The Glory of War
By Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

The bloom on the rose of war eventually fades, leaving only the thorns. By the time this takes place, most everyone has already begun the national task of averting the eyes from the thorns, meaning the awful reality, the dashed hopes, the expense, the lame, the limbless, the widows, the orphans, the death on all sides, and the resulting instability. The people who still take an interest are those who first took an interest in war: the power elite, who began the war for purposes very different from that which they sold to the public at the outset.

Thus does the American public not care much about Iraq. It is not quite as invisible as other nations that were the subject of national obsessions in the recent past. Hardly anyone knows who or what is running El Salvador, Nicaragua, Haiti, Libya, Serbia, or Somalia, or any of the other formerly strategic countries that once engaged national attention.

In fact, the president of Nicaragua, Enrique Bolanos (never heard of him, huh?) is visiting the White House next week in hopes of soliciting support for the upcoming election, which could prove to be dicey since the old US nemesis Daniel Ortega is running and gaining some support on a consistently anti-US platform. Should he win, one can imagine the White House swinging into high gear about how Nicaragua is harboring communists, er...terrorists. Or maybe not. Maybe he will rule the country and never make a headline. It is all up to the state.

Why the state goes to war is not a mystery ’Äì at least the general reasons are not mysterious. War is an excuse for spending money on its friends. It can punish enemies that are not going with the program. It intimidates other states tempted to go their own way. It can pave the way for commercial interests linked to the state. The regime that makes and wins a war gets written up in the history books. So the reasons are the same now as in the ancient world: power, money, glory.

Why the bourgeoisie back war is another matter. It is self-evidently not in their interest. The government gains power at their expense. It spends their money and runs up debt that is paid out of taxes and inflation. It fosters the creation of permanent enemies abroad who then work to diminish our security at home. It leads to the violation of privacy and civil liberty. War is incompatible with a government that leaves people alone to develop their lives in an atmosphere of freedom.

Nonetheless, war with moral themes - we are the good guys working for God and they are the bad guys doing the devil's work - tends to attract a massive amount of middle class support. People believe the lies, and, once exposed, they defend the right of the state to lie. People who are otherwise outraged by murder find themselves celebrating the same on a mass industrial scale. People who harbor no hatred toward foreigners find themselves attaching ghastly monikers to whole classes of foreign peoples. Regular middle class people, who otherwise struggle to eke out a flourishing life in this vale of tears, feel hatred well up within them and confuse it for honor, bravery, courage, and valor.

Why? Nationalism is one answer. To be at war is to feel at one with something much larger than oneself, to be a part of a grand historical project. They have absorbed the civic religion from childhood - Boston tea, cherry trees, log cabins, Chevrolet - but it mostly has no living presence in their minds until the state pushes the war button, and then all the nationalist emotions well up within them.

Nationalism is usually associated with attachment to a particular set of state managers that you think can somehow lead the country in a particular direction of which you approve. So the nationalism of the Iraq war was mostly a Republican Party phenomenon. All Democrats are suspected as being insufficiently loyal, of feeling sympathy for The Enemy, or defending such ideas as civil liberty at a time when the nation needs unity more than ever.

You could tell a Republican nationalist during this last war because the words peace and liberty were always said with a sneer, as if they didn't matter at all. Even the Constitution came in for a pounding from these people. Bush did all he could to consolidate decision-making power unto himself, and even strongly suggested that he was acting on God's orders as Commander in Chief, and his religious constitutionalist supporters went right along with it. They were willing to break as many eggs as necessary to make the war omelet. I've got an archive of a thousand hate mails to prove it.

But nationalism is not the only basis for bourgeois support for war. Long-time war correspondent Chris Hedges, in his great book War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning (First Anchor, 2003) argues that war operates as a kind of canvas on which every member of the middle and working class can paint his or her own picture. Whatever personal frustrations exist in your life, however powerless you feel, war works as a kind of narcotic. It provides a means for people to feel temporarily powerful and important, as if they are part of some big episode in history. War then becomes for people a kind of lurching attempt to taste immortality. War gives their lives meaning.

