NATO's Dummy War
Corry, John
DIIIllNATOly iyar 011N Conitl 32 June r999 • The American Spectator T ruth is not necessarily the first casualty of war, although often it is an early victim; and, as Orwell once wrote, "When one...
...If the answer is that it's to restore NATO's credibility, that's really not enough...
...But a cost-free war is not war at all, and at 15,000 feet it is hard to distinguish a tank from a tractor...
...Lord Ismay, its first secretary-general, said its role was "to keep the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down," but no one connected to NATO now could make such a succinctly elegant formulation...
...The KLA has been encouraged to create an unsustainable rump state...
...34 June r999 • The American Spectator...
...It seems that opponents of the war are drawn from a "a rather motley crew of neoisolationists," "Clinton despisers," and "ultra-sophisticated `realist' intellectuals who have divined that America has no interests in the Balkans and who claim that to combat Milosevic's aggression and brutality is merely to indulge in soft-headed liberal internationalism...
...But primitive Albania has only one usable airport, and its roads, bridges, and ports would need to be upgraded to handle big shipments of war supplies...
...Recall what Madeleine Albright said to Jim Lehrer when the air war started: "I don't see this as a long-term operation...
...In fact they were slow in arriving because the Joint Chiefs had hesitated to send them...
...Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon said the Apache helicopters were slow in reaching Albania because "we are concentrating on primarily the humanitarian aid...
...Actually Friedman had a point, even if not the one he intended...
...As William E. Odom, once the director of the National Security Agency, wrote in the Wall Street Journal, the corridor from Hungary into the Voivodina region of Serbia "invites a high-speed armored attack...
...But questions like that do not bother the war party...
...Friedman added: "The only way is a merciless air war...
...Also, Hungary was on the side of Germany then, and presumably it welcomed the Wehrmacht...
...The Wehrmacht used it in World War II, and took "the whole of Yugoslavia in a couple of weeks...
...Well, yes, but first the Luftwaffe had to kill 20,000 Serbs in Belgrade, and after the Wehrmacht took Yugoslavia it had a good deal of trouble holding it...
...It also makes fools and liars out of bureaucrats ree war and generals...
...Meanwhile polls show that Hungary is divided over the bombing...
...Does NATO really want that...
...The way to free Kosovo is to send in men with guns to force out the men with guns now doing the killing," columnist William Safire wrote in the New York Times...
...NATO has an honorable history, but Kosovo shows it no longer is useful...
...The Serbs do lie, of course, but they seem to have been reasonably restrained in their reports of civilian deaths, and twenty is not an implausible number...
...As filthy and obscene as war may be, it sometimes has noble ends, but a cost-free war precludes that...
...The bombing has had consequences...
...oincidentally, the same day that Clark spoke, the Serbs C said at least twenty civilians had been killed in a NATO attack on the southern city of Surdulica...
...No one seriously expects NATO, however, to help America defend Taiwan, say, or to intervene on the Korean peninsula...
...When real genocide took place in Rwanda they refused to even utter the word...
...Editorials ring out like battle cries...
...And, in fact, Brzezinski may be onto something here, and a good thing it might be, too...
...I think that this is...achievable within a relatively short period of time...
...Greece, however, does not want NATO to do that— Prime Minister Costas Simitis has also criticized the bombings—and Macedonian President Kiro Gligorov has said NATO cannot use Macedonia as a staging ground for an attack...
...As Madeleine Albright once said to Colin Powell, "What's the point of having this superb military that you're always talking about it if we can't use it...
...If Farah Aidid's clansmen could do that, then why not the Serbs...
...The world as we know it will end without NATO, and in the same editorial they quote Zbigniew Brzezinski, the very model of a hardheaded, not soft-headed, internationalist...
...Defense Secretary William Cohen told Congress that "Milosevic is engaged in one of the worst slaughters of human beings we have seen since the end of World War II...
...Kosovo is a European problem, and if Europe is serious Europe should solve it...
...Presumably he was unaware of the Sudan, Algeria, Chechnya, Afghanistan, Liberia, Sierra Leone, or even Rwanda...
...Many Hungarians live in the Voivodina region, and many Hungarians serve in the Yugoslav army...
...and, as Orwell once wrote, "When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases—bestial atrocities, iron heel, blood-stained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder—one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy...
...The spokesmen also now say that we're in Kosovo so the refugees can one day return there, but that makes no sense, either...
...Wesley Clark insisted, even though the air war had failed, and NATO was reduced to vague plans about an oil embargo that could only fail, too...
...Rather than limiting the possibility of a wider war, NATO has enhanced it, and American participation is in no one's interest...
...If Belgrade added still more troops, NATO presumably could declare victory...
...So why are we in Kosovo...
...The Serbs had surface-to-air defenses...
...Macedonia's fragile democracy has become imperiled...
...The idea that people are still holding rock concerts in Belgrade, or going out for Sunday merry33 A cost-f precludes noble ends...
...Say now that Albright's old machismo still lives, not in her discredited person, perhaps, but clearly in some unlikely acolytes...
