LIMBAUGH COMMENTARY: KOSOVO AND THE NATIONAL INTEREST

Republican uncertainty concerning foreign policy is a reflection of our society's failure to reorient itself as to international issues in a post-Cold War world. Democrats would be experiencing similar uncertainty, but for the fact that their party leader is currently serving as president, and they must reflexively support him at all costs -- including at the cost of deep reflection about the proper U.S. foreign policy role.

During the Cold War, foreign-policy issues were conceptually less difficult, at least for Republicans. There were two military superpowers in the world. One was constitutionally committed to the worldwide expansion of communism. In those days, our national interests always seemed to coincide with our humanitarian concerns: Containing the expansion of tyrannical communism by definition was humane and unquestionably in our national interests.

Many are asserting that the horrible atrocities committed by Slobodan Milosevic against the Kosovar Albanians are reason enough to compel U.S. military intervention, presumably regardless of all other considerations. They say that we cannot permit genocide to occur in the heart of Europe.

Even certain conservative editorialists argue that our intervention was morally mandatory and that all Republicans opposed to U.S. intervention are America First isolationists. This absolutely is not the case.

Many Republicans opposed to the bombings are not isolationists or America Firsters. America Firsters were opposed to the Gulf War intervention, a cause overwhelmingly supported by other Republicans. Those who would morph into Pat Buchanan every Republican who has serious misgivings about this operation are following the liberal lead of accusing everyone who disagrees with their policies as being heartless and uncompassionate. Not that Pat is uncompassionate, but that is their intended implication.

The situation in Kosovo is very complex and doesn't readily lend itself to black-and-white solutions. There is no question that Serbian dictator Milosevic is an evil man engaging in the ethnic cleansing (including murder and displacement from the nation) of Kosovar Albanians. So on one side we have an unmitigated bad guy.

But the cause around which he is flaming the nationalistic fervor of his Serbian people is not so clearly evil. Kosovo is not a sovereign nation, but a province of Serbia, one of Yugoslavia's two remaining republics. Kosovo is not just another piece of contiguous real estate. It is the spiritual heart of Serbia, of which the Serbians believe they have been wrongfully deprived for almost all of the past 600 years. The point is that absent the atrocities, it would be difficult to deny that Serbia has every right to take the necessary steps to retain the important Kosovo province within its domain.

The situation is further complicated by the fact that the other side, apart from the innocent civilians, does not have clean hands. The Kosovar Liberation Army is reputedly financed by Iranian drug money.

Moreover, we ultimately decided to begin the bombing because Milosevic would not agree to the negotiated peace agreement, which involved autonomy but not independence for the Kosovars.

Most experts acknowledge that in order for NATO to exert sufficient force to win it will have to cripple Serbia's military forces, which would likely lead to her impotence to prevent Kosovo from achieving total independence -- a result not desired by NATO. NATO doesn't favor complete independence, believing that it would destabilize the region and set a contagious precedent for ethnic insurgencies throughout Europe. So, in other words, if we do what it takes to win, we lose.

There is no question that our humanity makes it difficult to sit idly by as we observe the slaughter of innocents anywhere in the world. But humanitarian reasons alone cannot possibly justify intervention in every case. Otherwise as a nation, we have a great deal of explaining to do to the victims in Rwanda and elsewhere.

If our foreign-policy decisions cannot be wholly guided by our national interests, they must at least be qualified by them. We cannot pursue every humane mission in the world, irrespective of the consequences to our nation. What if, for example, this Kosovar operation depleted our military resources to the point that Saddam could pursue the unfettered development of nuclear weaponry? This would immediately turn a humane cause into one with gravely inhumane consequences.

The end of the Cold War and our nearly surreal, antiseptic victory in the Gulf War may be fueling an American arrogance of perceived invincibility and moral superiority. We would be well advised to disassociate our military might from our moral calculations. Just because we can intervene doesn't always mean we should.

~David Limbaugh of Cape Girardeau is a columnist for Creators Syndicate.