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today’s ” AR-online” again AR-Online recent issues: May 1999 April 1999 March 1999 February 1999 January 1999 December 1998 November 1998 October 1998 September 1998 August 1998 July 1998 Toronto, Canada, May 10, 1999 When we see how little was achieved, we’ll regret everything Post-war disillusionment ahead Professor Michael Bliss THE idealists who support Nato’s war against Yugoslavia will suffer multiple disillusionments in its aftermath.
The ability to mobilize idealism has been the key to the public support Nato’s attacks on Yugoslavia have enjoyed. Important legal and strategic issues have been swept aside by the claim that the Milosevic regime represents radical evil, that it is pursuing a genocidal policy of ethnic cleansing, which, according to Nato and many Western politicians, includes systematic rape, mass executions, and other atrocities.
We are fighting a regime that commits crimes against humanity, we are told, a government that ranks with Hitler ‘s or with the murderous regimes of Cambodia and Rwanda. Our side has no aim in the war except to stop the evil. We desire no territory, and we are promising to spend billions after the war rebuilding Yugoslavia and neighbouring countries. Even if the war isn’t going very well, we can at least take comfort in knowing that our intentions are honourable.
It’s all OK, Gwynne Dyer told Canadians early on in The Globe and Mail, because “at last,” we were involved in “a good war.” The editors of the National Post seem to take the same consolation. Canadians are a particularly idealistic people when it comes to world affairs, and this explains why we are one of the more hawkish Nato warriors. Our Parliament is far more supportive of the war than the U.S.
Congress (A cynic might note the Americans are expected to do most of the fighting and dying in the good war.) When Opposition leader Preston Manning cited the “moral imperative” in justification of the war and began reciting biblical commandments, those of us who had hoped for tough parliamentary debate knew it would not happen. The good people who take a black and white view of the war will become disillusioned on as many as three levels.
First, there is no doubt that Nato is already working very hard to find a way of making a deal with the devil. When a diplomatic settlement is reached, it will leave Milosevic’s government in power. He will not be indicted, let alone tried, as a war criminal. This will obviously be disillusioning, for the logic of Hitlerizing Milosevic is that the war must not end until he is captured or dead — found, if necessary, in a bunker in the ruins of Belgrade by invading Nato armies.
The American idealist William Safire is already forecasting a disillusioning settlement, a Clinton sell-out of the humanitarians, that would be “a triumph for mass murderers everywhere.” The second level of disillusionment will be triggered when the Nato governments try to head off just such charges by downplaying the “mass murderer” theme. The wild accusations of genocide, mass executions, rape camps, et cetera, will suddenly end.
The official spokesmen who spread the atrocity stories will remind us that they always said they were unconfirmed. Politicians such as Tony Blair, Art Eggleton , and Lloyd Axworthy will admit they exaggerated a bit in the heat of the moment. We will be told that Madame Justice Louise Arbour ‘s court has standards of evidence so high they cannot realistically be met.
Also that there seem to have been illegalities on both sides, such as the little matter of KLA terrorism, and they sort of cancel out, and it’s best to put such matters behind us and get on with the job of rebuilding. Idealism having served its purpose, being realistic will become the mode again. The third level of disillusionment will set in when, after the war if not as it continues, we realize what Nato has wrought.
Our humanitarians gave the professional destroyers in the military a mandate to force the Milosevic government