President Clinton has had several good opportunities to stop his Yugoslav war: Jesse Jackson’s successful mission to bring home our POWs, the embarrassing bombing of the Chinese embassy, and Milosevic’s feeble overtures about withdrawal of his troops. But it looks like Clinton wants to keep the war going even though it hasn’t accomplished any of his stated objectives.
Why? It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that he wants to continue the bombing in order to distract attention from the daily China scandals. Another explanation might be that he wants the drama of war to define his legacy rather than impeachment and Monicagate.
After all, he complained at the White House Correspondents dinner that he ranked only 53rd on the list of the top news stories, asking, “What do I have to do to make the top 50?” The answer is, start a war.
Clinton bombed a remote camp in Afghanistan and a drug store in the Sudan just three days after his non-apology about the Monica scandal was such a PR flop. He bombed Iraq the day before the House was scheduled to begin impeachment proceedings.
Was it mere coincidence that Clinton started bombing Yugoslavia just as the bad publicity started coming out about the Chinese espionage at Los Alamos, and keeps the bombs falling as every day’s news confirms that it happened on Clinton’s watch? When you add Bulgaria, mistakenly bombed during his attacks on Belgrade, Clinton has bombed five countries in the last year.
By using anti-population “dumb” bombs for “area bombing,” Clinton has abandoned all pretense that his accelerating air strikes are aimed only at military targets. His Administration has already had to apologize 13 times for what he calls “collateral damage,” including the bombing of a refugee convoy, a bus on a bridge, a marketplace, a hospital, a playground, a passenger train, and a sleeping refugee village.
Yugoslavia claims that the U.S./NATO bombing has killed 1,200 civilians and caused 5,000 casualties. Soon, we will be asking the question: Since the bombing started, who has killed more people, Milosevic or Clinton?
It’s not surprising that the Chinese don’t believe that the bombing of their embassy in Belgrade was a mistake. They think that blaming it on a two-year old map doesn’t ring true and, besides, nobody has been fired or punished.
This fatal and expensive bombing hasn’t achieved any purpose except to distract public attention from the transfers of U.S. missile technology to Communist China and the Clinton Administration’s coverup. It’s also made Milosevic a Yugoslav hero.
Clinton and NATO have done over $50 billion worth of damage to Yugoslavia without achieving any strategic or humanitarian objective. Of course, we all know exactly who will be called upon to rebuild the Danube River bridges, the civilian property, and the water and electric infrastructure that Clinton’s bombing has destroyed.
When the 106th Congress convened in January and Republicans were talking about passing a tax cut, Clinton got up on his soap box and sanctimoniously demanded that we save the surplus for Social Security. He rejected a tax cut because, he said, the American people might not spend it “right.”
Now Clinton has spent our Social Security surplus on his losing war. And the Republican Congress appropriated the money to pay for it.
For the first time in history, the United States is the aggressor in war, thereby forfeiting our reputation as a peace-loving nation. For the first time in history, a President has taken us into war when we were not attacked or threatened, and where we have no discernable national interest at stake.
Clinton’s talk about our “moral” duty to take “humanitarian” action is as phony as his lies about his private misbehavior. All the people he said he wanted to help are now worse off than before his bombing started, and the State Department admits that 90 percent of the refugees became refugees after the bombing started.
Clinton says we must push on with the bombing in order to save NATO’s credibility. On the contrary, Clinton’s war is well on the way to destroying NATO’s credibility because the bombing of Yugoslavia is so clearly in violation of the terms of the NATO treaty.
The officials of the 19 countries who caroused in Washington, D.C. in celebration of NATO’s 50th anniversary adopted a “new strategic concept” that pretends to authorize intervening by force against any government they don’t like (of course, using U.S. money and manpower, not NATO’s). But none of the heads of state, including Clinton, bothered to get approval for this dramatic change of mission from his own legislature.
The NATO countries think it’s a neat idea to have a Spanish Marxist, Javier Solana, order the U.S. air force into action to cope with European conflicts. Clinton Administration officials, who are on record as making demeaning remarks about the concept of national sovereignty, also think it’s a neat idea for a U.S.-financed NATO to police a new world order.
How much more damage will Clinton do before the 2000 elections bring the warmongering politicians back to reality?
