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The Rambouillet talks, people forget, were about Milosevic's cynical breach of the pledges he had made last October, which were the result of negotiations, of course, and which had been enshrined in a binding Security Council resolution -- the latest of more than 50 against him. After promising to move troops out, he moved in some 20,000 more and killed more than 2,000 people, making hundreds of thousands of others homeless, and incidentally, chased unarmed Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe monitors away when they tried to investigate the massacres. Only after its bluff was called did NATO take action. If NATO had been serious about its threats, ground forces would already have been introduced.

At the recent NATO summit in Washington, Tony Blair put pressure on fellow NATO allies to toughen up the response and move toward ground troops. (Blair once denounced me to a meeting of Labor Party parliamentary candidates as a "wild man from Liverpool, badmouthing President Clinton," after I had told him in 1992 that Clinton would sell his grandmother on the streets to gain office. I feel doubly vindicated, since Blair is now implying that he thinks his chum Bill is too wobbly for words.)

The handwringers on both sides of the Atlantic call for NATO to stop the bombing and, almost as an afterthought, for Milosevic to cease and desist from his campaign against the Kosovars. They overlook the fact that the bombing began precisely because the Serbs wouldn't stop killing, even as the OSCE monitors looked on.

Laughably, the harder left on both sides regard Serbia as some form of beleaguered workers' state facing off against global imperialism. Some are outright apologists for Serb atrocities. At the New York Socialist Scholars Conference this year, one or two referred approvingly to Milosevic's socialist credentials. Others have suddenly become big fans of the United Nations, insisting that NATO should have waited for U.N. endorsement of action against Yugoslavia, even though most of them opposed the United Nations when the Security Council endorsed the Gulf War.

In the New York Times ad taken out by the CPAEF, the group listed a possible violation of the U.N. Charter as one of their top ten reasons to stop the bombing of Yugoslavia. They also pointed to the "double standard" the bombing represents, pointing out the "brutal war" NATO member Turkey has been waging against its Kurdish population.

Of course, loony-left voices are much stronger within the American left, which has been pushed to the margins of American political discourse because of its failure to develop a successful mass electoral movement. Its members occupy their time with bizarre and quixotic causes: Mumia Abu Jamal -- his trial may have been a travesty, but his icon status within the American left makes no sense -- and support of Milosevic.

In Europe there is a genuine mass democratic left, with solid achievements in securing universal access to health care, education and social benefits. It has had power and responsibility, and so avoids the twin perils of what passes for the American left: Clinton's covert Republicanism vs. half-witted impotent sloganeering.

The European left is far from perfect. Tony Blair has learned too much from his American "Third Way" cousin when it comes to domestic politics. The British government's arms deals with Indonesia show it is not above reproach. But in comparison to the current American left, even New Labor looks radical and refreshing. And there is no doubt for whom the Kosovars would vote at the moment.
salon.com | May 14, 1999

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