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BACK TO : The Kosovo conflict 1999
War movie.(how the NATO-Yugoslavian conflict was presented to the public) by L H Lapham 
War movie.(how the NATO-Yugoslavian conflict was presented to the public) Harper's Magazine, July, 1999, by Lewis H. Lapham Corruption at home, aggression abroad to cover it up.... Sentiment by the bucketful, patriotism by the imperial pint; the open hand at the public exchequer, the open door at the public home; dear food for the millions, cheap labour for the millionaire. --Winston Churchill When the NATO alliance began the bombing of Serbia in late March, I thought at first that the generals merely wished to send a message or make a statement. Slobodan Milosevic wasn't responding to polite diplomatic notes--"Please stop killing Albanians in Kosovo," "Murder is a crime," "You should be ashamed of yourself," etc.--and so the generals undertook to spell out their meaning in the block letters of high explosive. They assumed that the lesson would be both simple and brief. Show Milosevic some serious damage, and he would go quietly to the conference table, a chastened and obedient tyrant eager to sign the papers that Madeleine Albright, the American secretary of state, told him to sign. But Milosevic was an even slower student than anybody in Washington or Brussels had guessed. He stared at the fiery diagrams posted on the blackboard of the Danube, saw bridges collapse and oil refineries disappear, and still he refused to follow instructions. Didn't change his attitude; wouldn't learn the German word for civility; couldn't identify the flash cards with photographs of Woodrow Wilson and Elie Wiesel; wouldn't quit killing Albanians. Which presented the NATO commanders with a difficulty that they hadn't foreseen. Like their American sponsors and patrons, they were in the communications business, not in the business of waging war. War was a trade they had never practiced and one for which they were ill-prepared. They knew how to mount slide shows and organize impressive publicity campaigns deploying aircraft carriers as visual aids, how to simulate combat (both aerial and naval) on state-of-the-art computer screens, where to parade the tanks on national holidays. All worthwhile projects, of course, but not to be confused with the Normandy landings, the Tet Offensive, or any other battle in which soldiers ran the risk of being killed. The Americans were very clear on the point. They had given a good deal of thought to the subject, and after conducting numerous studies and experiments (some of them with live ammunition), the senior officers at the Pentagon concluded that American troops were too precious to send into what Madam Albright designated as "non-permissive environments." Ever since the unpleasantness in Vietnam, American troops didn't travel abroad without all the comforts of home, and if any dying had to be done, the chore was best left to civilians. Civilians were good at the work, also much practiced. No fewer than 62 million of them had been killed in the century's wars (as opposed to 43 million military personnel), and they had proved their skills in all seasons and every quarter of the globe--in Israel and Cambodia as well as in Sarajevo and Baghdad. Whether buried in mud or sand, or stacked like cordwood in the rubble of a ruined town, they never failed to pose for striking photographs, sometimes managing only a faint grimace or a ghastly smile, but always glad to serve their country, always an asset to the annual request for a more patriotic defense budget. Divorced from any literal-minded military objective, the NATO bombing campaign could be seen as a series of expensively produced public-service announcements--about the price of freedom, the wickedness of Adolf Hitler, and the importance of Western civilization--and although Milosevic declined the invitation to join the benefit committee, at least he understood the part about civilians. Operation Allied Force paid for the pyrotechnical effects; Milosevic's police supplied intimate close-ups of human misery on the Albanian frontier. No soldiers at risk on either soundstage, each of the co-producers free to advertise their politics as a popular detergent (Milosevic's ethnic cleansing, NATO's moral cleansing), cameo roles for the Russians and Vanessa Redgrave as well as for Jesse Jackson and the president of France. Within a matter of days the campaign acquired as distinctive a look and tone as the promotions for the Gap. Severe in manner and terse in speech, the military spokesmen appeared at a podium every night in Brussels or Washington to say that the NATO aircraft had enjoyed another wonderful day of bombing in Yugoslavia. They displayed maps and video-highlight reels, listed targets, counted sorties, apologized for occasional technical errors (the odd cruise missile wandering off into Bulgaria or finding a hospital instead of a bridge), reaffirmed their faith in democracy, and said that the tyrant must not be allowed to continue his massacre of the innocents. A little later in the program the camera angles shifted to the mountains of