Hedges doesn't go this far but if you know something about the sociology of religion, you can recognize what he is speaking of: the sacraments. In Christian theology they are derived from periodic ceremonies in the Jewish tradition that cultivate the favor of God, who grants our lives transcendent importance. We receive sacraments as a means of gaining propitiation for our sins, an eternal blessing on worldly choices, or the very means of eternal life.

War is the devil's sacrament. It promises to bind us not with God but with the nation state. It grants not life but death. It provides not liberty but slavery. It lives not on truth but on lies, and these lies are themselves said to be worthy of defense. It exalts evil and puts down the good. It is promiscuous in encouraging an orgy of sin, not self-restraint and thought. It is irrational and bloody and vicious and appalling. And it claims to be the highest achievement of man.

It is worse than mass insanity. It is mass wallowing in evil.

And then it is over. People oddly forget what took place. The rose wilts and the thorns grow but people go on with their lives. War no longer inspires. War news becomes uninteresting. All those arguments with friends and family - what were they about anyway? All that killing and expense and death - let's just avert our eyes from it all. Maybe in a few years, once the war is out of the news forever and the country we smashed recovers some modicum of civilization, we can revisit the event and proclaim it glorious. But for now, let's just say it never happened.

That seems to be just about where people stand these days with the Iraq War. Iraq is a mess, hundreds of thousands are killed and maimed, billions of dollars are missing, the debt is astronomical, and the world seethes in hatred toward the conquering empire. And what does the warmongering middle class have to say for itself? Pretty much what you might expect: nothing.

People have long accused the great liberal tradition of a dogmatic attachment to peace. It would appear that this is precisely what is necessary in order to preserve the freedom necessary for all of us to find true meaning in our lives.

Do we reject war and all its works? We do reject them.

May 6, 2005

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. is president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, editor of LewRockwell.com and author of Speaking of Liberty.

This article was originally published at www.LewRockwell.com and is published here with permission.

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The Neocon Record: F For Failure
By Murray Polner

When an off-Broadway show opened a few seasons ago with the deliciously relevant title, "Now That Communism is Dead My Life Feels Empty," it made me think of the bright, clever neoconservatives I have known. Looking back, many of their prominent publications and groups were far too inflexible to accept that the USSR was no longer an invincible fifty-foot military monster incapable of change. By then many neoconservatives (though the term was and remains somewhat imprecise) "were no longer an adequate guide for interpreting a changing reality," as Richard Ehrman aptly put it in his book "The Rise of Neoconservatism" (Yale, 1995). The sad fact is they haven't changed much.

By the time George W. Bush's entered the White House, younger second-string, and too often second-rate neocons had already arrived, courtesy of well-funded ubiquitous think tanks, articles, books, TV spots, and subsidized magazines and newspapers. Typically, their writings were the sort of essays which might merit an A- or B+, well written but drowning in speculation, guesswork, and supposedly definitive judgments too often fashioned out of whole cloth. They didn't appear to have much of a sense of the past, given their subsequent misjudgments and given the fact that so many of them are rigid ideologues, utopians with questionable in a menacing and chaotic world. After 9/11 they helped spread rumors about Iraqi WMDs, Saddam's close ties to the 9/11 attacks, dismissed the United Nations and European roles and wholeheartedly backed the Patriot Act, parts of which represent a danger to future dissenters, right and left. Like Vice-President Cheney and others in the Bush White House, they were exalters of an American imperium, proud as punch that despite his modest anti-nation building campaign speeches, President Bush quickly came to mirror their thinking.

Dependent on and beholden to wealthy foundations and individuals with their own agendas, the necons, well schooled in Washington's Byzantine political climate, savvy about popularizing their points of view; had captured the presidency. Along the way they found new mantras and embraced vague, untested shibboleths such as "national greatness" and "benevolent global hegemony." Perhaps their greatest weakness has been their refusal to test critically the fundamental axiom on which they concocted a fantasy of democracies springing up in the Muslim Middle East following a walkover military victory and joyous reception in Iraq. Democracy is admirable, of course, but their theoreticians and polemicists never bothered explaining how establishing a democratic state in Iraq, a nation which had never known democracy, could stimulate the spread of democracy to other Arab states which had also no experience with it. Nor were they ever skeptical that voting equated automatically with democracy. Egypt, Yemen, Jordan, anyone? True believers, they listened to and promoted the views of Iraqi exiles who lacked believability.

