The New york Times

April 5, 1999

The Quiet Noisemaker

ESSAY

By WILLIAM SAFIRE

WASHINGTON -- In a New Year's Eve episode of the 50's program "Candid Camera," the interviewer Allen Funt went into a Times Square novelty shop and asked for a noisemaker that was not too loud. Before long, the unsuspecting salesman was earnestly pitching him "the quietest noisemaker on the market."

That is the NATO strategy in the Serbian war: light up the television skies with nighttime explosions, but exercise restraint -- fighting to win would be much too noisy.

Evidence of this feckless approach was in the glorious pictorial of the destruction of the Interior Ministry in downtown Belgrade. Our cruise missile caused a great blaze at one o'clock in the morning.

What determined the choice of target and time of attack? Not the weather, nor the danger of antiaircraft defenses -- the two reasons most often given for our ineffectual jabs. Cruise missiles are impervious to both.

The target site was chosen because it symbolized "infrastructure." We knew the building's occupants, forewarned, had been evacuated a week before. The post-midnight time was chosen to make doubly certain that nobody directing the sweep to make Kosovo Albanian-rein was on hand to be killed, and that flames would show up vividly against the night sky.

That was a propaganda mission. Its target was not so much the Serbian population, but the watching world -- to offset the pictures of refugees in misery by showing that a fierce NATO was really letting the war criminals have it.

This is the Third Way in foreign policy. One way remembers the Munich analogy, and aims to stop Milosevic in Kosovo lest internal aggression become the way of the world. The opposite way remembers Vietnam and avoids quagmires at all cost.

The nations of Europe, followed by Clinton, have chosen the Third Way: neither to stop nor to ignore the aggressor, but to punish evildoing in a low-risk manner. NATO's military mission is to lose honorably while making the winner pay a cost. Thus do we establish the principle of collective insecurity.

Nobody is better equipped to sell this than Bill Clinton. He believes he knows something that the idealists and the hawks and the Never Again set do not know: the American public will no longer sustain a war with casualties. Who wants to die for the credibility of NATO? Unless the U.S. fleet is sunk as at Pearl Harbor, avoid the use of infantry.

Armed with that lifelong insight and supported by polls that bolster it, he does what he does best: he positions himself at the head of public opinion's slow-walking parade. But he knows the public needs a sense of sacrifice, an illusion of moral righteousness, to go with its abdication of global responsibility.

Hence Clinton's rhetoric about the need to stand up to a new Hitler; his condemnation of near-genocide; his history lesson that two World Wars started in this region; his solemn warning that Milosevic will be held responsible for the lives of captured Americans; his hint that Kosovo can now no longer be ruled by Serbia; his call for patience in "staying the course." By all this he assumes the posture of resolve.

But in fact he is, in Churchill's phrase, "resolved to be irresolute." The course we are staying is not to defeat the Serbian expulsion of a million human beings, but merely to "diminish the capacity" of Milosevic to do what he has already shown himself to be quite capable of having done.

We'll make him pay, Clinton assures us; you just wait, he'll be sorry. Rollback is not promised but modified payback is; to assuage our conscience, we'll make the victor feel some of his victims' pain. But the hesitancy that seeps from such conscience, as another Hamlet said, makes cowards of us all. One of these days, Slobo (and Saddam) may lay hands on a half-stolen Russian nuclear missile -- and that's the end of retribution.

Perhaps our President awaits some change in popular opinion to give him cover for military action beyond telegenic punitive air strikes. If revelations of horror make that happen; if safely silent Presidential candidates urge rollback; if the NATO's anniversary in Washington pushes him forward -- then we may celebrate leadership from the man who now still seeks his quiet noisemaker.