On The Right - NATO-Yugoslavia Conflict; need to assess value of arts education - Column

National Review, May 17, 1999 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR.

Declare War?

Pull Out of NATO?

NEW YORK, APRIL 13

On Tuesday we read that the Wall Street Journal thinks that Congress should declare war against Yugoslavia-a pretty solemn act for the United States, which didn't declare war against Korea (U.S. dead, 40,000, or Vietnam, 58,000). On the same day, presidential candidate Pat Buchanan advocated bringing back from Europe not only the 17-odd Apache helicopters and two and one-half aircraft carriers we are using for our offensive against Milosevic, but all our troops.

Since reconstituting Kosovo is on the order of reconstituting Carthage after the last Punic War, we are really left looking for strategic satisfactions. Hanging Milosevic would give satisfaction (nemo me impune lacessit); retiring Commander in Chief Clinton would give satisfaction. Milosevic is protected by an unwritten post-World War II commitment not to destroy entire cities. Since it is unlikely that we will send in enough Marines to scout him out and pack him away, he is relatively safe. Clinton is protected by a Constitution that does not deem it an impeachable offense to hitch the honor of the United States to a falling star. But Mr. Buchanan spots now a third strategic satisfaction. No doubt about it, if we were to withdraw our troops from Europe a lot of people would sigh that, at last, we had renounced the crazy international adventurism we began in 1917. A Cliffs Notes history of the United States, 20th century, would read something like,

"In 1917, the United States departed from its traditional commitment to stay clear from extra-hemispheric entanglements, as counseled to do by George Washington, entering two world wars, a war on the Korean peninsula, and a war in Indochina. When called upon in the final year of the century to reenter Europe with a fighting force in Yugoslavia, public sentiment countered with a withdrawal of its armed forces from Europe and from Japan, and concentrated its defenses on naval and air weaponry."

That would bring satisfaction of sorts. So would a virus that crept into all modern weapons limiting their range to the reach of an arrow shot from a crossbow.

Mr. Buchanan is a superb polemicist. He knows how to make all the reticulations. What are we doing in Kosovo a) that we can do? b) that we must do? His answer is persuasive. We cannot reconstruct an Albanian Kosovo that lives happily ever after. And we are not required to make the effort to do this, in order to safeguard the United States. Mr. Buchanan adds that under Clinton, the defense budget of the United States has been trimmed to a level, up against the level of the economy, lower than any (3 percent) since Pearl Harbor. The impact of that straitening of our forces is apparent by the scarcity of Apaches and the need to bring in an aircraft carrier from the Persian Gulf.

But then the Wall Street Journal is also entirely persuasive in insisting that what we are currently engaged in-not what we are prospectively engaged in-is war. And the Constitution wisely stipulates that wars should be acts of Congress. The infrequency with which Congress declares war is testimony to the gravity we attach to the exercise. The further point is made that a declaration of war is a national commitment to total resolution. In war there is no substitute for victory, Douglas MacArthur taught us, which helps us to understand why we did not win the war against North Korea.

We are scheduled for an enhanced humiliation. At this point, we have failed to accomplish our mission but with no loss of life in the engagement. If we pursue the present course and send in ground troops we will suffer significant loss of lives and will inherit an incubus that will tax our resources and our will for years to come. The concomitant danger is a withdrawal into the illusory womb of continental security. If we withdraw from Yugoslavia on the grounds that it was an ill-considered venture, the humiliation (deserved) will be grievous, but transitory. If our failure in Yugoslavia prompts a movement to return all our troops from the area, then NATO will disband and the scorpions in Asia and the Mideast will be enlivened, on the prowl for another Pearl Harbor. That would enhance the Cliffs Notes, if revised every ten years, to document the collapse of primary status in the world for the United States and the flight of smaller nations to embraces with other powers which, in the nature of things, will seek to occupy the ground on which America once stood.

It couldn't have happened to a nicer country.

Anybody for Moral Arithmetic?

NEW YORK, APRIL 9

We (ought to) resist facile references to individual human lives, even when used as synechdoche. Some time just before the Gulf War began, Arthur Schlesinger said that the campaign there was "not worth one American life." Last week Robert Novak said the campaign in Kosovo was "not worth one American life." To begin with one has to assume that a figure of speech is being used. If one could have effected the withdrawal of the Iraqi Army from Kuwait and done substantial damage to the Republican Guard that facilitates Saddam Hussein's aggressions and knew that the cost of that operation would amount to one (1) dead American soldier, it is difficult to believe that any pragmatic American would decline to play those odds. Ditto Kosovo.