The New York Times
June 11, 1999
nytimes.com
ON MY MIND
Fruits of Victory
By A.M. ROSENTHAL
But -- why aren't we celebrating?
After all, we won, didn't we? The Kosovars will get to go home, won't they?
Well, yes, we did encourage Slobodan Milosevic to drive them from those homes by
giving him advance notice of when we would attack and assuring him not to worry
about our sending in troops.
All right, all right, those were mistakes; shut up about them. At least now the
million or so Kosovars we were supposed to be helping can pick up lives in their
broken homes in smashed villages. Can't they?
And somebody will put up the money to fix up the homes. Isn't that so, perhaps?
Then there will be real peace, won't there? Naturally, to keep the Kosovars and
Serbs from killing each other, we will have to maintain enough troops there for --
oh, for about a generation.
But we are already doing that in Bosnia, so what is the big deal about sending off
7,000 or so more Americans -- to start with -- to Yugoslavia? Let's not be petty
about that; we are into the Balkan wars far too deep to quibble.
Maybe it won't be dangerous duty. The Kosovar army of Yugoslav citizens who count
themselves Albanians won't take advantage of the departure of Serbian forces to
take revenge on civilian Serbs. Will it?
And the Serbs in Serbia -- they won't harbor a grudge against us, will they, for
bombing their power plants, their factories, homes, hospitals, bridges and of
course relatives, with a destructiveness only the Germans had achieved against the
Serbs, in World War II?
Maybe they will forgive what the Germans did to them. About that time, they and
their children will forgive us too, isn't that possible?
And the upside! Look at what we win. We saved NATO's face and President Clinton's,
and Madeleine Albright's. Her mouth foretold a quickie war. Maybe actually not
saved their faces -- but at least wiped them off a bit.
So we will be able to walk tall in the world for bombing Serbia into slivers. I
mean, when the fear of America dies down in some countries that one day we will
fly over their lands to bomb them into submission for not carrying out our orders.
You know, countries like India that are not about to surrender Kashmir without
all-out war, or Israel, whose mind it has crossed that if NATO could bomb a
neighbor that had not attacked its members first, why shouldn't the Arab League
exercise the same privilege against Israel and eventually ask the U.N. for
approval?
And remember -- we have indicted Milosevic for war crimes. Yes, the fact that we
never indicted Franjo Tudjman of Croatia, our own private dictator, for driving
300,000 Serbs out, is embarrassing. But at least the Serbian killer will have to
spend his vacations at home, or maybe someplace in Russia.
Maybe all that is why we are not celebrating the great victory. People like
myself, who have spent years struggling to get our country to use its political
and economic power for human rights, saw its leaders bumble into another Balkan
war using bombs instead of the brains God should have given them. The Bosnian
frightfulness has wound up in the partition that without foreign interference
Muslims, Croats and Serbs could have had a decade ago, without war.
We have seen our country launch a war, first by futile ultimatum, then by a
slovenly planned war that from the beginning brought more suffering to Kosovars
and Serbian civilians than to Milosevic and his troops. Far too many Americans
wrote and talked of Serbs, our allies in battles we should remember, as if they
were bugs.
To those Kosovars who will return or seek safe lives elsewhere, for Serbs who will
one day eliminate Milosevic, go our embraces. To Mr. Clinton and his fellow
"leaders" -- our contempt for their human and security "values."
While Mr. Clinton and his NATO comrades were busy bombing Serbia and Kosovo they
were permitting the destruction of the U.N. arms inspection of Iraq -- the one
barrier against Saddam Hussein's path to nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.
That is a disaster for all nations, for all human rights struggles. If America
remembers the Clinton-Albright bungling in Iraq, China and Yugoslavia, and demands
that any Presidential or senatorial candidate separate from them, we may have
reason for some satisfaction -- but for champagne and parades, none. |
