The New York Times

April 5, 1999

Tyrannized by Weaklings

By TONY JUDT

(Tony Judt, director of the Remarque Institute at New York University, is the author, most recently, of "The Burden of Responsibility.")

Democracies have always had great difficulty when they confront dictators. Dictators don't behave rationally. They impose self-defeating policies on their own countries. They lead them into disastrous wars against others. And they don't even pursue their own ends to best effect.

Stalin decapitated his officer corps in the years before World War II. Hitler diverted vital resources to the genocidal destruction of people who might have served the German war effort.

Faced with such men, democratic leaders helplessly apply their own criteria of political logic. Surely a dictator who is leading his people into an abyss must be vulnerable to public opinion, if only we can pressure him effectively. There must be something he wants. So fascism was born of a humiliating peace treaty? Then revise the treaty, and the fascist dictator will be appeased, right? And if he isn't, local and international public opinion will turn against him. (We ignore that in well-run dictatorships there is no public opinion.)

Forgetting this, we sometimes use the stated intentions of dictators against them while rallying world opinion. But to what end? When Stalin engineered the worldwide peace movement in the early 1950's, or Slobodan Milosevic promises to allow "peace-loving" Albanian refugees to return, it is our own intentions and our own public opinion that these dictators are reflecting and manipulating. It is democratic leaders, and the people who elected them, who crave peace, who don't want "to die for Danzig" (as the French fascist politician Marcel D at craftily suggested on the eve of World War II).

Dictators make war not because they have failed to meet their objectives by peaceful means. War -- whether against foreign nations or against their own citizenry -- is their primary objective.

The incomprehension of democratic nations is especially apparent when they are faced with small, weak dictators. Whereas Stalin and Mussolini recognized real-world constraints and preferred bluff to action whenever possible, the same does not hold for their modern micro-successors. Shortly after the start of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, an official at the National Security Council spoke of making Slobodan Milosevic pay an unacceptable price for his behavior.

But the only unacceptable price for Milosevic is the loss of power. Short of that, he can only gain from the aura of heroic isolation and suffering in which he is now wrapped; better still, he shares it with a growing number of previously skeptical Serbs.

The notion -- touted in Western military circles at the beginning of the NATO air assault -- that the Serb leader would fold after a few NATO bombing raids reveals how poorly our leaders understand the world in which they now live.

What democrats dislike about Milosevic, Saddam Hussein and their counterparts in North Korea and central Africa are their repeated violations of norms and rules established by international treaty, human rights conventions or simply the lingering memory of World War II.

The trouble is that these violations cannot be addressed by bombing raids and laser-targeted missiles.

In Kosovo, as in Cambodia, Somalia and Rwanda, ethnic cleansing (the "final solution" to a local political or communal problem) is an artisanal undertaking; the work of small groups of men wielding clubs, knives, axes, pistols, rifles, flame throwers or, at the technological high end, submachine guns.

Against such weapons and those who command them, democracies are all but paralyzed. Milosevic first exploits our inherent weakness -- our distaste for war or for intervention in the affairs of others. When that fails he exploits our strength -- a military machine and arsenal geared to ends completely different from those presented in Kosovo and utterly maladapted to the purpose.

In the case of the United States, he has yet another weapon at his disposal: America's fear of taking casualties. The proudest American claim to date is that not a single American life has been lost during the first week of combat there.

We have shifted our military objectives all over the place: first we sought to prevent humanitarian disaster, then we worked to avert a new Balkan war, now we have decided the problem is Milosevic himself (the same Milosevic whom President Clinton once praised for making the Dayton agreement possible). But all along our true goal has been to get in and out without having to use body bags.

In an era of professional armies, that concern is beginning to look very odd indeed. It also plays into the hands of Milosevic, who has no comparable anxiety over Yugoslav body counts.

NATO's leaders are making war the way they do because all other strategies are thought to be unacceptable back home. In short, this is the only war NATO can fight. In so doing, we have failed to learn the one lesson that should be common to democracies and dictatorships alike: bombing doesn't win wars.

The British carpet-bombed Germany in World War II because they, too, had to do something and could do nothing else. It no more brought Hitler down than the Luftwaffe raids on London weakened Churchill or the national sentiment in his favor.

Milosevic is probably the last little dictator of his type that we shall confront in Europe, at least for a while. Thanks to Stalin and Hitler, Yugoslavia was the only remaining patch of territory not yet cleansed of the complicated demographic residue of old empires; Stalin's population transfers and frontier adjustments and Hitler's policies of extermination had effectively resolved such difficulties elsewhere in Europe by 1945. But the general problem isn't going to disappear. In order to confront dictators of his kind we must set aside the misleading lesson of our victory in the cold war, achieved by huge military expenditure on a deterrent strategy. It no longer deters.

The alternative, nonengagement, is not an option: it is Milosevic and his associates who have raised the price of nonintervention to a level we cannot accept. Playing by their rules they oblige us to respect our own.

We cannot complain that Milosevic has caught us by surprise. In a speech he gave in Pristina in 1987, he put the world on notice of his intention to extend and secure his power in Serbia by playing the ultranationalist card against Kosovo's Albanians. The opportunity to expel these people is one he has long awaited and is consistent with the logic of his stance. The logic of our response must be that the international community or NATO or the United States must be ready to do what is necessary to stop him.

Yes, this means ground troops, and yes, that means casualties. If we can't admit this, we lack the military courage of our moral convictions. We must pray for a new political leadership that grasps this and can explain it to the electorate. The alternative is to unlearn every lesson we thought we had learned in the past 60 years. Dictators have long memories; so should we.