-Caveat Lector- >From http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/thomas.html Jewish World Review May 12, 1999 /26 Iyar 5759 Cal Thomas ""What's to go back to, and who will pay to rebuild the houses? If you guess the American taxpayer in order to save Bill Clinton's "legacy,'' you would be making a safe bet."" OAF-ish behavior explains U.S. mistakes (JWR) ---- (http://www.jewishworldreview.com) THE MILITARY AIR FORCES assembled to bomb Yugoslavia are known as Operation Allied Force, acronym OAF, or oaf. An oaf is defined as: "Originally, an elf's child; a changeling left by fairies or goblins; hence, a deformed or foolish child; a simpleton; an idiot.'' That about sums up our policy in the matter of the relentless and, so far, ineffective air attacks on Yugoslavia. Nothing has gone right, unless you count Jesse Jackson's freelance rescue mission, which the Clinton administration supposedly opposed. Our announced goal of stopping Slobodan Milosevic from his ethnic cleansing of Kosovo has failed. Now we say our policy is to make Kosovo "safe'' for the return of the refugees, many of whose houses have been destroyed and whose relatives are dead. What's to go back to, and who will pay to rebuild the houses? If you guess the American taxpayer in order to save Bill Clinton's "legacy,'' you would be making a safe bet. The bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade was a fiasco. I'm surprised the president didn't claim that it was a retaliatory strike for stolen nuclear secrets and the systematic effort by the Chinese government to influence the 1996 election, which is expected to be detailed in the soon-to-be released Cox committee report. Why not? Given Clinton's success at persuading the polled that his motives are good, even if his actions are not, he could have had those soccer moms swooning again. The embassy bombing was first described as an accident and one of the unfortunate consequences of warfare (though this unfortunate "war'' remains undeclared and a spineless Congress has been unable to come up with anything remotely approaching leadership on the issue). It was then said NATO was operating off old and "bad intelligence.'' Bad intelligence describes the people who conceived and are executing this unworkable strategy with unwinnable objectives. <Picture>Apologies were repeatedly offered to China. The Clinton administration, which has based its domestic strategy on feelings, apparently can't understand why apologies don't work with Beijing. A government-sponsored demonstration against the U.S. Embassy put American ambassador James Sasser and his staff under virtual house arrest. Ulysses S. Grant had this view of war: "The art of war is simple enough. Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike at him as hard as you can and as often as you can, and keep moving on.'' Such a philosophy presumes one has the will, the expertise and the proper implements to wage war successfully. In the case of the Clinton administration, there is no vision, save a '60s-generation "one-world'' mentality; our military is as weak as, or weaker than, during the Carter years; our intelligence capabilities may not have been this poor since Sen. Frank Church's committee began dismantling the CIA in the '70s; and the doctrine of Colin Powell, so successful in the Gulf War, has been replaced by an air war conceived in error and carried out with the same goals as a video game -- no combat deaths, no injuries and, depending on the results, the presumption that something significant has been won or that nothing important has been lost. The only way to keep Milosevic from killing more innocent people is to remove him and his friends from office by force. Doing that will require sending massive numbers of ground troops, which President Clinton knows he cannot afford to do. Remember, he let his fellow Americans go to Vietnam and get killed while kept himself safe for the presidency. The cost of this administration will be paid on an installment plan over many years. More than our defense and intelligence capabilities will have to be rebuilt when Clinton finally leaves office. American credibility and prestige will also have to be repaired. The credibility and prestige part might not take long if our next president has integrity. The rest will take longer and cost a lot of money. But that's what happens when we elect and maintain an oaf in office. <Picture> <Picture> <Picture: Up> I05/07/99: Israel's high-stakes election 05/04/99: Jeb Bush chooses to save kids, not institutions 04/26/99: Surrendering our civilization 04/26/99: War abroad, war at home 04/22/99: Those wild and crazy (Democrat) tax-cutters 04/16/99: Bubba’s contemptible behavior 04/14/99:Elizabeth Dole's choice 04/09/99: The taxman cometh 04/05/99: MEMO: MAKE LOVE AND WAR -- AND KEEP IT SIMPLE 03/30/99: Human-rights terror in China 03/25/99: Yasser Arafat: bad cop, worse cop 03/23/99: Bubba’s multiplied lies 03/18/99: Reinventing AlGore 03/16/99:Americans get bull while China shops 03/12/99: Bill Lan Lee: Flouting the law 03/09/99: Don't worry about your child, be happy 03/08/99:The ‘lady' is a tramp 03/04/99: Proving myself to President Clinton 02/24/99: New slaves to a new slavery 02/22/99: Character-plus 02/19/99: GOP losers tell winner how to win 02/17/99: The Clinton legacy 02/10/99: More a man, less a president ©1999, LA TimesSyndicate >From www.spintechmag.com/ <<Parts one, two, and three at site>> SpinTech: May 12, 1999 <Picture> NATO: Beyond Collective Defense, Part Four NATO's Hypocritical Kings by Steve Farrell Edmund Burke said of the justness of the American Revolution, that it sought not to overthrow the wisdom of the ages, but rather to build a more glorious structure upon its foundation. Our Constitution’s rejection of Kings, and what John Locke described as the King’s “divine prerogative,” to wage war, are two of the finer improvements the founders gave us to secure liberty. Yet today, we