I've heard this argument before and it seems to me to be so wrong-headed that I don't know where to start criticizing it. But here goes anyway: First, what's wrong with a certain degree of self-interest? Are we Americans supposed to flush our money down the toilet and get our pilots shot down and our soldiers killed without even considering whether the efforts will promote our goals? Second, even putting the material and (U.S. military) human costs entirely to the side, why shouldn't leftists (and anybody else, for that matter) vigorously oppose this bombing campaign on the grounds that, regardless of whether the motives behind it are good or bad, it won't work?
Maybe my engineering mentality is warping my judgment, but the first thing I consider when deciding whether or not to do such-and-so is, will it achieve its purpose? If it obviously won't work, then you've got to shit-can that plan, don't do it at all, period. Only once you're convinced that your plan might possibly succeed are you required to consider whether it is the right and proper thing to do. Plans which are so flawed that they can't succeed should be rejected immediately.
In fact the Kosovo "Bombs for Peace" plan has backfired bad, just like we all knew it would the first day the bombs started flying. I refer to the obvious fact that you can't defend unarmed civilians on the ground by hurling bombs out of the sky into the middle of cities many miles away. Nor can you defend villagers against rifle-toting ski-masked paramilitaries by dropping cluster-bombs on their villages either. You just can't. All this bombing has achieved is to kill a bunch of Serbian civilians, strengthen that bastard Milosevic politically in Serbia, and worst of all, immensely accelerate Milosevic's ethnic-cleansing campaign against the Albanians.
I don't think the civilian Serbs deserve bombs and hate, any more than I personally deserve to be hated or bombed by an Iraqi citizen. But when I read that we might actually start lobbing bombs at Milosevic my first impulse was "yeah!" I haven't forgotten Srebrenica, I hate that fucker, there's a guy for whom you want to dust off the Nuremberg gallows; e.g.:
http://www.balkaninstitute.org/analysis/cw-6-97.htm
Imperialism, hegemony, blah blah blah, a fucker with a record like that, I don't care who nails his ass; if either Gen. Pinochet or the Khmer Rouge's Ta Mok volunteers to knock off Milosevic, Raznatovic and that rotten gang, I say, let him out and give him a rifle and a parachute. (OK, that's pretty damn thoughtless, yelling "rah! rah!" for a shooting war on impulse, as though it were no more serious than renting a war movie on videotape. Oh well, the ability to practice that kind of thoughtlessness without moral consequence may be one of the few privileges of the politically powerless.)
But then when I heard that we planned to do the entire operation from 30,000 feet, and we didn't even have the sense to move in a few tens of thousands of ground troops to the surrounding territory, my elation turned to consternation in two seconds flat. If we had had 100,000 ground troops ready to jump off into Kosovo before we started shooting, maybe we could have bluffed Milosevic into falling in line with that Rambouillet business, and then it might not have been necessary to fire a single shot.
Milosevic may be a prick but he's not stupid. Once the bombs started falling, if he wanted to ethnic-cleanse Kosovo, here was his big opportunity to do it at zero additional political cost. With no ground troops, we aren't defending the Kosovo Albanians, we're sacrificing them. It seems to me we have deliberately started a fight, in historically the most volatile land on the entire globe, ostensibly to pursue goals we know, and our enemy knows, we can't accomplish. We are acheiving nothing, and killing civilians in the process. That's why I am against the NATO bombing campaign.
If you can disprove the last few paragraphs, if you can show me any reason to hope for positive effects of our aerial campaign thus far, THEN let's talk about whether, for ideological reasons, we should or shouldn't support NATO attacking Milosevic's regime from the air.
"Now we're in it, we're committed, it would be too humiliating to give up now," say, among others, Bill Clinton, John McCain and Robert Dole. But what does the humiliation of what pms used to call "the big cigars" count, while today Serb civilians are being bombed and killed outright for nothing? That's where the left comes in; we inherently don't give a damn about the embarrassment of the local ruling class, in fact, we enjoy watching the big cigars get doused, so we are the free-est of all groups to stand up and attack their policies.
Yours WDK - WKiernan at concentric.net