Peacenik Way Is Definitely Out of Style

It feels like only yesterday that editorial writers by the dozens were denouncing President Bill as a moral midget, deserving of the harshest reprobation for fondling Monica S. Lewinsky. Today many of them are doling out measured praise to the same president for blowing little children into pieces. Being a peacenik is definitely out of style. Liberals are learning once again--did they ever truly forget?--that it’s fun to be a warmonger and cheer the high explosive as it falls. After suffering indigestion toward the end of the Vietnam affair, they got the taste for war again in the mid-1990s, with Bosnia. They became the laptop bombardiers.

Back then, there wasn’t a week, for months on end, that liberals didn’t call for the bombardment of Serbia. The Serbs became demons, monsters, and Slobodan Milosevic the most demonic monster of all. In Britain there was a coalition running from Margaret Thatcher to the Laborite New Statesman in favor of bombing the Serbs. Ken Livingston, the pinko firebrand of London, bellowed for bombs. His leader, Tony Blair, talks about the “first progressive war.” In this country, the laptop bombardiers crossed from the Wall Street Journal editorial page, which likes to bomb anything, to William Safire, to Anthony Lewis, to the Democratic Socialists of America.

The press carefully ignored detailed accounts of how the Bosnian Muslims were manipulating Western opinion. Among such tactics, they almost certainly lobbed a shell into a Sarajevo marketplace filled with their own people, blaming it on the Serbs. When the Croats ethnically cleansed the Krajina of hundreds of thousands of Serbs--the biggest such cleansing in the Balkans since World War II--with direction from U.S. military and CIA officers, journalists mostly looked the other way or actually cheered.

Bosnia in the mid-’90s rode on a hysteria that was never properly confronted, and now the price is being paid, with contemptible opportunists like Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) shouting for “lights out in Belgrade.” But McCain is more than matched by Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), or by that brass-lunged fraud, Vermont Independent Rep. Bernard Sanders, “socialist progressive,” who has endorsed Clinton’s bombs. More than 80% of the Democrats in the House are cheering the bombs and senatorial liberals like Barbara Boxer of California are discovering the joys of war.

These days, to get common sense, you have to go over to the Republican side of the aisle and listen to people like Rep. Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania, who made a fine speech in Congress reporting on his contacts with members of the Russian Duma (where Weldon has many friends), endorsing their idea that Russia should pledge that Milosevic will abide by the Rambouillet accords on condition that an international peacekeeping force moves into Kosovo, devoid of any personnel from nations now bombing Serbia.

The exact nature of such a force is what’s causing bombs to fall on civilians in Belgrade and Kosovo. Remember that Milosevic agreed to virtually everything on the table at the Rambouillet meeting, with two exceptions. For him the status of Kosovo as part of Serbia was nonnegotiable, and he wouldn’t agree to the stationing of NATO forces on Yugoslav soil.

It’s clear enough that a solution could have been found. The U.S. and its NATO subordinates wanted a confrontation and ultimately forced it. Today, a negotiated agreement guaranteed by nonbelligerent forces under United Nations auspices would not be hard to reach unless the U.S. refuses to relinquish its overall goal of making NATO the sole arbiter of Europe’s future. This is what the war and the bombing are about. On this strategy, which presumes a continued refusal to let Russia have any role in securing a ceasefire or peace settlement, there can be no truce or suspension of hostilities.

People have talked so long about “a new Vietnam” that they don’t recognize it when it finally slouches ‘round the corner.

This war takes us back to somewhere around 1962, when the Eisenhower “internationalists” and the Kennedy liberals thought war in Vietnam was a great and necessary idea. The Republican isolationists had been put out of business by then, ever since the GOP Sen. Arthur Vandenberg signed on to the Cold War in the late 1940s. But these days there is no communist threat. The Chinese premier just took America by storm without so much as a weapon in his hand, except for the magic words, “cheap labor” and “big markets.” So, maybe our only hope now is that Republican isolationist tradition.