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

To: cody andre who wrote (40881)	3/30/1999 11:59:00 PM
From: pz	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 67261

XXXXX DRUDGE REPORT XXXXX TUESDAY, MARCH 30, 1999 22:45:09 UTC XXXXX NY TIMES: NATO MAY ADMIT THAT PLAN WAS FLAWED, ARMED INVASION IS RULED OUT NATO may acknowledge that the basic premise behind its bombing strategy in the Yugoslav conflict, that a sufficient show of air power would batter Serb leader Milosevich into accepting Western prescriptions for Kosovo, was fatally flawed, reports Wednesday's NEW YORK TIMES. The TIMES' Craig Whitney writes in a Page One, above the fold stretch story: "And that, in turn, would mean admitting that the world's most powerful alliance, with the world's most powerful air force at its disposal, was helpless to curb the authoritarian leader of a small Balkan country from killing and victimizing his people." An armed invasion has been effectively ruled out, NATO officials tell the TIMES. Whitney reports: "The existing strategy has only one more option left -- bombing the Yugoslav president's nerve centers in the heart of Belgrade, with all the risks that carries of civilian casualties." The WASHINGTON POST reports in Wednesday editions that the United States and its NATO allies late Tuesday agreed on such an expansion. "NATO ambassadors agreed in a marathon meeting in Brussels, Belgium Tuesday night to broaden the list of targets in the air war by about 20 percent, including sites in Belgrade, the Yugoslav capital, and others crucial to the power base of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic," sources tell the paper in a story being prepared for its Wednesday lead

To: cody andre who wrote (40881)	3/31/1999 2:50:00 AM
From: JBL	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 67261

The WH and Albright's spin is disgusting. This operation is a total disaster. We need to help the Kosovo refugees and forget about the obscene CYA speeches. 'Bombs Away' Washington Post Mar 31 Michael Kelly Bombs Away By Michael Kelly Wednesday, March 31, 1999; Page A29 The most revealing glimpse of the Clinton administration's thinking, such as it is, about Kosovo occurred earlier this month in a private meeting between the Italian prime minister and the president. As reported by The Post, Massimo D'Alema asked Bill Clinton a simple question about the contemplated NATO bombing of Serbia: What would the United States do if Slobodan Milosevic did not back down under bombing, and instead increased his assaults on the Kosovar Albanians? The president was stumped by the question. He did not answer, but turned inquiringly to his national security adviser, Samuel R. Berger. Berger hesitated, and then replied: "We will continue the bombing." The Post does not report whether the Italian prime minister at this point ran shrieking from the room, but it would have been understandable if he had. It must have been disconcerting to discover that the leader of the world's sole superpower was about to launch a war without a plan that extended beyond next Sunday's talk shows, or without a thought to one of bombing's most likely consequences. The NATO air campaign against Serbia began on March 24. By March 29, the resultant Serb ground campaign against the Kosovar Albanians had forced at least 130,000 of them to take refuge in Albania, Montenegro and Macedonia. Serbian troops were continuing their systematic campaign against the ethnic Albanian population, reportedly bombarding and torching entire villages, executing civilian leaders, detaining men of fighting age and sending women and children into exile. This is not the result that Bill Clinton and his merry band of deep thinkers expected. In his March 24 speech to the nation explaining his decision to bomb, the president said: "We act to protect thousands of innocent people in Kosovo from a mounting military offensive." Whoops-a-daisy. Administration officials now are doing what comes naturally to them in these moments of embarrassment. They are dissembling. Asked on Monday about news reports of a wave of executions of Albanian Kosovars, White House press secretary Joe Lockhart said: "We knew he was going to do this." We knew he was going to do this? We knew that, if we bombed Serbia, Milosevic would respond with a massive killing and cleansing campaign against the very population we were going to war to protect? If so, then the president and his advisers are guilty of criminal irresponsibility. For the United States made no serious efforts to prepare for what Lockhart says we knew was coming, a wave of killing and "cleansing" U.S. officials now compare to genocide. The president ordered up the bombing without any strategy to protect the Albanian Kosovars from resultant attack, without sufficient ground strength in the region to even think about countering the Serb ground offensive, without even an adequate refugee-aid plan in place. But of course Lockhart is, in the proud tradition of Clinton mouthpieces, merely uttering what sounds good in the moment. Others are too. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who has spent too much time in the company of her boss, went on the Sunday talks to suggest that the Serbian army offensive against the Kosovar Albanians had been underway before the NATO bombing campaign and would have intensified as it did whether or not NATO had bombed. "I think that it is just simply an upside-down argument to think that NATO or we have made this get worse," Albright said. "To say that this has now backfired is just dead wrong." To hear a secretary of state mouth such patent nonsense is embarrassing, and frightening. Do these people have any idea what they are doing beyond bombing their way through another day? Did they really start a war without a strategy for coping with the most obvious consequences? No, and yes. The American strategy in Kosovo, such as it is, is rooted in a series of remarkably careless assumptions: (1) to insist upon a peace accord that required Milosevic to accept foreign troops on Serb soil and to place Kosovo, the historical and cultural heart of Serbia, on a path to independence; (2) to think that Milosevic would swiftly back down in the face of, or under the punishment of, bombing; (3) to believe that, if necessary, we could pull an Iraq -- declare the bad man's military to be "degraded" and go home; (4) to promise at the outset that no American ground assault was forthcoming, thus giving Milosevic reason to think that he could wait out the bombing -- and that he might as well take the opportunity to get a spot of ethnic spring cleansing done. Michael Kelly is the editor of National Journal.