The Nation has not distinguished itself in its coverage of the Kosovo crisis.
It has had some good editorials and articles, but these are nicely balanced by pro-war
pieces. It should embarrass the editors that its UN Correspondent Ian Williams is a
fanatical hawk, who supports the NATO violations of the UN Charter and contemptuous
treatment of the UN itself. Contributing Editor Kai Bird has been given space for a truly
stupid hawkish entry that calls for a ground war in Kosovo, on political and moral grounds
(June 14). Christopher Hitchens has had three pro-war articles that have taken the form of
anti-anti-war diatribes (May 17, May 31, June 14). This all no doubt reflects the sad
intellectual and moral state of the liberal-left, but one would have hoped for more from
the Nation.
Bird quotes Paul Berman, an old Nation as well as New York Times favorite,
on the moral issues involved: "We, who used to be the party of non-intervention
(because we were anti-imperialists) should now become, in the case of various dictators
and genocidal situations, the party of intervention (because we are democrats)." Bird
seems unaware that Berman spent a great deal of his intellectual energy in the 1980s
denouncing the Sandinista government of Nicaragua, in a perfect complement to the
imperialist intervention of his own government. It also seems never to have occurred to
Bird that the NATO intervention in the Balkans might be a further reflection of
imperialism in action, with human rights providing only its legitimizing facade. He offers
not a word on the context of the intervention, which he seems to think sprang from NATO’s
natural aversion to ethnic cleansing. He wants a "truly international
intervention" in which the key is "international law." That NATO has
violated international law in order to avoid veto by the international community escapes
his understanding. He confronts the problem of double standards (e.g., Turkish Kurds) by
saying that "we should stop arming the Turks in their war against the Kurds."
But why is the leader of NATO supporting ethnic cleansing in Turkey and why not mobilize a
"truly international intervention" there? Bird does not say, except that Kosovo
is right in Europe, "on our watch." But Colombia and Turkey are also "on
our watch." In other words, this is intellectual and moral garbage.
Hitchens is equally bad in his latest effort ("Port Huron Piffle," June 14),
in which he attacks Tom Hayden’s May 24th Nation piece that opposed the bombing
with a series of sly obfuscations. He takes advantage of the fact that Hayden is trying to
influence the Democratic Party, and Hayden uses some opportunistic arguments like the
threat of a Vietnam-like "quagmire," the damaging effect of the war on the
Democratic Party and on Al Gore’s prospects, and the squandering of money that could be
used for better purposes. Hitchens asks why we should care about Gore’s political
fortunes, and he notes that Clinton had already committed large resources to Star Wars,
etc. These are legitimate criticisms of Hayden, but really question his political aim
rather than the guts of the article.
When we get to the guts, Hayden towers above Hitchens. Hitchens contends that Hayden’s
use of "quagmire" and "bogged down" suggests a clumsy superpower in
Vietnam rather than an aggressor, and implies an equating of the Vietnamese resistance to
the "drunken robotic militias" of Serbia. He adds that the free fire zones in
Kosovo "are the work not of NATO but of Serbian death squads." This is sleazy:
the use of "quagmire" implies nothing about aggression, clumsiness, or the
quality of the resistance. Making the victims of the NATO attack only the "drunken
robotic militias" is dishonest; and referring to the conscript Serbian army in such
terms is the kind of racist, dehumanizing propaganda that serves well the NATO eagerness
to kill without restraint (as the "allies" did in the desert slaughter of
thousands of helpless Iraqi conscripts in February 1991). Hitchens’ failure to see that
the free fire zones and refugee flight are in large measure a function of the NATO attacks
is straight NATO apologetics. (Hitchens never mentions Serbian refugees, although those
produced in Serbia itself now exceed those fleeing Kosovo.)
As in his earlier "Belgrade Degraded" (May 17) Hitchens sneers at "the
obligatory ‘double standards’ passage." The double standard is awkward for Hitchens
as he obviously supports hard line policies toward Yugoslavia but finds it difficult to
explain away something like the exemption of Turkey and the Kurds. So he resorts to
rhetoric, asking whether Hayden urged action in Rwanda, as if this is relevant to
evaluating the U.S. and NATO double standard. He then asks: "Did he not notice the
denial of Turkish membership in the European Union because of Kurdistan and Cyprus and
human rights for Turks, or would he have said that NATO members had no moral right to take
such decisions, given their silence on (let’s say ) Tibet? This is casuistry." But
the casuistry here is strictly that of Hitchens. He tries to demonstrate NATO’s high moral
standing by mentioning the European Union’s punitive action against Turkey, and then
brings in Tibet to deflect attention from the substantive issues raised by selectivity to
"moral right." But Hitchens slides by several points: EU is not NATO, and NATO
has never expressed the slightest discomfort with Turkey or its human rights failings. He
also fails to explain why the EU’s and NATO’s treatment of Turkey’s severe ethnic
cleansing was so extremely mild compared to NATO’s treatment of the Serbs, and he neglects
mentioning that the United States opposed those mild sanctions by Europe and has aided and
supported Turkey without deviation as it has killed large numbers of Kurds and has made
hundreds of thousands refugees.
What this selectivity suggests is that perhaps "moral right" is irrelevant to
explaining NATO policy in Yugoslavia. Tom Hayden has the merit of noting that "this
war is being conducted for reasons of state and not primarily for human rights."
Hitchens needs to avoid such matters, because with all his "left" bluster and
references to saving money with cluster bombs, in the end he accepts that
"Slavo-fascism" has been the driving force and problem in the Balkans and that
the NATO response was "when the sheer exorbitance of the crimes in Kosovo became
impossible to ignore." Mentioning that crimes in Colombia and Turkey were
substantially more severe than in Kosovo before the NATO bombing but were "quite easy
to ignore" is awkward for one who has bought the NATO bill of goods and objects
mainly to NATO’s tactical blunders.