To: Kosovo Talk
From: Howard Zinn
Subject: Re: Welcome to Kosovo Talk Where people are suffering, there is a moral imperative to act. But how one acts is crucial, because there are interventions that make things worse. What we have here is such an instance. In the past, we have often had to wait a long time before it became clear that bombing did not help the people we claimed to care about. We have rarely been able to come to a clear conclusion as quickly as in this case. The bombing, as became evident almost immediately, multiplied many-fold the suffering of the Kosovars and simultaneously inflicted suffering on innocent people in Serbia. The admonition "we must do something" and the question "what else could we have done?" become moot in such a situation. No matter how complex the situation, or how elusive the alternatives, we need to start with "the bombing is wrong" and go on from there.
The rhetoric of Clinton and other government officials reveals an utter lack of intelligence as well as an indifference to human suffering. Clinton, speaking to a military audience, again and again talked about making Milosovic "pay a price." The assumption that we will bomb him into submission makes no sense. The "price" is not being paid by Milosovic, but by the Kosovars and Serbs alike, as both are victims of our bombing campaign. This is comparable to the notion that we are making Saddam Hussein "pay a price" by the economic sanctions that have killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children. They have paid the price. The terrible consequences of the sanctions constitute powerful evidence that U.S. foreign policy is indifferent to large-scale suffering and suggests that its declared concern for the Kosovars is sheer hypocrisy.
If the bombing is morally indefensible, the difficulty of finding other "options" cannot change that fact. Bombing is always an easy option. Diplomacy and compromise are more complex, more difficult, and require coming down from macho heights of superiority. Again and again in recent decades, we have seen that military conflicts had to be resolved by diplomatic means, and that the final agreement could have been arrived at earlier without massive loss of life. I recall the Christmas bombing of Hanoi in 1973, and that after it took place, and all those people died, the peace agreement was substantially what it had been in October, before the bombing.
NATO was created to meet a Soviet threat that was never real. It built a huge military machine to guard against a threat to Western Europe that was never real, and that was useless in dealing with the Soviet control of Eastern Europe, which was real. Now, with no Soviet threat, it is being artificially kept alive by once again creating unreal threats. Its massive armaments cannot deal with the complex conflicts we have today -- and Kosovo reveals this. NATO should be discarded, and the sooner people start talking about this, the better. We don't need stronger military alliances; we need stronger instruments of international peacekeeping.
