By Norman Mailer
Monday, May 24, 1999; Page A25
Milosevic, as many of us have been told by now, grew
up an orphan. And his wife's mother might as well have
been the protagonist in a Greek tragedy. A Yugoslav
partisan, she was captured by the Nazis, tortured,
surrendered crucial information, was released, and then
was executed by the leader of her partisan group, who
happened to be her father.
It is obviously a family history to push beyond the
measure of just about all of us. Nonetheless, we use it
for political interpretations. Our good Hillary, caught on
the cusp between psycho-history and psycho-babble,
was heard to remark to Larry King that the Milosevices
were looking to turn their inner tragedies out upon the
Kosovars.
This about expresses the depth of our comprehension of
what we have been up to in Kosovo. What may be more
to the point is not Milosevic's personal pain, nor his
wife's, but the identity he acquired as a young
Communist in a Yugoslav regime at odds with Stalin but
nonetheless profoundly influenced by the Soviet sense
of virtue. The good Soviet operator was a dedicated
bureaucrat who could climb the greasy pole of Party
advancement skillfully enough to beat his fellow tigers.
Milosevic had to be one of the wiliest, toughest, most
treacherous, canny, tricky, ruthless, and resourceful
human beings Madeleine Albright had ever encountered.
She, too, had climbed a greasy pole, but it was as a
hostess charming up the Beltway's A-list. That was no
mean feat either, but it hardly compares to the vertical
rise of Master Milosevic. We must face it. She was no
match for him. Nor was Clinton or William Cohen.
Neither of them ever served in the Armed Forces.
Combat, for those who get into it, is about as strange
and mysterious an experience as first sex. To have,
therefore, such men (plus Madeleine Albright)
functioning as our command trust for the Kosovo
campaign is analogous to asking a young fellow
innocent of carnal experience to become a marriage
counselor. A genius could probably surmount the
difficulty.
Let us look, rather, at Milosevic's strategy. If, before the
bombings began, he had already committed all the
heinous acts he has since perpetrated, why, he would
probably have been doomed. The outrage of the world
would have been immense. So, he waited. He set up a
trap. Seven months ago, in October, threatened with air
strikes by NATO, he made promises about his future
conduct in Kosovo which, over the next months, he
resolutely failed to keep. Negotiations, therefore, began
again. They came to climax at Rambouillet. But, he
refused to appear. Albright, enraged, decided that he
was probably, at bottom, soft. If we not only threatened
him again but, indeed, carried it out, he would give in
quickly. So we began the bombing in cooperation with
NATO. They could use a stunning quick war to gild their
50th anniversary. We brought up the curtain with smart
bombs.
Milosevic was more than ready. NATO stepped into a
trap whose depth is best plumbed by the weight of the
malevolent tricks Milosevic had collected in his career.
Did no one anticipate that an all-out ethnic cleansing
would now begin immediately? Within 24 hours,
columns of refugees were in motion and the houses,
towns and cities of Kosovo were ablaze. "Genocide" had
begun.
If Clinton and NATO have done nothing else, they have
certainly leached out the power of that word. The
Holocaust is the foundation of its meaning. So the word
should be used with caution. Cambodia gave us
genocide, as did Rwanda, but ethnic cleansing, with its
loss of homes, passports, town and country, its random
rage and slaughter, is still not equal to the murder of
millions. Ethnic cleansing is better seen as psychic
genocide. For the majority who undergo its travail, the
past is amputated from the present.
Bombing, in turn, is another form of psychic genocide.
Except that now it is your future which is amputated from
your present. You no longer know that you have a
future. Your present sense of expectation -- what you
will do tomorrow, or next week, next year -- is as
crippled as a house with one wall sheared off. What,
then, have we accomplished? So soon as the bombing
commenced, Milosevic's atrocities increased probably
by 50 or 100 times over what he had perpetrated before
it all began.
Yet such chaos and horror was further magnified by the
horror of what NATO was doing to the Serbs. The
average Serb, after all, had no more to do with this war
than the average Kosovar. Chaos, therefore, was being
laid upon chaos. And there was no military plan for a
conclusion to the war. Just hopes, plus unconscionable
arrogance in NATO's exposition of its good motive.
For that matter, do we want to contemplate Clinton's
personal motives too closely? Given how badly he was
mucked-up by impeachment nauseas, it is hard not to
believe that apart from his avowed motive that we must
fight genocide everywhere, he might also have been
looking to shift the media's agenda. (Indeed, he has
succeeded at that.) On the other hand, those same
impeachment details had soiled the presidency to a
point where Clinton could not ask Americans to shed
blood. So, he had to give the store away. We will bomb,
he said, but we will not use ground troops.
This is now at the core of a prodigious national
embarrassment. War is never there to be easily
defended, but even so, there is a visceral difference
between a combat devoted uniquely to bombing, and
participation in a ground war. Ground war is always cruel
beyond human comprehension, but there are occasional
examples of heroism or sacrifice, and since both of the
adversaries lose young men, there is, with all else, a hint
of shared sorrow on both sides. Over the years and
decades, that can even permit a reconciliation.
Bombing, however, is oppression. If the bombing is done
with the notion that our own blood is not to be shed, it is
obscene. In large part, people who are bombed will
never forgive the aggressor. We can hardly wish to
meditate upon the detestation of America that we are
seeding in all the poor populations of the world.
Offering his explanation of Clinton's reluctance to send
in ground troops, Tony Blair said, " . . . Kosovo is a very
long way from Kansas." It is. It may even be too far
away. If we as a nation are not willing to shed our blood
to help the Kosovars, then it is time to disabuse
ourselves of the notion that we can prevent genocide,
actual or psychic. All we can do, using our present
methods, is proliferate havoc.
What, then, might we have done?
Well, after Rambouillet failed, we could have built up
ground troops on the periphery of Kosovo, and given
resonance to such a threat by a sustained
leaflet-dropping over all of Serbia delineating the
outrages Milosevic had committed. Then, if Milosevic still
refused to negotiate, a ground war fortified by an air war
could have commenced. While there would have been
notable European and American casualties, such a war
would probably have been won by NATO in short time.
Of course, this was the last solution Clinton could afford.
Since the above is armchair strategy, the real question
is: What do we do now?
The answer: Make peace. Negotiate. Milosevic's
problems in rebuilding are already great enough to force
him to allow the final results to appear ambiguous. If he
is looking for future financial credits -- and how would he
not? -- then he cannot afford to claim victory. From
NATO's side, not wishing to look too sheepish at
descending to a negotiated peace, stories of the
outrages committed against the Serbs by the Kosovo
Liberation Army are likely to surface. Clinton, in his turn,
will be looking to retain enough face to enable his
spin-doctors to gain a draw for him. Given that large
Clinton heart which suffers so dependably for all of us,
he is quite likely to make the cut. NATO, however, may
not. So much the worse for NATO. Its primary function
ended with the Cold War, and it has proved
propagandistic and witless in its desire to work up a
second function. It may be better if reconstituted as a
serious strike force, an international Foreign Legion
ready to die if necessary in the service of Europe and
America.
If there should prove to be insufficient volunteers for
such a special, dedicated, and conceivably most mortal
army, then let us at least recognize that when it comes
to standing up to genocide in any form, we are not
prepared to sacrifice our sons and daughters, no, our
blood is not as ready as our mouth. Such
self-awareness, while humbling, might even be of worth
for the future. It can serve to inhibit those acts of
programmatic compassion which all too few of us ever
feel to the quick. Virtuous emotion that is manipulated at
national and international levels is odds-on to breed
catastrophe.
Norman Mailer's most recent book is "The Time of Our
Time."
Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company
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