A well-known urban legend, called “Lights Out”, goes something like this: a gang initiation involves the new member driving around the city at night, with no headlights.  The first person to flash his headlights at the dark car becomes the target, and the gang member then has to pursue the target and shoot into his car. The gang initiate is trying to prove to the gang that he is reckless and criminal, that he has no concern for human life, and that he holds the gang above everything else.  The story is disturbing enough to those who read it that many still fear any dark car approaching them at night.

President Clinton, having ordered stealth fighters to bomb Yugoslavia in the night, seems to have similar purposes.

First, the bombing is reckless: Clinton had been warned by the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff that a bombing campaign would escalate the atrocities that the Serbs were committing against ethnic Albanians, and probably lead to full-scale ethnic cleansing (as now appears to be happening). Despite the warning, NATO had no provisions to deal with the refugee flood.

Second, the bombing is criminal: Clinton’s Administration proposed the Rambouillet treaty, without any negotiations with the Kosovo Albanians or the Serbs, and demanded that it be signed under threat of force (illegal under the Vienna Convention).  He then carried out the threat, in violation of the American Constitution (war must be declared by Congress), the United Nations Charter (war must be explicitly sanctioned by the Security Council), and even NATO’s own Charter (war must be in defense of a NATO country under attack).

Thirdly, and contrary to a common misconception among many liberal people, this bombing is not for humanitarian reasons.  Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia was also nominally for humanitarian reasons.  In fact most wars have been fought over humanitarian issues (remember the Crusades?), but in retrospect we can see they were merely for political gain.  Why can so many people not see it while it’s happening?

To demonstrate the falsity of the humanitarian claims, we need only look at Turkey, which has suppressed its own Kurdish population, using tactics very similar to those of Milosevic.  By most estimates, the death toll among Kurds in Turkey has been significantly higher than among ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.  How is Turkey punished for its repression and gross violations of human rights?

Well, it’s not.  Actually, it’s one of our closest allies, and has been at times the single largest purchaser of American weapons.  Clinton has said “we cannot allow people to be destroyed because of their ethnic or racial or religious groups - when we do have the power to do something about it.”  Well, we could easily do something about it in Turkey: just stop selling them the weapons they use to kill Kurds.  The fact that we don’t is clear and compelling evidence that Clinton is lying.

And although the claim is made that the civilian casualties are simply well-intentioned accidents, they are happening frequently enough to discredit the claim that “we are doing everything we can to avoid civilian casualties”.  For example, there was the bombing of the train (the pilot actually went back after realizing he had hit the train and hit it again).  There was the bombing of the refugee convoy in Kosovo, killing at least 64 Albanian refugees (according to surviving refugees, the NATO plans struck several times, and came back after an hour).  There was the indiscriminate bombing in Aleksinac, which had no military targets.

Even an Orthodox cemetery was bombed several times.  Guess they weren’t dead enough the first time.

Finally, the bombing was meant to be a signal to the world.  We made threats to destroy Serbia, so we had to carry them out.  And of course, there can be no retreat or compromise; the victory must be complete, the opponent brought to his knees.  More poetically, “Once you’re in it, you have to win it.”

When we ask why America is so eager to go to war, so blatantly inconsistent in its policies, and so obviously illegal in its actions, we can find the answer in Nixon’s “Madman Theory”.  It says that America should portray itself as violent and irrational in defending its interests, in order to scare other countries into submission.  Virtually the same theory has been espoused in a 1995 Defense Department document, “Essentials of Post-Cold War Deterrence”.

This is what it means to establish the “credibility of NATO”: we have the right to go to war arbitrarily, regardless of the United Nations, and we will do so irrationally and with utmost violence.

And now we see that the arbitrary violence of the “Lights Out” story, which horrified so many people, is not only acceptable, but respectable.  Don’t be fooled: war is wrong, always wrong, and no state has ever conducted a war for humanitarian reasons.  This is no different from any other war.