today’s ” AR-online” again AR-Online recent issues: May 1999 April 1999 March 1999 February 1999 January 1999 December 1998 November 1998 October 1998 September 1998 http://www.sacbee.com/voices/national/will/ Sacramento Bee California, May 6, 1999 Sales pitch for a Balkan farce by George Will WASHINGTON–The answer is “Madonna.” Formulate the question.
The question is: What is the name of the discotheque, located in Slobodan Milosevic ‘s hometown of Pozarevac, and owned by Milosevic’s son, Marko , that Nato might bomb as a “signal” of seriousness?
Last week, after Nato bombed Pozarevac, The Washington Post reported: “Nato military sources said the attack on Pozarevac was designed to send a chilling signal to the inner circle of the Yugoslav leadership, which includes several members of Milosevic’s extended family. “We are going to draw the noose around them until it starts to hurt,’ said a senior U.S. policy-maker. “When people like Marko start to feel the pain of this air campaign, then Milosevic might wake up and come to his senses.”‘
Milosevic is frightening. So is the thinking of that “senior U.S. policy-maker.” Nowadays no diplomatic farce is complete without a cameo appearance by Jesse Jackson . Media raptures about his brokering of the release of the three U.S. soldiers has underscored for Milosevic America’s aversion to even the mildest costs of combat. But, then, surely Milosevic noticed when President Clinton visited with the family of one of the captured soldiers.
A nation serious about military objectives would not advertise its distress about three prisoners. “I think,” says Yale’s Donald Kagan , author of “On the Origins of War,” speaking of the United States today, “you have to go all the way back, nearly 2000 years, to the Roman Empire, to find a single power so pre-eminent compared to all others.” True, but neither economic nor military pre-eminence necessarily translates into effective power, absent a certain hardness that could be called Roman.
Perhaps somewhere near Brussels there is a warehouse stuffed with ballpoint pens, stationery, ash trays and other things emblazoned with Nato’s logo. Perhaps Nato intends to stay in business until all that stuff is used up. Or until the bombing campaign achieves the objectives about which Nato says it will not compromise. Whichever comes first. Clinton says the bombing may continue into the summer. It probably will not, for two reasons.
First, before Milosevic is toppled by his supposedly disgruntled military (Nato’s hope du jour), Nato’s determination to continue punishing Serbia may be sapped by television pictures of the wretchedness Nato is trying to produce in Serbia, as when the power goes off in pediatric and geriatric hospital wards. Second, Clinton surely shares the high estimate of himself that “a senior administration official” recently expressed to The New York Times.
The official explained that Clinton, although he has ruled out compromise with Milosevic, will be able to compromise: “Once Clint
on decides that’s what he’s going to do, he’ll sell it. If Nixon could sell the fall of Saigon as peace with honor, Clinton can sell this.” More farce: Gerald Ford was president when Saigon fell. But when there is no penalty for failure, failures proliferate–like these senior administration officials who are saying these astonishing things about the debacle they have produced.
Unless the emptying of Kosovo becomes the first Balkan diaspora to be reversed, what Clinton will try to sell as a Nato success will be Milosevic’s success in radically and permanently altering the demographics of that province. Even if the Kosovars had homes to