There was, to be sure, a brutal un-imaginativeness about the allied air strike on the Serb television station, RTS: was it really impossible for the NATO masters of command and communications to have ensured the building was evacuated before the cruise missiles struck? Could they not have done rather more to ensure lives were not lost? By means of a simple telephone call, even, like our chums the Provos used to make, on the lines of, "Get out"?
Such thoughts are probably very naive indeed; but it is still more naive to think that in wars such as this one the Serb television station wouldn't have been a legitimate military target, and on the very first day of hostilities rather than the 30th. Milosevic's primary weapon is falsehood, and Serb television is the main munitions factory for his lies. This is the century of The Lie as a means of waging war, deployed through the mass media. That is what made Goebbels a true war criminal though he ran no death camps, ordered no killings. He invented The Lie just as Hiram Maxim invented the belt-fed machine gun and I.G. Farben invented Zyklon-B.
Journalist victims
So I get a little restless when I hear journalist victims being singled out for especial sympathy. When you work for Serb television, you work for a cause. You are not a journalist in the sense that we know the word. You become more than just an apologist for the regime which has been responsible for the murder of a quarter-of-a-million people. You are also responsible for cleansing the world of inconvenient truths, just as Milosevic's goons cleansed Vukovar and Srebenice of inconvenient life-forms. The Serb people have been primed for war by his propaganda machine and the state servants who run it.
Such functionaries are a far more important part of Milosevic's war machine than some barely literate teenage conscript killed as in his bed in a barracks which is a "legitimate" target. No tears are shed for him, though he put on his ill-fitting uniform for the first time that morning, and he went to sleep longing for home and his mother.
That doesn't mean I hold with the killing of the Serb journalists. I do not. It was a monstrosity. More than that. War itself is a monstrosity, to be avoided at almost any cost. But there are times when a conspicuous willingness to pay the cost will mean the cost will not in fact be paid. If Milosevic had been thoroughly convinced that unless he kept his killers in check, NATO would by cruise missile and stealth bomber partition the Yugoslav state down the Danube, gut every government building, level every army barracks, destroy his entire air defence system and turn every power station into an adventure playground, then today three-quarter-of-a-million Albanian refugees would not be camped on Kosovo's borders and death squads would not once again be making lines of weeping men dig mass graves.
UN in Bosnia
But unfortunately Milosevic judged NATO by the contemptible standards set under the UN mandate in Bosnia. That duel-key authority saw UN officials over-rule NATO commanders who were pleading for permission to launch air-strikes against Serb positions outside Srebenice. That same wretched mandate saw Dutch UN soldiers meekly hand over Muslims to Serb butchers. It was the darkest hour and those were the darkest deeds done in Europe since 1945.
It almost passes belief that hand-wringers wished to revive UN mandates to cope with the Kosovo crisis and have been muttering witlessly that NATO should seek UN authorisation before taking military action. The UN might be a splendid organisation for dealing with refugees; but when it comes to dealing with the genocidal ambitions of a mentally deranged warmonger (as Slobodan was recently described by Montenegro's prime minister), I would prefer to place my trust with the Irish Countrywomen's Association. And if the good ladies of the ICA are not available, then I suppose we must look to something like NATO.
Initial attacks
This is not to applaud the war but to give it an extremely reluctant support. But after a certain point, talk of talks is doing Milosevic's work. We know from Bosnia that Milosevic uses negotiations as conquest by other means. Not that the war option is simple; it is not. Air attacks have never diminished the support for a country's ruler by the ruled; quite the reverse. Furthermore, the initial attacks were woefully inadequate, presumably through ignorance of the toughness of Serb character and an absurdly optimistic belief in the effectiveness of air power; five minutes with a history book would have prevented both errors.
History books teach us other lessons, obvious ones which we learn in the school playground but then forget amid the benignity of welfare state social democracy. This is a truth: people who choose virtuous defencelessness will one day find themselves in unvirtuous chain-gangs. When this war is over, will we in Ireland finally accept that we have a duty to ourselves and to our friends in the EU to take our defence, and the defences of the eastern marches of our European civilisation, seriously? Will we not now learn that the inevitable alternative to saying Never Again is saying Sooner Or Later?