Commentary / PERSPECTIVE ON INTERVENTION :...

The only way to bring peace to Yugoslavia is to send soldiers there. These soldiers in effect will have to hold guns to the heads of the combatants and demand that they stop their slaughter. European and American leaders rightfully shrink from this prospect. They realize that enforcing peace on the ground would take months of intense fighting and years of attrition.

Western leaders grasp that even when “peace” is won, it can only be maintained by troops indefinitely stationed between hostile tribes, who will soon make the peacekeepers the object of their enmity. These leaders understand that peace in Yugoslavia ultimately requires highly coercive measures, including the large-scale resettlement of minorities to create ethnically homogeneous and stable states. In short, these leaders know that ending the killing requires a savage war of peace, brutalizing to all concerned.

Since the necessary means are abhorrent, the Americans and Europeans, responding to cries that they must do “something,” choose half-measures that they know will not be enough. This is a dangerous portent of future quagmires.