Don't Send the Air Force to Do an Angel's Job.

Here's a paradigmatic image of the NATO effort to date, thanks to Fox TV News. A U.S. transport helicopter lands somewhere in Albania, and a Marine, in full combat gear, leaps out. Assuming the ritual half-crouching position, he duly points his automatic weapon in various directions, although there is no one around, not even a shrub. His form is admirable, his mien menacing. And his mission, according to the voice-over? He has come to build houses for the Kosovar refugees.

NATO's mission in the Balkans started with the noblest of aims. Faced with scenes of mass misery afflicting telegenic white people by the hundreds of thousands, European socialists, social democrats, even the formerly pacifistic Greens dropped all their customary objections to heavy-handed, U.S.-led military interventions. So what if NATO is a zombie kept alive largely as a market for U.S. made weapons? If your spouse is being molested and screaming for help, you intervene with whatever tools lie at hand, rusty and imperfect as they may be, and leave the debates over Lenin's theory of imperialism for later. As for the argument that intervention in a civil war constitutes a gross violation of "national sovereignty," tell that to the Rwandan Tutsis, if you can find any of them around to listen.

But this mission of mercy--heralded by Tony Blair as a "progressive war"--quickly took a nasty turn. NATO bombs have already killed about 500 Serbian civilians, including children and, no doubt, a few anti-Milosevic peaceniks as well. Innocent people do, regrettably, die in wars, as the NATO spokesmen continually remind us. But since when was Operation Allied Force a "war"? In a war, it may be all right to kill the enemy and anyone who looks like him, but in a mission of mercy, the most urgent priority is to rescue the enemy's victims. To go back to the case where that intruder is menacing your spouse, would your first reaction be to run over to the intruder's house and strangle his wife and child? If so, you might as well blow your own spouse a last, fervent kiss goodbye.

What is happening with NATO is known technically as "mission creep": You start out doing--or claiming to do---one thing and end up doing quite another. While the bombs rain down on Serbia, the humanitarian crisis that originally inspired the whole operation has been relegated to a purely propagandistic role. The United States, for example, has budgeted only $58.5 million for humanitarian aid, less than the cost of a single day's bombing sorties, says Marc Weisbrot of the Preamble Center, writing on Z magazine's web page.

As for the ethnic Albanians still playing hide and seek with the Serb ethnic cleansers within Kosovo, NATO has nothing to offer them but shrapnel. Asked why NATO doesn't airlift these desperate people food and other supplies, the answer is always that the requisite low-flying transport planes would be too vulnerable to Serb anti-aircraft fire. Although unable to drop food and medicine from its planes, NATO will, of course, continue to drop bombs wherever possible, as weather permits, the spokesmen assure us.

In the week of April 12th, the mission had crept so far that it began to look as if NATO and Milosevic were undergoing some weird kind of role reversal. First, NATO demonstrated its efficiency at Milosevic's old job of ethnic cleansing by killing approximately 100 ethnic Albanian civilians in a bombing raid. Then, NATO commander General Wesley Clark hinted that Milosevic will be expected to take over NATO's former mission of succoring the ethnic Albanians remaining within Kosovo. At least, when asked by a New York Times reporter whether NATO might be able to aid these people with airdropped relief supplies, he referred the problem to Milosevic: "Our view on this is that, frankly, this is a problem that's caused by President Milosevic. He needs to address this problem."

So the mission of mercy morphs into ever-escalating mayhem, which is perhaps what should be expected whenever one sends an air force out to do an angel's job. Remember Somalia, where the starving victims were treated to tens of thousands of well-fed--though no doubt potentially tasty--Marines. There is a problem with all these efforts to contain our species' genocidal tendencies. When we want to make peace, we send the weapons of war. Where we want to save lives, we deploy trained killers. Which is, from a purely logical perspective, a little like recruiting your local arsonists into the volunteer fire department.

Warmaking, as opposed to peacekeeping or rescue missions, operates according to a simple binary logic: There are good guys and bad guys, and the latter have to die or be otherwise subdued.

But the logic of ethnic conflict is not so simple. Instead of good people and evil people, think of a chain of atrocity and revenge, with each act of vengeance constituting a fresh atrocity. As the great literary scholar Rene Girard has written, the chain of violence-and-revenge propagates itself as if it were a living thing. Over time, the chain grows, entangling millions and stretching on for generations. The Serbs may be the most atrocious of the Balkan lot, but they are caught in the chain themselves, reacting to thousands of ancient and newly inflicted hurts, including now the NATO bombs. When you use violence in the attempt to end a chain of violence, Girard explained in Violence and the Sacred, "the real victor is always violence itself."

Clearly, the "international community"--meaning the United States and its allies du jour--needs a whole new technology of intervention. Former U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali once proposed the creation of a special U.N. army--restrained, self-sacrificing, and trained (one would hope) for just this kind of work.

Absent that, the only thing to do is to stop the bombing and concentrate all resources on helping the victims of ethnic cleansing, living now in terror and mud. Airlift supplies into Kosovo, using fighter jets to protect the transport planes. Dry out Yeltsin and flatter him with a major peacemaking role.

As a last resort, bring in an armed U.N. force to carve out safe havens within Kosovo.

And when you send someone to build houses, remember to give him a hammer as well as a gun.

Barbara Ehrenreich, author of "Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War" (Henry Holt), is a columnist for The Progressive.