PERSPECTIVE ON THE BALKANS CRISIS : The Call to Arms Is All-American : We are unique in seeing a national obligation to use our power to do good; this time, even liberals are on board.

Europeans are not Americans. One is constantly reminded of this truism by visiting in Europe, as I did for six weeks this summer. During that entire time I heard not one European say in conversation or on television or in print that his country should send troops or bombers to separate the warring factions in the Balkans. Yet on landing in America, it seems that’s all I’ve heard. In emotional conversations. On talk shows. From (most notably) liberals. From Democrat Bill Clinton.

I have not quite adjusted to being home yet (when I left, Clinton stood at 22% in the polls, in third place), so maybe I simply haven’t grasped some nuances, but the argument seems to go like this:

The bloodshed is awful, the constant shelling of cities unconscionable, the human cruelty simply unbelievable. This has to be stopped! DO SOMETHING!

As far as I can see, Europeans feel no such logic. They are sad. They deplore the carnage. They wish it were not happening. They think that talks should be held about it. They are willing to send humanitarian aid. But they do not wish to risk the lives of their own young men and women in a fight.

No European nation that I know of feels that its national mission is to protect human beings elsewhere, to intervene (like St. George) to save innocents from evil dragons. They do not regard other peoples in distress as part of their national obligation. They concentrate pretty much, and pretty closely, on their own national interests. They don’t even talk about national ideals, such as a foreign policy based on the extension of human rights.

To feel such sentiments keenly, to feel that betraying them would be to forfeit your moral self-worth and national honor, you have to be an American.

Since World War II, we Americans have grown up knowing that we are powerful. We are confident (sometimes too much so) that America is good. For Americans, it is as obvious as 2 + 2 = 4 that power plus goodness equals national obligation.

Is it a surprise that the logic of armed intervention is now emanating most loudly from the American left? As a certified hawkish anti-communist (a record that now makes me very proud, especially in Eastern Europe), I broke from the left in 1973 over lessons (mistaken, I thought) being drawn from the Vietnam War. Now, many of the same people who opposed every anti-communist intervention these past 20 years, disparaged the military and marched for “peace” with flowers in their hands are demanding an air assault on Serbian positions or the sending of U.S. troops into the mountain redoubts of the Balkans. It figures. The Serbians are not fighting under the banner of communism or the international left. Communism is not an issue (although the old communist leaders are still in place), and so the emotions of the left have been disencumbered. They are free to love war.

God knows, the villainy of the current Serb leadership cries out for a punishing military action. For me, the last straw was the deliberate shelling of a cemetery in which infant victims of an earlier attack were being buried.

The sheer horror of the policy of “ethnic cleansing” has for weeks been too evil to contemplate, the memory of the Nazi policy against Jews, Gypsies and Slavs being still too raw. Then, this past week, came the pictures of concentration camps. In order to stampede ethnic populations into flight, Leeway has apparently been granted for sadism and brutality at the whim of Serbian officers. Reportedly, 2.5 million refugees have fled the former Yugoslavia, with more than 10,000 others taking flight daily. This macabre policy is working while diplomats go on pretending to believe in “cease fires” that only allow its horrid work to go on.

All who watch this sordid scene--Americans, anyway--feel corrupted simply by looking passively at the pictures. Do something!

I think it is particularly hard for those on the left to watch this, since liberals do believe (against all evidence) in the fundamental goodness of man. The sight of pure malice, the visible enjoyment of wanton cruelty, the clear and rational choice of evil means adapted to evil ends, and a total disregard for the suffering of other human beings--all this shatters the liberal faith. It is cognitively unendurable. Do something, for God’s sake!

But also for neoconservatives like me there is something about being American that makes me unable to sit still for this display of raw human evil. We are a biblical people (even those among us who are atheists or agnostics). To see politics and war in moral terms is as natural to us as opening our eyes. The two great imperatives of what the ancients called the natural law-- Resist evil! Do good!-- are as deeply second-nature to liberals as to conservatives. Even those who deny the existence of a natural law sometimes obey it.

And so I must ask: What must be done? The Nazis could not tame guerrilla armies in Yugoslavia’s hills and valleys during years of bitter trying. Sending ground troops today seems highly impractical.

Just the same, the Serbs must be taught a lesson. Surely their war machine can be punished as was Saddam Hussein’s. Surely army bases, supply routes and depots in Serbia can be identified and destroyed from the air. Their leader should be declared a war criminal. A bounty should be put on his head, payable to anyone bringing him to trial. Such a man does not belong in civilized society, and civilized society has a duty to let him know that or become complicit in his crimes.