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| Republican Military Genius Takes It In The Slats |
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| Clinton's Derided War in Kosovo Seems to Have Done The Trick |
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This is Dark Cloud on Wednesday, June 09, 1999. I don’t want to get too technical here, but these are the facts. After seventy odd days, NATO has, using only air power and the threat of ground forces, defeated Yugoslavia’s military system and, increasingly, his actual tactical units. They are now, with impunity, carpet bombing military gatherings. They have reduced the enemy’s ability to manufacture munitions or much else to zero. The en-emy military has, as I can tell, no physical structures they can return to once out of Kosovo. The enemy now has to retreat to his own nation, and if not done according to NATO demands, the Highway of Death in Iraq is likely to be recalled for its scenic beauty in comparison with what will happen to the Serbs. It is a situation that military men like to refer to as a ‘wet dream’, a fantasy so dazzling that it can never be that good in real life. For despite the thousands of dead Serbians, less than one hundred of whom were innocent civilians, NATO lost not one soldier in combat. Zero. One hundred forty were killed in the Gulf War, fought basically for oil, and none have been lost in Yugoslavia, fought for entirely good reasons. Setting aside the ghastly deaths this war accomplished directly, and hastened among the Albanians indirectly, if you are a military person, it doesn’t get any better than this. Even better, Yugoslavia is caught having to both admit defeat and reexamine its own mythology, something that the United States had to do after Vietnam. Yugoslavia, composed now only of Serbia and Montenegro, could look back with both pride and revulsion to the Second World War and the heroic way it fought the Nazis and then turned around and refused to be absorbed into Stalin’s world, while still remaining comfortably communist to prevent Soviet invasion. They now will have to suffer the indignity of having their ethics examined and voted upon by other nations, including the ones who just hammered them, for their leader is the only sitting head of state to be accused by the United Nation’s chosen body as a war criminal. They will have the works of their soldiers held up for examination, and this will not be pretty. They are guilty as hell, and they will remain social and financial pariahs until they both admit it and have a plan for making amends. And with any luck and justice, some of their highest rankers will be hanged in accordance with law. It will be a huge, huge step forward in civilization if it can be done with unanimity. I realize that sounds like grotesque hyperbole, but really, when you dwell on it, nothing more important and scary will emerge from this century than its last act: that nations can, should, and will unite to attack bloodthirsty racist regimes deemed dangerous to the world at large, win, and try the heads of state. Talk about sending a message. Unfortunately, back here in the United States were are encumbered with the Republican Party, a political organization I once chose to belong to. Exclusively based upon petty political concerns of their own, the Republicans denounced Clinton for starting a war based solely upon fear of a worse one and a sense, barely, of decent behavior. He stuck to airpower, which hitherto has always been a deceptive practice since Vietnam was once going to be won only with airpower. The Republicans in the House and Senate, whose military experience is no more and now far less than Bill Clinton’s, refused to support the effort, or did so by vaguely excluding the President from their exhortations. Then, based upon a sense the war wasn’t going well, they offered up the concurrent accusations that Clinton was too chicken to use ground troops and that Clinton was needlessly risking American lives. Thus far, the only lives admitted lost were in training accidents, which might statistically have happened had the war not existed. Even John McCain separated himself from his own party. This was a genuinely disgraceful moment for the GOP, and it’ll kill them next election. For the war is won. And Kosovars will, in no small numbers, return. And there will be no gi-ant war in the Balkans between Serbia, fed by the Russians, and the Croats, fed by the Germans, and the Muslim Bosnians, fed by the Islamic powers. At least not for a while, and perhaps with Europe taking the lead, the Balkans, which are lovely, fertile, rich in resources and home to highly educated if argumentative people, might start policing itself and shine as they deserve. Naysayers are correct when they point out that it is winning the Peace that counts these days, but with Bill Clinton’s unbelievable good fortune, the western economies are scorching. The four billion dollar Yugoslavian air war won’t cause a quiver in even the smallest departments. The fifty billion dollar peace won will not even cause a western economist to burp. It is quite possible that after this horrid period, the influx and influence of the West to Belgrade will finally tame this ridiculously combative region. The French Philosophe Montisquie in the 1600s described the lands above Greece as being filled with caves, which lent the region to small, petty religious groupings, and as well filled with blockheads, who tended to head up those groupings. From what was then a vast distance, the description of the region was dead on, and no less so today. The west, by good fortune, won a short war for all the right reasons this time: the prevention of a greater hell, the flattening of Slobodan Milosovitch, and the announcement that finally, enough is enough, and when you have the ability and can afford to, it doesn’t take much to do the right thing. Just like the message of Schindler’s List was that you don’t have to be a hero, just not a mass murderer, to do a good deed, the message of the Yugoslav War could be that when you have the time, money, and ability to fight the good fight, it pays to go with the flow. It would be nice to think that we would feel that even when things are not so easy. |
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