wilson himself,stunned by the number of delegations that applied to him for statehoodwhile he, British prime minister David Lloyd George, and French primeminister Georges Clemenceau were negotiating peace in 1919, later admit-ted he had used the term self-determination without the knowledge thatnationalities existed, which are coming to us day after day. �� It was justthis sort of fuzzy-headed utopianism, of course, that so annoyed practi-tioners of realpolitik when it came to Wilson.And it should come as nosurprise that Wilsonianism has often been honored more in the breach.During the Cold War, containment doctrine for the most part recog-nized the status quo of a world half free and half Communist (as we saw170 At War with Ourselvesin Chapter 1, the hard-right conservatives never quite accepted this, rightthrough the era of d�tente).Wilsonianism was flouted most publicly in1956, when the Eisenhower administration failed to voice support for theHungarian rebellion at a crucial moment, probably sealing the fate of theIron Curtain countries for the next thirty years.Wilson was spurnednumerous times in covert actions such as the U.S.-approved Diem coupin Vietnam, and in Kennedy s quiet complicity in Khrushchev s construc-tion of the Berlin Wall (JFK thought the alternative might be nuclearwar).This was especially true in Latin America where, under the doublehammer of the Monroe Doctrine and the policy of global containment,Washington often secretly propped up anticommunist strongmen such asManuel Noriega and Augusto Pinochet over more democratic but pinkishalternatives��even to the point of promoting the assassination of demo-cratically elected leaders such as Chile s Salvador Allende.But there is an important distinction between our hypocrisy then andnow.During the Cold War we were, for the most part, forgiven.We couldpoint an accusing finger at an alternative value system��that of the Com-munist bloc��that was less compelling than our own, for all our inconsis-tencies.In a world engaged in a pitched battle for survival againstCommunist internationalism or fascism, those self-righteous Americanswere always the lesser evil.With Kaiser Wilhelm and Adolf Hitler snarlingat them, the French were much less inclined to sniff at American moral-ism, as they do today.Had German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder facedStalin or even Leonid Brezhnev across the Fulda Gap rather than Vladi-mir Putin, he would have been far less likely to turn anti-Americanisminto a campaign issue, as he did in the fall of 2002.The same goes forSouth Korean president Roh Moo-hyun, who was also elected on an anti-U.S.platform.U.S.presidents during the Cold War, even as they compro-mised their principles occasionally, were cheered on when theypersistently identified victory with freedom, from Kennedy s 1961 vow to pay any price, bear any burden for liberty to Reagan s famous 1987 chal-lenge: Mr.Gorbachev, tear down this wall!The difference is that today, in Kosovo as elsewhere around the world,Washington really does not want to tear down any more walls [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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