This article appeared in the May 3 issue of National Review.

Faking It

Do we really care about Kosovo?

By Owen Harries

As many readers will know, Rudyard Kipling once wrote a poem called "The Gods of the Copybook Headings." It is about how, through the ages, mankind has sought to evade and deny the hard, simple truths that have always defined human existence-those precepts and maxims that children learn at school and then forget-in favor of easier and softer options. But, maintains Kipling, inexorably those elementary-and elemental-truths insist on reasserting themselves:

As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,

The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

One way of looking at the predicament we are now in concerning Kosovo is that, after a decade of posturing and prevarication, of inflated rhetoric and easy options, of inflicting pinpricks and pretending they were hammerblows, the Gods of the Copybook Headings have caught up with us and applied the reality principle to our foreign policy. The result is not pretty.

A tenet of foreign policy (and, indeed, of most human endeavor) is that if you will the end you must also will the means. It has a corollary: If you are not prepared to will the means, you should forget about the end. In the last decade--the decade of the cheap hawk--this tenet has been systematically violated, not primarily in the allocation of dollars but in the combination of large ambition ("the indispensable nation") and extreme parsimony regarding the taking of casualties and the shedding of blood. A strong case can be made for a bold, assertive foreign policy by the United States. A case of a different kind can also be made for giving very high priority to protecting American lives--including even the lives of professional, volunteer soldiers. But no case at all can be made for combining the two.

Yet this is what the United States has been trying to do for the better part of a decade. To the extent that it has got away with it until now, it has done so by faking both ends and means. The former have usually been described in grandiose terms in the preamble, but in much more timid and flexible terms in the small print (flexibility being a specialty of the forty-second president); the latter have involved substituting flashy but fairly innocuous displays of military technology for the more effective but politically costly use of human resources.

But all this can only work for a time. Sooner rather than later, attitudes toward ends and means have to be brought into balance, either by becoming more modest about the first or more ruthless about the second. Yet any advocacy of such a commonsensical adjustment has been fiercely denounced. Anyone advocating the scaling down of ends has been routinely accused of being "neo-isolationist"; anyone advocating a greater willingness to bear costs, especially human costs, is open to the charge of being callous, politically insensitive, and premodern.

Part of the problem--an important part--arises from the nature of the ends in question. I would offer as a basic truth, a Copybook Heading, that a people, any people, will be prepared to bear heavy, sustained cost in blood (treasure is another matter) only when it believes that its interests are directly and seriously at risk. It may quite sincerely believe in other, wider, larger, more idealistic ends, but not, in the absence of supporting national interests, to the point of suffering large-scale casualties in their pursuit. Though we may regret it, no substantial war involving serious carnage has ever been fought for the sake of human rights or the spread of democracy. Political leaders, unless they are determined to make their mark as major innovators, would do well to factor that into their formulation of foreign policy.

To be fair, it should be acknowledged that this is usually at least half recognized when a crucial step is about to be taken. However much national interests may normally be disparaged as parochial in an age of globalization, or selfish in an age of humanitarianism, when a difficult policy has to be sold there is invariably some effort to justify it in terms of those interests. The trouble is that people who don't normally think in terms of such interests are not much good at it in times of crisis, so what we tend to get is more fakery.

Sometimes this takes the form of extravagant claims concerning interdependence, proving that as ultimately everything is related to everything else, our vital interests must somehow be involved. Sometimes, as with President Clinton's attempts to relate America's commitment to Kosovo to the outbreak of two world wars in the Balkans, it takes the form of bad history. Apart from the fact that the beginning of World War II had nothing to do with the Balkans, World War I began at a time when the interests of three vast empires collided in the region, making it one of extraordinary geopolitical sensitivity. That is no longer the case. Now, properly considered, it should be an insignificant backwater, and it has taken a good deal of determined, sustained political stupidity to make it otherwise.

Another Copybook Heading that has been violated with respect to Kosovo: Know Your Enemy. For rhetorical purposes, President Clinton compared Slobodan Milosevic to Hitler, but in crafting a strategy he treated him as a cynical opportunist who would come to heel when a little pain was inflicted. The first characterization was nonsense, and, in typical Clinton fashion, we have heard no more about it since its initial trial run. The second characterization is at the very least oversimple and may be dangerously wrong. Milosevic comes from a very hard school, in a very hard region, where the sight of blood is familiar and where quarrels are pursued with a ruthless vengeance. Certainly, he began by deliberately exploiting Serbian nationalism, but by now he may well be its prisoner. That, at least, is the opinion of Lawrence Eagleburger, one of the few Americans who both understand foreign policy and have close firsthand knowledge of Yugoslavia: "Serb nationalism is the real ruler here. Whoever would follow Mr. Milosevic would certainly be just as bad. Or he might even be worse--a true believer in the nationalist cause." But if Serbian nationalism is the real ruler, it doesn't make a great deal of difference whether the ostensible ruler is or is not a true believer, for in either case he is riding a tiger.

