Let war settle Yugoslavia - Column

National Review, June 26, 1995 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

Most of us have provocative little epigrams, stored in the catacombs of the mind because they tend to be (mine are) iconoclastic. From time to time they leap up, demanding attention. Twice, in days gone by. The first evoked by the news that the nation's medical-research centers are running out of money; the second, that the Yugoslav mess had reached impasse.

The first of the fugitive thoughts was given to me as a college student by a professor scanning that day's newspaper featuring a cure for cancer, which cure of course never materialized. ``We have to die of something,'' he said. The second observation was made by James Burnham, who told me during the Korean War, ``You know, it's not true that wars settle nothing.'' Three years ago in the former Yugoslavia there were two opportunities, one driven by moral motives, the second, by strategic motives. Margaret Thatcher, arguing for decisive intervention in the area, insisted that here was a union of the two. We had only just concluded a war against Iraqi aggression. The operation was so neat, so trivial in cost, that Wilsonian impulses were fired up, and President Bush spoke of a New World Order. That turned out to be a dangerous phrase, because it bespoke more than Mr. Bush intended. But if on the cutting-room floor anything was left of it, it was that aggression would not be permitted to succeed. And in Yugoslavia, Mrs. Thatcher urged, we had a challenge to NATO unambiguous in its demands for treatment. The reason for action by NATO, she argued, had to do not merely with keeping some sense of order in one's back yard, but also with acknowledging that the stakes weren't purely parochial. The temptation to aggression in Macedonia provoking Greek reprisals, the cordite that leads to the Muslim periphery and the possibility of a holy conflict on a grand scale -- all of this prompted, said Mrs. Thatcher, intervention. The case to the contrary was also plausible -- there is always a presumption against sending troops to foreign places. To begin with, making the world safe for democracy is unmanageable. It is what, with a smile, some theorists would renounce as an attempt to immanentize the eschaton. Another reason to stay away was the ambiguity of the claims of every single one of the four parties: the Serbs, the Croats, the Bosnian Muslims, and the Bosnian Serbs. And there were those who insisted that this was the wrong moment to interfere with an ally of the late Soviet Union, suffering DTs from taking in democracy cold turkey. What the allies then did was, so to speak, nothing. Dr. David Owen and Mr. Cyrus Vance put forward a peace plan that looked like an American congressional district designed to produce a black congressman, in appearance more like a Rorschach test than a lapidary geographical line on the order of the 38th Parallel in Korea or the DMZ in Vietnam. Moreover, the plan would have ceded to the Serbs 70 per cent of the territories they had occupied by aggression. But then having failed at the diplomatic table, we sponsored a peacekeeping plan that temporarily stilled military activity and stuck to a policy of denying the Bosnians and Croats access to military weapons with which they might deflect the Serbs. The flat reasoning for this -- more arms mean more war -- was better suited for the nursery than for the Situation Rooms of the West. There was the lull, and then the Bosnian Serbs began their provocations, the UN command retaliated with a pinprick of reproach, and now the UN peacekeepers face the humiliation of being tied individually to stakes that laugh scornfully at Western innocence. We cannot know whether the hostages can be saved. It is only predictable that, at the earliest opportunity, the sponsoring peacekeepers will pull out. As they should do. Simultaneously, we should end the arms boycott. And, alternatives having been ruled out, we have then to let the war define itself, and the smoking residue of Croatia, Serbia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina.