FROM BOSNIA TO BAGHDAD - The Revenge of Geography - page 9

make the world safe for individual freedom? “For liberal internationalists Bosnia has be-
come the Spanish Civil War of our era,” wrote Michael Ignatieff, the intellectual historian
and biographer of Isaiah Berlin, referring to the passion with which intellectuals like him-
self approached the Balkans. 13
The call for human agency—and the defeat of determinism—was urgent in their minds.
One recalls the passage from Joyce's Ulysses , when Leopold Bloom laments the “generic
conditions imposed by natural” law: the “decimating epidemics,” the “catastrophic cata-
clysms,” and “seismic upheavals.” To which Stephen Dedalus responds by simply,
poignantly affirming “his significance as a conscious rational animal.” 14 Yes, atrocities
happen, it is the way of the world. But it doesn't have to be accepted thus. Because man is
rational, he ultimately has the ability to struggle against suffering and injustice.
And so, with Central Europe as the lodestar, the road led southeastward, first to Bosnia,
then to Kosovo, and onward to Baghdad. Of course, many of the intellectuals who suppor-
ted intervention in Bosnia would oppose it in Iraq—or at least be skeptical of it; but neo-
conservatives and others would not be deterred. For as we shall see, the Balkans showed
us a vision of interventionism, delayed though it was, that cost little in soldiers' lives, leav-
ing many with the illusion that painless victory was now the future of war. The 1990s,
with their belated interventions were, as Garton Ash wrote searingly, reminiscent of W. H.
Auden's “low, dishonest decade” of the 1930s. 15 True, but in another sense they were much
too easy.
At the time, in the 1990s, it did seem that history and geography had indeed reared their im-
placable heads. Less than two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, with all of the ahistor-
ical and universalist stirrings that had followed that event, the world media suddenly found
themselves immersed in the smoky ruins, mountains of rubble, and twisted metal of towns
with difficult to pronounce names, in frontier regions of the old Austrian and Turkish em-
pires, namely Slavonia and Krajina, which had just witnessed atrocities not experienced in
Europe since the Nazis. From airy contemplations of global unity, the conversation among
elites now turned to unraveling complex local histories only a few hours' drive across the
Pannonian Plain from Vienna, very much inside Central Europe. The relief map showed
southern and eastern Croatia, close to the Sava River, as the southern terminus of the broad
European flatland, which here heralded, beyond the Sava's banks, the tangle of mountain
ranges collectively known as the Balkans: the relief map, which shows a vast and flat green
splash from France all the way to Russia (from the Pyrenees to the Urals), abruptly, on
the southern bank of the Sava, turns to yellow and then to brown, signifying higher, more
rugged terrain that will continue thus southeastward into Asia Minor. This region, near to
where the mountains begin, was the overlapping, back-and-forth marchlands of the Habs-