Yeltsin as the 'Vozhd'

...All of these actions were executed on the assumption that American softness made it politically difficult for a President to risk American lives...

...Nor is the United States alone in opposing a ground force...

...That was a gratuitous gift to Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and undoubtedly helped him design his order of battle...

...There were already signs of nervousness in Beijing in April, when some 20,000 members of the Falun Dafa spiritual movement gathered around the Communist compound in a silent demonstration...

...Many extremists see our sentimentality about American life as a decadent weakness to be exploited...

...Sometimes, especially the President...

...In announcing the start of the present air war on March 24, President Clinton clearly believed it was necessary to assure the country, in the most emphatic terms, that there would be no ground troops...

...In the House of Commons, Blair subsequently said that the air campaign had not accomplished its purpose and that he was "acutely aware" time was running out for ground intervention before the Balkan winter sets in...

...Meanwhile, British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook has been on the road trying to drum up NATO agreement for the "semi-permissive" strategy...

...That may sound like belaboring the obvious, but the fact is that the United States has suffered a relatively small number of casualties in the wars of this century—under a half-million in the two World Wars, Korea and Vietnam...

...One was the blast that killed 19 American airmen in Saudi Arabia after an Air Force security officer had warned of their vulnerability...

...Compare that to 1 million British, 2 million French, 5 million Germans, and 10 million Russians...

...In 1961, after the botched Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, President John F Kennedy fired CIA Director Allen W. Dulles and talked, half seriously, about breaking up the agency and scattering it to the winds...

...No fear haunts Communist leaders more than loss of control at home...

...For the Administration to agree now to ground troops would be to go back on an unqualified Presidential commitment and to raise a tornado in Congress...

...Probably not...

...Many in Russia call this "wild capitalism...

...sinking roots that would corrupt the capacity of future generations to truly govern themselves...

...Clinton After two months, the war over Kosovo has already cost the United States the goodwill of Russia and China...

...But it is noteworthy how careful Beijing was to burn no bridges to the United States...

...The President was clearly articulating an outlook more than a policy, an outlook that grieved over the way groups of people establish their identities by looking down on other groups...

...Ground forces for Kosovo are such a sensitive matter in this country because Americans have a thing about not wanting their soldiers to die...

...The FBI disclaims responsibility for the leaking of nuclear secrets to China, saying it didn't get proper search authority from the Justice Department...

...Saddam Hussein, before invading Kuwait, expressed confidence that there would be no U.S...

...Their economic concessions hadnot won China entry into the World Trade Organization...

...Fritz Ermath, a retired CIA expert on Russia, foresees "some form of weak, irresponsible state authority over a disordered society...

...A week later, at a dinner honoring Rabbi David Saperstein of the Religious Action Center, Clinton revealed more of himself as he spoke of those who reacted to wounds by wounding others...

...The FBI was found to have run secret intelligence operations that harassed innocent citizens and spread libels about the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr...

...Since its economic meltdown last August, Russia has been edging closer and closer to political chaos...

...Nobody wanted me because I was too fat and too slow...

...Mark now the new crop of intelligence failures, highlighted by the gang that couldn't read its maps straight and guided a smart bomb into a dumb target, namely the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade...

...Chinas Bush Strategy As for China, in one respect the mistaken bombing of its Belgrade embassy came as a boon to its rulers...

...Although meetings on arms control, arms proliferation and human rights were postponed, they were not canceled...

...They were able to orchestrate violent, albeit carefully modulated, demonstrations against the U. S. that might deflect some of the passions building up among the Chinese people with the approach of the 10th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre on June 4. Better anger directed at foreign devils than at China's repressive practices...

...Chinese nuclear espionage and political campaign financing continued to be live issues in the American Congress and press...

...A relative unknown, Stepashin's résumé emphasized police and intelligence work...

...This was almost a mirror image of how President Bush dealt with American anger over Tiananmen in 1989...

...Yet it is certainly true that the hopes of a decade ago that a reformed Russia would take its place in the family of civilized nations are far from being realized...

...Penetrations ranged from the Navy's John Walker, whose espionage activities enabled the Soviets to decode more than a million secret messages, to Aldrich Ames, who betrayed over 100 covert operations and more than 30 Western spies...

...Iranian militants seized the United States Embassy in Teheran and put the squeeze on President Jimmy Carter...

...The President's point was about understanding those who looked down on him because they were looked down upon by others...

...In recent appearances Yeltsin has been unsteady on his feet, incoherent, and has even muttered about apossible exchange of missiles with the United States...

...Currently it is fashionable in Russia to blame America for having pushed the vast country covering 10 time zones into the free market and political democracy before it was ready...

...Today officials will also tell you, on mumbled background, that the plant in Sudan President Clinton ordered destroyed by missile attacks last August, because it was supposedly producing poison gas, was probably making nothing more dangerous than pharmaceuticals...

...A Vicious Cycle There is a side of President Clinton difficult to see because it is so visible...

...Another was the nuclear bomb tests in India and Pakistan last year that the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office, for all their expensive imaging and listening hardware, never saw coming...

...In the mid-'70s, Congress hung the CIA and FBI out to dry in a series of investigations that disclosed senseless ventures that included bizarre assassination plots and experiments with mind-altering drugs on unsuspecting subjects...

...Ostensibly part of a future peacekeeping force, they might not remain that way...

...Blair vs...

...Diplomatic relations were not broken off...