Even more ominous was the Paul Wolfowitz - neocon doctrine of preemptive war, "a program breathtaking in its ambition," wisely observed George Szamuely, former editorial writer for the Times (London), The Spectator and the Times Literary Supplement, a genuine and thoughtful conservative. "Wolfowitz," he wrote, "was advocating total global supremacy by the United States. In every single region of the world the United States was to ensure that no power or coalition of powers could emerge that would challenge the rule of the United States in that region... Any power seeking to challenge this order could expect a vigorous and forceful U.S. response."

It was as critics left and right rightly recognized, a prescription for endless war.

After the fall of Iraq in 2003, they seemed remarkable prescient. They had won! But had they? Now we know they were painfully wrong. The callow generalizations of living room warriors without military or significant political experience had no idea what their invasion of Iraq would come to mean: no flowers and kisses from ebullient crowds, savage guerilla resistance, the ever-present possibility of religious civil war, and the birth of new terrorists. Nor have they expressed any regret, sorrow or shame about the many Americans, allies and Iraqi dead, wounded, tortured and terrorized in Iraq.

Neocons are the heirs of Woodrow Wilson, not because of his ill-formed fantasies of world peace through war, but rather the man who invaded Mexico, took the country into WWI, treated dissenters such as Eugene V. Debs with brutal prison sentences and who viewed blacks as inferior --along with his failed and confusing vision of newly created and artificial rump states in a league of nations. But neocons have yet another American imperial ancestor: Senator Albert Beveridge, a passionate supporter of American imperialism during the Spanish American War and the subsequent bloody invasion of the Philippines, which cost 4,000 American lives and 250,000 Filipino deaths. When Beveridge pontificated, "We are the trustees of the world's progress, guardians of its righteous peace... His chosen nation to finally lead in the regeneration of the world" he echoes his spiritual heirs in the Weekly Standard, New York Post, Fox TV, Pentagon civilian corps and the White House.

It will take a long time before this generation of neocons will be able to atone for their profound blunders. Nor will they be able to satisfy millions of us who still have never heard an honest explanation of why we invaded Iraq instead of going after Osama, which has caused problems that will take generations to resolve. I hope that some day the neocons can even find time to erect a monument to our Iraqi War dead and then pray for forgiveness.

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Aaron Tapper, Ph.D. Student

Recently, along with many other Jews, I celebrated the Jewish holiday of Purim.

I highlight this word because there is something that has troubled me about Purim for years. Though I was brought up attending Jewish Day Schools, Jewish summer overnight camps, Shabbat synagogue services, and have studied at numerous different yeshivot, I am no longer comfortable with some aspects of this holiday.

According to Jewish law, during the holiday's 24-hour period a Jew is obligated to hear Megillat Esther, the sacred text read on Purim, twice, and during this recitation Jews commonly celebrate the killing of human beings. Although I am aware that some scholars say that the megillah is a brilliantly written farce -- illustrated in the exaggeration of numbers of people, the all-too-many coincidences found in the story -- the Jewish communities that I have been exposed to in my life have not focused upon this literary technique. Instead we have cheered and applauded King Ahashverosh's sentencing and hanging of the character Haman, as well as his 10 sons, alongside the killing of more than 75,000 others at the hands of Jews. Following a traditional custom, though the entire text is chanted with specific troupe, we have recited the verse of Haman's hanging using a special upbeat melody, one of six verses in the megillah that is treated in this way because each of these passages contains descriptions of events that are perceived as having been beneficial to the Jews of the text's story.

