Arguing About War by Michael Walzer

Author:Michael Walzer
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2004-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

If the building is burning, and there are people inside, firefighters must risk their lives to get them out. That’s what firefighters are for. But this isn’t our building; those aren’t our people. Why should we send in our firefighters? Americans can’t be the world’s firefighters.

This is a familiar argument, and not implausible, even though it often comes from people who don’t seem to believe in putting out fires at all. I have heard it especially from people on the left (not only in America), and it is to them, especially, that I want to respond. Indeed, Milosevic should have been stopped years ago, when the first reports of ethnic cleansing came out of Bosnia. And he should have been stopped by the European powers. The Balkans is a European mess. Austro-Hungary carved out an empire there. Germany fought a war in Yugoslavia; Italians invaded Albania; the British armed Tito’s partisans. There is a long history of military intervention and diplomatic intrigue. But today Europe as a military force exists only in alliance with the United States. That’s not an eternal truth, and people who believe in international pluralism and a balance of power can hope for the emergence of an independent European Union with an army that it can put into action on its own. But it is true for now that no Kosovo intervention is possible without strong American involvement. If you want to stop Milosevic, you can argue about how to do it; there is no argument about who can do it.

That doesn’t make us the world’s firefighters. It was the Vietnamese who stopped Pol Pot in Cambodia, the Tanzanians who stopped Idi Amin in Uganda, the Indians who ended the killing in East Pakistan, the Nigerians who went into Liberia. Some of these were unilateral military acts, some (the Nigerian intervention, for example, and now the campaign in Kosovo) were authorized by regional alliances. Many people on the left yearn for a world where the U.N., and only the U.N., would act in all such cases. But given the oligarchic structure of the Security Council, it’s not possible to count on this kind of action: in most of the cases on my list, U.N. intervention would have been vetoed by one of the oligarchs. Nor am I convinced that the world would be improved by having only one agent of international rescue. The men and women in the burning building are probably better served if they can appeal to more than a single set of firefighters.

But what is most important for the future of the left is that our people, our activists and supporters around the world, see the fires for what they are: deliberately set, the work of arsonists, aimed to kill, terribly dangerous. Of course, every fire has a complicated social, political, and economic background. It would be nice to understand it all. But once the burning begins something less than full understanding is necessary: a will to put out the fire—to find firefighters, close by if possible, and give them the support they need.

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