are confronted with the reality that we now have a President and his comrades at NATO, who stand accused of exercising this “dearest prerogative of kings,” on a sovereign nation which has fired no shot across the bow at them - for two very unjust reasons. First, from the perspective of our would-be-king, an attempt to distract attention, once again, from another embarrassing investigation - this one exploring what has been described as “treasonous” aid to China; and second, from the perspective of NATO’s would-be-kings, an effort to launch NATO into the 21st century as a key player in the emerging international order. The latter, Clinton and Blair have said, is the “top reason NATO must win in Kosovo.” Who can doubt that these are the real reasons we are at war? Take Bill Clinton, for instance. Does any one really believe he lies sleepless at night worrying about ethnic cleansing and the raping of Kosovo’s women, as a recent article in Time magazine suggested? It was he, after all, who justified human rights violations in China by comparing them with our own deficiencies. It was he, who stands accused of receiving campaign donations (bribes) from Red China in exchange for Top Secret information and technology, which has, in turn, put US citizens at risk from nuclear and biological war. It was he, who deemed it moral to “reserve judgement,” after Russia literally leveled an entire village in Chechnya, since, said Clinton, “I wasn’t there,” It was he, who then secured a multibillion dollar loan for these “ex- Soviets” - now Russians - to finish the job. It was he, who has consistently stood behind the terrorist Palestinian Liberation Army in its quest to surround and finally conquer Israel. It was he, who brazenly categorized the BATF assault on a church, which murdered men, women, and children at Waco, as justifiable. It was he, who successfully promoted as a constitutional right the slaughter of the innocent through partial birth abortions. And it is he, who still stands accused of numerous accounts of sexual harassment and rape. Are these the makings of one who lies sleepless at night worrying about peoples liberties and moral sanctity? And what about - British Prime Minister Tony Blair? Wasn’t it he, who during his watch as Prime Minister, stood gleefully by as Hong Kong slipped out of British hands into the clutch of Red China? Wasn’t it he, who didn’t raise so much as an eyebrow in protest, as China - for up to a year prior to the transfer - aggressively reneged on its promises to secure democracy and free enterprise for 50 years in Hong Kong? Wasn’t it he, who looked the other way as Red China assigned Beijing “advisors” to newspapers and private companies in Hong Kong, who looked the other way as Red China confiscated Hong Kong businessmen’s holdings in China because they dared to object to some of the changes, who looked the other way as China forbade outside investment in Hong Kong’s telecommunications market, and who looked the other way even as China disbanded the legislature and then stripped voting franchise to a very small fraction of the people? And isn’t it Tony Blair who has continued the English “ethnic cleansing” of the Catholic Irish Republican Army? One wonders if NATO will be bombing London also? The hypocrisy shows, and so who can believe we are in Kosovo to bring an end to moral cleansing and to usher in an era of democracy in Yugoslavia? Common sense bears witness that the mixture of Clinton’s scandal cover-up and Clinton and Blair’s new world imperialism are the real reason we have waged an unprovoked war on a sovereign nation? It is dumbfounding then, that Congress has not yet brought our President, Prime Minister Blair, and NATO back down to earth. Acting like Kings, NATO’s rulers speak in terms of “how dare they,” of those who would question the morality of their bombing civilians in Kosovo. But since they have gone to war without our consent and have trashed the rules of sovereignty in favor of some utopian vision of a new world order, perhaps, “How dare you,” is what should we should say to NATO. Read Part One of this series Read Part Two of this series Read Part Three of this series ------ Steve Farrell is a Ph.D. candidate in Constitutional Law at George Wythe College. His regular column is Constitutionally Yours. Copyright 1999 Steve Farrell. >From http://www.fair.org/press-releases/kosovo-solution.html FAIR Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting 130 W. 25th Street New York, NY 10001 Media Advisory: WAS A PEACEFUL KOSOVO SOLUTION REJECTED BY U.S.? Contact: Steve Rendall May 14, 1999 Since the beginning of the NATO attack on Yugoslavia, the war has been presented by the media as the consequence of Yugoslavia's stubborn refusal to settle for any reasonable peace plan--in particular its rejection of plans for an international security force to implement a peace plan in Kosovo. An article in the April 14 New York Times stated that Yugoslavian President Milosevic "has absolutely refused to entertain an outside force in Kosovo, arguing that the province is sovereign territory of Serbia and Yugosla via." Negotiations between the Serb and Albanian delegations at the Rambouillet meeting in France ended with Yugoslavia's rejection of the document that had been adopted, after much prodding, by the Kosovo Albanian party. But is that the whole story? There were two parts to the peace proposals: a political agreement on autonomy for Kosovo; and an implementation agreement on how to carry out the political deal--usually understood to require international peacekeepers i n Kosovo. By the end of the first round of Rambouillet in February, the Serb side had agreed to the essentials of a political deal. Agence France Presse (2/20/99) quoted a U.S. official as saying that the "political part" of a peac e accord "is almost not a problem, while the implementation part has been reconsidered many times." The U.S. wanted the Kosovo plan to be