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Politics : Bill Clinton Scandal - SANITY CHECK -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Daniel Schuh who wrote (6500)	10/1/1998 11:12:00 AM
From: DMaA	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 67261

G Bush hasn't been in office for 6 damn years. When in the HELL are you going to stop blaming others and start holding Clinton responsible for SOMETHING!!!! The Albanians are getting slaughtered. 250,000 are huddling in the woods like animals waiting to freeze to death and Albright just flaps her jaws. WSJ Yesterday. Outlook How Convenient "Today there is peace in Kosovo-Metohija. Life in Kosovo-Metohija has returned to normal. The Republic of Serbia has thwarted the secessionists' attempts to realize their intentions through terror. The terrorist gangs have been destroyed . . . Serbia has once again shown that it is capable of resolving its problems alone, with full respect for the democratic countries' principles and standards regarding human, civil and minority rights." --Serbian Prime Minister Mirko Majanovic The above quote was part of an Orwellian victory peroration given by the Serbian Prime Minister Monday. How convenient that the West is now demanding that Slobodan Milosevic call a cease-fire and withdraw his forces from Kosovo. For the past three months, Mr. Milosevic's army and police forces have been burning and bombing their way across the ethnic-Albanian-dominated province of Kosovo in an "antiterrorist" campaign that has left more than 200 villages destroyed and sent more than 250,000 refugees into the woods and mountains, or across the border to an uncertain fate in crumbling Albania. The timing of the new cease-fire demands from the United Nations Security Council and NATO beggars belief. If these ultimatums have a familiar ring to them, rewind several months to the first days when television cameras relayed pictures of the bodies of murdered Albanians and their burned-out homes. The tough-talking Madeleine Albright led the outrage club: The United States, declared Secretary Albright in March, was "not going to stand by and watch the Serbian authorities do in Kosovo what they can no longer get away with in Bosnia." In late June, foreign ministers from Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Russia and the U.S. met in London to demand that Belgrade cease all military action against Kosovar civilians, help the return of refugees and allow international monitors into the areas. "President Milosevic will be making a grave mistake if he imagines the international community will be as slow to act in Kosovo as it was in Bosnia," said British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook. And later: "President Milosevic is now on his last warning." NATO then conducted military operations in neighboring Albania and Macedonia, issuing a statement that the operations have "the aim of demonstrating NATO's capability to project power rapidly into the region." The meeting, it turned out, was just another pit stop on the photo-op diplomacy circuit. There were more warnings. "If President Milosevic does not realize how dangerous the game he and his military forces are playing, the consequences will be very serious for him and his country," Richard Holbrooke told a National Press Club audience in June. He was echoed by British Defense Minister George Robertson after a spate of high-level talks in Brussels. It is difficult to think of a time when the language of diplomacy has been so devalued; or when U.S. and Western leaders have been so careless with the principle of credibility. These warnings were followed by--as Milosevic knew they would be--three months of relative silence as Serb tanks and howitzers made their way from village to village in Kosovo. Now there's the onset of winter, with its potential to leave thousands of refugees stranded in the mountains and woods dying of cold or starvation--a humanitarian crisis that would no doubt be embarrassing for governments that swore they wouldn't let it happen. The truth is that the West made a conscious, if nonpublic, decision to leave Milosevic to his dirty work in Kosovo. There were plenty of "reasonable" justifications for doing so along the lines of, "We were unprepared to recognize an autonomous Kosovo, which is what the ethnic Albanian leadership in Kosovo and the Kosovo Liberation Army were seeking." Or, "Had we intervened earlier, we might have emboldened the KLA, who after all are a bunch of outlaws too." Or, "We never expected his forces would take it this far and kill this many civilians"--and so forth. Privately, European foreign ministry officials have told us they would have gladly supported an effort to hit back at Milosevic if only the U.S., which would need to supply the air power and leadership, had said the word. But the foreign policy apparatus in the U.S. has lost its compass. When leaders refuse to lead and instead hide behind empty threats, high-minded phrases and supplicant visits to the aggressor, credibility goes out the window. If the Kosovars foolishly thought the West would come to their rescue, Slobodan Milosevic knew better. Now that the job is done, the Clinton Administration, which still pretends to lead the Western world, is conveniently demanding justice. It will no doubt declare victory when a satisfied Milosevic follows the script. Whatever "deal" is now cut in Kosovo, don't expect those refugees to be on the right end of it.