This past summer I had the opportunity to spend one month in Freetown, Sierra Leone, volunteering as a research intern with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). As many people know, prior to this country's ceasefire a bloody and ruthless civil war raged in Sierra Leone for close to ten years. One of the many forms of violence perpetrated during this time was the chopping off of an "enemy's" hands, and on one of my last days at the TRC I spoke with a Sierra Leonean who had lost his left hand in one such attack. When I asked him about his understanding of the concept of forgiveness, I hesitantly questioned him as to what he would do if he encountered the man who had chopped his hand off, and in one of the more profound moments of my life I listened to the beautiful way that this individual had decided to treat his so-called enemy.

"I would embrace him," he said. "I would hug him and tell him that I forgive him. I know that he didn't chop off my hand because he hated me. He didn't even know me. He chopped off my hand in a crazed state of fear and madness."

I've often thought about this man's decision -- to forgive the person who carried out this ruthlessly violent act -- and have been touched that such people exist in our world. Though I don't know if I would be able to do this, I do believe that it is the closest path to the Divine.

The question thus remains for me, how should my Jewish community deal with perceived enemies? Should we pray for their demise or even their deaths? And what about those who don't actually commit a crime? Should their intentions be punished as well? Haman, as the text informs us, didn't kill anyone. Using terms from the current United States criminal system, Haman only conspired to kill others. And, according to the text, his sons didn't even do that. As for the more than 75,000 others who were killed by the Jewish community that day, the text implies that some of these non-Jews were killed in self-defense and some were murdered outright. Why does my community cheer on these acts? Why do we customarily hiss and boo when Haman's name is mentioned, in an attempt to 'blot out his name', when this figure never even spills anyone's blood? Is it simply because of his genealogical connection to the tribe of Amalek, the community that repeatedly tries to kill the Hebrews in the Torah? Should he be faulted for the sins of his ancestors? Yes, the text teaches us that Haman is a bad guy. He's greedy, manipulative, jealous, and conspiring, among other negative traits. But he clearly was not a murderer. Nor were his sons.

Following Purim, the next major holiday on the Jewish calendar is Pesach, or Passover. A like-minded custom from this holiday is the recitation of the Shfokh Chamatkha paragraph, said towards the end of the Pesach Seder when families traditionally open the front door of their home for the Prophet Elijah, so that he can bring upon the peacefulness of the 'end of days'. This passage goes as follows: "Pour out Your fury against the nations that do not know You and upon the kingdoms that do not invoke Your name because they devoured Jacob and desolated his home. Pour out Your wrath on them; may Your blazing anger overtake them. Pursue them with anger and destroy them from under the heavens of Adonai." [NOTE: Translations are my own]

For many years now I have been uncomfortable making this statement, especially when there are non-Jews at our Seder. For me, the phrase "that do not know You" is all too vague. Does this mean all non-Jews? Does it mean non-Jews who are immoral and unethical? Or does it just mean those non-Jews who have persecuted other Jews? What about the non-Jews who persecute other non-Jews? If my community is trying to perfect humanity by getting rid of these bad seeds, so to speak, why not have God pour out God's wrath on all evildoers, not just those who target Jews?

A few years ago one of my rabbis introduced the following prayer to me, substituted by some Jewish communities for the Shfokh Chamatkha paragraph: "Pour out Your love against the nations who have known You and upon the kingdoms who call upon Your name, for the loving-kindness they have enacted with Jacob and for defending the nation of Israel from those who would devour them. May they live to see the sukkah [of peace spread over] your chosen ones and to participate in the happiness of your nations."

Until last year, I chose to recite this passage at my family's Seder, after my father would say Shfokh Chamatkha. Because my rabbi taught me that this second passage was actually written and recited by a Jewish community from fifteenth century Worms, said to be related to the great medieval Jewish commentator, Rashi, I was comforted that I was performing a custom that was more than 500 years old. Similar to the pluralistic, multi-opinioned pages of the Talmud, I also felt that in reciting both traditions my family was actually being more religiously sincere by including different ideologies simultaneously.

