Pat Buchanan: Get Out of Yugoslavia Now
One argument being used to defend the U.S. intervention in Yugoslavia is
persuasive even to skeptics of the war itself. It goes like this: maybe the
war was a bad idea, but now that we're in it, we've got to fight it all the
way to the end, no matter what the costs.
Baloney, says conservative columnist and presidential candidate Pat Buchanan:
"Three weeks into Bill Clinton's Balkan adventure and
America risks a debacle. The human rights crisis in Kosovo
has exploded into a catastrophe...
"With Milosevic still defying NATO, we are admonished
that 'failure is not an option,' the United States must do
'whatever is necessary to win.' Otherwise, NATO's credibility
will be destroyed. But this is mindlessness. If the war was a
folly to begin with, surely, the answer is to cut our losses
and let the idiot-adventurers who urged the attack resign to
write their memoirs, rather than send 100,000 U.S. troops
crashing into the Balkans to save the faces and careers of
our blundering strategists. Only a fanatic redoubles his
energy when he has lost sight of his goal. After the Gallipolli
disaster, Churchill went; after Suez, Eden went; after the
Bay of Pigs, Allen Dulles departed the CIA. Surely, this is
a wiser, more honorable, course than a ground war in
Kosovo. Moreover, Americans will not support 'whatever
is necessary to win.' We are not going to turn Belgrade
into Hamburg...
"And if we send in the troops, what do we 'win'? The
right to say that NATO defeated Serbia? The right to
occupy Kosovo?
"...What the United States
needs today in the Balkans is a least-bad peace, patrolled
by Europeans, where Serbs rule Serbs, Croats Croats and
Albanians Albanians. And if, in the negotiations to end this
tragedy, Belgrade cries, 'No American troops in Kosovo!'
let us insist upon it, and bring our soldiers home from
Europe, as Ike told JFK to do nearly 40 years ago."
-- "The Mess They've Made", The Washington Post, April 13, 1999
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