Robert L. Payton

3 December 1995

Governor Evan Bayh announced that the State Police assigned to help the city of Gary deal with its crime problem are being recalled. The job is done.

President Clinton was in Germany on that same day, talking with the U. S. troops about to be sent on a peacekeeping assignment to Bosnia. The job is just beginning.

Why is the first task so easily accepted and the second so controversial? Aren't they comparable? Don't they both have to do with keeping the peace? Don't they both entail some risk for the men and women assigned to do the job?

The point the two events bring out for me is that the military can play a peacekeeping role -- they can, like the police, be asked to restrain violence and to protect the innocent. They can, as in this case, go into Gary or Sarajevo without engaging in an all-out attack on an "enemy."

The difference between intervening in Bosnia and our action in the Gulf War is that the Gulf War gave us an enemy – Saddam Hussein -- and an "interest," namely oil. Those may be good reasons to fight a military action; they are different reasons from those we have when we take risks to protect the innocent.

***

Sad experience proves that "police actions" can become military adventures. Efforts to protect the innocent can also fail. Bosnia is, like President Bush's intervention in Somalia, a humanitarian undertaking to bring an end to the mindless slaughter of civilians.

Like Somalia, it may fail.

Like Somalia, too, we might have to withdraw without accomplishing our purpose. There are no guarantees that peacekeepers will succeed, but there is a clear moral argument for making the effort when there is some reasonable hope of success.

The Bosnian peace agreements may not hold -- General Mladic, named as a war criminal, has a strong incentive to keep fighting. But the possibility of failure is not a sufficient reason why civilized people should not take some risk to bring an end to uncivilized warfare.

***

The principal argument against President Clinton's action in Bosnia is that we run the risk of falling into another "Vietnam quagmire."

A young National Guardsman said the other day (on a talk-show program in Orlando) that he didn't think there was any justification for going into Bosnia and he didn't want to go. The talk-show host agreed with him. President Clinton, a draft-dodger, shouldn't have the right to drag American soldiers into a dirty war they didn't want to fight.

That is exactly the argument war resisters like the Bill Clinton of 1968 used against service in Vietnam.

Some who thought it was treasonable to oppose the United States military engagement in Vietnam now seem to find it patriotic to oppose American involvement in Bosnia.

Does that mean they now think Bill Clinton was right in 1968? Are they willing to echo the Bill Clinton of 1968 in order to oppose President Clinton in 1995?

***

Cal Thomas, Jerry Falwell's former public relations man, sought the views of George McGovern -- George McGovern! -- on Bosnia.

It is not inconsistent that former Senator McGovern could have opposed the United States policy in Vietnam and yet support President Clinton in Bosnia. Vietnam was a military action, from beginning to end. We were there to destroy someone identified as an enemy of our "interests." We were there to prevent the spread of Communism, the enemy of American interests in Asia and at home.

Hawks were people who strongly supported that policy and Doves were people who opposed it. Who was right? If the war became a "quagmire," the Hawks were wrong. The problem is we haven't learned the right lesson: the simple difference between maintaining the peace and prosecuting a war.

Robert McNamara's guilt has to be shared by a lot of people -- Hawks like Senator Strom Thurmond, for example -- who turn Dove when a peace-keeping responsibility comes along.

***

It is worth using Bosnia as a lesson about war and peace. One lesson is that the losers of the war in the former Yugoslavia are the civilian victims who have lost their families, their homes, perhaps their homeland as well. As others have pointed out, the progress of military action in the world during the past century is most accurately measured by the civilian rather than the military casualties.

Honorable military men (they are still most often men) must lose sleep over the problem. Consider the military reasoning that was used to justify bombing the civilians in the market in Sarajevo. Consider the military tactic of using rape as a weapon. Consider the mindlessness of being able to justify "anything goes."

Compare organized military behavior of our time with the scandal of crime on the streets. There seems no longer to be any difference.

My fervent hope is that the U.S. military in Bosnia will not out of fear repeat the tragic atrocities of Lt. Calley in Vietnam. (Remember Lt. Calley?)

I hope and pray that the American troops in Bosnia can tell the difference between innocent civilians and attacking soldiers. I can only pray for the souls of those who would use innocent civilians as decoys and weapons.

Dean Rusk once said that the world is like a large city: there are dangerous people out there, committing crimes in dark alleys. The terrible myth of our century is that the police and the military, in their own defense, have to behave like the criminals and egomaniacs they are charged to control. While you enjoy the titillation and thrills of the latest James Bond movie, remember that that is the moral of those stories: anything goes. It is all right that anything goes if you are on the Right Side.

Because the Right Side is always the one you're on.

***

Philanthropy is about peace rather than war; it is about loving strangers rather than hating them. Misanthropy is about hating others because they are strangers. The wars in the former Yugoslavia are an object-lesson in misanthropy: they spell out in bloody detail what happens when people allow their fears and hatreds to be exploited.

I almost said when ignorant people allow their fears and hatreds to be exploited. one of the bitter lessons of my life -- perhaps of the life of anyone who has been around so many wars -- is that educated people are twice guilty: they suppress their intelligence and independence of mind in order to be "patriotic;" and they provide the reasons for ignorant people to follow them.

Many of the worst things in Bosnia, on all sides, have been done by ignorant people -- led and perhaps "inspired" by educated leaders.

How does education go wrong? What do we do about it?

"Philanthropy," some of us argue, is the only alternative available when patriotic madness is the threat. Civil war and disorder, whether in Bosnia or Northern Ireland or Israel or Sri Lanka or India or South Central Los Angeles, is always closer at hand than we want to admit. Those places are more like our cities and towns and countryside than they are different.

Education about the ways to hold societies peacably together is a topic worth bringing up at a moment like this. When American troops are asked to risk their lives to restore some level of peace and order in behalf of innocent mothers and children, it is a good time to think about the difference between making peace and making war.

***

A columnist in the Financial Times of London and another in the New York Times see President Clinton going into Bosnia for political gain. The received wisdom among such columnists is that American presidents turn to foreign affairs because domestic affairs are so difficult. American presidents can act decisively abroad when they are hamstrung at home.

Cal Thomas seems to think otherwise. "This president has little political margin and even less moral capital for a Bosnian operation." I agree. In fact, I think the received wisdom in this case is all wet, as it so often is. President Clinton has every political reason for staying out of Bosnia, shifting the blame (as others have) to the Europeans, or blaming the victims by pointing (as Senator Byrd did the other day) to their tragic history. The point Senator Byrd seems to make is that those children are not innocent, they are incorrigible.

There is a good police reason for going into Bosnia: strong force may stifle violence or reduce it to occasional crime and banditry, as Governor Bayh's use of the State Police seems to have done in Gary. Bosnia may call for more troops, or it may prove to be beyond the troops we send in to maintain the peace. The war criminals of the former Yugoslavia may be able to keep the fires of ethnic fear and hatred burning even longer.

In defeat, perhaps in embarrassment, the peacekeeping effort may fail. But the effort is at least as honorable as our effort in Vietnam, or in the Gulf War.

The older I get the more certain I am: the Hawks are our worst enemies, not the Doves. The more like good cops the military become, the better hope there will be that the innocent will be protected rather than brutalized and destroyed.