On Kosovo
By Charles Rush
May 30, 1999
received this via e-mail this week. "Lockheed F-16 Fighting
Falcon - $25 million, Lockheed F-117 Nighthawk Stealth Fighter - $45
mil. Boeing B-52 Stratofortress - $74 million, Brand new B-2 Stealth
Bomber - $2.1 billion, A decent map of downtown Belgrade - Priceless.
There are some things that money can't buy...unfortunately good
intelligence is one of them.
(unless you're at Los Alamos)
Reinhold Niebuhr once observed that "we are never so dangerous
as when we are acting out of our highest ideals". He is right
about that. We Americans are compelled to justify our wars
vis-à-vis high moral principle. Likewise, we have heard quite a
bit of moral justification coming from the English in this conflict.
And it is true that there is at least a note of irony in our
pronouncements. As President Clinton explained last week in the Op-ed
piece in the New York Times, we are at war in the Balkans to prevent
the spread of ethnic cleansing and the restoration of civilization in
Europe. NATO is making good on their pledge at the end of WWII that
said "never again" to inhumane genocide. In my view, we
simply must be willing to intervene militarily in the face of such a
threat in Europe. But it is important to remember that we Americans
have done a little ethnic cleansing of our own. And the native
Americans that we did not exterminate, we resettled on reservations
that we created for them, much as the Serbs would like to resettle the
Kosovo population. Likewise, as Jamie Shea recounts for us the horrors
in Kosovo, you can't help but remember the destruction that the English
visited upon the Irish during the potato famine 110 years ago. You
can't help but remember that the English invented the modern
concentration camp during the Boer Wars in South Africa. We are
eradicating evil, yes, but it is not like the evil is not also in us.
Such a recognition ought to prevent us from demonizing the enemy. It
ought to help us remember that the evil we would surgically remove as a
cancer is within the body of the world politic. It is not as though,
our pristine political system is under attack from some alien contagion
that we are warranted in decimating before it is within striking
distance.
Furthermore, as Mark Twain pointed out so eloquently during the
Civil War, in the assumption of the use of arms, the onus of moral
responsibility is always on the aggressors. The use of violence is
always fraught with moral danger. The situation is always ambiguous
and morally compromised. And there is no question that when we seek to
invoke God in these matters, things get infinitely more complicated
still. How can anyone presume to make an ultimate judgment on an
ambiguous and relative situation? The temptation to project our
partial, self-interested desires upon the Almighty is rife. Even
though, it is legitimate for us to have the desire to be vindicated and
victorious in battle, it is not legitimate for the followers of Jesus
to have any hope of divine approval for our vindication.
I am reminded of my colleague Browning Ware, the Minister of
University Baptist Church in Austin, Texas. Every year, the President
of the University of Texas would call Browning and ask him to give the
invocation before the football game. Usually it was a particularly
tough game, like the home game against the University of Oklahoma.
Every year Browning politely declined. Finally, he accepted, the last
year of his ministry. There were 45,000 hyped up fans in the stadium.
Browning took to the mike. And this is what he prayed. "O God,
we know you don't care who wins this game. Keep the boys safe and
honest. Amen."
In the midst of the Civil War, reporters came to Abraham Lincoln
and said, ministers in the North are praying for victory and ministers
from the South are praying for victory. Where is God in all of this?
Lincoln said, "The question is not whether God is on our side.
The question is whether we are on God's side."
So it ought to be with considerable restraint that we make moral
judgments in the church. That restraint has been lacking in some of
the more widely covered pronouncements. Most notable among these have
not been some jack legged preacher from Texas but the Patriarch of the
Orthodox Church. Understand that Kosovo have some 1500 Orthodox
churches and monasteries and is thus considered quite a holy site to
the Serbs.
Nevertheless, when the Patriarch led a protest march in Moscow on
May 9
th
with banners that said, "NATO is the new fascism" and
"Clinton equals Hitler", I think they were over the top. In
his speech that day he said "We have become witness to an action
of glaring lawlessness as a handful of powerful and rich countries, who
dare consider themselves the measure of good and evil, is trampling
upon the will of the people who wish to live differently... Bombs and
missiles are pouring down on this land not because they seek to defend
anyone. The NATO military action has a different goal- the goal to
destroy the postwar order, which was paid for by a severe bloodshed,
and to impose upon people and order alien to them and based on the
dictates of brute force." Orthodox Christianity is very different
than Protestantism. Where we assume a separation of the church and the
state, they see the Church and the soul of the nation as unified.
Where we assume that the role of the church is to stand outside the
state and critique it, the Orthodox assume that they are to defend
their nation. Patriotism plus faith.
