PAUL HOLLANDER
135
among both politicians and the general public had trouble supporting
military involvement in a part of the world they had difficulty finding
on the map.
Political affiliation and prior stands taken did not predict attitudes
toward
u.s.
involvement. Among the critics of NATO intervention were
such otherwise dissonant political-intellectual figures as Patrick
Buchanan, Jimmy Carter, Noam Chomsky, Daniel Ellsberg, Tom Hay–
den, David Horowitz, Jack Kemp, and Trent Lott. Among the support–
ers of NATO were similarly incompatible figures like Saul Bellow,
Zbigniev Brzezinski, Geraldine Ferraro, Tom Harkin, Tony Judt, Jeanne
Kirkpatrick, William Kristol, Anthony Lewis, David Rieff, Susan Son–
tag, Elie Wiesel, and Leon Wieseltier.
In many critiques of the airwar, memories of Vietnam loomed large.
For Tom Hayden the parallels were obvious: "Bombs couldn't bring
peace in Vietnam," so why would they in Kosovo? There was the famil–
iar "quagmire" imagery, and references to "a new IU.S.] imperialism"
and "America as the world's policeman." Critics on the left (besides
Hayden) included Noam Chomsky, Ramsey Clark, and Jesse Jackson,
guardians of 1960s sensibilities (predisposed to solidarity with the per–
ceived victims of American power), and other critics of America who
rarely encountered a group, nation, or political movement hostile to the
United States to which they did not feel drawn. They had been con–
vinced for a long time that a society as immoral and unjust as that of the
United States has no business judging the behavior of others, let alone
using its military power to impose its will on them. Chomsky (in a
Harper's article) compared what he regarded as the spurious humani–
tarian involvement of NATO and the U.S. to Japan's invasion of
Manchuria, Mussolini's attack on Ethiopia, and Hitler's grab of the
Sudetenland. Remarkably enough, he also took the opportunity to crit–
icize the U.S. for not having taken stronger actions against Pol Pot (an
illustration of its lack of moral credentials in the fight against human
rights violations), although he himself defended Pol Pot's regime while
it was in power, and scorned refugee reports of its atrocities. Chomsky
also suggested that a "rational person" would find it difficult to judge
more severely "the Iranian record of intervention and terror than that
of the United States."
The NATO airwar often stimulated the moral equivalence response.
For many critics the accidental bombing casualties among the Serb civil–
ians carried the same moral weight as the thousands of Albanians mur–
dered and hundreds of thousands methodically plundered and expelled
from Kosovo. On his return from Belgrade, Jesse Jackson evenhandedly
