Smart bombs, stupid people

John Xiros Cooper

28 May 1999

Vladimir: Well? Shall we go?

Estragon: Yes, let's go.

They do not move.

Curtain

- Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

Last week the war over Kosovo continued and ended, both at the same time. CNN's long running TV series, Strike Against Yugoslavia, had entered Alice's looking glass phase. Our smart bombs continued to 'degrade' Serbia. Yugoslav artillery were shelling Albanian villages. Albanian refugees were tearing Gypsy refugees limb from limb. The harbor officials in the Greek port of Thessaloniki refused to let the U.S. Marines land. And the politicians of the G8 nations, according to a Reuters headline, were in Cologne 'struggling for words'.

And if that wasn't enough, there was the NATO comedian who ordered the first peace talks on the Macedonian border between the alliance and the Yugoslav military to be held in an ethnic Albanian café? And you were wondering why the Serb generals were three hours late. It's lucky they showed up at all.

Last week what we thought was the endgame, turned out to be Beckett's Waiting for Godot instead. And then on Thursday it turned into the endgame again, with Eliot's Waste Land just around the corner for the returning refugees. And although we "won," how come there were firework celebrations in Belgrade and we're keeping our fingers crossed?

So, what's happened to the impeccable planning, the step-by-step logic, the brilliant strategy of this campaign against Yugoslavia? It tanked about two weeks into the war, that's what. And although planning and logic and strategy are important, a little thoughtfulness might have helped.

When I first started teaching years ago, I made friends with a faculty member in the philosophy department. He was a Princeton man and taught courses in logic. We hung out together because we shared a love of baseball. Although a member of a 'philosophy' department, he hated being called a philosopher.

"Please," he would frown, "I'm not a philosopher, I do logic." He thought the other members of the department who 'did' Plato and Aristotle, moral and political philosophy, ontology, epistemology and particularly aesthetics were pretentious blowhards.

He loathed their attempts to answer questions which he regarded as slippery non-questions. His usual ploy in argument was to tell his opponents that their positions were not necessarily wrong, just incoherent. In the end I realized that what he really hated was the fact that human beings must endure a deeply ambiguous and uncertain existence.

Which is why he loved baseball. And computers. I suspect it's why most of us like games and machines. They both require a logical mind and the ability to blot out the shadowy, shifting, uncertain reality in the out of bounds, in foul territory so to speak.

Such a mind can build, for example, a meticulously intricate, long range projectile with warhead, guided by satellite, corrected to a degree of error that can be computed down to the square meter. It can even engineer a success rate of 99.9%.

But such a mind can rarely get past Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard's question: "Is despair an advantage or a drawback for life?" Smart alone cannot help you here. Wisdom can perhaps, but smart, as in 'smart bomb', is definitely stupid.

There's no doubt that the political leaders of the NATO countries are pretty smart individuals. Bill Clinton is a graduate of Yale. His lithe finessing of the Monica Lewinsky thing was deeply impressive. His advisers, most of them brainy Ivy Leaguers, like Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (Ph.D., Columbia), National Security aide Sandy Berger (Doctor of Law, Harvard), and Defense Secretary William Cohen (LL.B., Boston) are also very, very smart.

The British PM Tony Blair is in the same league. An Oxford man, he too is a gifted manipulator of the political machinery at Westminster. Look how he's kinked the Conservative leader, William Hague, into a political pretzel.

Like Clinton and his Ivy Leaguers, Blair is also surrounded by the best and the brightest that Oxbridge and the ancient universities of Scotland can stamp out. Robin Cook, Geoff Hoon and Elizabeth Symons in the Foreign Office come immediately to mind. And then there's the smartest of the lot, NATO spokesman Dr. Jamie Shea (a man of many academic parts in England and America)

So how come the policies that this brainy bunch, along with the B team of NATO allies, have followed in the Balkans has turned out to be so stupid?

How come no one asked the obvious questions at the start? What do we do if the Serbs don't capitulate in a week? In a month? What if our high-altitude war has to descend below 15,000 feet in order to deliver even more finely engineered destruction to those stubborn Serbs? What if we have to send in our ground troops? And what happens if individual Serbs refuse to surrender? Do our soldiers have to shoot them and bayonet them one by one?

And what do we do with a million Albanian refugees if the Serbs choose to resist by expelling them? And how do we get them to go back to their 'homes' when they've either been razed by the Serbs or demolished by NATO bombing?

And has anyone figured out what we're going to do if Slobodan Milosevic is replaced in Belgrade, as NATO is demanding, by someone worse? And does anyone know how long we'll be policing Kosovo? This is year four for the twelve-month Bosnian peace mission.

You have to admit there's something not quite right with NATO's thinking on the Balkans no matter how many times Tony Blair frowns into the camera, denounces the bloodthirsty Antichrist in Belgrade, and threatens not to give him any money. I guess you didn't know that the best way to deal with Pure Evil is to cut off his IMF credits. OK, so something may have been wrong with NATO's thinking, but there was nothing wrong with the logic.

We stage a political lynching at Rambouillet. They fall into our trap by refusing to sign. We bomb the hell out of them. They capitulate in a week. We swagger virtuously at the 50^th anniversary of NATO. They hang their heads in shame. We occupy Kosovo. We declare a no-fly zone over Serbia. The Albanian Kosovars go home. Montenegro secedes from Yugoslavia and joins the queue for European Union handouts. Serbia wanders in the wilderness for a while. Milosevic evaporates. Louise Arbour becomes a Supreme Court Justice. Serbia lines up for European Union handouts. End of story.

The logic was impeccable. The only problem was that it veered into foul territory right where the Serbs are supposed to fall on their faces and grovel around on their bellies for a while. None of our geniuses thought they would paint targets on their behinds and moon the F-18s. Or send newly minted tourist postcards of the smashed bridges over the Danube with "Greetings from Novi Sad" printed cheekily across the front. I guess someone forgot to save the CIA field report that concluded with the fateful words, 'in addition, the Serbs are wags.'

Some political commentators are saying that not enough planning has gone into our war in the Balkans. Possibly. But how confident are you that the minds responsible for this quagmire wouldn't have screwed up even more spectacularly given additional 'planning' time? After all, look at all the years and years of 'planning' by those other Ivy Leaguers who brought us the war in Vietnam.

And look at all the planning that's gone into getting rid of Saddam Hussein. Nine, yes count'em, nine years after the Glorious Gulf War Massacre of a hundred thousand Iraqi peasants on the Highway of Death, Saddam is still twirling his moustache on the banks of the Euphrates.

The London newspaper, the Guardian, reported on May 25 the shocking news that not one of the two dozen or so Balkan specialists in British universities, people with first hand knowledge of the place, had been asked for their advice. The Blair team, it seems, just didn't want to hear anything that might blur, or over-complicate, the immaculately logical morality tale they've been spinning from day one.

We wouldn't want any greater understanding of the place, its people, and its history to get in the way of the pure contemplation of the beauty of our own brilliance, now would we?

"Is despair an advantage or a drawback for life?" If in February someone in NATO had thought to ask how a Serb might answer that question, several hundred thousand ethnic Albanians might be enjoying a very good dinner in their own homes tonight.

And my philosopher friend? He went on to become a senior administrator in the institution where we both worked. I'm happy to report that in his mind the place runs like clockwork. And his love of baseball remains undiminished.

(John Xiros Cooper teaches at the University of British Columbia and writes about current affairs from Vancouver.)

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