But eventually I became unsatisfied with the second tradition as well. Rather than asking God to bless those non-Jews who were in need of guidance, those people who were so far from God's path that they were committing violent acts against Jews, among others, I was asking God to bless Righteous Gentiles, those non-Jews who had helped Jews in precarious situations, such as during the Shoah. I was asking God to bless those people who were, in common vernacular, "good to the Jews." These words no longer echoed my own theology, which is much more focused on the world community at large. Instead, like the first tradition, this too seemed to be limited in scope, focusing on a group of non-Jews who -- at least in my mind -- already seemed to be on God's path. (Soon thereafter I learned that this second tradition was probably fabricated circa 1963, as the prominent Halachic authority, Rabbi David Golinkin, contends in the Spring 2003 edition of Conservative Judaism).

Discontented with both of these traditions, before Pesach of last year I finally decided to create my own tradition, to write my own paragraph, which I could read at my family's Seder. I decided that this new prayer, loosely based on the other two, truly encompassed my own religious beliefs, yet simultaneously echoed an idea found in a famous Talmudic passage, written centuries ago. According to this text, the esteemed Talmudic figure Beruriah finds her husband, Rabbi Meir, praying for God to destroy some men. Shocked at her husband's behavior Beruriah sharply admonishes her husband, asking him to explain how he could make such a prayer. Rabbi Meir quickly responds that on his way home two thieves robbed him and this prayer was asking God to 'rightly' punish these sinners. Citing her own interpretation of a verse from the Book of Psalms, Beruriah tells Rabbi Meir that rather than asking God to destroy the men -- to destroy the sinners -- he should instead pray for God to destroy their sins.

After additional research, I was not hard-pressed to find that Beruriah was actually following an ages-old Jewish tradition that confronts a Jew's urge to commit revenge, focusing instead on our biblical commandment not to bear a grudge against another and to strive to forgive others. One such well-known tradition is the Pesach custom for Jews to spill some of the wine out of their cups during the recitation of the Ten Plagues, symbolizing the idea of our communal discomfort with celebrating the suffering and deaths of the Egyptians. Using Beruriah's wisdom and these other texts and customs as a backdrop, last April I wrote the following prayer: "Pour out Your love upon the nations who do not know You and the kingdoms who call upon Your name in vain, for they need help from you. May they live to see the sukkah of peace and to participate in the happiness of Your nations. Give them, and us, assistance and internal peace in order to perfect the world, for our world needs this, in Your name if not in ours, in our name if not in Yours. You who brings peace to Your world brings peace to us and to the people Israel and to all humankind."

In a time in which our world clearly needs physical and spiritual healing, I humbly hope that this prayer can serve as a new addition to the Jewish tradition.

Aaron Tapper is a Ph.D. student in Religious Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He also has a Master's degree in Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School.

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Admiral Eugene J. Carroll, Jr.

The world lost one of its great men of peace when Gene Carroll, the former long-time Deputy Director of the Center for Defense Information, passed away on February 19th. Gene was intelligent, articulate and committed to doing his part to create a peaceful, nuclear weapons free world. He was an extraordinarily unique admiral, one who spent the years following his career in the Navy fighting for peace, nuclear weapons abolition, and drastically reduced military budgets.

Gene had a vision of America's greatness resting on our ability to make peace, not war. He had a rare blend of intelligence, heart and experience that will be impossible to replace. Nonetheless, we must try. The world needs many more individuals like Gene Carroll, individuals with the courage to stand uncompromisingly for peace.

This is what Admiral Carroll had to say about US nuclear policy: "American leaders have declared that nuclear weapons will remain the cornerstone of U.S. national security indefinitely. In truth, as the world's only remaining superpower, nuclear weapons are the sole military source of our national insecurity. We, and the whole world, would be much safer if nuclear weapons were abolished and Planet Earth was a nuclear free zone."

In his last message to me, not long ago, Gene expressed his strong belief in the relevance of the United Nations: "Until there is something better than the UN," he wrote, "it seems to me that we must support its authority under the Charter. Considering that the US essentially wrote the Charter to protect our security interests in 1945, that seems desirable to me now."

He continued: "I don't know if irony sells but we shouldn't miss any opportunity to point out that Bush cannot restore relevance and respect to the UN by flagrantly violating the Charter. In truth, if we initiate war without UN authorization the blow might be fatal to its future."

