-Caveat Lector-
http://www.devvy.com/tonysnow1.html#SOFC
Is Kosovo Really That Bloody?
Tony Snow
March 29, 1999
Key members of the United States Senate sat
slack-jawed through a confidential briefing last Thursday
from the Clinton administration foreign-policy team.
They were waiting for some sign that the president and
his advisers knew why they wanted to bomb Kosovo
and possibly send troops there. Presidential mouthpieces
previously had described our mission to Dalmatia either
as a humanitarian gesture, an effort to avert World War
III or a favor to NATO. But senators figured the White
House was holding back some secret information that
would silence critics on Capitol Hill.
They were wrong. After the foreign-policy wise men
asserted that the United States has a moral imperative to
stop the murderous Serbian president, Slobodan
Milosevic, one senator asked: How many Albanians
have Milosevic's troops massacred this year?
The president's emissaries turned ashen. They glanced at
each other. They rifled through their papers. One
hazarded a guess: "Two thousand?" No, the senator
replied, that was the number for all of last year. He
wanted figures for the last month -- or even the year to
date, since the president had painted such a grisly picture
of genocide in his March 24 address to the nation. Said
Clinton, "We've seen innocent people taken from their
homes, forced to kneel in the dirt and sprayed with
bullets; Kosovar men dragged from their families, fathers
and sons together lined up and shot in cold blood."
The senator pressed on. How often have such slaughters
occurred? Nobody knew. As it turns out, Kosovo has
been about as bloody this year as, say, Atlanta. You can
measure the deaths not in the hundreds, but dozens. (I'm
not trying to deny Milosevic's brutality here; only provide
some comparisons.) More people died last week in
Borneo than have expired this year in Kosovar
bloodshed -- more died in a single Russian bomb blast;
in a single outburst of violence in East Timor; in a single
day in Rwanda. China has been bloodier this year.
This is a case of rhetoric outracing facts. A U.S. military
officer distributed a briefing paper last year that
described the nature of Balkan hostilities: "The term
'ethnic cleansing' is frequently misused. While it certainly
includes wholesale slaughter, it really entails all activities
to remove one ethnic group from a particular area.
"The Serbs were often able to 'cleanse' an area without a
lot of killing, simply by providing a show of force and
then allowing an escape route for displaced Muslims to
depart an area. The Serbs are employing ethnic cleansing
in Kosovo today. But the Serbs aren't the only guilty
parties. Their Croat and Muslim adversaries have each
mimicked the Serb ethnic-cleansing techniques."
The administration fumbled with other obvious questions
posed by the senators: Why now? What should
Milosevic do to halt the air strikes: halt hostilities,
withdraw troops or return to the peace table?
This kind of confusion is giving everyone the jitters --
Congress, military planners and our allies. The president,
far from looking like the Prince of Peace, increasingly
behaves like Atilla the Hick -- a man who vents his rages
by bombing enemies, often without clear purpose. The
commander in chief has become the vengeful god of
etiquette: Miss Manners with missiles.
Moreover, we may have created the very situation we
set out to avoid. Violence has begun to dance across the
region, like sparks in a wildfire. Macedonian protesters
lobbed fire bombs and debris at our embassy in Skopje,
which ought to be a cause of concern, since we're using
Macedonia as the staging area for our ground troops.
Russia has began uttering loud threats, which may or
may not be backed up by action. Albanian Kosovars
have lost the protection of Western diplomats and
observers, which means the conflict has made them less
safe, at least in the short run. And NATO has begun to
fray ever so slightly. Italy wants the hostility to cease and
peace talks to resume, pronto.
Administration officials seem certain of their
righteousness but can't find the words to express what
they wish to convey. They need to find their words if
they hope to avoid a grievous loss of legitimacy.
A president must inspire and unite a nation before going
to war. This incursion makes us an aggressor for the first
time in our history (if you don't count the
Spanish-American War), and ground troops already
have begun receiving orders to ship out to Kosovo.
Democrats and Republicans desperately want a reason
to support the commander in chief, but as one key
politician said of the administration after the briefing,
"They've got to do a lot better than this."
COPYRIGHT 1999 CREATORS SYNDICATE, I
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