Again, those who study the subject assure us that not only is Serbian nationalism strong, it attaches tremendous importance to Kosovo. So we have a situation that in some respects--certainly not in all--as analogous to the one we faced in Vietnam three and a half decades ago. We are militarily much stronger than our adversary, but he has much, much more at stake than we have. In the case of Vietnam his will outlasted ours. More recently we have the example of Saddam Hussein, who also seems capable of outlasting us. Whether the same is true of the Serbs remains to be seen.

At the time of this writing, the near-consensus among the foreign-policy elite in Washington is that, whatever the flaws in the original case for waging war over Kosovo, there is now no alternative to pressing on, even if that means sending in ground troops. The cost of not doing so, it is insisted, would be prohibitive. But while it is certainly true that it would be very high, that in itself is not conclusive. The real question is whether it would be higher than the cost of doing the opposite, and that is not an easy question to answer.

For ordinary Americans, the strongest argument for going on is likely to be to alleviate the condition of the Kosovar refugees, as graphically illustrated on television screens. For the foreign-policy establishment the overriding argument turns on the necessity to protect America's--and NATO's--future credibility. If, having started the thing, we do not now prevail, the future costs all over the world, in terms of emboldened thugs, rogue states, and terrorists, will be steep. To be diplomatically effective, strength must be seen to comprehend will as well as capacity, and after the ducking and weaving that has gone on for seven years there are already too many doubts about American will. In addition, if there were to be a faltering now it is quite possible that NATO's imminent fiftieth birthday would be its last as an effective alliance.

These are valid and serious arguments. But then they, or something very like them, were also serious and valid arguments in 1965, when the question of how to proceed with respect to Vietnam was the issue, and in the end the policy they gave rise to turned out to be not such a good idea. While it may not rise to the level of a Copybook Heading, the adage "When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging" often makes good sense.

In any case, there are two serious arguments against going in deeper. First, it may not be sustainable. Taken seriously, doing so means putting in ground troops. Putting in ground troops means sustaining serious casualties, quite likely over a lengthy period of time. Given currently prevailing American attitudes to casualties, the ability to stay the course must therefore be questionable. And when we consider the character of a president who has made a career of responding to poll figures and feeling people's pain, and who in terms of his place in History will be desperate not to end his term in office in a Balkan quagmire, it becomes very, very questionable indeed. Bear in mind, too, that the consequences of faltering even farther down the track would be even more dire than those involved in quitting now.

THE COSTS OF VICTORY

The second argument against going in deeper is that in the end it may succeed and that this may be even more daunting than defeat. Because what does one do then? The Rambouillet formula is surely dead. The only thing that seems feasible is an "independent" Kosovo, one that would in practice mean a second American (or NATO) protectorate in this miserable and inconsequential region for the indefinite future. In such an arrangement, "indefinite" may be the operative word: It could mean keeping American troops there for decades (Brent Scowcroft is on record as envisioning a stay of up to 50 years), or it could mean a brief and abruptly terminated stay, for while America's intentions are pure, in the absence of a compelling national interest its attention span is sometimes uncertain (consult the Meo, ask the Kurds).

There is also the question of what kind of country we would be protecting. Currently the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) is seen as the good guy in the fight, made up of heroic freedom fighters and lovers of democracy. Some of those who know them well have reservations. The Oxford historian Mark Almond, a Balkan specialist, warns that the KLA has a Marxist-style liberation ideology, close ties with the Albanian mafia, and a serious involvement in the drug trade. He may exaggerate, but it is unlikely that there is no truth in that characterization. As well as knowing one's enemy, one should know one's client.

In any case, the assumption of protectorate responsibilities would tend to cast doubt on, rather than to confirm, the resolve of the United States to act the policeman in the future. For how many nasty little wars and protectorate responsibilities over dangerous but otherwise obscure places would Washington and the American people be prepared to countenance? And how many should they be prepared to countenance?

One of the most serious costs of going in deeper would be the serious alienation of Russia. Proclaimers of the primacy of human rights in foreign policy may not worry much about such an outcome, but the prospect of an unstable, truculent Russia that still possesses 20,000 nuclear warheads (which can be sold as well as used) is a serious one-much more serious than a bullyboy Serbia.

I started by quoting a poet. I will end by quoting another, and greater, one. In "Paradise Lost," John Milton writes of

A gulf profound as that Serbonian bog

Betwixt Damiata and Mount Casius old,

Where armies whole have sunk.

I don't know how good Milton's geography is, but the image he presents invites reflection before we proceed further into the Balkans.

Owen Harries is editor of the National Interest.