Zero Interest

...But when the rain pours and the winds howl, you quickly find out what is and what isn't...

...Ask the South Vietnamese who worked and fought against the Communist North Vietnamese, only to find, in early 1975, that the enemy was advancing, the war was about to be lost, and the Americans were preparing to evacuate...

...W ell, you can define anything as a national interestjust as you can define anything as a building material...

...Stability in the Balkans became a vital interest: President Clinton justified our mission there by warning that "problems that start beyond our borders can quickly become problems within them" and insisting that Bosnia was a case where "we can defend our fundamental values as a people and serve our most basic sliategic interests...

...One is that men and women will be sent to die for no purpose...

...and the other countries made it plain that ending i the violence was a lower priority than staying clear of it...

...Stuart Herrington later recalled, "In a very real sense, that last drama, that last scene of the last tragic act in the courtyard of the embassy was a microcosm for the war as a whole, because at the beginning, we told the Vietnamese, around 1964, to stand up and fight...

...But in the end, the promise was broken, and many of them were left behind to face the enemy alone...

...Countries ordinarily do not place substantial assets at risk of war unless they have something more than lofty ideals to uphold-- and if they do, they often find that the game is not worth the candle...

...See for yourself at...

...This was due partly to good luck and partly to design...

...But we weren't willing to use anything else--i.e., ground soldiers--because there was no national interest to justify the casualties that would inevitably result...

...That raised questions no one has yet answered: If we are willing to send combat soldiers into a hazardous environment to achieve some good purpose, why are we unwilling to let them do things that might get them killed...

...Bill Clinton and his foreign policy advisers weren't entirely comfortable being depicted as crusading do-gooders--perhaps recalling the fate of Woodrow Wilson and Jimmy Carter, who were notorious for letting altruistic intentions lead them astray...

...We sent troops to Somalia to avert mass starvation...

...L ast September, German Chancellor Gerhard Schri3der's byline appeared on an article in an obscure domestic publication, stating that Germany is "a great power" whose foreign policy must be based on "fully acknowledged selfinterest...

...We extended our nuclear guarantee to our postwar allies-raising the stakes as high as they possibly could go--for the same reason...

...What does that mean...

...NOW you can read the testimony, watch the video taped depositions, and see the pictures that further prove why Hillary Clinton will be found liable in Judicial Watch's $90 million Filegate class-action lawsuit...

...B ut grave perils exist whenever the U.S...

...Never mind what's good for us...

...All we lacked, as we discovered too late, was a powerful interest.And that, we should know by now, makes all the difference...

...An interest is what compels a nation to persist in an undertaking even when it becomes costly, difficult, and even bloody...

...As a rule, nations do not wage military struggles because they choose to...

...Haitian democracy became a vital interest...

...And as long as no one tests our resolve--as in Bosnia and Haiti--we can get away with it...

...If the German government has been careful to deny interests where they exist so that it can do what it needs to do, Washington has been doing just the opposite: pretending it has important needs at stake in assorted places so it can justify actiofis that do nothing for the prosperity, safety, or independence of the United States...

...That is exactly what we have been doing in Kosovo...

...To say something different, reported the New York Times, "appears to signal the formal end of Germany's self-imposed reserve since 1945...

...admitted Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic to NATO, cheerfully extending our protective shield to countries with which we had never previously been allied...

...But Clinton administration officials were hardly inclined to give second priority to altruistic intentions...

...The war in Bosnia stirred passions in this country because of the presence of CNN camera crews, not because the fighting there had the slightest impact on life here...

...THEN a U.S...

...interests--which henceforth would include anything they chose...

...When a firefight in Mogadishu in October 1993 left 18 American soldiers dead, President Clinton immediately announced that our troops would be removed within six months--and on March zs, 1994, the withdrawal (officially, and appropriately, called "Operation Quickdraw") was completed...

...Those happen to be the very places they need to go to fulfill their chief mission, namely protecting Kosovar civilians (whether Serbian or Albanian) from being intimidated, attacked, or murdered by their local enemies...

...A national interest is to large military commitments what love is to marriage: It may not be enough to assure success, but success is almost impossible without it...

...This is a new development...

...But of course Germany has always pursued its national interests...

...To move in a more direct, assertive, and energetic way would provoke other powers to unite against Germany, so it would have even less latitude...

