Doug quoted the NYT as follows: (snip) Polling since April by the Pew Research Center has found 60 percent of Americans "very worried" about American combat casualties, although there have been none. The polling also found that even after bombing mistakes killed scores upon scores of civilians, just 40 percent of Americans were "very worried" about that.
By that measure, the Kosovo effort was perfectly attuned to American opinion. The sole American deaths occurred when two helicopter pilots died in a training accident. (snip)
Doug, do you by any chance have a link to the Pew center polls? (The site at www.pewcenter.org seems to only contain information about "civic journalism")
The Washington Post ran some interesting commentary a couple of weeks ago on the morality or otherwise of NATO's war. I thought the article by Jean Bethke Elshtain on the rise of the NATO/US doctrine of "combatant immunity" (as opposed to the just-war doctrine of non-combatant immunity) was very good, although she could have mentioned that the US has never been in the vanguard of countries accepting theoretical restraints of any sort on warmaking -- just think of many of the campaigns of the Indian wars, Sherman's march from Atlanta to the Sea, etc. K.Mickey
A LOOK AT . . . What Makes a War Just? Whose Lives Are We Sparing?
By Jean Bethke Elshtain
Sunday, May 16, 1999; Page B03
Take a look, for a moment, not at NATO's aims in the war against Serbia, but at its strategy. If, as we have proclaimed, our overriding objective is a humanitarian one--to stop the harrying, killing, raping, torturing and displacement of the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo--why choose a strategy so unlikely to achieve that goal? A strategy, what's more, that flies in the face of a centerpiece of the just-war tradition--"noncombatant immunity"? By placing such enormous emphasis on the safety of NATO forces, we have been failing to eliminate enemy troops efficiently. And we have placed civilians, instead, in the path of prolonged danger.
Although Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic acknowledged for the first time last Wednesday that NATO's airstrikes had caused significant damage to his country's police and military forces, the effects of the bombing so far have mostly been to destroy the country's infrastructure.
Perhaps that's not surprising. Having given a pledge not to deploy ground troops and entered the fray with one hand tied behind our backs, NATO's only option has been to "degrade" Milosevic's capacity to wage war. So we bomb and bomb, and bomb some more. As obvious military targets are exhausted and Milosevic still refuses to capitulate, the search widens to the infrastructure that also sustains civilian life, especially in large cities such as Belgrade.
What follows is predictable: Disrupt the water supply; wipe out power sources; destroy all the bridges; crush communications. None of this appears to have persuaded the dug-in Serbian forces in Kosovo to beat a retreat. Instead, the air campaign has permitted these combatants to maintain their hold on the territory in dispute.
With our continued determination to keep NATO soldiers out of harm's way, we are promoting "combatant immunity"--ours and, indirectly, theirs. We can do lots of damage from the air, of course, reducing buildings to rubble and tearing up bridges. It is far harder to face determined combatants on the ground, to use the only means that will allow us to achieve just ends: fighting the old-fashioned way, yard by yard, hill by hill, valley by valley, until Kosovo becomes once more a safe environment for all who want to live there.
The results are ironic--and appear to turn our traditional concern for civilian lives on its head. Thus far, in this war, it is noncombatants who face some of the greatest danger, whether from "collateral damage," like folks in marketplaces pulverized by cluster bombs as they carry home a dozen eggs, or from the collapse of the infrastructure on which civilian life depends. We know what happens next: The very young and the very old are the first to suffer. Others follow. And the Serbian combatants? Under the tacit new rule of combatant immunity, they remain entrenched, a barrier to any possible safe return of the refugees.
It is a terrible thing for anyone to kill or be killed. But that is the occupational risk of men and women in arms. The restraints of the just-war tradition are always difficult to implement in what Clausewitz called "the fog" of war. It isn't easy to distinguish friend from foe or an enemy soldier from a civilian who happens to find himself or herself in harm's way. And with the advent of modern war, what was always difficult has become, or so some have argued, nearly impossible. But if combatant immunity is to become our new organizing principle, we shall face many more situations in the future in which we refuse to do what is necessary to meet our stated objectives and resort instead to means that may undermine not only those objectives but also the centuries-old effort to limit war, as much as possible, to combatants.
Jean Bethke Elshtain, the Laura Spelman Rockefeller professor of social and political ethics at the University of Chicago Divinity School, is the editor of "Just War Theory" (New York University Press).