The New York Times OP-ED

Friday, June 11, 1999

ON MY MIND

By A.M. ROSENTHAL

Fruits of Victory

But -- why aren't we celebrating?

After all, we won, didn't we? The Kosovars will get to go home, won't they?

Well, yes, we did encourage Slobodan Milosevic to drive them from those homes by giving him advance notice of when we would attack and assuring him not to worry about our sending in troops.

All right, all right, those were mistakes; shut up about them. At least now the million or so Kosovars we were supposed to be helping can pick up lives in their broken homes in smashed villages. Can't they?

And somebody will put up the money to fix up the homes. Isn't that so, perhaps?

Then there will be real peace, won't there? Naturally, to keep the Kosovars and Serbs from killing each other, we will have to maintain enough troops there for -- oh, for about a generation.

But we are already doing that in Bosnia, so what is the big deal about sending off 7,000 or so more Americans -- to start with -- to Yugoslavia? Let's not be petty about that; we are into the Balkan wars far too deep to quibble.

Maybe it won't be dangerous duty. The Kosovar army of Yugoslav citizens who count themselves Albanians won't take advantage of the departure of Serbian forces to take revenge on civilian Serbs. Will it?

And the Serbs in Serbia -- they won't harbor a grudge against us, will they, for bombing their power plants, their factories, homes, hospitals, bridges and of course relatives, with a destructiveness only the Germans had achieved against the Serbs, in World War II?

Maybe they will forgive what the Germans did to them. About that time, they and their children will forgive us too, isn't that possible?

And the upside! Look at what we win. We saved NATO's face and President Clinton's, and Madeleine Albright's. Her mouth foretold a quickie war. Maybe actually not saved their faces -- but at least wiped them off a bit.

So we will be able to walk tall in the world for bombing Serbia into slivers. I mean, when the fear of America dies down in some countries that one day we will fly over their lands to bomb them into submission for not carrying out our orders.

You know, countries like India that are not about to surrender Kashmir without all-out war, or Israel, whose mind it has crossed that if NATO could bomb a neighbor that had not attacked its members first, why shouldn't the Arab League exercise the same privilege against Israel and eventually ask the U.N. for approval?

And remember -- we have indicted Milosevic for war crimes. Yes, the fact that we never indicted Franjo Tudjman of Croatia, our own private dictator, for driving 300,000 Serbs out, is embarrassing. But at least the Serbian killer will have to spend his vacations at home, or maybe someplace in Russia.

Maybe all that is why we are not celebrating the great victory. People like myself, who have spent years struggling to get our country to use its political and economic power for human rights, saw its leaders bumble into another Balkan war using bombs instead of the brains God should have given them. The Bosnian frightfulness has wound up in the partition that without foreign interference Muslims, Croats and Serbs could have had a decade ago, without war.

We have seen our country launch a war, first by futile ultimatum, then by a slovenly planned war that from the beginning brought more suffering to Kosovars and Serbian civilians than to Milosevic and his troops. Far too many Americans wrote and talked of Serbs, our allies in battles we should remember, as if they were bugs.

To those Kosovars who will return or seek safe lives elsewhere, for Serbs who will one day eliminate Milosevic, go our embraces. To Mr. Clinton and his fellow "leaders" -- our contempt for their human and security "values."

While Mr. Clinton and his NATO comrades were busy bombing Serbia and Kosovo they were permitting the destruction of the U.N. arms inspection of Iraq -- the one barrier against Saddam Hussein's path to nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.

That is a disaster for all nations, for all human rights struggles. If America remembers the Clinton-Albright bungling in Iraq, China and Yugoslavia, and demands that any Presidential or senatorial candidate separate from them, we may have reason for some satisfaction -- but for champagne and parades, none.