...By contrast, our supposedly urgent mission in Somalia was purely humanitarian in its purpose: We went in to make sure the combatants in the country's civil war didn't prevent relief supplies from being delivered to hundreds of thousands of starving innocents...

...Public support for the intervention was a mile wide but, as it turned out, only an inch deep...

...We landed the Marines in Port-au-Prince to restore the elected president of Haiti...

...interests, they simply redefined U.S...

...Ronald Reagan's efforts to support the Salvadoran government and the Nicaraguan contras offended liberal sensibilities by placing greater importance on Cold War imperatives than on the right of the peoples there to self-determination...

...It just happens that for the last half-century, its primary interest was allaying the deep international distrust of German motives that resulted from the two world wars...

...And we weren't willing to simply stay out of the fray...

...We and our NATO allies have installed soldiers on the ground and then refrained from sending them anywhere they might get bloodied...

...The Bonn government could act only if it acted in concert with other countries, and then only in ways that seemed to subordinate its immediate needs to those of its neighbors and allies...

...These undertakings were unusual in the postwar American experience because they really represented nothing more than efforts to right perceived wrongs in the world...

...The I administration pursued the war in such a way as to keep U.S...

...In 1995, we coerced Slobodan Milosevic and the Bosnian Serbs into signing the Dayton peace agreement by carrying out a U.S...

...The American Spectator _9 June 20 o o 33 Having seen that the United States was not willing to pay in American blood to get what it wanted in the Balkans, Milosevic ignored Clinton when the threat was brandished again over the issue of his treatment of Kosovo...

...He was right about our aversion to casualties, but failed to grasp that we could mount a punishing attack without incurring any: In the 78day NATO air assault, not one American died in combat...

...We kept hundreds of thousands of soldiers and airmen in Europe for halfa century to prevent an expansionist power from conquering our most important allies...

...And if our paramount goal is to keep them from getting killed, why not simply stay out of places like Kosovo to start with...

...No longer constrained by Soviet military power and the risk of nuclear confrontation, we found ourselves with the luxury of stepping in anytime we saw someone getting what appeared to be a raw deal...

...When the city of Mitrovica erupted in violence in February, the U.S...

...Our military presence served only to keep the three sides in the war from resuming the savage hostilities they had carried on so vigorously beforenot a trivial achievement, but also not what Dayton promised...

...And in the end, of course, we made that commitment in good faith, but we were unable to carry it out, and we wound up betraying the country...

...Yet no one can doubt that the havoc wreaked and the toll exacted by HIV/MDS do threaten our security...

...If another choice is available, they are apt to take it...

...As retired Army Col...

...We lost 4o0,00o men in World War II but never thought of giving up, because our national independence and survival were at stake...

...Standard fare for any other government, but in Germany, the declaration qualified as a historic shift...

...As Saigon was falling, thousands of South Vietnamese fled to the U.S...

...So, rather than revamp their policies to give greater importance to actual U.S...

...Without ground soldiers, NATO had to stand by while Serbian soldiers and paramilitary units engaged in a frenzy of violence in Kosovo--killing and displacing far more Kosovar Albanians after the air war began than had been affected in the months before...

...But for the most part, it wasn't...

...It's all easy to access on Judicial Watch's website...

...What's new is not that Germany is focusing on its own concerns--they have always been front and center--but how it defines those concerns...

...Admirable intentions are a useful complement to, but they are no substitute for, a powerful motive of basic self-regard...

...exposes itself to military casualties that it is not fully prepared to bear...

...Last year, we bombed the Serbs in Serbia for 11 weeks to stop ethnic cleansing in the Yugoslavian province of Kosovo...

...34 June 2000 " The American Spectator ~- FIRST the Independent Counsel told you that Filegate was a figment of your imagination - that the Clinton Administration never illegally obtained and used FBI files of hundreds of former Reagan and Bush administration appointees, and others...

...embassy, where they were promised passage out on Army helicopters...

...We S'r~.vE CHAPMAN is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune...

...Our friendly relations with autocratic regimes in South Korea, the Philippines, Chile, and South Africa were defended by the right as necessary for combating Communism, but liberals said the price was too high...

...They do so because they have no choice...

...In none of these cases was there anything concrete at stake for the United States...