From my vantagepoint, it is scandalous. There is no acknowledgment
of Serbian responsibility for ethnic cleansing. "Living
differently" lacks any moral censure for rape, pillage, torture
and death that was the means to accomplish "the will of the
people". Neither is this military action a use of brute force by
rich nations against poor nations. At its most noble level, it is an
attempt to live by the rule of law, respecting certain fundamental
human rights, within as well as without national boundaries.
It is interesting that in the U.S. our response from the religious
community has been largely negative as well. Reflecting the sentiment
of political conservatives, the religious conservatives argue for
isolation in American foreign policy. They have mainly limited the
scope of their comments to a commentary on how poorly the Clinton
administration has carried out the military attack thus far.
And liberal Christianity has likewise reserved their few comments
on the subject to a general condemnation of the use of arms to achieve
political ends, with particular reference to the plight of those
innocent people who have suffered the vicissitudes of the bombing
campaign. They stress the need to restart negotiations, to work
towards a diplomatic solution, to involve the United Nations so as to
avoid any American imperialism. Occasionally some of them have
suggested that stopping the bombing might prove a good will gesture
that would pave the way toward a negotiated settlement. Many of these
commentators are veterans of opposition to the Vietnam War and much of
their argument appears to be recycled from another war in another era.
There is a general reluctance to morally condone the use of force,
violent force in particular. I certainly understand but it seems to me
that it is a discussion that we need to have because it is only going
to come back time and again in the near future. This is simply the
situation that the United States finds itself as the leading military
power in the United Nations. Furthermore, we will inevitably be in a
damned if we do and damned if we don't position. There are those who
have criticized our military intervention in Kosovo and in the same
breath decry the fact that we did not get involved to stop the genocide
in Rwanda and Ethiopia. We can expect that this same criticism will
continue.
I have a dissenting opinion on our involvement in Kosovo. I think
we should have intervened militarily, though, like all the other Monday
morning quarterbacks, I regret that we made so many misjudgments at the
outset. It is clear that our leaders were under the impression that a
few days of bombing would cause the Milosevic regime to fold. It is
clear that they did not anticipate the number of refugees that would
flee the country. It is clear that they were not prepared, nor did
they think they would have to, actually use ground troops. It is clear
that they underestimated the degree of destruction in Kosovo, where
dozens of villages have simply been razed to the ground.
Time and again, the refugees have reported that a systematic
campaign of ethnic cleansing was under way, that it proceeded without
reference to any diplomatic negotiations. Time and again they report
that they believe this would have happened whether or not the
negotiations in France had gone forward. In light of what happened in
Bosnia, we have no reason not to believe them in this case.
As a moral question, I am not persuaded that standing by and doing
nothing in the face of mass execution, rape, the destruction of all
papers that creates stateless people, razing villages, and deportment-
I am not persuaded that doing nothing is morally superior to military
action. Despite the real danger of American imperialism that we neatly
hide in the rationalization that we are the saviors of the world, I
believe that something had to be done.
Let me put this negatively. It would be even worse if we sent a
message that even in Europe we will treat tyranny and the grossest
abuse of human rights as an internal matter for local citizens to deal
with alone. If we allow that in our own back yard, in southern Europe,
we have no basis to set a standard for developing countries and
countries that have no real history of the recognition of human
rights.
Morally the situation is difficult. As the poem by Mark Twain
pointed out, war is fraught with moral danger. To any thinking person
it is obvious that it is ambiguous and none of us likes to have to make
relative moral judgments. We would like obvious black and white
options. In Kosovo, the fighting has gone back and forth for nearly
2000 years. They do not share an understanding of universal human
rights like we do. And even those who do must deal with the resentment
and frustration of defeat over the last thousand years that their whole
community cannot get over- Serbs, Croats, Albanians, Roman Catholics,
Eastern Orthodox, Muslim. A political negotiation is not likely. What
is likely is an imposed armistice with redrawn maps that offend nearly
every interested party. There is not going to be an early exodus. The
rebuilding will be prolonged. This is not going to be a surgical
strike that we can walk away from. In short, it is a complex, muddled
situation for which there are no clear answers and we don't like that.
Nevertheless, it is necessary for us to make a stand in the midst
of compromise and ambiguity. The beginning of that stand, for me, at
least is taking seriously the pledge at the end of World War II -Never
Again'. The moral justification for the use of force, and it is always
in question, is the command we have been given by God not only to
advance the good but also to restrain evil. The hope of that pledge
"Never again" has always been that it would be universal in
scope. No more extermination based on race, religion, or ethnicity.
We are a far cry from seeing that universally actualized. But we do
have spheres of influence, spheres of responsibility, and Kosovo is one
of the closest rings, which means we have a greater responsibility to
do something.
I could say a great deal more but I want to hear from some of you.
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