Macedonia, where sympathetic news correspondents culled the herd of refugees for those among them who had brought prize-winning stories to tell. Here was Bajram, whose three sons had been beheaded, and there was Shala, who had been raped by fourteen Serbian soldiers in Pec, and over here, just behind this tractor, we have little Besim, age nine, who watched his father and mother being burned to death in a barn. What was difficult to understand was the lack of connection between the two sets of images, the absence of cause and effect. To hear the gentlemen in Washington and Brussels talk about the avowed purpose of Operation Allied Force (to stop the killing in Kosovo), one might have expected to see some sort of military maneuver in the southern Balkans--possibly a few helicopters or the arrival of an armored vehicle. But Kosovo, alas, was a nonpermissive environment, too dangerous for allied soldiers (who might come up against mortars or machine guns), too dangerous for low-flying helicopters (which might encounter hand-held rockets), too dangerous for the briefing officers with the video-highlight reels (who might find themselves at a loss for an overhead projector and a sufficient number of leather chairs). And so NATO attacked Belgrade. Belgrade wasn't dangerous. The planes could come and go at will, dropping their bombs like sermons from the superior altitudes of moral certainty, leaving it to the tyrant Milosevic to study (study and commit to memory before the midterm examination) the symbolic relation between a pulpit and a B-52. The days passed and nothing changed: the Serbian police continued to burn villages and deport Albanians; NATO continued to bomb Belgrade, sometimes complaining about the rainy weather but otherwise happy with the pictures of the resourceful crosshairs closing down on a truck convoy or a tobacco factory. The juxtaposition of the two sequences didn't make much sense until I understood that NATO and the Milosevic government were working at different tasks. Milosevic was waging war; NATO was making a movie. Not just any movie but a movie with an important message about how everybody in the world must learn to live together in the land of peace and justice under the protection of the Jedi knights. As with most Hollywood epics, the special effects counted for more than the acting or the script, which was why it was hard to know what the movie was about. Too many people were looking at the daily rushes on CNN before the film editors had time to dub in the story line or fit the music to the soundtrack. The confusion allowed for a good many differences of opinion, and in the newspaper op-ed columns during the months of April and May the numerous strategists offering technical and geopolitical advice sounded like studio executives desperate to find an upbeat ending (or at least a coherent plot) for what was beginning to look like a production as badly botched as Kevin Costner's Waterworld. Some moviegoers thought it was a Holocaust picture (NATO force rescues Kosovo and atones for the crime of Auschwitz); others saw it as a costume drama about the glory of the British or Roman empire (the golden days of law and order, when the native tribes knelt before the thrones of justice); the younger audience thought that the Pentagon should have sent General Spielberg or Keanu Reeves. Tony Blair, the British prime minister, advanced a theory of postmodern imperialism "based not on any territorial ambitions but on values." Although he didn't say so, the values presumably were Christian, and what he seemed to have in mind was some sort of gunboat philanthropy. Old-fashioned imperialists plundered continents and captured slaves; up-to-date, enlightened imperialists gave lessons in conduct and deportment. As bearers of the rich man's burden, they were obliged to teach poor and ignorant dictators how to become gentlemen. Not always easy to do, and sometimes the prefects had no choice but to employ stem disciplinary measures, but rules were rules, and in the end, once the dictators saw their capital cities reduced to bombed-out ruins, they would know that the time had come to renounce the childish pleasures of sodomy and murder and apply for a charge account at Harrods. Other voices in other screening rooms expressed similar hopes for a happy return to the golden age of world empire. Blair had addressed his remarks about "a new doctrine of international community" to an audience in Chicago, and President Clinton, echoing the sentiment, told the American Society of Newspaper Editors, in San Francisco, that the bombing of Serbia was meant to be understood as a skirmish in "the great battle between the forces of integration and the forces of disintegration, the forces of globalism versus the forces of tribalism." The foreign-policy analysts supplying notes to the Wall Street Journal seconded the motion for "transnational institutions" capable of managing rebellious provinces with the sang-froid of imperial Rome. The genius of modern capitalism had produced a world market and a global economy, but where was the world government? Where was the benign figure of the Emperor Caesar Augustus in whom Edward Gibbon had found the virtues of "a supreme magistrate ... invested with the sublime perfections of an Eternal Parent and an Omnipotent Monarc Both Blair and Clinton could see themselves playing the part of the Eternal Parent, awarding prizes as well as punishments. The literary and academic sectors of opinion favored the role of the Omnipotent Monarch. Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist who conducts the paper's twice-weekly lesson on foreign affairs, regretted the absence of the Roman legions, who cut down their enemies without apology or remorse: The idea that people are still holding rock concerts in Belgrade, or going out for Sunday merry-go-round rides, while their fellow Serbs are "cleansing" Kosovo is outrageous. It should be lights out in Belgrade: every power grid, water pipe, bridge, road and war-related factory has to be targeted. Like it or not, we are at war with the Serbian nation (the Serbs certainly think so), and the stakes have to be very clear: Every week you ravage Kosovo is another decade we will set your country back by pulverizing you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1389? We can do 1389 too. Friedman's column appeared in the paper on April 23, the same day on which the leaders of the nineteen NATO nations had gathered in Washington to applaud the alliance's fiftieth anniversary, and he worried about a possible loss of nerve on the part of the ornamental generals. The futility of the Serbian bombing campaign had dampened everybody's spirits and spoiled the celebration. Instead of attending military fly-bys and black-tie dinners, which had been canceled for fear of sarcasm, the captains courageous were attending worried councils of state, their movements in and around the Ronald Reagan International Trade Center preceded not by flags and drums but by press advisories offering photo-ops for such events as Leaders Walk to Working Lunch. Friedman undoubtedly wished to hearten the company with the rhetorical equivalent of a military fly-by, but his message to Milosevic bore an unfortunate resemblance to Milosevic's message to the Albanians, or Hitler's message to the Jews. Every Serb was guilty, and all the Serbs were vicious. Yugoslavia must be cleansed, an entire people cast into the purifying fire to rid the European Economic Union of their poverty and corruption. If Friedman's remarks seemed at odds with the NATO public-service announcements about the sanctity of human rights, the contradiction could be explained by his prerogative as a moviegoer. Moviegoers weren't expected to know much about history, or military logistics, or dying in the mud; they expressed important opinions about the cinematography and the lighting, made clever references to other action pictures--30 Seconds Over Libya, The Sands of Grenada, Seizing General Noriega, Dark Moon Over Baghdad, etc.--noticed the strength of a performance or the weakness of the dialogue. Like Friedman, most of the other critics contributing commentary to the major news media were free with fanciful interpretations-Serbia to be occupied for fifty or a hundred years, Milosevic indistinguishable from Hitler, Serbia to be utterly destroyed, as Japan and Germany had been destroyed in 1945, as proof that, in the words of Jamie Shea, NATO's chief publicist, Europe "has no tolerance for brutality." Tony Blair likened to the young Winston Churchill, Madam Albright compared, unfavorably, with both Joan of Arc and Charles de Gaulle. The film criticism proceeded from presumptions of omnipotence similar to those that have governed the making of American foreign policy for two generations. Because the United States bestrides the narrow earth like a colossus (the only superpower, the supreme magistrate and eternal parent), the studio executives in Washington assume that they can afford to look upon the world as so much painted scenery. They understand the acts of war not as a means to an end but as exemplary projections of moral virtue, peace without victory presented as illustrations of the democratic way of life. The Serbian audience unhappily failed to see in Bill Clinton the obvious allusions to Luke Skywalker, and although by the middle of May the NATO alliance had bombed Belgrade for fifty days and fifty nights, the production was in serious trouble--the budget out of control, the script too preachy, the Russians and the Chinese refusing to work at union scale, too many refugees standing around in the canteen. The prospect of certain failure at the summer box office forced the studio executives to revise the focus of the picture. The stern rebuke directed at the brutal Serbs had become an inspirational message addressed to the vanity of the audiences in Washington and Brussels. The movie was about "the credibility of NATO," not about the future of the Balkans, and if more civilians had to be killed, surely they could take comfort in the knowledge thai they were making the world safe for the Pentagon's briefing officers and Spielberg's camera crews. COPYRIGHT 1999 Harper's Magazine Foundation COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group |