...We managed just fine 1 during the years when the three new q NATO members were members of the Warsaw Pact...

...what's good for humanity7 In the last decade, though, no one could say that self-interest has dominated the U.S...

...But we know that if the cost becomes even modestly significant, we won't mean what we say...

...No one was going to stop us, and much of the world would cheer us on...

...Adam Smith said that it is not from the benevolence of the baker that we expect our daily bread, and it is equally unwise for any country in need to depend on the selflessness of foreign governments for its safety and independence...

...But interventionists found themselves on the defensive against those at home who asked why on earth Americans should risk blood and treasure in places so irrelevant to our well-being...

...This is a strange way to embark on military action...

...The other is that the people we promise to help will make decisions based on the mistaken assumption that we will make good on our pledge...

...Rail lines, roads, bridges, and power plants were bit, not because these targets were particularly useful to Belgrade in its campaign in Kosovo, but because they allowed life to function in a semi-normal manner for ordinary people in Yugoslavia...

...NEXT you learn that thousands of White House e-mail messages containing information about Filegate originally subpoenaed by Judicial Watch, Congress and the Independent Counsel were hidden and never produced by the Clinton-Gore White House...

...The same calculation governed the behavior of Kosovar Albanian leaders, who resisted American demands that they agree to disarm because they had little confidence that the United States could be counted on to protect them...

...Its political judgment was that the American people would do anything to stop the Serbian abuse of Kosovo's ethnic Albanians--anything but send their sons and daughters to die...

...killed in Vietnam to surrender his young life...

...District Court rules that President Bill Clinton committed a similar CRIME when he violated the privacy rights of Kathleen Willey in our Filegate lawsuit...

...The reason, of course, is that we dearly love to pretend that we are willing to make great sacrifices for such admirable humanitarian causes...

...approach to troubles abroad...

...FINALLY we learn that, contrary to Hillary Rodham Clinton's denials, pictures show she knew Craig Livingstone, the bar bouncer who accessed the FBI files...

...Famine in Somalia posed no conceivable threat to our security...

...We sacrificed 37,ooo lives in the Korean i War because we believed not fighting there would invite Communist aggression that would ultimately bring about another world war...

...Even the AIDS epidemic in Africa was recently pronounced a matter of urgent self-interest by AI Gore, who said, "We tend to think of a threat to security in terms of war and peace...

...casualties to a minimum...

...air war, and then installed 20,000 troops to see that it was implemented...

...The reliance on air bombardment alone, meanwhile, obliged NATO to try to coerce the Yugoslavian government by pummeling its subjects...

...The British ambassador to the United States, whose government supported the dispatch of ground troops to police the Dayton accords, candidly acknowledged in 1995 that "the war could rumble on for years without directly impinging on the security of Western Europe," to say nothing of North America...

...We deployed our air power against noncombatants because it was largely useless against combatants...

...Liberals opposed the Gulf War partly because Secretary of State lames Baker and others justified it in terms (oil and jobs) that left little room for starry-eyed idealism...

...What did we achieve in Somalia to justify the supreme sacrifice asked of those 18 Army Rangers in Mogadishu...

...What good did it do for the last American G.I...

...The dictatorship in Haiti had no noticeable effect on Americans, beyond a few boat people who had to be turned back...

...With the world's most potent armed forces and no serious military rivals, we could do pretty much whatever we wanted...

...This abrupt retreat bore an eerie resemblance to our mission to help rebuild Lebanon, which seemed laudable and necessary when our troops landed in 1983 . But when a car bomb killed 241 Marines, President Reagan decided that we could well afford to let Lebanon remain a mess...

...We're with you.' And when we told the Vietnamese that, in our idealism and our naivet6 and our sense of being omnipotent, we meant it...

...We bombed the Serbs in Bosnia to stop a brutal civil war...

...In the past, Germany had portrayed its intention as nothing more than advancing the common interests of Europe, NATO, world peace, and the like--never its own narrow concerns...

...What was needed, they argued, was less realpolitik and more idealism in our foreign policy...

...The result was a war that visited considerable unnecessary suffering on enemy civilians, while affording scant protection to the people we set out to help...

...Serbs and Albanians who stayed in Kosovo or returned after the war took a risk believing that we meant what we said...

...Americans had all sorts of defensible and even admirable reasons for fighting the Vietnam War...