In that same message, he described the Bush doctrine as "the road to ultimate disaster." We would do well to pay heed to this wise warrior for peace.

David Krieger
February 20, 2003

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War, Again
Murray Polner

I originally wrote these words while the bombing against Serbia was still raging. Looking back now, perhaps the greatest irony for me was that at least in this bitter conflict, doves became hawks and hawks doves.

People I know and respect favored the bombing raids. Many argued passionately for a land invasion of Kosovo and even Serbia, dismissing high estimates of anticipated dead and wounded from battle and "collateral damage" as a necessary if unfortunate price to pay.

Antiwar leftists and liberals and yes, even pacifists, were genuinely and right-fully shaken by repeated televised scenes of anguished Albanian Kosovar refugees and thus became supporters of what a contemporary German scholar described as "NATO's new military humanism," a novel concept that defending human rights with arms everywhere (with political and strategic exceptions, of course, especially when it served one?s own national interests) was a guide and mandate for the post-Cold War era.

A large number of people properly ask: Given that there is so much evil abroad in the world, what do antiwar people such as myself suggest we do when horrors are inflicted on men, women and children, in this instance, Albanian Kosovars? As many believe, the nations of the world failed in their moral duty by doing nothing when a million or so people were murdered in Rwanda. Or, as so many others have wondered, could the Holocaust have been prevented had the West acted with resolve long before the outbreak of World War II and years before very few dared to believe with certainty that a disaster of that magnitude would ever be carried out by a nation thought to be as civilized as Germany?

It?s this undeniable brutality directed against innocent human beings that have led so many otherwise decent people to support this war and try to rationalize its even greater violence in the hope of stopping further genocide. But that even more F-16s, Apaches, Tomahawks, cruise missiles and waves of infantry and armored units storming into Kosovo or Belgrade or relentless night time air raids, would lead to a more pacific, democratic and economically viable Balkans beholden to the "free market" and NATO -- and especially U.S.--- mentors is an illusion which will prove no more than a temporary Band-aid, if indeed it succeeds in achieving NATO?s constantly shifting and ambiguous goals. (Does anyone really know what will happen now that the war is over, especially with the Kosovo Liberation Army vying to become the preeminent force?) During the war it did not save terrified people from death, injury or flight, and after the war there are few signs that it will prevent future outbreaks of ethnic revenge. More than likely it has set off a chain of postwar economic, military, political and human aftershocks still unimagined.

A friend, a serious student of history, tells me: since no war follows the pattern of previous wars, war cannot be embarked on or pursued by analogy. History's battlefields are replete with shattered efforts to fight the last war today. His point? The war against Serbia was unique in that it was about the Balkans and all that fractured and fragmented region?s history connotes.

It also leads me to wonder about those who approved of massive violence supposedly to save Kosovars. In doing so, I believe they chose to disregard the intricate, complicated history of the Balkans and the diplomatic blunders and fatal errors that led to this latest of wars. For one thing, it is remarkable with what thoughtlessness the NATO and US became involved. They were totally unprepared for the terror unleashed by the Serbs on Kosovars and the resulting mass exodus. Should someone have been paying attention when in 1989 Milosevic annulled Kosovo's status as a self-governing area? Or two years later when in the rush to cut up Yugoslavia, Croatia and Slovenia broke loose and were quickly recognized by Germany? Did Rambouillet have to be a ?take it or leave it? proposition? since the only real difference at the conference was NATO?s stubborn demand that it be granted the right to oversee any agreement reached about Kosovo? And did NATO have to insist on "unconditional surrender" rather than a cessation of bombing while diplomatic efforts were underway to find a solution to this mess? The essential moral question was not whether to become involved but in what manner. As the Jewish Peace Fellowship, to the best of my knowledge the only national American Jewish organization that opposed the war pointed out -- quoting from the Judaic tradition -- "Even in time of war peace must be sought."

