It is a rare moment for those who contemplate international politics
when a dramatic event suddenly clarifies seemingly insoluble
arguments over basic principles and policies. Such moments are of two
basic types: those that repudiate a course of action and those that
confirm it.

When a seminal event confounds a reigning consensus, it can condense
fragmented thoughts on the margins of debate into powerful new
metaphors and motivations, and generate a new vocabulary to discuss
new realities. Thus Hitler's perfidy in Czechoslovakia not only
turned the 1938 Munich agreement into a powerful symbolic repudiation
of appeasement, but revealed unmistakably the strategic intentions of
the Nazi regime.

When an event reaffirms widely held convictions, on the other hand,
even strong dissent may be silenced by the trumpets of official
vindication. Confirmation can lead to the commitment of more
resources to achieve a more complete success, and to "lessons
learned" applied to seemingly analogous problems. Thus the 1948
Berlin blockade solidified U.S. elite consensus around a Cold War
model of American foreign policy, and the June 1950 invasion of South
Korea spread that consensus to the country at large. Both resources
and lessons followed.

What a lucky bunch are we, then, to have recently witnessed two such
clarifying dramas in near simultaneity. The fall of Slobodan
Milosevic in Belgrade not only vindicates Clinton administration
policy in the Balkans, but shows the broader wisdom of worldwide U.S.
engagement in armed humanitarian interventions. The collapse of the
Oslo process is a prooftext written in rocks, flaming bottles and
rubber bullets that Oslo was a mistake from the start, not just by
Israel, which negotiated and signed it, but by the United States,
which endorsed and supported it at times with greater energy than the
Israeli government of the day. And how useful for pedagogy that one
event vindicates and the other condemns a policy of the selfsame U.S.
administration.

There is only one problem with all this: it isn't true. Those who
have jumped to such conclusions are mainly those who have been
waiting impatiently at the chalk line for evidence to confirm their
own views. The temptation to see "clearer than the truth", to twist
Acheson's memorable phrase just a bit, owes as much to ego
maintenance as to the wish to influence others. It is a natural
impulse, and nearly all of us succumb to it now and again. But
sometimes it leads us to jump not to conclusions but to confusions.

"The triumph of demo-cracy in Serbia last week may well rank as the
most important international event of the post-Cold War era", Robert
Kagan and William Kristol told us on October 8. It constitutes for
the United States "a strategic triumph of the first order", for it is
now "irrefutable that U.S. intervention in Kosovo, as well as our
earlier intervention in Bosnia and the continued presence of U.S.
peacekeeping forces were essential factors in the defeat of
Milosevic."

If the Belgrade revolution is really such an epochal event, then it
follows that U.S. interventions in the Balkans were epochal, too. But
as the premise strains credulity, the conclusion suffers in
consequence.

It is aesthetically pleasing that Slobodan Milosevic is fallen, but
it is still far from clear that the problem he represented ever
threatened any significant U.S. strategic interest. The Balkans are
not, and never were, at the heart of Europe; anyone who thinks
otherwise either cannot read history or a map. The worry that Balkan
wars would spread to Central Europe or the Aegean was always
exaggerated, and the argument that NATO would have collapsed had it
remained passive before Serbian depredations became true only after
Western leaders foolishly spoke and acted in ways that made it so.

Most likely, if the United States had let the Serbian dog lie it
would be lying still--an ugly, decrepit and slightly rabid dog, true,
but not an especially dangerous one for those able to keep their
distance. Consider: as the wars of Yugoslav succession slithered on,
the Serbian state was shrinking, not expanding, and its ability to
jeopardize peace outside of the former Yugoslavia was shrinking with
it. It had no ideology that appealed to others. Weapons of mass
destruction were never involved. Serbia did not directly menace any
American ally. And--contrary to common misuse of the word--there was
no genocide in the Balkans, but a very brutal pre-twentieth
century-style land grab not unlike many others in this and other
parts of the world.

Neither was Milosevic the worst of the Yugoslav lot. He did win fair,
democratic election at least once, which makes the claim that his
fall has somehow introduced democracy to Serbia a little peculiar. Is
a foreign country a democracy only when America approves of those
elected? Or when it intervenes massively in the election campaign?

