COLUMN LEFT/ JOHN R. MacARTHUR : ‘Liberals’ Take a Shameful Pro-War Turn : U.S. action against Serbia would be Wilsonian but wrong.

Since last summer, I’ve noticed a growing number of liberals, by definition America’s anti-war camp, demanding some form of U.S. military intervention in Bosnia. So I wasn’t entirely surprised when I was asked recently to sign an open letter to President Clinton calling for removal of the arms embargo on behalf of Bosnia. What did surprise me was that the signatories included some of my closest associates in the peace movement--activists who have long opposed military adventurism, jingoistic foreign policy and the export of American weapons.

Curiously, my dove-turned-hawk compatriots express their concern for Bosnia in the vernacular of human rights and peace, then demand military action in the euphemistic Pentagonese of the Vietnam era: Besides “lifting the embargo,” they want to “send a message” to the Serbs with “limited” or “focused” “air strikes,” enforcement of “no-fly zones” and the commitment of U.S. infantry to a “multilateral” “peacekeeping” force. This is nothing less than a call for war against Serbia.

Why do post-Vietnam liberals want to get America mixed up in another bloody civil war overseas? In part, they remain parishioners in the church of Woodrow Wilson, our first “liberal” internationalist President. Unlike the blatant jingo Teddy Roosevelt, who unashamedly proclaimed the superiority of American civilization and the tonic effect of war, Wilson asserted his global ambition in Calvinist sermons about America’s mission to redeem the world. His homilies about “making the world safe for democracy” still appeal powerfully to the unfortunate American tendency, inherited from the Puritans, toward evangelical self-righteousness. “What America touches, she makes holy,” was how Wilson’s biographer, Lord Devlin, summed up his subject’s foreign policy.

The Founding Fathers warned against foreign crusades, preferring that this country provide an attractive example for the world, not a moral code enforced by bullets. The Constitution, as Robert Nisbet has written, is “only too obviously a charter for peace, not war.” But ever since World War I, it is Wilson’s global moralism, not Jefferson’s more modest Republican vision, that has captured the imagination of Americans who hunger for a role on the international stage.

The Vietnam War, which was launched with a small contingent of military “advisers” and prosecuted by two “liberal” Democratic presidents, supposedly changed all this. Blind faith in American power and moral superiority was repudiated not only by our military and political defeat, but also by our savagery against civilians. Liberals in intellectual opinion-making circles were among the first to understand that U.S. policy-makers, infected by the notion of American “exceptionalism,” had grossly misread the Vietnamese people and their relationship with China and communism in general. The Vietnam disaster, many liberals hoped, would shrink our Wilsonian arrogance--and innocence--to manageable levels.

Twenty years later, here are many of the same liberals pushing for military intervention in a country less cohesive than Vietnam, in a region wracked by violent religious and political factionalism that most Americans barely comprehend. Here are today’s liberals shamelessly parroting the long-discredited domino theory: that if we don’t stop the Serbs in Bosnia, they’ll overrun Albania, Macedonia and maybe Istanbul before you can say Munich. (These liberals favor Munich as their historical and moral trump card, conveniently forgetting Croatian and Muslim collaboration with the Nazis and the Italian Fascists.) Here are liberals bellowing about American “honor” and “resolve” as if Bosnia were the final battleground for the soul of Woodrow Wilson’s America. Here are liberals urging that we send our soldiers--men and women who signed up to defend the United States--to “keep peace” amid a suicidal Balkan cross fire.

America can help the Bosnian Muslims without helping them kill Serbs. In addition to supporting the U.N. negotiations, Congress might increase our pitifully low quota for Bosnians seeking asylum here, something we failed to do for the Jews of Europe before the onset of World War II.

I hope President Clinton won’t be bullied by my moralizing friends into a destructive military entanglement. The President is said to be an enthusiastic student of history, literature and the Constitution. He should quickly reacquaint himself with the thoughts of Jefferson and the Vietnam-era insights of his first political mentor, Sen. J. William Fulbright. And he should ponder Graham Greene’s remark on the purity of American motives in his Vietnam novel, “The Quiet American”: “Innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.”