The Liberal Media on Yugoslavia

The disappearance of Yugoslavia (or at least its renaming) got me thinking. In light of the liberal media's coverage criticizing the Bush Administration on Iraq, I started wondering how the liberal media's foreign policy sages covered the 1999 war against Yugoslavia. Were they for the war or against it? What did they predict? How right were their predictions? What have they learned in the interim and have they applied those lessons to their coverage of Iraq? Let's turn back the clock to March 1999 and rummage through some archives, shall we?

The San Francisco Chronicle printed this op-ed piece on March 24 titled Clinton to Bomb Again -- Now Serbia Is the U.S. interest to `stop the killing' or to expand the police power of NATO?

With already hundreds of U.S. military facilities around the world and new U.S. bases in Macedonia and Hungary, along with the expansion of NATO eastward to now include the former Warsaw Pact countries of Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic, a picture is being painted that any student might recognize as resembling designs of the Roman or British empires. No one should fool themselves about who is enjoying the spoils of victory of the Cold War.

Ah, yes, the mundane KFOR as the spoils of victory and the return of the Roman Empire. This author is nobody's fool, for sure, except perhaps his own.

This denigration of international law threatens to exact a horrible price for the future of peace and justice in world affairs, both for Americans and others. While this unilateral action by U.S.-led NATO forces against Yugoslavia is illegal under the U.N. charter, it also represents a dangerous precedent, namely the attack of an independent, sovereign state, which violates all of the founding principles upon which international law has been based. It portends a more lawless future.

The worst lawlessness in the world since then has been the anti-Western violence emanating from the Arab and Islamic quarters, and probably not attributable to America's defense of Kosovar Muslims.

The Chronicle also ran a few articles from the New York Times which implied that bombing Serbia would only make matters worse --
March 27 A Military Loss by Yugoslav Forces Could Be Political Plus for Milosevic

``It sometimes looks like America and Europe are doing all things to support the survival of Milosevic,'' said a 31-year-old rock musician drinking beer at Wunderbar. ``After the bombing and the loss of Kosovo, he will be stronger.''

March 30 "Milosevic's Acts May Prevent More Talks; Brutality could make negotiation uneasy for West "

As reports of Yugoslav forces killing and evicting the ethnic Albanians emerge from Kosovo, a critical question has arisen for the West: At what point do brutal acts by Slobodan Milosevic, and the increasingly personal attacks on him by the West, make it impossible ever to negotiate with him again? ... The United States has looked in recent years for credible and moderate opposition figures in Serbia, without unearthing many.

Four years later, you tell me -- who is worse, Kostunica or the jailed Milosevic?

The following is from the Progressive Magazine from May 1999, titled Bill Clinton's War

This NATO war is another boost for the nationalists in Russia, where all the ingredients of a revanchist regime are in place: a lost empire, a ruined economy, a humiliated leadership. Clinton's chief accomplishment in office may turn out to be that he laid the groundwork for a new Cold War.

Sorry, Russia has not revived the Cold War any more than Spain has revived the Inquisition

Bombing is not the answer. And ground troops are not the answer. The answer is to stop the war, negotiate a settlement, and dedicate our energy and our Pentagon treasury to finding peaceful ways to settle conflicts instead of resorting to war.

The United Nations is the only proper forum for addressing and resolving the difficult issue of humanitarian interventions. These are global problems; they are not the province of the lone superpower or of the alliance it dominates. Only when the United Nations exercises its responsibility and expands its power will it be able to intervene with enough force to prevent humanitarian catastrophes.

That last sentence was true, at least. But it's easy to demand a ruthless adherence to fictitious processes when you're sitting in your safe comfortable home in Madison, Wisconsin, a city where no child has ever been murdered in her bed while waiting for the French and Chinese to approve a Security Council Resolution for her benefit.

Most intriguing was this San Francisco Chronicle editorial from March 16, titled "Count Kosovo as Vital to America's Interest":

MANY AMERICANS don't get it. Why is a poor, landlocked Kosovo worth sending U.S. troops or weeks of diplomatic overdrive? What vital interests does this country have in a Connecticut-sized realm embroiled in ethnic strife not of our making?
...
For 50 years NATO has had the task of containing the former Soviet Union. Now the alliance must handle new trouble -- meeting the challenges of ethnic and religious tensions. Credibility is everything for the military pact which the U.S. founded.

There is also a profound moral dimension to Kosovo. Yugoslav strongman Slobodan Milosevic regards his province as a fiefdom beyond the world's control. He wants to tear up agreements on Kosovo autonomy by moving in soldiers and police who have displaced tens of thousands of refugees. He must be curbed from further dirty work.
...
But the importance of peace in Kosovo should not be lost on Americans, who live half a world away. Kosovo, tiny and unfamiliar, still draws in this country's interests.

This is striking in the context of the Chronicle's editorial of Feb. 6, 2003, which rejects military action against Iraq on the grounds that Saddam is not an "imminent threat" to the US. I read the March 1999 editorial four times and even played it backwards on my phonograph. For some reason the phrase "imminent threat to the US" does not appear. NATO didn't even have UN approval for its aerial bombing campaign. All the arguments that the Chronicle used to justify action against Milosevic apply to Saddam. Why, I wonder, does the Chronicle demand such a higher standard to act against Saddam, who makes Milosevic look like the Mahatma Gandhi? Could it be pure partisanship to support a Democratic President but not a Republican President? Does the Chronicle think it's okay to use force for purely selfless humanitarian reasons to save non-Americans, but wrong to use force that is justified for both humanitarian reasons and also for defending US interests? Does the Chronicle think it's only okay to go to war against Europeans, but not against non-Europeans?

NATO's bombing of Serbia lasted less than three months, and ended with the withdrawal of Yugoslav forces from Kosovo and their replacement by NATO ground troops. Milosevic was ousted less than a year and a half later. Life in Serbia and Kosovo seems to be an improvement, at least, from what was there before the NATO campaign. The liberal media doesn't seem to have learned anything since then to overcome its near evangelical belief in unilateral pacifism. And the Chronicle has taken a giant step backwards, toward the Progressive's fantasy view of the universe.

Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at February 10, 2003 08:00 AM