...the war party will never see tanks there, and Albania and Macedonia remain its best hopes...
...If the war party is aware of any of this it does a good job of hiding it...
...The true soft-headed internationalists are in charge, and the world is a more dangerous place because they are...
...For one thing, they remembered Somalia...
...Apparently Kristol and the Standard are serious...
...Europe's economic output is now larger than America's, and it also has more men under arms...
...Also, only two secondary highways in all of Albania cross the mountains into Kosovo...
...So quick now: Why are we in Kosovo, or at least flying over it...
...But if they did that some of the planes would be shot down, of course, and NATO leaders, Clinton in particular, were intent on a cost-free war...
...It would seem Albright was lying either one time or the other, although self-delusion and ignorance are so embedded in this administration there was really no way to tell...
...Paul Watson of the Los Angeles Times, the last American reporter in Kosovo, wrote about NATO air attacks that hit a bus station, a graveyard, and a basketball court in the middle of an apartment complex in Pristina...
...NATO supposedly was fighting a war for humanitarian reasons, although it was placing the lives of its pilots above those of the Kosovars it was sworn to save...
...If nothing else, Kosovo proves that...
...It could unload men and material at Thessaloniki in Greece, and then use the road that runs from there to Skopje, the capital of Macedonia, just south of the Kosovo border...
...Meanwhile it presses ahead...
...State Department spokesmen often say now that it's to stop "genocide," but even for a low, dishonest administration that's truly going too far...
...Then, on the "NBC Nightly News," he said what he thought about the bombing: To think that NATO is doing this to try to end the civil war, to try to end all ethnic hatred, when all I see is those ethnic hatreds boiling over like they haven't before in my lifetime is to think that someone didn't think this through very well...
...go-round rides, while their fellow Serbs are 'cleansing' Kosovo is outrageous...
...Indeed NATO never entered the Gulf War, although there were sound reasons why it should have done so—economic, for one...
...So return now to the war party, and neoconservatives who confuse bombing in the Balkans with national greatness...
...NATO has an honorable history, but Kosovo shows it no longer is useful, and its time as a credible alliance is over...
...The American Spectator • June 1999 eral enemies say, we should use "all means necessary" and "whatever it takes" to do it...
...We're winning, Milosevic's losing, and he knows it," Gen...
...He cloaked his admission with glad tidings —"We are systematically taking apart President Milosevic's structure and power" —but there was no mistaking its meaning...
...The air war, as conducted, was bizarre...
...Hungary today, though, would not do that for NATO...
...One reason they still had them, however, was that the planes were flying as high as they were, and to destroy the defenses they had to fly lower...
...It wants to restore NATO's "credibility," and, as John McCain, both Doles, Warren Christopher, assorted congressmen, and any number of old Cold War warriors and their once implacable libJOHN CORRY is TAS's senior correspondent and Presswatch columnist...
...The history of Balkan diasporas shows that they're permanent...
...When Jamie Shea, the smiling NATO spokesman in Brussels who seems to have escaped from an old Monty Python sketch, announced that the Serbs had added 8,000 troops to their forces in Kosovo, he said it was really good news...
...Apparently they will sweep in from Albania or Macedonia, and if that can't work, either, they can always try Hungary...
...So scratch Hungary...
...It also makes fools and liars out of bureaucrats and generals...
...Two Black Hawk helicopters were shot down there, and two more severely damaged...
...Bombing is preferred, and if that does not work, ground troops should be used...
...Orwell was not writing about NATO and its air war, of course, but when the alliance celebrated its 5oth anniversary, it evoked that same feeling about dummies...
...NATO planes, among them B-2s making round trips from Missouri with bored pilots, were flying at 15,000 feet so they could stay out of harm's way...
...Despite the bombs and missiles, Milosevic was still reinforcing Kosovo...
...William Kristol and the Weekly Standard are doing their best to shore up weak Republicans...
...It's a sign," he said, "of how difficult Belgrade is finding it to bring the area under control...
...So Albania is also unlikely...
...The air war was a failure...
...But eleven days later she said, "We never expected this to be over quickly....We are in there for a long time...
...stopping the proliferation of terrible weapons, for another...
...Then the next day his Times colleague Thomas Friedman wrote, "Let's at least have a real air war...
...Obviously there are some who never will...
...The war party may want quick action, but the upgrading, not to mention assembling the troops, would take a matter of months...
...Meanwhile Kosovo had been ethnically cleansed, and the Balkans destabilized, and bombing had united the Serbs...
...NATO must turn to Macedonia...
...Slobodan Milosevic had won, and the only question was, did the dummies who said otherwise believe what they were saying themselves...
...It is no exaggeration to say," he declares, "that NATO's failure to prevail would mean both the end of NATO as a credible alliance and the undermining of America's global leadership...
...Its time as a credible alliance is over...
...But then, the week after that, or five weeks into the bombing, even General Clark had to admit there was a problem...
...Actually the question had always been there...
...Russian paranoia has grown...
Vol. 32 • June 1999 • No. 6
