The Fifth Columnists of Kosovo

By Michael Kinsley

On its face, this has the look of a victory for President Clinton," sniffed the Wall Street Journal editorial page the day after the Kosovo peace deal. The editors were unable to hide their irritation that the U.S. would not be humiliated after all, that NATO would survive, and that America had done good in the world at little cost to itself.

Critics of the Kosovo project--some of whom said we should stay out, some of whom said we should go in with ground troops, many of whom managed to say both these things, and all of whom predicted that the Serbs would never cave--are bitter. Slobodan Milosevic betrayed them! Doesn't he watch the Sunday talk shows? Doesn't he know that air power never works? Has he forgotten that he represents a centuries-old tradition of ethnic violence? Where is that quagmire he was supposed to produce?

Milosevic probably does not watch the Sunday talk shows. But he surely was influenced in his thinking about when to hold and when to fold by his assessment of the climate of opinion in the U.S. Relentless predictions of quagmire are partly self-fulfilling. The constant carpers and gloomy doomsters of the commentariat and Capitol Hill encouraged Milosevic to think America would fold first. Thus they prolonged the war and added to the human cost they claimed to deplore. Of course, this complaint could be used to discredit dissent in any war, and often has been. Aiding and comforting the enemy was a frequent charge against the antiwar movement during Vietnam. Today, when almost nobody denies that Vietnam really was a quagmire, the only argument left against those who called it a quagmire at the time is that they were responsible for making it one.

Recent years have seen amazing reversals of traditional political postures, none more amazing than on the issue of using military force. Although the pattern is mixed and shifting, in Kosovo and other recent military controversies liberals are more likely to favor military action and conservatives are more likely to oppose it. The folks who frothed about protesters undermining the war effort are now doing it themselves.

The term fifth column was coined in 1936 by a Francoite general during the Spanish Civil War. He boasted that he had four columns of soldiers marching on Madrid plus an invisible fifth column of supporters within the civilian community. George Orwell, who fought as a volunteer on the other side of that war, wrote in 1941, "Objectively, whoever is not on the side of the policeman is on the side of the criminal," and therefore Britons who opposed fighting the Germans (on pacifist grounds) were "objectively...pro-Nazi." But by 1944 Orwell had changed his mind and declared that to accuse dissenters of supporting the other side is "dishonest" because it "disregard[s] people's motives."

When to go to war is the most important question a democracy faces. You cannot disqualify all dissent on the grounds that it helps the enemy. And Vietnam put an end to the notion that dissent should stop once the decision to fight has been made. If not for protests while that war was going on, it might still be going on. But there's a distinction between making a moral or strategic argument against the use of military force and relentlessly predicting military disaster. There's also a distinction between heartfelt opposition to a use of military force and treating this issue as fodder for a different and less important battle of politics and personalities. The intense suspicion of President Clinton by the Washington press corps and punditocracy and the extreme partisanship of the Republican congressional leadership heavily influenced the public dialogue on Kosovo. No one called Vietnam a quagmire for five years. Kosovo was declared a quagmire after about five days. Press suspicion and Republican partisanship are reasonable enough, but there ought to be a sense that criticism of a military operation in progress should meet a higher standard of seriousness because such criticism does aid the enemy, whether it is intended to or not.

Yes, Kosovo critics generally took care to say they opposed the war but supported the troops. Even that usually meaningless ritualistic distinction, though, often came barbed with the innuendo that the draft dodger President did not support or respect the troops (or he wouldn't put them at risk so promiscuously). It was very clever to have figured out how to use Clinton's antiwar past against him when he decides to use force and when he decides not to. But this is just the kind of sound-bite strategizing that ought to be suspended for the duration.

Faced with the unpleasant choice between acquiescing to ethnic cleansing and paying in American blood to stop it, Bill Clinton characteristically chose "neither"--and characteristically seems to have lucked out. No doubt this is annoying to political opponents and unfriendly commentators who thought they had him in a checkmate. In their annoyance, the critics should at least keep in mind that their country lucked out too.