Lucky Bill marches on, all the way to Kosovo

In the spirit of Rousseau, the President goes to war

Bill Clinton is a lucky man.  He came to office with the Cold War won and the United States the only remaining superpower.  He was then saddled with a Republican Congress which balanced the Budget and frustrated his more stupid policy adventures, had Alan Greenspan to manage monetary policy and reaped the benefits of a long boom, the foundations of which were laid under Carter, Reagan and Greenspan's predecessor Paul Volker.

And when he did get into trouble over a spot of perjury, he was faced by a prosecutor whose apparent narrow-minded Puritanism was no match for economic success, shameless manipulation -- including strategically timed bombing of Sudan and Afghanistan -- and the support of a Democratic Party and American left willing to, in the words of one downcast liberal commentator, mortgage their integrity at the altar of Clinton's "loathsome legalisms".

And there is a statute of limitations on rape.  So, while American official feminism squirms with having supported a President to evade the consequences of lying under oath about behaviour which, if done by a conservative, would have led to huge screams of "unequal power" and who is now, thanks to public revelations by Juanita Broaderrick, widely believed to be a rapist, Clinton marches on.

All the way to Kosovo, where Bill the Lucky has convinced NATO to commit to military action not to stop aggression, not to protect some overriding national or collective interest, but simply to stop an internationally recognised government behaving badly within its own borders.

It is not a war of self-defence, but a war of intervention in the internal affairs of another state.  A war to express our values within someone else's country.

If we in the West are going to go to war merely because of our values, unrestrained by any sense of national interest or the constraints of national borders, then we must become warmongers par excellence, since the potential for other states to affront our values -- from environmental destruction through "female circumcision" to lack of democracy -- is almost endless.

Far from imposing a moral order on the world system, moralistic intervention Kosovo-style creates a moral chaos, by overriding the only real ordering constraints in the international system on the use of power -- that action will be comparable to the national interest at stake and that borders will restrain action.  Interests and borders are clear, knowable and limited in nature.  Free-floating values are unlimited in their claims.  A West which uses its immense military predominance merely at the service of currently fashionable values is a West profoundly dangerous for anyone else to attempt to live with.

Even worse, how can we protest if others do the same?  What can we then say to Russia, for example, if it intervenes in the Baltic States to stop what it claims is the "ethnic cleansing" of Russians.  Surely the claims, the Russians could retort, of their kith and kin are even greater on them than those of the Kosovars on the West?  Unimpeachably true.  The action against Serbia has already greatly boosted anti-Western sentiment in Russia -- after all, we did not punish Croatia for its expulsion of up to a million Serbs.

Such moralism unconstrained by a sense of appropriate limits to action is Jean Jacques Rousseau's overriding "general will" -- a general will against which there is no appeal -- brought into international politics.  It is a tradition which, precisely because of its conjunction of universalist pretension with a refusal to acknowledge limits, is profoundly conducive to tyranny and mass murder.

Rousseau's intellectual heirs include Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot and Mengistu:  Rousseau's Leninist and Nazi heirs have murdered 131 million people, or 78 per cent of the 169 million people slaughtered by their own governments this century.

Clinton's Kosovo adventure is Rousseuian in another sense:  its failure to seriously match actions to likely consequences.  It was always blindingly obvious that, if the intent was to protect the population of Kosovo from the Serbian police and military, then only ground troops could do that.  Air attacks alone removed constraints on Slobodan Milosevic's actions and positively invited him to make a thorough job of the "ethnic cleansing".

But a good Rouseauian is not bothered by such boringly pedestrian calculation of consequences -- the noble intention is all, and life will, of course, conform to the patterns the Rousseauian sage has already identified.

Americans, as heirs to their own Revolution, used to be largely immune to the Rousseauian delusions of the heirs to the French Revolution.  In the 1960s, however, as the baby boomers where going through university, Rousseauian ideas, in Marxist and other forms, pervaded the intellectual consciousness of a generation radicalised by the Vietnam War.

Draft-evader Bill may not have inhaled the green stuff, but could hardly have avoided the transmitted ideas of Jean Jacques (who, as it happens, was also a notorious breaker of trust and eschewer of obligations in his personal life).

So there we have it, the adventures of "Bubba Rousseau", Rousseau as Southern good 'ole boy.  A President who is a breaker of trust -- an accused rapist, a self-confessed adulterer and perjurer, and a warmonger.  Someone whose progressive moralism is unrestrained by any actual morality, but who is adept at using the language of high purpose to cover selfishness and egoism and whose lack of constraint unleashes moral chaos on the world.  A fortunate heir of others' labours debauching the legacy.  The first baby-boomer President.  What a wonderful example of the species.

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