The media told us that “critics warn bombing alone won’t budge Milosevic,” so when bombing alone did budge him, the media told us ’twas a famous victory. “It worked!” gushed Mara Liasson of National Public Radio as the G-8 peace accord was announced in early June. “Clinton is vindicated, and Gore is looking good again. . . . Clinton was right!”

“Bombing alone” broke the Serbian resistance, and little wonder. An elderly man in Belgrade, Aleksandar Stamatovic, told an Associated Press reporter, “That agreement was the only choice. There was no other—they were killing us.” It is utterly amazing the results you can get when you’re willing to bomb civilians and their power grids and water supplies indiscriminately. Why bother with moral cover? After all, it worked!

Between 5,000 and 30,000 people who were bothered by the allies’ conspicuous lack of moral cover gathered at the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial on Saturday, June 5, then marched to the Pentagon. They should have marched to Foggy Bottom, where this operation was incubated for many years before the military was ordered to drop it down the hatches. The misdirection of the marchers was symptomatic of a more serious problem with the march, and by extension with (what’s left of) the opposition to the current regime in this country.

The largest contingent at the march represented hard-bitten, old-guard factions of what was once, long ago, the New Left: Workers’ World Party, Socialist Workers Party, Fourth International, and so on. In other words, the “blame America first” crowd, for whom Kosovo is just Addendum #999 to be tacked onto their long-drawn-up indictment of racist, sexist, homophobic, capitalist, imperialist, militarist America—folks who have hung in there long enough to see their wildest, darkest charges finally come true (even a stopped clock . . . ). These losers were politically marginalized years ago, dépasses par l’histoire, and won’t ever catch up.

Serbs, other Slavs, and a few Greeks were the next largest contingent, as blood told, followed by pacifists and greens, and finally a motley crew of hippies and punks. Around such a coalition no vital movement can be built in this country, as we have seen again and again. The media’s portrayal of the Vietnam War and the anti-war movement on TV forced U.S. withdrawal from that conflict, but the media aren’t playing it that way now. This time, in the endgame of nations, the media are all wide, dewy eyes and blissed-out smiles and breathy, bubbly voices like a commercial for term-life insurance. Power politics don’t raise a single famous-anchor eyebrow. Macht macht Recht—it worked! Nice guys finish last—Clinton was right! We’re in the game, playing hardball with the big boys in the major leagues!

In the film noir Body Heat, Richard Crenna portrays a rich and evil businessman who sneers to small-time shyster William Hurt, “There are two kinds of people in the world—a——s, and those who are willing to do what it takes. Which kind are you?” (I will not rent the movie again to render the lines exactly.) Can’t you just hear Clinton saying something similar to Vince Foster during that last long phone call the night before Vince lost what it takes to stay alive? And isn’t that really the distinction between the lords and the little people?

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity,” Yeats sensed on the eve of World War I. Many years earlier, Nietzsche foresaw the emergence of men beyond good and evil who would run roughshod over a world tenderized by generations of Christian morality. Kosovo is immoral!—It worked! Oppressive!—It worked! Exploitative!—It worked! Unjust!—It worked!

NATO’s global managers have fully recovered from the “sickness” of Christianity, as Nietzsche would put it, and are above and beyond any appeal to ethics or morality or any law you care to cite, spiritual or temporal. Moral constraints, like paying taxes, are for the little people. Efforts to shame them into being nice will not work. Bombing them would work (bombing, mirabile dictu, works like a charm on anything!), but they seem to control all the bombs now that Tim McVeigh’s been put away.

There are two kinds of people in our shrinking, massifying world: the bombers and the bombed. Therefore, shouldn’t wise and caring parents devoutly strive to place their children in the bombers’ ranks? In a world with many Kosovos yet to come, isn’t it dangerous to weaken and confuse a child with moral qualms? Globalism means that Earth’s six billion will virtually all be reduced to little people, infinitesimal people; and it means that your child will have only about a one in three million chance of being elevated above “target” statLis.

Sauve qui peut.