Few in western capitals and in international media offices gave serious thought to the Albanian mass nonviolent movement, which lasted from 1989 to 1998. Were Adem Demaci and Ibraham Rugova, both Albanian Kosovar adherents of nonviolent resistance, men who might have served as a possible bridge between enemies? Nor was much attention paid to the 1.5 million Serbian democratic opponents of Milosevic and his ultra-nationalists who took to the streets for nearly three months in 1996-1997 demanding their political rights.

"But violence begets international attention far better than does nonviolence," wrote David Hartsough of Peaceworkers [Mother Jones Mojowire, May 18, 1999 and Sojourners, July 1999], who spent three years in Kosovo and Yugoslavia and was arrested, imprisoned and forced out of the region by Yugoslavia for joining Albanians in their nonviolent actions. "The world," he noted in a perceptive essay, "lost a crucial opportunity to respond to the massive nonviolent movement in Kosovo and Yugoslavia before the conflict erupted into the tragic war".

All the same, many bombing supporters were insistent that 'something' had to be done to contain Serbian extremists and save the refugees. Of course people needed to be rescued, though few in the west and its media paid heed when in 1991 some 250,000- 300,000 Serbs were ethnically cleansed from the Krajina region of Croatia. What was different about the Kosovo intervention that did not apply as well to a host of other nations where trigger-happy politicians, generals and warlords incited murder against those who fell outside the boundaries of their tribal, religious or ideological boundaries?

I have my own questions for these erstwhile antiwar, now prowar (at least in the Balkan war) people: Will they now support military action against all future violators of human rights? Is China our next "enemy" to be "punished?" And what of regions where there have been as much or more slaughters than in the south Balkans, say, in East Timor, Nogorno-Kharabakh, Colombia or Uganda, among other areas? Does military intervention also include (I doubt it) assisting the millions, perhaps billions living in abject impoverishment? "The $59 million NATO spent every day on bombing Yugoslavia would feed 77 million people," wrote Ignacio Ramonet in Le Monde diplomatique [June 1999]. And to what extent will they favor a Pax Americana policy of policing human rights throughout the world - this by a nation that has throughout the twentieth century supported a bevy of dictators, thugs and other assorted despots in the name of trade and "national security?"

If so, and military means are to be the accepted method of defending human rights, are these new hawks willing and eager to offer their own children and grandchildren to the military to serve in its global legions?

None of this absolves the Serbs or Milosovic for their awful crimes. But perhaps some of their crimes might have been avoided had not the Clinton administration rejected joining a permanent international war crimes court which would have brought all Balkan war criminals to the bar a la Nuremberg before the bombing began. (Perhaps, too, there will be far fewer future Milosevic clones if they know that they will be severely punished for their actions). Instead, a White House and State Department bustling with non-veterans decided to fight their virtual war.

In the end, we all need to ask ourselves how peacemakers can realistically cope with undeniable evil. My own response is that we are the realists, even if our views are usually dismissed. In the most recent Balkan conflict, a history of mutual outrages and injustices led to repeated displays of rage and revenge. Perhaps one "realistic" approach is for the international community (such as it is today) to promote a movement viewing the Balkans in its entirety, and not merely as the usual competing and vengeful ethnic enclaves, and which with hope and patience will one day lead to a Balkan union attached to the European Union. Another realistic suggestion is that the United States, together with some of its NATO allies, cease being the world's most prolific and shameless peddlers of arms, so that the Balkans (and many more regions too) can become a lot less militarized.

So long as the war raged, there was no hope for the Kosovars and little enough for Serbs who despised their demagogic rulers and saw their hopes for a multicultural and pluralistic civil society dashed. Now that the war is ended, triumphalist claims aside, the most serious question is what next? Will hatreds be muted? Killings stopped? Who knows, now that the TV cameras have been moved elsewhere, the reporters have gone home and it's back to the usual business for the desk warriors in Washington, London, Belgrade, etc.

Murray Polner is co-author (with Jim O'Grady) of Disarmed & Dangerous: The Radical Lives & Times of Daniel & Philip Berrigan (Basic Books/Westview Press) and co-chair (with Carolyn Toll Oppenheim) of the Jewish Peace Fellowship.



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