Toronto Star: 'NATO's hubris will seal its soldiers'
fate'
April 4, 1999
NATO's hubris will seal its soldiers' fate
VANITY. PRIDE. Arrogance. Vaingloriousness. Conceit. Presumption. Self-regard. And over
all of these, hubris, overweening, unexamined, unchallenged and, ultimately, coarse and
vulgar.
It is hubris, the downfall of the Greeks, that has brought NATO to its present pickle.
One week or another, NATO is going to ``win'' its war against the Serbs. A nation of only
a little more than 10 million - about the same size as Denmark, but a lot poorer - cannot
stand forever against the most powerful military alliance in history.
But NATO is also going to come out of this contest a loser. Its leaders, including
Canada's Foreign Affairs Minister Lloyd Axworthy and Defence Minister Art Eggleton, are
going to end up looking like the 1990 equivalents of the ``best and brightest'' of the
1960s and 1970s, who led the U.S. into the debacle of Vietnam.
Today, no differently from three decades ago, the driving force for the disaster is
hubris.
Start with the hubris that because NATO is so powerful, all its leaders took for granted -
and kept on telling each other - that no state and no people would dare stand up to it,
and would rather retreat than be blown to bits.
Under ordinary circumstances, this calculation was sound enough.
But, as NATO's planners ought to have recognized, the circumstances in Yugoslavia are not
ordinary. Kosovo is sacred territory to the Serbs. Maybe this is all an historical
fantasy. But many people define themselves by some iconic incident in their past, no
matter what actually happened then. (Roland's stand against the Moors at Roncevalles that
is sacred to the
French was mostly later invention.) Only conceit and the historical amnesia that comes
easily to those who assume their superiority, would have prompted NATO's leaders to doubt
that the Serbs would die for what they believed to be holy, or doubt that if Milosevic
gave up Kosovo he would lose his job, and very likely his life.
Consider the hubris of the belief that technology could do everything. It can do a great
deal. The cruise missiles and smart bombs will wreck and cause immense damage, and
increasingly do this upon civilians as with the demolition of a bridge over the Danube,
which has minimal military utility but which will further impoverish ordinary Serbs.
Military technology, though, is distant, remote, antiseptic. It can break bodies. It
cannot change attitudes and values.
The related hubris of assuming that a war started by NATO would be NATO's war. Instead,
despite the disparity in power, it has become, as it was always bound to, a Serb-NATO war,
in exactly the same way that the war in Vietnam started out as a technocratic,
computerized, American war and became increasingly a Vietcong-American war, and
eventually, exclusively a
Vietnamese war.
Unless the Serbs break, NATO will have to send in ground troops in order to win the
NATO-Serb war that this conflict has now become. This, though, will mean casualties and
body bags.
Here is the apogee of NATO's hubris. The organization was so certain of its potency and
effectiveness that it made no effort to explain the war to the peoples of its
member-states, or to the international community by way of a debate at the United Nations.
Indeed, NATO was so certain it would win easily and quickly - and as important as either,
would win safely - that its
leaders deliberately avoided talking to their publics.
Now, too late, they wish they had been more honest. There was something chillingly
pathetic in President Bill Clinton's declaration following the capture of three American
GIs along the Kosovo-Macedonia border that, ``There was absolutely no basis for them to be
taken.''
By what presumption, and conceit and self-regard, does Clinton assume that it is proper
for Serbian soldiers to die in American air-raids,but improper for Serbian troops to
capture uniformed Americans, who by overconfidence or incompetence exposed themselves to
risk?
This war has another aspect to it, and an entirely different one. The motive for
undertaking it was the wholly laudable one of humanitarianism, if not the exclusive motive
for it since NATO bureaucrats also wanted to create a new justification for themselves.
With the mass eviction of Albanians that's going on in Kosovo, this humanitarian war has
now become become a ``Just War,'' or an undertaking that can no longer be quarrelled with.
It's also, though, a war of hubris, of self-satisfied conceit, vainglorious and arrogant.
Those who've started it will now have to finish it - on the ground. When it's over, these
leaders are going to have to answer for the body-bags they will have filled.
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