Those who oppose our sending troops to Bosnia argue that our own vital interests are not at stake. They're viewing our interests too narrowly. We should know by now that what other people do, and what we let them do, affect what we see when we look into the mirror. And how we see ourselves is as vital an interest as sea lanes and access to oil. This lesson we should have learned from the Nazis' holocaust. Here we are, two generations later, still suffering from the disturbance those horrors inflicted on our understanding of what we are-- as a species and as a civilization. It is not only Jews who still wrestle with this undigestible history. I do talk radio in a somewhat provincial and fundamentalist area of Virginia, and I can tell you that people here are also still struggling to come to terms with the troubling question: "How could people so much like ourselves do such things?" Doubtless we should be similarly disturbed by atrocities committed in places like Rwanda, because at the most fundamental level these crimes, too, are committed by people "like us." But the great gaps in culture and history and, yes, race allow most of us to look at tribal violence in Africa --or in Asia-- and not feel that we are looking in the mirror. But the Germans of World War II were different: a "highly civilized" people, we noted in bewilderment; the land of Bach and Brahms; a Western and Christian nation, schooled in the same traditions of morality as ourselves, in Plato and Jesus and Kant. They were people who looked like us, could speak to us in comprehensible terms-- and who proceeded to reveal themselves as monsters. The Nazis forced us to confront the question, "What are we?" That's why, a half century later, our fascination with the Holocaust has not abated. Now comes Bosnia. If Bosnia were just a war, we might confine our discussion of "interests" to such matters as the stability of Europe and the possible widening of the conflict. We understand that some conflicts will come to a contest of force. But the Serbs --with their butchering of defenseless thousands into mass graves, with their establishing camps of rape-by-command to degrade women of another ethnicity-- have challenged us again at the deeper level of bringing into question what we are. These people, too, are much like us. They drive cars and own TVs. Their spokesmen come before us speaking English; the leader of the Bosnian Serb is a trained psychiatrist. Before the war, the war criminals --Serbian and other-- were living lives very much like our own. And then they proceeded to do unspeakable things. Of course, the crimes of these people --however much like us they may be-- are not our crimes, and every community can have crimes committed in its midst. The way a commmunity can limit how much its horrible crimes will define its image is to demonstrate emphatically that such offenses will not be tolerated. NEVER AGAIN! we said. But then, if crimes against humanity take place that we could stop but we don't --and the end of the cold war has made it possible for the world community to act together in a way it never could before-- we become complicitous in those crimes. And the face in our mirror looks more like the monsters we allow to run amok. Some have asked why we are acting now, when we failed to act for several years. Indeed, we should have acted sooner, but apparently until the offensive image was shoved into our faces we could tolerate it. Atrocities committed before we, as a world community, had asserted our authority were evidently not provocation enough. But this summer, at the town of Srebrenica --after the world community of which we are the leader had said "Stop!" to atrocities and had placed soldiers on the scene to represent its power and principles-- under the noses of those soldiers, the Serbs marched six thousand unarmed men out of the town we had declared a "safe area," and massacred them. Their crimes were fast becoming our own, so we began to take more serious action. If we are not willing to sacrifice some comfort to enforce an end to such crimes, we must indeed ask, "What are we?" And if it is not vital to our interests that we can answer that question in terms of justice and human decency, then just what is vital to us?

Andrew Bard Schmookler is the author of The Parable of the Tribes: The Problem of Power in Social Evolution, the second edition of which was published earlier this year by the State University of New York Press.