The menace of war.

The images on TV and the accounts in the newspapers are horrible: a woman hanging from a tree limb, thousands of refugees streaming away from their captured "safe havens," and thousands of Muslims being led off to unknown fates.

The Bosnian Serbs have committed unspeakable horrors, including mass rapes, and the impulse is to join in the cry for war, or at least for U.S. air attacks, against them. But we do not believe that is the proper course to take.

In general, we don't believe war solves anything. "While there are certainly vicious enemies of liberty and human rights in the world, war itself is the most vicious of enemies," Howard Zinn wrote in You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train. "War itself multiplies the violence, multiplies the cruelty."

Bombing the Bosnian Serbs, or introducing massive numbers of U.N. troops on the side of the Muslims, will certainly bring more killing and horror. And it's extremely unlikely that the Bosnian Serbs will give up; bombing will only make them dig in deeper and behave more ruthlessly. Expect more hostage-taking, more summary executions.

There are other unintended consequences that could be catastrophic. A Western attack on the Bosnian Serbs is likely to put enormous pressure on Serbia to join directly with the Bosnian Serbs in the war against the Bosnian Muslims and the Croats. It will also fuel the hyper-nationalists in an already unstable Russia to meddle dangerously in the conflict; every Zhirinovsky would be up on his soap box. Is the United States, is NATO, prepared to deal with the havoc this would cause?

It is the combustible unpredictability of war that should give anyone pause. "All wars have invariably produced fatal surprises," writes Gabriel Kolko in Century of War. "Those who have led the world's key war-making nations and governments in this century have repeatedly and calamitously misjudged the ultimate consequences of their command decisions."

Has Bill Clinton accurately judged the consequences of his decision to approve massive air strikes against the Serbs? We doubt it. And on what constitutional grounds has Clinton made this commitment? There's been no Congressional approval, no declaration of war. Just because our sympathies lie with the Muslims does not mean we should throw out the Constitution and bow to the imperial Presidency.

Nor are we for an end to the arms embargo, which Bob Dole so sanctimoniously has championed. Yes, the Bosnian Muslims have been at a disadvantage militarily because of the embargo, but more arms will bring more death and more destruction to innocent people on all sides. There is no end to this cycle. As long as the United States continues to arm the world, the U.S. military will be called upon endlessly to intervene in disputes in which the two sides are fighting each other with weapons that say MADE IN THE U.S.A.

There has to be a better way. Instead of trying war, let's try peace. Bring the warring parties to the negotiating table. Admit that the Bosnian Muslims have lost the civil war; no amount of U.S. bombing (except nuclear annihilation), no amount of NATO troops (short of a million) will reconquer all the lost territory. Settle for peace, even an unfair peace. The alternatives are too ghastly.

"We must look for negotiated solutions," Zinn wrote, "even at the expense of national pride, must consider human life more important than boundary lines, must buy time for the achievement of justice without war."

Warmakers are mythmakers, and the most popular myth in the mainstream media is that America is the nation on the white horse, and it needs to get up in the saddle again and ride. The New Republic, which supported the war against Saddam Hussein and the contra war against Nicaragua, says, "The United States seems to be taking a sabbatical from historical seriousness."

Was the United States the dean of historical seriousness in Vietnam? In Guatemala? In Chile? In East Timor?

The New York Times Week in Review for Sunday, July 16, led off with a piece entitled, "Honor, Too, Is Put to Flight in Bosnia." The writer, Roger Cohen, said, "America still personifies the confidence necessary to draw a distinction between right and wrong and then fight for it." Give us a break! "Even in Vietnam," Cohen wrote, "the honor of fighting to extend the reach of freedom stood at the core of the beliefs of those who backed the war." If Vietnam taught anything, it should have been that fighting for Western honor was not all that it was cracked up to be.

But the United States didn't intervene in Vietnam for Western honor. This gets to the nub of the question, "What should we do about Bosnia?" For the "we" is not the left; the "we" is not good, humanitarian-minded individuals. The "we" is the U.S. government and the U.S. military. These entities bomb not for principle but for interest--the interest of the leading economic forces in our country, which benefit from every projection of U.S. power abroad, and the interest of the military and political players, who stand to gain from war. Sometimes the United States goes to war in spasms of ideological drunkenness, as in Korea and Vietnam; other times it's to enhance the military's image at home, as in Somalia; still others, to burnish the image of the Commander-in-Chief, as in Panama, Grenada, Libya, and Iraq. But it's never--not even in World War II--for honor, much less for humanity.

So let's not kid ourselves with talk about what "we" should do. The United States will intervene militarily in Bosnia when it suits the interests of those who call the shots. Then the high-minded rationales will be wheeled out, the talk of "honor" will resume, and the killing will go on. We must stand for peace.