Last week I came across an old cartoon from the Saturday Review which reflects my attitude as I ask about a "just war in the Balkans." There is a room with a dozen or so uniformed men sitting around a table, the Washington monument framed by a large picture window in the background. It is the Pentagon. The Chief of Staff says, "Gentlemen, let's knock it off for today. It's cherry-blossom time."[1]
That's the way I feel. Here I am, enjoying the beauty of a Western New York spring. At the same time, with sinking heart, I am watching a war unfold. Several of you told me, "I'm so glad you're preaching on the Balkans this Sunday," meaning, I think, they hope I can shed some light on a difficult issue.
Only, I'm not glad I'm preaching on the Balkans, because it is a true moral dilemma. Usually when I speak on social justice I do so with passion because I am confident in the rightness of my cause. Now, I'm not sure. But perhaps my struggle will aid you in your struggle. What I say may well confuse you, but I hope you will be confused at a higher level of moral understanding.
I have been in the Balkans once. In the summer of 1966 Joyce and I drove through central Yugoslavia as tourists, noting the contrasts between the lovely Plevietzian lakes and the rock-and-rut-filled back roads on which we drove - as poor children came out to beg. Then we drove along the majestic Adriatic coastline with its towns perched precariously, but pleasantly, on the hills overlooking the Mediterranean. It was a maverick Communist state then, poor, but peaceful.
At the time Bosnian refugees began to arrive in Rochester, we were host family to a Yugoslavian graduate student at the U of R. We invited Alexandr, a Serb, to meet Faruk, a young Bosnian we knew. Both declined, saying they were not ready to do that yet. Even at a distance, the Balkans kept human beings apart. That was our second introduction to this troubled part of the world.
Now, the Balkans are a powder keg, a maelstrom of ethnic strife, a montage of high tech warfare, rivers of refugees, flattened buildings and lives destroyed by intent and accident. Yugoslavia, so cleverly held together by Marshall Tito, has quite simply fallen apart, and like Humpty Dumpty, we can't seem to put the pieces together again.
On the one hand we have Slobodan Milosevic, a ruthless dictator, candidate for trial as a war criminal, and a proud people who love not him, but their country, and have been driven into his arms by NATO's ferocious attack. On the other, we have the United States, with our NATO allies, a powerful war machine trying to do with technological warfare what we fear to do the old-fashioned way - with ground troops. It is a classic David vs. Goliath scenario, although here David is not really the good guy, and it is highly unlikely his five smooth stones will slay mighty Goliath. Taunt him, yes; kill him, no.
And we, with our booming economy hiding the very real social problems of our own nation, are bystanders to ethnic cleansing reminiscent of World War II. Yet, we are more than bystanders, because our tax dollars enable the awesome military strikes that scream at us from the mass media daily. We are not innocent of what is happening. We are implicated whether we want to be or not. And we know this conflict will only encourage vastly increased Pentagon spending.
We shout with righteous indignation at the cruelty of Milosevic, who seems to possess the cunning and cruelty of Adolf Hitler, though without the power. We have seen uneasy peace in Bosnia, held tenuously together by an international force, including some of our own. We cannot help being disturbed at the spectacle of American warplanes raining down destruction on a nation we know we will soon be called upon to rebuild.
What tools do we have to make some sense of it all? As Unitarian Universalists we inherit a varied tradition, from President John Adams' admonition not to go abroad "in search of monsters to destroy,"[2] to the pacifism of Henry David Thoreau, to the realpolitik of the current Secretary of Defense William Cohen.
For many years I considered myself a pacifist, resonating to the moral clarity of the great preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick after World War I: "O War, I hate you most of all for this, that you lay your hands on the noblest elements in human character, with which we might make a heaven on earth, and you use them to make a hell on earth instead. You take our science, our loyalty, our unselfishness, with which we might make the earth beautiful, and, using these, our finest qualities, you make death fall from the sky.... And you so bedevil the world that 15 years after the armistice we cannot be sure who won the war, so sunk in disaster are victors and vanquished alike.... I renounce war and never again, directly or indirectly, will I support another."[3]
But then came theological school and the real world of ministry. My idealism became locked in mortal combat with my realism. I emerged from the struggle no longer a pacifist, but still eager to apply moral principles to social issues - even one so horrible as war. I studied the just war doctrine, and while that phrase is considered by some an oxymoron, it seemed a helpful set of criteria in a morally messy world. Applying this theory to the Balkans does not resolve our dilemma, but it does give us tools for thinking about it.
