Kosovo Conundrum
The Collective Confusion of American Progressives
There are many terrible injustices in the world today. The largest ethnic group that’s been denied its own nation is the Kurds. And it’s the Turks, our allies in NATO, in bombing Serbia, who are denying the Kurds and repressing the Kurds in many of the same ways that Milosevic was repressing the Kosovar Albanians before this war started. The largest group of refugees in the world today, I read, is from Afghanistan. The United States cannot use military force to solve all the problems of terrible injustice in the world today, and I fear that our use of military force up to this point has only made things worse. I am, unfortunately, confident that increasing our military engagement in Yugoslavia will make it much worse, and, therefore, we need to find some other ways of resolving these injustices.
MEYERSON: The foreign policy of the Clinton administration has been marked by contradictory tendencies. On the one hand, they do a totally dumb-ass, gratuitously alienating, strategically questionable move like expanding NATO eastward, which only makes the Russians more insecure without making Europe more secure. On the other hand, there have been interventions for which the word humanitarianactually fits. Haiti is one.Do I wish that Europe had the sort of wherewithal, both militarily, spiritually and whatever, to have intervened on its own against Milosevic? I do. But that said, this isn’t a unilateral intervention. It’s backed by German Greens, French leftists, French Gaullists — who hate America more than French leftists do — and a lot of other forces which aren’t particularly interested in expanding the American empire. It is an imbalanced coalition, but it is a coalition. I would like it if the U.N. were a more effective body for intervening when necessary. But sometimes it’s not. When Vietnam invaded Cambodia and got rid of Pol Pot, you couldn’t do that through the U.N., because China would be able to veto any such move. Preferably, you go through the U.N., but it shouldn’t be a prescription for paralysis if that doesn’t work out.
MIJOJLIC: One thing that saddens me, Bekim, is that I see you being very militant, taking the position that lets us go into this no matter what the cost and then see what the settlement is. My position is, let’s not go there — that militant way — and let’s not kill so many people. Let’s first sit down and talk. Let’s do that before too many people are killed. HASANI: My contention is that sometimes you have to use force to stop force. Hitler was stopped by a war, after all. LAWSON: Well, I agree that you have to use force, but you can use — you can use creative, nonviolent force to stop force too. And, above all, you cannot overcome evil with more evil. You must stop evil by somehow trying to build the good larger and stopping it in that fashion.
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