...The doomsday prophecies, several of which predict a renewed conflict with the United States, may be overly alarmist...

...Two days after the Littleton high school massacre, Clinton went out to a high school in Alexandria, Virginia...

...Indeed, the latest upheaval has taken on an anti-American tone that is showing signs of having an impact on U.S.-Russian cooperation in international endeavors...

...Apparently it no longer matters to Russians that Yeltsin frequently gives the impression of not being in full control of his faculties...

...Then he said this curious thing: "They had the wrong reaction to the fact they were dissed...

...Yet as Mikhail S. Gorbachev's perestroika experiment in the USSR a decade ago showed, nothing is harder to achieve than controlled decontrol of authoritarian rule...

...All this, supported by abudget of $26.7 billion, they call intelligence...

...The Price of Intelligence We seem to be in for one of those spells that comes every 10 or 15 years and has us wondering about our intelligence community and its way of falling flat on its face...

...He worried about the Kosovars going home and the cycle of "getting even" resuming...

...Russia has witnessed collapsing production, the impoverishment of the majority, and the rise of a criminal class...

...He "deeply deplored" the Chinese resort to force...

...To show he means business, Blair ordered 2,300 more troops alerted to move into the Balkan area, with another 20,000 reserves put on standby...

...President Jiang Zemin and Premier Zhu Rongji may have had some version of that in mind, but they were in a more delicate position...

...I can still remember like it was yesterday...

...Germany, Greece, Italy and perhaps others have their doubts as well...

...He suspended "high level exchanges," but he made no move to interfere with trade...

...He talked to the students gathered around him about rampant violence among young Americans, about how some youths lash out against ridicule and ostracism...

...Even the President...

...Look, everybody gets dissed some time in life...

...British Prime Minister Tony Blair has appeared closer and closer to going public on the issue President Bill Clinton persuaded him not to raise officially during the NATO summit in April...

...Terrorists seized Americans in Lebanon to pressure President Ronald Reagan to trade them for missiles...

...So despite President Clinton's apologies, they may have had some trouble convincing their Politburo colleagues that all this and the Belgrade bombing did not add up to the foreign devil once again humiliating China...

...They told Deng Xiaopeng that while the President had felt obliged to placate public opinion, he wanted to maintain good relations with China...

...In April, the International Monetary Fund granted the country S4.5 billion in credits, but kept the money on its own books for debt repayment, not trusting the Moscow government to handle it...

...As sponsors of their country's engagement with America they had a lot to answer for internally...

...Because the rich whites were looking down on them all the time...

...Strenuous efforts are being made to avoid an open quarrel between President Clinton and his good friend, Tony Blair...

...From his experience of being a humiliated poor white, the President went on to his thesis of humiliated Serbs picking on Kosovars...

...Dating back to Stalin and earlier, the vozhd, the supreme, all-powerful, often irrational ruler is much in the Russian tradition...

...He then went on to win overwhelming confirmation (the vote was 301 to 55) of his Prime Minister du jour, Sergei V Stepashin...

...And the issue of ground troops threatens to divide the NATO alliance...

...It is the side that has been making him—particularly since his impeachment ordeal— wander off into introspection and identify with victims...

...Then there was the series of events for which our intelligence community should have had better advance information...

...After the Belgrade bombing, the regime tried to uncork the pressure cooker just enough to let some steam out before the Tiananmen anniversary...

...But who is to blame, a Senate subcommittee is currently asking, for the FBI's blocking the report on the 1996 explosion of TWA Flight 800 while it looked in vain for a terrorist plot it never found...

...Defense Secretary William S. Cohen observed on television that "there is no consensus within the alliance for a ground force...

...President Clinton, who appealed in a speech on May 13 "for all of us to work together," has essentially stood fast on his opposition to the use of ground troops...

...During interviews the Prime Minister has suggested NATO is now working on contingency plans that include the deployment of ground troops in a "semi-permissive environment"—that is, when resistance has been so weakened from the air, it is no longer threatening...

...Washington Notebook By Daniel Schorr Yeltsin as the 'Vozhd' Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin exhibited the 1 Oth of his nine lives May 15, beating impeachment in the Duma on a series of charges ranging from genocide to treason...

...That is putting it mildly...

...Blair is possibly ahead of the rest of NATO in recognizing the disaster that awaits as pressure rises against an air war that too often hit the wrong targets, while Serbian armor gets more and more effectively dug in and camouflaged...

...I can still remember," he said, "when I was in second grade and I was the only kid who wasn't picked to play on the Softball team...

...military response because President George Bush feared losing American lives in battle...

...Then, in direct contravention of his ban on high-level exchanges, he sent National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft and Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger on a secret mission to Beijing...

...That virtually amounted to Moscow withdrawing as a strong intermediary, a role that Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright and her Russophile deputy, Strobe Talbott, devoted so much effort to building up...

...When I was a kid in the South," he asked rhetorically, "why were the poor whites the worst...

...One sign was Russia's j oining China in demanding a halt to the bombing campaign against Serbia prior to any attempt to achieve a Kosovo settlement...

...But more serious is what may happen internally...

...Is Russia headed toward a new version of Stalin's or Leonid I. Brezhnev's authoritarianism...

...They point toward some kind of temporizing agreement to proceed with NATO contingency planning for ground troops, and at the same time stress as loudly as possible that no decision had been made...

...From the mid-'80s until the mid-'90s we had the decade of the moles...