According to this tradition, a just war must be a last resort, after every other peaceful method has been employed to resolve conflict. War is an admission of diplomatic failure. As the veteran Israeli diplomat Abba Eban put it, "(People) and nations tend to behave wisely after having exhausted all alternatives."[4] It would seem NATO had gone the second mile, but who knows if there were not, or is not yet, some diplomatic solution to the problem. The good news is that there will eventually be a negotiated settlement; the bad news is that countless lives will be lost and damage done before we get there.
As an aside I cannot help but wonder if the President was fully focused on this trouble spot, or if the American people were really paying attention to the world. We are an easily distracted people. Take, for example, the ratio of minutes that the three major networks spent on the Monica Lewinsky story last fall to minutes they spent on Kosovo - 5:1.[5] Had we not been preoccupied with scandal, would we have taken our role as world citizens more seriously? Would the President have been more able to prevent this tragedy? I know, it is idle speculation, but I am disturbed at how easily Americans are distracted.
A just war must have a worthy cause. Protecting human life, rescuing innocent civilians from ethnic cleansing clearly is a just cause. This, in fact, was the way the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee had its beginning on the eve of World War II. The Rev. Waitstill and Martha Sharp risked their lives to facilitate the escape of many refugees from Nazism beginning in 1939, operating from Prague until, threatened with arrest, they too had to leave. It is heroic history.
On the other hand, beyond saving refugees, what is our cause? We used to say we wanted an autonomous Kosovo within Yugoslavia. Now, we seem to be leaning in the direction of an independent nation of Kosovo, with NATO as the de facto air force of the KLA - the Kosovo Liberation Army - with its own brutish record.
Last week on National Public Radio I heard a compelling piece about Israelis welcoming fleeing Kosovars. On the one hand they identify with the image of refugees being herded onto trains for deportation - not to death camps, but to an uncertain future. On the other hand, it was Serbia, not Kosovo, which opposed Hitler and aided the Jews in World War II. Moral ambiguity abounds. The West has played a major role in Yugoslavia - essentially creating that nation out of a group of ethnic minorities in 1918. We sometimes forget that the Serbs feel Kosovo to be holy ground, stemming from the 1379 Battle of Kosovo, lost by the Serbs to the Turks, who left Serbian bodies to the crows - Kosovo means "field of black birds."
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles Simic, native of the former Yugoslavia, thinking of his nation's history, wrote, "I'm surprised that there is no history of stupidity.... I do not underestimate the influence of religion, nationalism, economics, personal ambition, and even chance on events, but the historian who does not admit that men are also fools has not really understood his subject.... what amazed me in the case of Yugoslavia was the readiness with which American intellectuals accepted as legitimate the claim of every nationalist there. The desirability of breaking up into ethnic and religious states a country that had existed since 1918 and that had complicated internal and outside agreements was welcomed with unreserved enthusiasm by everybody from The New York Times to the German government. It probably takes much longer to get a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise than it does to convince the world that Yugoslavia should be replaced by as many little states as the natives desire."[6]
The just war must be carried out by legitimate authority with some hope of success. We have no United Nations mandate because we know China and Russia would veto any Security Council action. NATO is ostensibly a defensive force and the UN Charter explicitly prohibits the UN or nations from crossing the border of another nation to settle a civil war. We tried that in Vietnam. Entry into these "civil wars" can put us on a morally and militarily slippery slope. Talk of putting Serb generals on trial at the International Court of Justice simply reminds us of our nation's opposition to that court and our failure to pay our dues to the United Nations, delaying creation of a peace force that might be deployed.
There is clearly cause for intervention, but one can argue about the doubtful possibility of success in settling a volatile war where good and evil are not easily segregated. Milosevic is well-called "The Balkan Butcher," but we have little assurance of the virtue of the Kosovo Liberation Army. There are few heroes here - perhaps aid workers, perhaps the refugees themselves; perhaps the people in Belgrade linking arms across a bridge to defy the bombing.
