[ALBSA-Info] Krauthammer's Commentary

[Agron Alibali]

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 


March 31, 2001, Saturday, REGION EDITION 

EDITORIAL, Pg. A-10 

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER WHAT THE U.S. SHOULD DO ABOUT THE
MESS IN MACEDONIA 



WASHINGTON 

There are two ways to look at war. One school sees it
as a temporary emergency, the result of bad people
taking control of important countries and wreaking
havoc. The other tends to see conflict as endemic,
ingrained in human nature and the perpetual striving
of peoples for power and dominion. 

Liberals, with their belief in the perfectibility of
human nature, tend to believe the first. Dour
conservatives tend to share Ambrose Bierce's
definition of peace as "a period of cheating between
two periods of fighting." 

The liberal view borrows its prestige from a pretty
major example, World War II. The problem, however, is
that the Clinton administration deployed the idea
indiscriminately to any place it wanted to intervene. 

It was this logic that got us into Haiti, for example.
Some evil generals, it was explained, were doing
terrible things to the country. Our goal was to get
rid of them, restore democracy and fix things up. 

We invaded, sent the bad guys into exile and brought
back the "democratically elected president,"
Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Six years later, Aristide held
a sham election, sent thugs to physically attack the
opposition and had his senate call for the arrest of
the head of the opposition alliance. Haiti remains the
impoverished, murderous dictatorship it was when our
troops arrived. 

A more serious example -- at least we could get out of
Haiti with no one noticing -- is the Balkans. The
Clinton rationale for deploying our military in Bosnia
and then in Kosovo hinged on the notion that Serbia,
misled by its nasty ruler, Slobodan Milosevic, was the
root cause of Balkan instability. "The source of the
problem," explained Clinton the day before beginning
the bombing campaign in Kosovo, "has been that the
leader of Serbia has tried to dominate the former
Yugoslavia by starting wars in Croatia and Bosnia in
the last decade, and stripping from Kosovo . . .
self-government." 

Well, we have just run a fairly good historical
experiment: We are rid of Milosevic. Serbia is run by
democrats. And yet the Balkans are on the verge of
another explosion. 

Macedonia, the single most peaceful ex-Yugoslav
republic, is now in an incipient civil war. From
NATO-liberated Kosovo, guerrillas have attacked
Macedonia, ostensibly in the name of civil rights but
clearly in the hope of detaching its
Albanian-populated region (Macedonia is 30 percent
ethnic Albanian) to Kosovo and a Greater Albania. 

The pity is that this was all utterly predictable. "An
independent Albanian Kosovo will surely seek to
incorporate the neighboring Albanian minorities
-mostly in Macedonia," wrote Henry Kissinger in
February 1999. Other realists, such as National
Interest editor Owen Harries, expressed similar
objections. I wrote (Feb. 26, 1999) that "NATO
intervention . . . would sever Kosovo from Serbian
control and lead inevitably to an irredentist Kosovar
state, unstable and unviable and forced to either join
or take over pieces of neighboring countries." 

The Albanians did not wait for their Kosovar state.
They have already struck. And peaceful Macedonia, some
of whose soldiers went into battle this week in
sneakers, is a poor candidate to fight a deadly
counterinsurgency. 

This conflict was never caused by one country or one
man. Yugoslavia, after an interlude of quiet imposed
by totalitarian repression and fear of the Soviet
Union, has reverted to its centuries-old state of
convulsive ethnic and religious conflict. 

What to do? Unfortunately, getting out is not an
option. Even though the original commitment was folly,
once a superpower makes a commitment to Balkan
stability, its very presence creates a new national
interest -- credibility -where there was none there to
begin with. We have two options: deputize and
"Vietnamize." 

(A) Deputize the Europeans to do the dirty work. NATO
has just announced that a British-Scandinavian unit in
Kosovo will deploy near the Macedonian border. This
makes sense. While we're stuck with peacekeeping
because of our previous commitment, an escalation to
counterinsurgency is absurd. It is the Europeans'
front line, not ours. They ought to man it. 

(B) In Vietnam, we tried to get out by getting the
locals to replace our soldiers. In this case,
ironically, the locals are Serbs. We've already
"Vietnamized" one part of the conflict by allowing
Serbs to return to a border region that had become a
center of activity for the Albanian guerrillas.
Macedonia is a harder case, but in the end it may be
Serbia that will guarantee the security of its fellow
Slavs in Macedonia. 

There is little more we can do about this quagmire.
But it should be a lesson the next time a president
comes to the American people and asks for intervention
in a local war, on the grounds that if we could only
get rid of the bad guys, peace and light will reign.
Sometimes that is true; most times it is not. 

Charles Krauthammer is a syndicated columnist for The
Washington Post. 


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