Aside from the exaggeration of the Serbian threat, there is the
matter of what U.S. interventions have accomplished and are likely to
accomplish in future. Yes, Milosevic is gone from power--though not
yet from Serbian politics--and good riddance. But that will make
building a viable, multi-ethnic Bosnian state only marginally easier,
and it is very hard. It will not make removing Kosovo from its
diplomatic suspended animation any simpler either. To the contrary,
since it will be harder to deny Yugoslav sovereignty there with a
"nice guy" like Vojislav Kostunica in office, NATO forces are liable
to become "bad guys" in the eyes of the Albanian Kosovo Liberation
Army (KLA). The KLA being what it is, those forces are also liable to
draw not only enmity but live fire. That the KLA has lost recent
local elections to more moderate forces makes this not less but more
likely.

As for Serbia proper, it may finally be able to "join Europe", but
this is not obvious either. Having practiced for centuries a cult of
sacred victimization, it will take at least a generation to convince
the Serbian body politic that the whole world is not conspiring
against it. It may take nearly as long to persuade many Serbs that
atrocities were committed in their name. That is why it is a mistake
to analogize Milosevic to Saddam Hussein. In Iraq, a homicidal madman
aided by a small group of thugs intimidates and terrorizes a mostly
innocent people. This is not the case in Serbia, where Milosevic has
been much less ruthless and far more popular, and where his strongest
opposition has come from the ultra-nationalist Right.

Which raises several potential problems. Dr. Kostunica may or may not
be able to root out the corruption in Serbia's political and economic
system and establish the rule of law. He may or may not turn out to
be a skillful politician, and, if not, someone worse than Milosevic
might replace him. It is sweet when a dictator is deposed, but the
aftermath can quickly turn sour. Suharto was corrupt and aged and had
to go; but is Indonesia more stable without him? The Haitian colonels
were vile, but was Father Aristide such a prize? Will we still thrill
to Milosevic's fall if former Deputy Prime Minister Vojislav Seselj,
a certifiable apprentice mass murderer, succeeds Vojislav Kostunica?
Stranger things have happened.

Against these achievements, too, we must mark the price paid for
them. A sizeable chunk of the U.S. Army has been tied down by the
Clinton administration's Balkan interventions. The damage done by
heightened operational tempos to military morale, recruiting and
retention is not mere, and neither is the large sum of money spent
that might have been better used for modernization. The Kosovo war
also damaged U.S. relations with both Russia and China and, conducted
as it was without UN Security Council sanction, increased worldwide
resentment of U.S. arrogance and double standards.

The most serious price in the long run, however, may be fallout from
the feckless conduct of the war itself. U.S. diplomatic and military
tactics exacerbated an existing humanitarian problem and then dragged
the NATO alliance into a bombing campaign that succeeded only at the
eleventh hour, and for reasons no one yet fully understands. That
fecklessness led willy-nilly to an acceleration of the European
Union's desire to build foreign policies and military forces separate
from those of NATO (read: those of the United States), an impulse
that if sufficiently mismanaged in future could doom the Atlantic
partnership itself.

When one sums its mixed consequences and close calls, the real costs
and the uncertain future of it all, U.S. Balkans policy hardly
suggests itself as a model for emulation. When a good thing
happens--and Milosevic's fall does qualify--it is hard to resist the
temptation to elevate its meaning beyond the evidence, particularly
if one can plausibly take credit for it. But resist it we should; we
are a long way from finished with this mess.

One should also resist exaggerating trouble. From Israel's point of
view, Oslo was a calculated risk. Yitzhak Rabin, never known to be an
impetuous man, was faced in 1993 with a choice between an untenable
status quo and an uncertain leap into the future. To succeed, that
leap rested on the possibility that enough trust might develop
between self-interested Israeli and Palestinian leaderships to move
away from positions of mutual negation.

It was a risk Rabin took not because he knew it would succeed, but
because he knew it did not have to fail. Moreover, even if complete
success proved elusive, Rabin believed that Israel would still be
better off so long as it made no critical and unrecoverable security
concessions. Israel could off-load responsibility for controlling a
hostile population, improve its regional and international position,
and enhance its own morale and unity in the knowledge that if the
process failed the fault would not lay with Israel. That is why he
believed that not to try would be worse than failure.

Did Rabin believe that a stable final status agreement was probable,
however? Not likely, and if necessary he was ready to impose a
"separation", its unilateralism derived from Moshe Dayan and its map
from Yigal Alon. But Rabin knew that Israel could not impose
separation without some degree of international and especially
American acquiescence, and that required Israel to first demonstrate
a maximal effort to reach contractual peace with the Palestinians.

