CULTURE WARS

Is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s undeclared war against Yugoslavia a moral cause? For erstwhile activists against the Vietnam War, the question has a particular poignancy. Three decades ago, they were demanding that the United States stop its assault against Vietnamese radical nationalists determined to unify their country. The antiwar movement helped force the U.S. out of Indochina, and, in the process, achieved a longer-term victory. In the quarter-century since the last Marines left Saigon, the U.S. public has remained wary about sending troops to intervene in any foreign land where they are likely to encounter serious resistance. Left-liberals of every age have been the most consistent foes of overseas adventures.

But it is hard to portray Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic as a heroic guerrilla, and NATO’s clumsy attempt to stop his aggression in Kosovo has split the ranks of the once solidly antiwar left. At the center of the dispute is the urgent question of how to protect and further human rights.

Thirty years ago, the answer seemed self-evident. Opponents of the war could recite a litany of outrages--rigged elections, massacred peasants, forced urbanization through terror bombing--that made U.S. policy seem grossly immoral, the stated purpose of U.S. presidents a model of deceit.

The current conflict in the Balkans, however, does not allow so stark a choice. Hardly anyone on the left doubts that the ethnic Albanians of Kosovo are victims. The argument is about the ethical consistency of U.S. and NATO war-makers--and whether they are really trying to aid the Kosovars or to show the rest of the world who’s boss.

For some former anti-Vietnam activists, Kosovo is clearly another quagmire in the making. “Bombs couldn’t bring peace in Vietnam,” wrote Tom Hayden, the California state senator and former leader of the New Left, in an open letter to President Bill Clinton last month. Once again, charges Hayden, an administration, “driven by false assumptions of superiority and entitlement to police the world,” is contemplating waging a ground war without the consent of Congress or the public. Once again, an American president’s stated concern for “human rights” is revealed as blatant hypocrisy. Why, asks Hayden, didn’t we intervene to support the students who protested in Tiananmen Square? Or the Zapatistas in Chiapas? Or the Kurds in Turkey?

For many other former antiwar activists, such questions evade the obvious. Michael Walzer, the liberal political theorist who once rallied fellow academics against the war in Vietnam, compares Milosevic to an arsonist who can only be halted if the U.S. takes the lead. “That doesn’t make us the world’s firefighters,” he cautions in the next issue of Dissent, of which he is co-editor. Vietnamese brought down the genocidal regime of Pol Pot, and Tanzanians helped topple the brutal Idi Amin. But only NATO is in a position to help the Kosovars now. “What is most important for the future of the left,” writes Walzer, “is that . . . our activists and supporters around the world see the fires for what they are: deliberately set, . . . aimed to kill, terribly dangerous.” And he doesn’t shirk from suggesting that U.S. ground troops will sooner or later have to help douse the flames.

The conflict between Hayden’s position and Walzer’s--echoed in the columns of left magazines, on Web sites and at campus teach-ins--is at odds with the concerns that traditionally drive policy-makers. Neither man talks about the national interest or national security. Each would agree that the only good reason to fight a war or abstain from one is to aid people oppressed and in danger, wherever they may live. This is a remarkable premise in a world where the making of foreign policy has often been the province of opportunists, fanatics and cynics.

But radical ideals are no assurance of a humanitarian outcome. Leftist critics of the NATO offensive assume Washington remains essentially the same arrogant, imperialist behemoth that ravaged Indochina and financed Central American dictatorships. To preserve economic hegemony and cultural self-confidence, U.S. officials must demonize Milosevic and build sympathy for the Kosovar refugees. They don’t really care about human rights, argue Hayden and his fellow anti-warriors, they simply want the powerful to continue to have their way. Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright inherits the soul of Dean Rusk, secretary of state for Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.

This stance downplays or neglects entirely the ravages that Serb forces have carried out and are still carrying out in and around Kosovo. The outrage of U.S. leftists at a dishonest leadership in Washington reduces the mass killings, rapes and brutal deportation of roughly 840,000 people abroad to an excuse for policing the world. Hayden does assert, in passing, that he favors “saving Kosovar lives” through an “alternative” policy. But not even the shred of a suggestion is forthcoming. At least during the Vietnam War he and his fellow radicals had a clear alternative in mind: Withdraw U.S. forces and let the other side win. As Walzer writes, “If you want to stop Milosevic, you can argue about how to do it; there is no argument about who can do it.”

But there are serious flaws in Walzer’s position, too. However morally compelling, the war on Yugoslavia could easily end with most refugees becoming exiles and with Milosevic still ruling both in Belgrade and, less securely, in Kosovo itself. How would even tens of thousands of NATO ground troops defeat entrenched and highly motivated Serb forces or insure the Kosovars’ security once the fighting stops? A poor strategy and inept tactics can make the most admirable of motivations irrelevant. To borrow Walzer’s own metaphor, fighting fire with fire might result in burning down the entire neighborhood.

The left’s current dilemma is reminiscent of an analogous debate more than 80 years ago. World War I, touched off by a Serbian nationalist assassin, was devouring the lives of young Europeans. In the spring of 1917, President Woodrow Wilson argued that the U.S. must intervene in the war to “fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts--for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations.”

Many on the left characterized the Great War as a struggle between empires that aided no one but bankers and munitions makers. But a large number of liberals and radicals, including the philosopher John Dewey and the activist and scholar W.E.B. Du Bois, countered that only if the United States joined the fight would the ideals Wilson articulated have a chance of being realized. Neither side convinced the other--and the administration jailed some anti-war leaders, like Eugene V. Debs, who continued to speak out. The American left would never be so large or so influential again.

The intervention in Yugoslavia is unlikely to last long enough to become a defining moment for today’s smaller and less visionary cohort of “progressives.” Yet the internal debate does mark a critical distinction--between those who are content to point a finger at bumbling hypocrites on high and those who support doing what they can to help people set upon by tyrants. “From a moral/political perspective,” concludes Walzer, “I don’t think it matters much if this particular fire isn’t dangerous to me and mine. I can’t just sit and watch. Or rather, the price of sitting and watching is a kind of moral corruption that leftists (and others too) must always resist.”