implemented by NATO troops under a NATO command, and had already made plans for a 28,000-troop force. The Yugoslavian leadership was opposed to the idea, claiming such an arrangement would amount to a foreign occupation of Kosovo by hostile forces. On February 20, the Russian ITAR-TASS news agency reported from Rambouillet that unnamed "Contact Group members may offer, as a compromise, Milosevic an option under which a multinational force will be deployed under the U.N. or the OSCE flag rather than the NATO flag as was planned before." Agence France Presse reported the same day that the Serb delegation "showed signs that it might accept international peacekeepers on condition that they not be placed under NATO command" and added that the head of the Ser b delegation "insisted that the peacekeepers answer to a non-military body such as the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe…or the United Nations." A U.S. official confirmed this to AGP: "The discussions ar e on whether it should be a UN or OSCE force," the official said. The next day, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright declared: "We accept nothing less than a complete agreement, including a NATO-led force." Asked on CNN the same day: "Does it have to be [a] NATO-led force, or as some h ave suggested, perhaps a UN-led force or an OSCE…force? Does it specifically have to be NATO-run?" she replied, "The United States position is that it has to be a NATO-led force. That is the basis of our participation in it." Two days later, Albright repeated this position at a press conference: "It was asked earlier, when we were all together whether the force could be anything different then a NATO-led force. I can just tell you point blank from the perspective of the United States, absolutely not, it must be a NATO-led force." Over the next month, this position was repeated countless times with increasing vehemence by State Department officials. Furthermore, the U.S. refused to allow the Serbs to sign the political agreement until they first ag reed to a NATO-led force to implement it. "The Serbs have been acting as if there are two documents but they can't pick and choose," Albright said (AGP, 3/13/99). "There is no way to have the political document without the implementation force that has to be NATO -led…. If they are not willing to engage on the military and police chapters, there is no agreement." Finally, on March 23, the day before the NATO bombing began, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke met with Milosevic one last time to deliver his ultimatum: Sign the agreement or be bombed. The response was delivered that night b y the Serbian parliament, which adopted resolutions again rejecting the military portion of the accords, but expressing willingness to review the "range and character of an international presence" in Kosovo. At a March 24 State Department press briefing, spokesman James Rubin was asked about this development: QUESTION: Was there any follow-up to the Serbian Assembly's yesterday? They had a two-pronged decision. One was to not allow NATO troops to come in; but the second part was to say they would consider an international forc e if all of the Kosovo ethnic groups agreed to some kind of a peace plan. It was an ambiguous collection of resolutions. Did anybody try to pursue that and find out what was the meaning of that? RUBIN: Ambassador Holbrooke was in Belgrade, discussed these matters extensively with President Milosevic, left with the conclusion that he was not prepared to engage seriously on the two relevant subjects. I think the de cision of the Serb Parliament opposing military-led implementation was the message that most people received from the parliamentary debate. I'm not aware that people saw any silver linings. QUESTION: But there was a second message, as well; there was a second resolution. RUBIN: I am aware that there was work done, but I'm not aware that anybody in this building regarded it as a silver lining. In other words, the State Department was aware that the Serbs had once again expressed openness to an "international presence," but this was not seen as a "silver lining," apparently because only a NATO force was acceptab le to the U.S. In an intriguing corollary to the insistence on NATO forces, the Pentagon's 1994-1999 Defense Planning Guidance report advises that the United States "must seek to prevent the emergence of European-only security arrangeme nts which would undermine NATO…. Therefore, it is of fundamental importance to preserve NATO as the primary instrument of Western defense and security, as well as the channel for U.S. influence and participation in Europe an security affairs." This whole subject seems to have escaped the interest of the major media. Those who support the bombing of Yugoslavia argue that the motives are humanitarian and that all peaceful options for arriving at a settlement in Kosovo had been exhausted. Journalists need to do more reporting on the Ram bouillet process to see if that in fact was the case. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ This media advisory was written by FAIR media analyst Seth Ackerman. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ More on Yugoslavia Read the the Rambouillet Agreement ---------------------------------------------------------------------- -- [FAIR Home] | [Search] | [Contact Us] A<>E<>R ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + A merely fallen enemy may rise again, but the reconciled one is truly vanquished. -Johann Christoph Schiller, German Writer (1759-1805) + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Forwarded as information only; no endorsement to be presumed + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without charge or profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this type of information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. 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