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PARTISAN REVIEW
that Milosevic is "uncommonly ruthless... Iand displays I an insensitivity
toward suffering and a coldness toward individual humans. He had a
tendency to treat people as pawns on a political chessboard....For such
a man, the use of force to rid Kosovo of its entire population would have
presented no moral dilemma." What types of societies, cultures, or his–
torical circumstances allow such flawed human beings to seize and retain
power?
It
is a question historians and social scientists should continue to
ponder.
Besides the all-too-familiar motives and aspects of mass violence and
brutality, there was also something unusual about the Kosovo conflict:
the absence of conventionally defined or easily identifiable "national
interest" at stake for NATO and the U.S. Many critics of the involve–
ment were opposed to it for precisely that reason. Milosevic and the
remains of Yugoslavia did not militarily or politically threaten the U.S.
or the countries of NATO; Yugoslavia was not capable of disrupting oil
supp li es; there were no prospects that any "dominos" might fall.
According to this view, the brutalization of Albanians in Kosovo was
regrettable, but there was plenty of inter-ethnic and other brutality
around the globe, and the U.S. (or NATO) could not be expected to
police the whole world; moreover, the Balkans were a notorious
"hotbed" or "tinderbox" of "ancient ethnic hatreds" which the U.S.
could not prevent from exploding from time to time.
If
national interest as generally understood provided a poor explana–
tion for the U.S. and NATO involvement, what did? For critics of the
United States, the idea that the U.S. would get involved in a war thou–
sands of miles away on largely moral or humanitarian grounds was
implausible or outright preposterous. And yet, strangely enough, this
was a military intervention dominated by moral and humanitarian con–
siderations, in which national interest, as usually defined, played a small
part.
• • •
THE Kosovo
CRISIS
produced interesting and unpredictable alignments
and splits of opinion. Republicans and other Clinton-haters opposed the
intervention largely because it was "Clinton's war," but a more old–
fashioned, reflexive isolationism has also reemerged on the right. In the
New Republic,
Jack Kemp called the NATO intervention "an interna–
tional Waco," while Patrick Buchanan professed to be ashamed of his
country on account of the bombing. It was hard to know if principles,
or moral principles, played any part in this rhetoric. Many of the critics
