Editorials / Coat-and-Tie Radicals / Botching Bosnia
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
/agree with Hillary and Chelsea and Socks and all the other quaintly named boosters of our president. All around the White House the Best and the Brightest of the Republic's last two generations are...
...House has proven with his increasingly left-wing appointments, 1960s coat-and-tie radicals (much like late-eighteenth-century French Bourbons) learn nothing from the passage of time...
...So these Muslims now fighting Topic, where have they come from...
...History tells us his performance will get worse...
...but always they would turn up prim and purring when jobs and preferment were handed out...
...There was no clamor of protest when, during the campaign, Bill Clinton said the economy was in a state of "depression" or "the worst economy in fifty years...
...Quotas are "goals...
...He is cutting the military budget by far more than was his campaign promise...
...President Bill Clinton's history is that of an anti-military idealist...
...They are double-talkers today, but they have always been double-talkers...
...As the New Democrat in the White T he other day, when reports began to come in that Muslims and Croats were fighting in Mostar, I was at first alarmed...
...There was no protest when he disparaged the ethics of the Reagan-Bush administrations as being uniquely scandalous...
...In the 1960s those of us who snickered at their phoniness called them "coat and tie" radicals...
...and American forces should only be sent to conquer, not to serve as peace-keeping targets...
...Today's news reports describe the city as having a population of 125,000...
...I do not know, but I am certain that the news reports are inaccurate, and that Bosnia-Herzegovina is a complex chowder...
...I get other reports that those opposing the Croats are really Serbs claiming to be Muslims...
...As their critics multiply, an amusing perplexity is going to come over them...
...They will not wise up...
...Hillary Rodham Clinton, careerist and policy mullah...
...My sources tell me that a few months ago the president of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Alija Izetbegovic, began sending some 35,000 Muslims from eastern Bosnia into the area as provocateurs and to repopulate the city so that it will qualify as Muslim territory during future negotiations...
...Then I grew curious...
...They believe Americans are eager for tax increases, for national health care, for an America as efficient as the Post Office...
...He has broken a dozen campaign promises and never been hooted down...
...All the policies they advocate are pretty much the policies they and their mentors advocated in years gone by...
...Now he is talking not only about air strikes against bellicose Serbs but also about sending in ground forces...
...Hillary is equally fluent in double-talk...
...I have friends there...
...All around the White House the Best and the Brightest of the Republic's last two generations are asking this question: "Why now are so many voices up in arms"—that's the way these hinds talk!—"against the president...
...Sometimes they have changed the names...
...A subgroup of 1960s youth has always had a knack for being on both sides of most issues...
...She has actively participated in multitudes of liberal causes, yet in Parade magazine she tells us she is "conservative in the true sense of the word...
...What has happened...
...When I was in Mostar we were constantly under random bombardment from Serb artillerymen guzzling slivovitz and generally having a grand old time high in the hills that surround the city...
...Clinton, wife and mother, to being Ms...
...Now, after years of discrediting bourgeois values, she is presenting herself as a moralist...
...This is his Wilsonian idealism acting up...
...It would be better for us all if he had more respect for history, his and the Balkans...
...that might mean reforming themselves, which is impossible...
...Are thy sources sound...
...He has depicted a healthcare system that is probably the world's best as one of the advanced countries worst and never faced catcalls...
...Half of the city's original 125,000 population was dead or in refugee camps...
...History, geography, military science, and present political conditions worldwide suggest that the Balkans are no place for any American ground troops...
...I visited the Herzegovinian city twice last fall, first to review the condition of refugees in the area, and later to distribute supplies with Ted Forstmann, the American entrepreneur who had procured them...
...Bill and Hillary are, truth be known, splendid examples of that subgroup of 1960s youth that has, ever since the great days of protest and soapboxes, pretty much had things its own way...
...His antipathy for the military has been repeatedly evinced, from his extraordinary attempts to avoid military service in his youth to the insouciance he has shown toward military traditions and practices since his inauguration...
...Bill Clinton has been speaking out of both sides of his mouth for years and there have been few objections...
...Retired General Michael Duggan, who was Air Force chief of staff at the outset of the Gulf War, is even more optimistic on...
...That line has a familiar ring...
...Thus a vast flabbiness has overtaken these poseurs...
...The Muslims who were in Mostar when I was there would be no match for him...
...Inflagrante she has moved from being simply Mrs...
...Were he respectful of history he might recognize that the confused values he embodies brought us to Vietnam...
...The actual figure was half that when I was there, and the city was a shambles...
...Moreover, it was the idealistic civilians who were the first to cut from Vietnam, leaving the military and the hawks to fulfill our diplomatic and geopolitical responsibilities...
...Aloof in the Kultursmog they rarely encounter critics...
...And he has attempted to lift the military ban against homosexuals...
...The modern American habit of mind is to ignore history and to see people as infinitely pliable...
...Despite the advice of a presidential commission he has ordered that women serve in combat...
...President Clinton isnow planning vast diplomatic schemes and even a number of military ventures to tranquilize the historically chaotic and bloody Balkans...
...Late last April General Merrill McPeak, head of the Air Force, testified before the Senate, "Give us time and we will order strikes on every one of those artillery positions and put it out of business...
...No one at the press conference picked on him for that or even politely inquired as to why, if things were worsening, the Republicans were repeatedly reelected...
...For a quarter of a century these frauds have been advancing themselves at universities, government bureaucracies, think tanks, law offices, and those corporate boardrooms befogged in the Kultursmog of the coatand-tie left...
...Social engineering is "community building...
...They are the spoiled brats of their generation, and they have not a hint as to what is amiss with shutting down half of Los Angeles International Airport's runways so that a $200 haircut can be administered to one of their selfless advocates of the Noble Cause—any noble cause...
...Socialized medicine is "national health care...
...Now she is pontificating New Age flapdoodle at college commencement exercises where most of the profs are too inane to object, though surely some bright students and alumni must recognize the gibberish...
...Many have been armed by Serbian forces whose artillery positions have been under pressure from the Croats for months...
...Once an elegant Italianate city, Mostar was now an armed ruin, eight of its nine bridges destroyed, its parks turned into cemeteries with fresh graves marked by Christian and Muslim gravestones alike...
...the efficacy of air power...
...They would polish apples for the prof, go just as far to the left as the prof would approve, moonlight on the counterculture for its lewd entertainments...
...They are indeed usually thumping for the same policies they thumped for in their youth, but no longer do they talk of socialized medicine or welfare with the crisp scholarliness of their mentors from yesteryear, nor are they really intent on reform...
...He has frozen military pay and ordered that future pay raises be beneath those of the private sector...
...Yet President Clinton alternately bungles his diplomatic openings to the Europeans and rattles sabers—the wrong sabers...
...But when I was in Mostar there were no Muslims, at least not many...
...Beginning last summer it was increasingly clear that aerial destruction of Serb strongman Slobodan Milosevic's army and artillery was feasible and desirable...
...At his recent press conference, he asserted that in every year of the Reagan-Bush era conditions worsened...
...The American people are not ready, the Europeans are not, President Yeltsin is not...
...Most Muslims were dead or departed...
...Serb artillery had gutted homes, hospitals, schools, office buildings, churches, and mosques...
...When they do the critics are dismissed as racists, male chauvinists, ideologues, ultraconservatives...
...They respond purely to their own delusions...
...The news was reporting that the city's Croats were fighting the city's Muslims...
...The leader of the Croatian militia that governed the city, Jadran Topic, formerly a soccer player for the New York Cosmos, commanded a mixed force dominated by Croats but with a much smaller contingent of Muslims...
Vol. 26 • July 1993 • No. 7
