<Susan Sontag justifying a war!

Of course, this is a Clinton war. That's very different, isn't it? God, I couldn't have made this article up. Nobody would have believed it. Some excerpts:

...But opposition to the war is hardly confined to Italy, and to one strand of the political spectrum. On the contrary: mobilized against this war are remnants of the left and the likes of Le Pen and Bossi and Heider on the right. The right is against immigrants. The left is against America. (Against the idea of America, that is. The hegemony of American popular culture in Europe could hardly be more total.)

...Of course, it is easy to turn your eyes from what is happening if it is not happening to you. Or if you have not put yourself where it is happening. I remember in Sarajevo in the summer of 1993 a Bosnian friend telling me ruefully that in 1991, when she saw on her TV set the footage of Vukovar utterly leveled by the Serbs, she thought to herself, How terrible, but that's in Croatia, that can never happen here in Bosnia ... and switched the channel. The following year, when the war started in Bosnia, she learned differently. Then she became part of a story on television that other people saw and said, How terrible ... and switched the channel.

How helpless "our" pacified, comfortable Europe feels in the face of all this irrational slaughter and suffering taking place in the other Europe. But the images cannot be conjured away -- of refugees, people who have been pushed out of their homes, their torched villages, by the hundreds of thousands and who look like us.

Generations of Europeans fearful of any idealism, incapable of indignation except in the old anti-imperialist cold-war grooves. (Yet, of course, the key point about this war is that it is the direct result of the end of the cold war and the breakup of old empires and imperial rivalries.) Stop the War and Stop the Genocide, read the banners being waved in the demonstrations in Rome and here in Bari. For Peace. Against War. Who is not? But how can you stop those bent on genocide without making war?

We have been here before. The horrors, the horrors. Our attempt to forge a "humanitarian" response. Our inability (yes, after Auschwitz!) to comprehend how such horrors can take place. And as the horrors multiply, it becomes even more incomprehensible why we should respond to any one of them (since we have not responded to the others). Why this horror and not another? Why Bosnia or Kosovo and not Kurdistan or Rwanda or Tibet?

...If several African states had cared enough about the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda (nearly a million people!) to intervene militarily, say, under the leadership of Nelson Mandela, would we have criticized this initiative as being Afrocentric? Would we have asked what right these states have to intervene in Rwanda when they have done
nothing on behalf of the Kurds or the Tibetans?

Another argument against intervening in Kosovo is that the war is -- wonderful word -- illegal," because NATO is violating the borders of a sovereign state.

...But are national borders, which have been altered so many times in the last hundred years, really to be the ultimate criterion? You can murder your wife in your own house, but not outdoors on the street.

Imagine that Nazi Germany had had no expansionist ambitions but had simply made it a policy in the late 1930's and early 1940's to slaughter all the German Jews. Do we think a government has the right to do whatever it wants on its own territory? Maybe the governments of Europe would have said that 60 years ago. But would we approve
now of their decision?

Push the supposition into the present. What if the French Government began slaughtering large numbers of Corsicans and driving the rest out of Corsica ... or the Italian Government began emptying out Sicily or Sardinia, creating a million refugees ... or Spain decided to apply a final solution to its rebellious Basque population. Wouldn't we
agree that a consortium of powers on the continent had the right to use military force to make the French (or Italian, or Spanish) Government reverse its actions, which would probably mean overthrowing that Government?

But of course this couldn't happen, could it? Not in Europe. My friends in Sarajevo used to say during the siege: How can "the West" be letting this happen to us? This is Europe, too. We're Europeans. Surely "they" won't allow it to go on.

But they -- Europe -- did.

For something truly terrible happened in Bosnia. From the Serb death camps in the north of Bosnia in 1992, the first death camps on European soil since the 1940's, to the mass executions of many thousands of civilians at Srebrenica and elsewhere in the summer of 1995 -- Europe tolerated that.

So, obviously, Bosnia wasn't Europe.

Those of us who spent time in Sarajevo used to say that, as the 20th century began at Sarajevo, so will the 21st century begin at Sarajevo. If the options before NATO all seem either improbable or unpalatable, it is because NATO's actions come eight years too late. Milosevic should have been stopped when he was shelling Dubrovnik in
1991.

Back in 1993 and 1994, American policy makers were saying that even if there were no United States intervention in Bosnia, rest assured, this would be the last thing that Milosevic would be allowed to get away with. A line in the sand had been drawn: he would never be allowed to make war on Kosovo. But who believed the Americans then?
Not the Bosnians. Not Milosevic. Not the Europeans. Not even the Americans themselves. After Dayton, after the destruction of independent Bosnia, it was time to go back to sleep, as if the series of events set in motion in 1989 with the accession to power of Milosevic and the revocation of autonomous status for the province of Kosovo,
would not play out to its obvious logical end.

If Europe is having a hard time thinking that it matters what happens in the southeastern corner of Europe, imagine how hard it is for Americans to think it is in their interest. It is not in America's interest to push this war on Europe. It is very much not in Europe's interest to reward Milosevic for the destruction of Yugoslavia and the creation of so much human suffering.

Why not just let the brush fire burn out? is the argument of some. And the expulsion of a million or more refugees into the neighboring countries of Albania and Macedonia? This will certainly bring on the destruction of the fragile new state of Macedonia and the redrawing of the map of the Balkans -- certain to be disputed by, at the
very least, Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece. Do we imagine this will happen peacefully?

Not surprisingly, the Serbs are presenting themselves as the victims. (Clinton equals Hitler, etc.) But it is grotesque to equate the casualties inflicted by the NATO bombing with the mayhem inflicted on hundreds of thousands of people in the last eight years by the Serb programs of ethnic cleansing.

Not all violence is equally reprehensible; not all wars are equally unjust.

No forceful response to the violence of a state against peoples who are nominally its own citizens? (Which is what most "wars" are today. Not wars between states.) The principal instances of mass violence in the world today are those committed by governments within their own legally recognized borders. Can we really say there is no
response to this? Is it acceptable that such slaughters be dismissed as civil wars, also known as "age-old ethnic hatreds." (After all, anti-Semitism was an old tradition in Europe; indeed, a good deal older than ancient Balkan hatreds. Would this have justified letting Hitler kill all the Jews on German territory?) Is it true that war never solved
anything? (Ask a black American if he or she thinks our Civil War didn't solve anything.)

War is not simply a mistake, a failure to communicate. There is radical evil in the world, which is why there are just wars. And this is a just war. Even if it has been bungled.

Stop the genocide. Return all refugees to their homes. Worthy goals. But how is any of this conceivably going to happen unless the Milosevic regime is overthrown? (And the truth is, it's not going to happen.)

Impossible to see how this war will play out. All the options seem improbable, as well as undesirable. Unthinkable to keep bombing indefinitely, if Milosevic is indeed willing to accept the destruction of the Serbian economy; unthinkable for NATO to stop bombing, if Milosevic remains intransigent.

The Milosevic Government has finally brought on Serbia a small portion of the suffering it has inflicted on neighboring peoples.

War is a culture, bellicosity is addictive, defeat for a community that imagines itself to be history's eternal victim can be as intoxicating as victory. How long will it take for the Serbs to realize that the Milosevic years have been an unmitigated disaster for Serbia, the net result of Milosevic's policies being the economic and cultural ruin of the
entire region, including Serbia, for several generations? Alas, one thing we can be sure of, that will not happen soon.

Anybody still have questions on what the real motivations of people like Sontag are?