A lesson unlearned: War makes things worse

By James Carroll, 04/06/99

`The problem after a war is with the victor. He thinks he has just proved that war and violence pay. Who will now teach him a lesson?'' This question was put, prophetically, in 1941 by A.J. Muste of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (Howard Zinn is my source). The United States was the victor, first after World War II, and then after the Cold War. Each time it seemed that the usefulness of ''war and violence'' had been vindicated. No one was there to teach us otherwise.

After World War II, we were left with the illusion that bombing from the air is a good way to conduct warfare. Because the Nazis were so evil, and because we were immediately thrust into a dangerous contest with the Soviet Union, we never confronted the moral meaning of our policy of saturation bombing of cities. Our pursuit of victory had rolled into a quest for vengeance, pure and simple, which is why the vast majority of civilians killed by Allied bombing died needlessly in the last months of the war - a crime that was never adjudicated. The postwar strategic bombing survey exposed the limited military value of bombing, but the lack of an equivalent moral survey left us clinging to the myth that we could freely hurl thunderbolts from the sky, like God.

After the Cold War, too, we failed to learn about the limited usefulness of violence, even nuclear violence. Hadn't our readiness to hurl the ultimate thunderbolt brought us victory? We convinced ourselves that it was the 1980s arms buildup that finally defeated the Soviet Union. Thus we refused to turn away from the narrowest notion of national security. Without a military rival, we entered an arms race with ourselves. Instead of dismantling NATO as an outmoded structure of Cold War, we expanded it, not imagining that such a reinvestment of treasure and hope in war readiness would bring its own momentum toward new conflict. Then we resuscitated ''Star Wars,'' sending a sharp signal around the world that missiles must still define national self-worth.

Believing that military solutions are the only ones to trust, we failed, when faced with the real challenge of Slobodan Milosevic, to mobilize the moral force of true diplomacy or serious economic pressure aimed directly at him and his clique. Then, two weeks ago, in a culmination of such choices, we put our absolute faith in bombing again. And look what happened. At last the thunderbolt illusion seems to have burst.

A.J. Muste's question remains: Who will teach us the lesson that ''war and violence'' make things worse, not better? The answer is not Milosevic, whose faith in killing exceeds ours. The teacher, this time, is that mass of refugees who have been driven from their homes by a perverse combination of NATO bombing and Serbian brutality. Perhaps never before have the limits of warfare been made more apparent more quickly or more dramatically. At the beginning of the NATO bombing campaign, as I observed a week ago, the watch word was ''credibility'' - a sure signal that bombs would be dropped to protect NATO's self-image instead of the Kosovar Albanians. Now we know that even US intelligence warned that bombing might unleash Serb forces against civilians, as it did. Their safety was never our priority.

Now the word that defines NATO's purpose is ''victory.'' Half-panicked NATO leaders speak of doing whatever is necessary to ''win.'' Once more, the needs of the men, women, and children in the fields and valleys of Albania, at the borders of Macedonia, and on the roads of Kosovo are being given short shrift. ''Victory'' is the code word for vengeance. Settling the score with the ruthless Milosevic is taking priority over saving the lives of the innocent masses. Their plight, finally, must be our teacher here.

How do NATO choices affect the real situation of real people on the ground? NATO airstrikes are what enable Milosevic to keep his criminal program of ethnic cleansing going. That is the first reason to stop the bombing. The life-and-death needs of hundreds of thousands of refugees must be NATO's absolute priority. That is a second reason to stop the bombing. NATO's enraged determination to punish Serbia for the humiliation it has suffered turns a moral mistake into a chosen moral catastrophe, which is a third reason to stop the bombing. Stop the bombing now.

Everything has changed. Once again, war has proven its unpredictability. The motives, strategies, and even good intentions of two weeks ago are irrelevant now. Questions of winning and losing no longer count. All NATO talk of ''perseverance,'' and ''persistence,'' and ''steadiness,'' disguise a terrible failure that has already occurred.

At bottom, it is the failure to learn the one lesson this century has been trying to teach. NATO must face the tragic fact that it has inadvertently joined forces with the heinous Milosevic in a war against an innocent people. Whether Milosevic stops his part of that war will not matter until NATO stops its part. A million shivering, starving, frightened people are asking us to forgo saving face for the sake of saving them. Stop the bombing!

James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe.