'Indifference': FDR Was Guilty, Is Clinton
Also?
By Morton M. Kondracke
On Holocaust Remembrance Day, President Clinton could comfort himself that
he is doing more in Kosovo than Franklin Roosevelt did for the Jews of Europe.
But is he doing enough to escape his own level of disgrace?
Roosevelt refused to bomb the railways taking Jews to Hitler's death camps.
Clinton is bombing Serbian forces. But by refusing to introduce ground troops,
he may be giving Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic time to exterminate
much of the remaining Albanian population of Kosovo.
Clinton may emerge as less guilty than Roosevelt of the crime of indifference.
Or will he? We do not know yet what Clinton knows from intelligence reports
about what's happening on the ground in Kosovo.
Anecdotal reports of mass murder and NATO speculation about mass
starvation suggest, though, that tens or even hundreds of thousands of people
face death inside Kosovo. Not rescuing them, arming their fighters or dropping
food to them is also a form of indifference.
With President Clinton attending, Holocaust Remembrance Day was observed
at the White House with a solemn, poetic lecture Monday night by Nobel Peace
Prize winner Elie Wiesel on the "Perils of Indifference."
It was the "only miserable consolation" for Buchenwald prisoners like himself,
Wiesel said, to believe that leaders of the free world didn't know about Hitler's
war against the Jews.
"If they knew, we thought, surely those leaders would have moved heaven and
earth to intervene. They would have spoken out with great outrage and
conviction. They would have bombed the railways leading to Birkenau, just
once."
Of course, he observed, they did know -- and they were indifferent. "The
Pentagon knew. The State Department knew. And the illustrious occupant of
the White House then, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was a great leader,"
Wiesel made it clear, also knew and was indifferent.
"But this time," Wiesel said, referring to Kosovo, "the world was not silent.
This time, we do respond. This time, we intervene."
When it came time for Clinton to respond, he said that as Wiesel has observed,
what is happening in Kosovo is not the Holocaust, "but that should not deter
us from doing what is right."
Clinton has intervened in Kosovo as much for moral reasons as for strategic
ones -- to halt Milosevic's barbaric ethnic cleansing of the Albanian population
as much as to secure the credibility of NATO and the stability of Europe.
Although it's always tempting to question Clinton's moral compass (Wiesel
spoke on the very day Clinton was held in contempt for lying under oath), in
Kosovo he is taking considerable political risk to "do what is right."
And yet, he is in grave danger of executing his policy so badly -- or, possibly,
so self-protectingly -- that he may end up presiding over both a strategic and
humanitarian disaster.
Clinton's policy is to bomb, but to rule out a ground invasion. His top military
advisers, in both the Pentagon and NATO headquarters, almost unanimously
believe that bombing alone will not stop Milosevic's aggression against the
Kosovars.
And many of them also believe that an invasion would not be the Vietnam-style
quagmire that Clinton seems to fear will mar his presidency.
"This is not another Vietnam," one top Pentagon general told me. "The terrain
is challenging. It's hilly and wooded. It's not easy. But if the goal is to push the
Serbs out of Kosovo, we can to that."
Members of Congress who visited Europe last week say that NATO
Commander Wesley Clark and his staff believe it was a mistake for Clinton to
rule out ground forces.
So why is Clinton refusing? The public -- which Clinton is said to poll daily --
supports ground troops. Allied governments in NATO don't, yet, but it's the
job of the president to lead them.
One key instrument for that task is full information about what is going on in
Kosovo. The worse it is, the more likely Europeans and their governments are
likely to support a rescue operation.
Rep. Ellen Tauscher (D-Calif.), who was with Defense Secretary William Cohen
in Europe last week, says "they know a lot more than they are telling us" about
Milosevic's atrocities.
Clinton evidently plans to continue bombing for "weeks" yet before deciding
it's not working and considering a ground assault. After that, it would take more
"weeks" to assemble forces. By that time, the 700,000 Albanians remaining in
Kosovo may be dead by slaughter or starvation.
We have been through this before on Clinton's watch -- in Rwanda, where
500,000 innocents were butchered five years ago as the world did nothing.
Clinton at first tried to say he didn't know. Then definitive reports emerged
showing that he did know. After being embarrassed in Somalia, refused to get
involved in Rwanda. Exposed, he apologized.
Apologize is what Clinton does when evil events unfold and, after he first tries
to lie his way out, he gets caught. Kosovo right now presents him with the
opportunity not to have to apologize later, but doing the right thing will take
courage.
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