Parents and Police

The dispatch of US Apache helicopters and long-range rockets to the Kosovo border and the accelerating Washington drumbeat for "victory" threatened as we went to press--despite a Serb declaration of a unilateral cease-fire--to inflate the NATO air war into a full-scale ground war. At the same time, a stumbling Clinton Administration is desperately defining down the meaning of victory--claiming the primary NATO goal to be an ambiguous "loosening the grip" of Slobodan Milosevic on Kosovo.

Unable to clearly articulate its course or its objectives, the Administration has also failed to explain why we are at this perilous juncture. Its claim that NATO knew of Milosevic's ethnic cleansing plans and was prepared for the torrent of refugees flowing out of Kosovo was a shabby attempt to cover up a reckless miscalculation whose consequences NATO and humanitarian groups are now scrambling to deal with. What seems clear is that the half-million Kosovar refugees are worse off than before the NATO campaign began and that although Milosevic is indeed a tyrannical butcher, NATO planes and missiles are the wrong tools for nation-building. Indeed, with the bombing of Belgrade's civilian infrastructure in the name of "degrading" the enemy's military power, we are degrading our nation's moral reputation.

American progressives are of many minds on where to go from here. But we all agree that humanitarian efforts to help the refugees must be radically expanded and expedited. The dangerous destabilizing effects of the refugee flood on Albania and Macedonia increase the urgency. The US offer of $50 million in aid (compared with the estimated $4 billion price tag of the air war) and the shipment of 20,000 refugees to holding pens at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba are insufficient and insulting. We also agree that Milosevic's forced dispossession of the Kosovars strengthens the case for an International Criminal Court.

The emphasis in the days to come must be on peacemaking efforts to protect the ethnic Albanians and not on fatuous concerns about NATO "credibility." It is a hopeful sign that several members of the alliance are searching for a diplomatic exit and that the Clinton Administration has approached Moscow to serve as a go-between with Milosevic in a new attempt to find a diplomatic solution to the crisis.

On the other hand, the Administration's initial out-of-hand rejection of the Yugoslav government's cease-fire proposal, its refusal to make a counteroffer and its insistence that the military campaign continue were not helpful. NATO's bombing and Milosevic's mass expulsions, like the Bosnian Serb massacre at Srebrenica in 1995, have opened divisions among American progressives. This week we present two arguments on the question of military intervention--even as we continue to hope that the question will become moot.

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