Just War. Just Means?

KOSOVO

The problem with zero casualties.

Mr. Abrams, an assistant secretary of state under President Reagan, is president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

NATO's Balkan bombing campaign was victorious, more or less, but there may be as much relief in the West as in Belgrade that it is ending. Given that NATO was imposing, but not taking, casualties, why that reaction? There was broad public outrage in the West against ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and equally broad support for this humanitarian intervention. Why then the sense that not only the Serbs, but we as well, have had a lucky escape?

Steven Rosenfeld, writing in the Washington Post, offered this extraordinary analysis: "It turned out that the principal shortage . . . was of viable military and economic targets. Serbia being . . . a small, middle-level country, the number of these began to run short. The gap was made up by verging into targets that could be hit only by putting civilians at extra risk. Still, the end of the war came before the NATO publics revolted against the collateral civilian kill."

This is strong language, but it points to the fundamental humanitarian problem of the Kosovo war: How was it that an intervention whose goal was to prevent ethnic cleansing and the creation of refugees from Kosovo failed so miserably at that, then became a campaign to inflict pain on Serbia's economy rather than on its army? In a total war such as World War II, these questions barely arise: Germany's and Japan's armies and economies were equally legitimate targets. But Kosovo was that new breed, the "humanitarian intervention." How did we get from stopping ethnic cleansing in Kosovo to bombing bridges and electric plants in Serbia?

Some analysts have called this war a great achievement for air power, and the redoubtable John Keegan has written that "the outcome is a victory for air power and air power alone." He has moreover called it "a victory for the New World Order," for "there are now no places on earth that cannot be subjected to the same relentless harrowing that the Serbs have suffered in the past six weeks," which has been "inflicted by aircraft operating from carriers at sea or by others flying direct from the United States." Thus "would-be Milosevics around the world will have to reconsider their plans."

But Keegan is casting us in a new role: While once we were the "arsenal of democracy," he now sees us as the world's purveyor of "relentless" bombing campaigns. It is an honor we may wish to refuse. For one thing, it isn't at all clear he is right about air power: Milosevic gave in, it seems, only when NATO threatened a ground war. If that is true, then President Clinton's decision to consider ground forces only in June after publicly rejecting them in March caused unnecessary human suffering. Whatever effect the bombing campaign had on Milosevic, it certainly didn't prevent the brutalities suffered by a million Kosovars. And it ended up, as Rosenfeld acknowledged, aiming at targets in Serbia that were collateral to the war effort in Kosovo.

If we acted out of humanitarian motives, what went wrong? The answer is that President Clinton and our NATO allies willed the ends but not the means-and that gap was filled with Serbian economic targets. We refused to interpose our troops between the Serbian soldiers and their Kosovar civilian victims. We chose instead a means that guaranteed very low American casualties, at the price of vastly inflating the damage done in Serbia and Kosovo. In the context of a "humanitarian" intervention, this was a problematic choice. It was not novel, for we have been doing this in the Balkans all along: too little too late. Our intervention in Bosnia was of the same character, and there we were treated to the sight of NATO troops refusing to capture indicted war criminals and refusing to act when the Serbs violated clear promises they had made to respect safe havens. Our intervention in Kosovo came with clear pledges not to deploy ground troops, which can only have emboldened Milosevic and prolonged the suffering.

The lesson of this entire episode is not that humanitarian intervention is wrong, but that, like all forms of war, it requires a resolute will to win and a decision to commit whatever forces are needed to win-and the sense to resist intervening if our goals are unachievable at a price we are willing to pay. Our intervention in Haiti in 1994 was nearly risk-free, but its goal of "restoring democracy" was simply beyond our capacity given the realities of life and politics on that unhappy island. In the Gulf War, President Bush did match our military means to his goal of expelling the Iraqis from Kuwait (even if the proper goal was the removal of Saddam Hussein from power). In the Balkans, there was no doubt our forces could prevail, but no real willingness to take casualties. Thus the air war.

The victory against Serbia, inflicted with no casualties at all on our side (except in accidents), is likely to encourage us in future interventions. If the "lesson of Vietnam" is that everything may turn into a quagmire, the "lesson of Kosovo" may be the opposite: that humanitarian intervention is pretty cheap, morally rewarding, and an appropriate role for the United States as the world's leading democracy and its only great power.

But that lesson is too simple. Bill Clinton's insistence on escaping the hard choices in Kosovo gave succor to Milosevic, encouraged and permitted the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo, and contributed to a great humanitarian tragedy. While the administration will call the bombing campaign a successful humanitarian intervention (for in the end NATO forces will occupy Kosovo and protect refugees who may wish to return), in truth this was a failed substitute for a real humanitarian intervention that might have prevented mass murder, terror, and exile in the first place.

Humanitarian intervention is a militarily and morally complex decision. It requires calculations and balances of factors such as timing, means, goals, and chances of success. The picture of an America willing to make those moral calculations, and to risk its own resources and even its troops to prevent terrible crimes such as those committed in Kosovo, is an attractive one. This is a fitting role for a superpower that believes itself motivated by a commitment to democracy and world peace. The alternative picture, of a superpower willing to bomb but not to fight, willing to inflict a tremendous amount of pain on others to avoid the slightest risks to itself, under a leadership more sensitive to poll data than to the moral considerations involved in deciding which wars are just-that is a picture that should repel us.

Both pictures are being drawn today. Americans will reject the second, ugly portrait of their country, or say that it describes only Bill Clinton. But the issues presented by Kosovo-and by our decisions to intervene or not to intervene in the Gulf, Rwanda, Haiti, and Somalia- need far more careful consideration than this administration, Congress, or the American people have yet given them. There is no foreign-policy question more central in the post-Cold War world than when and how the United States should intervene in situations that are not, or not yet, clear threats to our national security. The Clinton years have only sharpened those questions, without answering any of them.