Mailer on the War

CounterPunch sitka at teleport.com
Tue May 25 07:51:30 PDT 1999


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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