I'm an idealist. I don't know why. I think there's a certain goodnesswithin me that just comes welling up and makes me want to do things to make the world a kinder, more loving place.
Take the Caucasus. Any eighth-grader can see that the area between the Black and Caspian Seas has a geographical unity and, on the heels of the election in Bosnia, that it's destined to be a unified nation. I'm talking about Armenia, Georgia, Uzbekistan, the Ingush, Chechen and an assortment of other loving Caucasian peoples. I even have a name for the place: "Caucasia."
Now you're going to tell me that these people have absolutely never had the slightest hint of unity except when under foreign rule, usually Turkish, Austrian or Russian. But you're going to make me angry because you're completely ignoring the modern idealism that the United States and the United Nations have brought to the world.
And I'd say that an army of no more than half a million men would be enough -- if they deployed with love in their hearts -- to make all those rotten Caucasians love each other. OK, maybe three-quarters of a million men. Okay, too -- evenly distributed over the different ethnic groups -- maybe a million dead, with a massacre here and there, mass murder and secret mass graves like the ones the Physicians for Human Rights are picking over these days to identify the corpses in Bosnia.
But at the end, what joy! What communal embracing! Azeri with Armenian! Chechen with Russian! Ingush with I don't know who! How they'd cry over the lakes of blood they've spilled uselessly over the centuries, and how they'd rejoice at our coming to build for them a modern multi-ethnic nation based essentially on nothing but geographical proximity: Caucasia! How they'd love each other! And how they'd consider with saintly forgiveness the lakes of blood we spilled to establish this new nation, but spilled usefully this time, of course. I'm sure there'd be no grudges or bitterness.
Few Americans seem to realize that Croatia, formerly Austrian, was in World War II an ally and collaborator of Nazi Germany. While Croats followed the Fuehrer, all those fierce partisans in the mountains, who fought the Wehrmacht to a standstill (no mean trick), were all Serbs. To ask Serbs and Croats to kiss and make up is like asking the survivors and guards of Auschwitz to have annual picnics and other friendly get-togethers to recall the good old days when one team was shoveling the other team into gas ovens. Oh, what a time we had. Lots of bonding.
Now I've been pointing out since 1992 that until four years ago, this multi-ethnic Bosnia dreamed up by Western liberals was never an independent state. Some enraged Bosnian nationalists have written me to deny this, informing me that there had, too, been an independent Bosnia in the 12th and 13th centuries. This obliges me to inform them that this was hundreds of years before the stunning expansion of the Turkish Empire, and there were no Muslims in Bosnia. It was entirely part of what was then called Christendom.
Recalling Woodrow Wilson's hallowed principle of national "self-determination" and his 1918 policy of ethnic cleansing (which was then called "displacement of populations"), you must be wondering what mad intellectual running around loose ever thought Bosnia should make a harmonious and unified nation.
Well, it was the Bush administration -- not its only error in foreign policy by any means -- which in 1991 killed an agreement nearly reached among the three parties to form a loose confederation in Bosnia which would in plain fact have amounted to partition. Bosnia had just seceded from a disintegrating Yugoslavia, and if it were allowed to fly apart, thought the Bush administration, it would set a terrible example for the Soviet Union --which, you will have noticed, shortly flew apart anyway.
Remember the "stability" that President Bush sought to preserve in the Middle East by leaving Saddam Hussein in power? Well, in like manner, he sought to preserve "stability" in the Soviet Union, and therefore in Bosnia. George Bush was a big stability man. In 1993 he also killed the Bosnia Vance-Owen partition plan. The Clinton administration, for its part, in 1994 covertly encouraged the sending of arms to Bosnia from Iran -- Iran, you see, being a well known stabilizer.
At the moment, the Clinton administration and the liberal press are elated that the nationalist Serb party in the recent Bosnian elections was held to a mere 70 percent in the Republika Srpska, and they're positively euphoric at the existence of a substantial opposition party. But if a Woodrow-Wilson-type plebiscite were held in Republika Srpska, would even these "opposition" Serbs vote to preserve this lunatic fiction "Croatia"? Or would they prefer partition and perhaps, following another plebiscite, reunification with the Serb motherland?
Furthermore, what in God's name are 20,000 U.S. troops doing in Bosnia? They halted the violent fighting, a worthy goal, but perhaps halted it for only a time. President Clinton has sworn repeatedly that our troops will be out by the end of December. But then what? Thousands of U.S. and U.N. troops are in Bosnia with no authorization whatever from the contending parties who live there -- who hate each other -- on a mission based on the hare-brained notion that we can turn the Balkans into Switzerland. And if those miserable Bosnians don't want to be Swiss, we might darn well stay there and make them. A benefit to the world, no doubt, but a rather extensive historical undertaking, and how many dead Americans is it worth?
Published September 24, 1996, in The Washington Times Copyright ) 1996 News World Communications, Inc. _______________________________________________________________________________