On its face, this has the look of a victory for President Clinton," sniffed the Wall Street Journal editorial page the day after the Kosovo peace deal. The editors were unable to hide their irritation that the U.S. would not be humiliated after all, that NATO would survive, and that America had done good in the world at little cost to itself.
Critics of the Kosovo project--some of whom said we should stay out, some of whom said we should go in with ground troops, many of whom managed to say both these things, and all of whom predicted that the Serbs would never cave--are bitter. Slobodan Milosevic betrayed them! Doesn't he watch the Sunday talk shows? Doesn't he know that air power never works? Has he forgotten that he represents a centuries-old tradition of ethnic violence? Where is that quagmire he was supposed to produce?
Milosevic probably does not watch the Sunday talk shows. But he surely was influenced in his thinking about when to hold and when to fold by his assessment of the climate of opinion in the U.S. Relentless predictions of quagmire are partly self-fulfilling. The constant carpers and gloomy doomsters of the commentariat and Capitol Hill encouraged Milosevic to think America would fold first. Thus they prolonged the war and added to the human cost they claimed to deplore. Of course, this complaint could be used to discredit dissent in any war, and often has been. Aiding and comforting the enemy was a frequent charge against the antiwar movement during Vietnam. Today, when almost nobody denies that Vietnam really was a quagmire, the only argument left against those who called it a quagmire at the time is that they were responsible for making it one.
Recent years have seen amazing reversals of traditional political postures, none more amazing than on the issue of using military force. Although the pattern is mixed and shifting, in Kosovo and other recent military controversies liberals are more likely to favor military action and conservatives are more likely to oppose it. The folks who frothed about protesters undermining the war effort are now doing it themselves.
The term fifth column was coined in 1936 by a Francoite general during the Spanish Civil War. He boasted that he had four columns of soldiers marching on Madrid plus an invisible fifth column of supporters within the civilian community. George Orwell, who fought as a volunteer on the other side of that war, wrote in 1941, "Objectively, whoever is not on the side of the policeman is on the side of the criminal," and therefore Britons who opposed fighting the Germans (on pacifist grounds) were "objectively...pro-Nazi." But by 1944 Orwell had changed his mind and declared that to accuse dissenters of supporting the other side is "dishonest" because it "disregard[s] people's motives."