To: Daniel Schuh who wrote (6500)	10/2/1998 10:54:00 AM
From: John Lacelle	Respond to of 67261

Daniel, Whatever. Call it what you like but this so called "NATO" action in Kosovo is nothing more than operation BLAST MONICA LEWINSKY OFF THE FRONT PAGE. Clinton is a moron. His foreign policy is a joke. Nobody takes the U.S. seriously anymore as a result of Bubba and his pathetic attempts to try and divert attention from his obviously flawed personality. Do you really think bombing the Serbs is going to have any impact on the problems there? It didn't deter them last time. The only difference is that this time some poor sap American who served his country with dignity is going to get his ass shot out of the air just to help salvage the draft-dodging Bill Clinton presidency. Impeach the jerk!!! -John

To: Daniel Schuh who wrote (6500)	10/2/1998 11:23:00 AM
From: Les H	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 67261

The American involvement in Yugoslavia is under the U.N. auspices. The U.S. has been limited by the U.N. and its European allies. You might check: abcnews.com Along with the African client states, almost all of the world conflicts are the result of the Soviet empire breaking up. Many of these civil wars are between rival communist militia or guerilla.

To: Daniel Schuh who wrote (6500)	10/2/1998 11:42:00 AM
From: Zoltan!	Respond to of 67261

electronic Telegraph 9/24/98 Ambrose Evans-Pritchard Former Clinton CIA Chief blames Clinton for foreign policy failure that may lead to world crisis: In an interview with The Telegraph, Mr Woolsey gave a caustic assessment of the President he served until his abrupt resignation in January 1995. Dismissing Bill Clinton as a "tactician", he said the foreign policy of the administration was driven by opinion polls, short-term PR calculations and the spin-cycle rhythm of an election campaign. "If you want to know how they make decisions, all you need do is watch the War Room," he said, referring to the documentary of Mr Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign. During his two years as Director of Central Intelligence, Mr Woolsey managed to secure only two conversations with Mr Clinton. "It wasn't that I had a bad relationship with him. I just didn't have any relationship," said Mr Woolsey. He believes the damage to the American national interest has been substantial, though largely hidden from view. Mr Woolsey compared the global scene to the late 1920s when inchoate foreign threats were ignored, played down, and ultimately allowed to escalate. He said US policy towards Iraq was "feckless and flaccid". Mr Clinton's midnight bombing of an empty building in Baghdad in 1993 was a "laughable" gesture, an inadequate response to an Iraqi assassination plot against former President Bush. "We should have hit the instruments of state power," he said. "It was exhibit number one of a paper tiger." Exhibit number two was the failure to intervene to stop the Erbil massacre in northern Iraq in 1996. Exhibit number three had been the collapse of the UN weapons inspection regime, blamed by Mr Woolsey on the capricious manouevres of the Russians and the French, as well as the incompetence of the Clinton administration. "We've not been willing to take on the biggest bully in the Mid-east playground, and you can't keep giving the bully a free pass." The danger was growing because Saddam Hussein had wrapped himself in the flag of Islam. Mr Woolsey compared the gambit with Stalin's tactical exploitation of Christianity during the Second World War. Cementing an alliance with Sunni fundamentalists, Saddam was successfully invoking the idea of a "new Caliphate". To complicate matters further in the Islamic world, Mr Clinton had damaged relations with Pakistan by firing missiles at five camps in Afghanistan in an anti-terrorist strike last month. Two of the camps were training Pakistani guerrillas for operations in Kashmir. Mr Woolsey said Yevgeny Primakov, Russia's new prime minister, a former KGB boss, was "terrible". Calling him an antediluvian, "zero-sum" communist, he said Mr Primakov could be expected to "kowtow to the most unreconstructed elements of the military industrial complex" and would seek to hurt Western interests wherever possible. Mr Clinton had staked everything on Boris Yeltsin and was now inextricably associated with this grand failure. The risk was that Russia would turn increasingly nasty and xenophobic. "I'm troubled by the parallels with the 1930s. I can see Russia playing the role of Weimar Germany," he said, adding that the Weimar Republic, a democracy under the rule of law, with a viable economy, was in far better shape than Russia today. "The 1930s were not inevitable, they could have been avoided. But not even Churchill could see what was happening. He was cutting the Royal Navy budget when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer. "And here we are now, cutting the devil out of our defence budget. We need to be careful." telegraph.co.uk:80/