Just You Try Making Sense of the Balkans

It’s springtime for Hitlers; they’re sprouting up everywhere. Just when we had gotten used to the idea of routinely bombing Iraq because Saddam Hussein is the modern Fuehrer, President Clinton now insists that he must also bomb the former Yugoslavia because Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic is yet another Hitler.

At first that bothered me. I mean, being Hitler ought to put you in a class of your own. This is not a title to bestow on every two-bit thug who happens to be running a country and its people into the ground. There are dozens of those. Being Hitler ought to be special, you know, chewing up neighboring countries and threatening world domination or at least biological warfare. This guy Milosevic is pretty evil all right, but which NATO country could he ever conquer?

But then I thought, what the heck, go for it. Might cost us--those Cruise missiles run a million bucks a piece--but it’s good for the economy. Anyway, war is no big deal as long as there isn’t a draft when you or your children might have to go fight. For most Americans, it’s a surround-sound TV entertainment, a video arcade war in which no one you know gets killed.

Even when that $46-million Stealth fighter went down, we were able to save the pilot. And the plane itself was no serious loss since the technology obviously isn’t so hot and we’d better go back to the drawing board. We need this war: How else can we justify spending $281 billion a year on defense if it’s not to protect our vital interests in places like Kosovo?

Sorry, I didn’t mean to write vital interests, since there aren’t any as with Iraq, which is sitting in the middle of the world’s biggest oil puddle. No one claims there are any U.S. strategic or economic interests at stake in the splintering of the old Yugoslavia. Sure, when the Cold War was on and old Marshal Tito thumbed his nose at the Soviets, then you could make the case that the stability of his country mattered to us. Back then, we liked the fact that Yugoslavia was united, even if by the Communist boss Tito, of mixed ethnic parentage, who quite logically suppressed ethnic nationalism.

But then the Cold War ended, everyone wanted his own nation, and Yugoslavia came apart at the seams. Hey, let’s hear it for God and country. Which means killing the people you recently got along with in the name of patriotism. The Serbs had the best killing machine, inspired by the born-again nationalist Milosevic, so they got to do the most damage destroying the rights of others.

It’s those rights we must protect now by bombing the Serbs, even the many who opposed Milosevic. After all, the Serbs are the ones who commit genocide. Seems almost in their national character. Although, it did give one pause to see those pictures of German planes bombing Serbs like they did during World War II. Back then, the Serbs were the heroic partisans battling the Nazis while some Croatians and Albanians sided with the Germans and engaged in ethnic cleansing.

The important thing is not to read up on any of this stuff. That’s a big mistake I made, going out and buying a few books on the history of the Balkans. Whew, is that ever dangerous for a columnist.

The problem is that when you check out the history, the good guys don’t look quite so pure and the bad guys--well, it kind of makes them too human to be attractive bombing targets. I don’t mean Milosevic and his henchmen--bomb them all you want. But those Serbs, from Chicago to Belgrade, who are angry with us--they might have a point.

It’s not one I accept uncritically, mind you, since nationalism has never been my thing, and as far as I’m concerned, the impoverished province of Kosovo, or the whole of Yugoslavia for that matter, is not worth a bloody war. Then again, that’s how I feel about Northern Ireland, the West Bank and that other wannabe Paradise loosely called Kurdistan. However, people are drawn like moths to the fire of nationalistic and religious disputes, and when that’s been going on for more than 1,000 years, lots of luck on keeping them from getting singed.

But, as Clinton and all the editorial writers tell us, we have to try. And as soon as we free the Albanians in Kosovo, we’re going to separate the Tutsis from the Hutus in Rwanda, while freeing the Tibetans, Chechens, Palestinians, Kurds, Basques and any others being denied self-determination. Welcome to the New World disorder.

Robert Scheer is a Times contributing editor. E-mail: rscheer@aol.com.