Christopher,
Here is an exerpt from a recent Henry Kissinger interview (Mar. 23), I think his take on Kosovo bears consideration....
MARGARET WARNER: We're here to talk
about your book, but first I want to ask you a
little bit about Kosovo. Do you support the
military action that the president seems on the
verge of taking now in Kosovo?
Crisis in Kosovo.
HENRY KISSINGER: I am
extraordinarily uneasy, and
I have supported every
military action that the
president has undertaken.
And it's very hard for me to express
reservations. I do not understand what our
strategic objective is. I do not understand how
it's going to be brought to a conclusion. And I
have read what one can get of the agreement, in
the name of which are bombing and which we're
trying to force Milosevic to accept, and I think
that is a prescription for permanent
confrontation with both parties, and, therefore,
I'm extremely uneasy. If genocide is committed,
I can understand that we insist that we cannot
tolerate such an offense to our values -- but
even then, very uneasy about what the president
said today that this is similar to our domestic
anti-hate legislation. And there are a lot of
atrocities committed in the world, and we should
oppose them, but not necessarily with American
military forces.
MARGARET WARNER: Now he - as you heard
I'm sure today - answers the national interest
argument by saying we have a national interest
in an undivided and free and democratic Europe
and that we can't let the Balkans be the sort of
cauldron that it is. How do you respond to that?
HENRY KISSINGER: Well,
is he prepared, or should we
be prepared as a nation to
create a series of
protectorates in the Balkans
held down by American and
even NATO military forces, which is the road
on which we are now engaged? We are already
in Bosnia with no way of getting out. We will be
in Kosovo, in an infinitely more complicated
situation in which there are no dividing lines,
and in which, I repeat, the agreement that is
being proposed and which provides for the
disarmament of the Albanians and which leaves
some Serbian police forces and which talks
about autonomy when the Albanians want
independence. This leaves so many land mines
around that we are in the midst of a permanent
turmoil.
MARGARET WARNER: So in other words, you
think the agreement, itself, even could just
generate more of the kind of instability -- it's
designed --
HENRY KISSINGER: I do not think that it's
the kind of agreement that American military
forces should police.
MARGARET WARNER: As you noted, the
president made a lot of the killings going on and
stopping these atrocities that are going on.
HENRY KISSINGER: I have great sympathy
for that and I can in individual cases support
the use of American military force to stop it,
but not as a general principle of American
foreign policy. We are not doing it in Africa.
We have not done it in many other places. We
are not doing it in Kashmir. We are not doing it
in all kinds of conflicts.
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