In other words, from Israel's perspective the peace process was a
calculated exercise in moral realism. It was not a utopian delusion,
a case of unilateral withdrawal, a sign of Israel's loss of nerve, or
a manifestation of post-Zionist political masochism, as various and
sundry detractors now claim. Prime Minister Ehud Barak began his
tenure in June 1999 with an attitude similar to that of Yitzhak
Rabin, except that when Barak assumed office the utility of Oslo's
interim logic had, in his view, come to an end. Three months or so
would be enough to find out, he said, whether a stable final
settlement was possible--for all the arguments were known and what
remained was only the summoning of courage on both sides to make the
tough decisions.

So what has happened? It took a little longer than three months, but
we have found out. At Camp David in July, Barak went to and arguably
beyond the threshold of Israeli tolerance in offering concessions to
the Palestinians. Yasir Arafat failed not only to accept Barak's
offer but even to engage it in negotiation. In the following weeks it
became clear that Arafat prefers to steal a smaller prize that avoids
a promise to end the conflict than to negotiate for a larger prize
that requires it. He thus labored to establish the basis for
unilaterally proclaiming an independent state, and when this effort
fell short--when European, Russian, Chinese and even Arab support was
not forthcoming--the chairman found himself cornered. So he resorted
to violence in such a way as to regain the international sympathy he
required. In other words, he needed "martyrs."

Arafat has employed this tactic many times to good effect, but this
time he went too far. The scale of violence, its obviously
premeditated nature, and the incessant official incitement goading it
to and occasionally beyond control--all following the most generous
Israeli negotiating offer politically possible--shocked even the most
dovish Israelis.

The symbolic center of it all was the video footage of the murder and
mutilation of two Israeli reserve soldiers in Ramallah. The crowd
captured on film was happy; even young women in their scarves shouted
in a frenzy of joy over the spilling of Jewish blood. To see this
Palestinian mob was for Israelis the coda to Arafat's unwillingness
to negotiate in good faith. Not only would the Palestinian leadership
not negotiate peace on honorable if necessarily imperfect terms, but
many Palestinians seem determined to wage a guerrilla war for
independence. Having convinced themselves that Israel was forced from
southern Lebanon by just a few thousand Hizballah fighters, they
think that the Palestinian masses backed by more than 40,000 armed
police can do the same in the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem.

As most Israelis now see it, thanks either to the perfidy or the
failure of the Palestinian leadership, every demonstration of
Israel's desire for peace has been interpreted on the Palestinian
"street" as evidence of Israeli weakness. Hence the escalation of
Palestinian ambition with every Israeli invitation to normalcy, and
hence the deterioration of the situation to the edge of protracted
guerrilla warfare.

Is this a fair appraisal of where things now stand? Yes, it is. Does
it mean that Oslo was a mistake from the start? No, and anyone who
claims now to have known for certain from that day on the White House
lawn in September 1993 how the peace process would turn out--whether
for good or ill--is not to be taken seriously. As Rabin knew, history
is profoundly contingent. If Arafat had chosen real leadership, and
if Israel had enforced Oslo's terms more stringently from the start
to better shape that choice, things might have worked differently. As
for the United States, it was not wrong to encourage the process; but
it could not make peace happen if either of the parties demurred--and
one has.

The key question, still, is whether Israel is better off having gone
through the Oslo exercise. The answer is, I believe, yes. Israel did
free itself from the debilities of ruling a hostile population. Oslo
was a precondition for the peace treaty with Jordan, which is of
enormous benefit to Israel. Through the peace process Israel deepened
the separation of the interests of the Arab states from the
Palestinian agenda, a long-sought Israeli goal that was demonstrated
when the leaders of the major Arab states refused to tie their fates
to Arafat's at the October Arab Summit in Cairo.

Most important, and as Rabin knew, it was necessary to go through
Oslo, or something like it, in order to find out if a deal among
politicians was possible. He knew that peace among peoples would have
to follow. For the time being, at least, we know that a deal is not
possible, let alone real peace. But the way we found out carries the
benefit Rabin foresaw. The practical price Israel has paid for this
knowledge has not been great. Israel can deal readily with the
Palestinian areas by force majeure, and it now has the will to do so
because, though stung by disappointment, Israelis are more united on
basics than they have been in years. They know what has gone wrong,
they know their own leadership is not to blame, and they know what
they have to do to restore the credibility of Israeli deterrence.

As it happens, at least one other government--that of the United
States--shares Israel's basic view of recent events. Alas, it's
lonely at the top. As for the rest of the world, most Jews, whether
Israeli citizens or not, entertain few expectations. The last few
weeks have also shown that the capacity of the "Seventy Nations"--the
rabbinic shorthand for the gentile world--to discount the rights and
lives of Jews has yet to find its limit. This is not a conclusion to
which one jumps, but approaches only with great reluctance.