For a war to be just, more good than harm must come from the action taken." What of the large geo-political implications of NATO and US policy? The estrangement of Russia while the START II treaty on downsizing missile forces is at risk. From that perspective, is it really worth it? In a "just war" care must be taken not to harm innocent non-combatants. We all know about "collateral damage," an antiseptic military way of saying that innocent civilians have been killed. What must be the feelings of the unfortunate pilot who mistakenly unleashed technological death on a caravan of fleeing refugees? Such accidents of war - even in a "smart missile" age - are inevitable. How many innocent deaths justify war?
The poets state the case against it. One writes,
"Silent, I nurse the stinging on my arm.
To this maimed flesh honey, wax, and industry are irrelevant.
Silent, I read today's black headline
"Bomb dropped on wrong target"
Wildly, I wonder, is there a 'right' target?"[7]
In a just war, the use of force must be proportionate to the power of evil. Killing a fly with a sledge-hammer, destroying a village in order to save it, are unjust in this moral calculus. Can we justify what we have done and what we are going to do apparently well into the summer as just? Will the Kosovars be better off for what we have done? In short, it is hazardous to take upon ourselves the role of "moral policeman of the world." There are limits, even for the world's only superpower.
Finally, a nation must match an attack on evil force by an attack on conditions that cause it. Here humanity must collectively confess its abject failure. Nations often set in motion the course of events which leads to violent confrontation. The Balkans is a forgotten and neglected part of the world. Foreign aid is likely to flow only after war, seldom before.
I would add one other criterion which is used in the modern de facto understanding of just war thinking. I call it the "worth of one" test. Is this war worth one American life? Would I be willing to have my son or daughter go to fight and die for the credibility of NATO? Here the great issues of peace and justice bump up against issues of personal morality. Just war is no longer a moral abstraction, but a compelling human issue.
Ultimately, of course, a "just war" is just war, an oxymoron; JUST and WAR used in the same phrase are inherently contradictory. I believe all wars are unjust, but some are more unjust than others. Use of force is almost always wrong, but it sometimes must be employed to prevent a greater evil.
All very well. What to do? Cicero said, "I prefer the most unjust peace to the most just war." I am not so sure, but to me entry into war must stand the stiffest test of the just war criteria, not the least. Traditionally, all of the criteria have to be met. But what if some are met and some are not, as in the present case?
I fear a pyrric victory in the Balkans if we continue our present policy. In 279 BCE Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, defeated the Romans in a bloody battle that was won at such a great a cost in human lives it became really a defeat - hence a Pyrrhic victory.[8] What does "winning" mean? Are we doing more harm than good?
I have not engaged in strong protest against this war because I have not found a good alternative to it. While I realize that feelings of anger at watching human suffering are not a policy, they clearly can drive policy. My response is to support efforts to save the refugees - in the tradition of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, and to urge at least a pause in the bombing - which we might have done for the Orthodox Easter.
We ought to find a way for Serbia to save face - to maintain national pride - and to re-join the family of nations. We ought to provide the kind of aid we gave to Germany and Japan after World War II.
Because the issue is so complex and because it is so distant and because, at least until now, it is so far from our personal lives, we are tempted to just shrug our shoulders and dismiss it from our lives. We quite simply want it to go away.
After all, it will eventually die down and leave the headlines. But as Unitarian Universalists such dilemmas will be part of our lives for the foreseeable future. In years to come, we will continue to enjoy the cherry blossoms, or their Western New York equivalent, often with international tragedy disturbing our quietude. That is because our faith mandates that we be citizens of the world - pursuers of "global peace, with liberty and justice for all."
Elie Wiesel had it right, I think, when he recently spoke at the White House. Indifference to our neighbors, he said, is the worst sin. And we cannot afford to allow this conflict to feed our considerable cynicism about our world and lure us into apathy.
I remember reading Robert Ardrey's African Genesis - an exploration of human violence which gives me hope: "...we were born as risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides.... The (human) miracle is not how far (we have) sunk but how magnificently we have risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses. No creature who began as a mathematical improbability, who was selected through millions of years of unprecedented environmental hardship and change for ruggedness, ruthlessness, cunning, and adaptability, and who in the short ten thousand years of what we may call civilization has achieved such wonders as we find about us, may be regarded as a creature without promise."[9]
"Peace," said George Bernard Shaw, "is not only better than war, it is also more arduous." We must be as patient and persistent for peace as others are for war. Then one day our friends Alexandr and Faruk may be able to sit down and enjoy the cherry blossoms together. So may it be.
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