On The Right - alternatives to US aerial bombing policy to end Kosovo crisis; term limits; China's access to US military secrets - Column

WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR.

Victory or Else?

NEW YORK, APRIL 6

The mantra is that having gone as far as we have in Kosovo, we can't settle for anything less than victory. An imposing panel assembled by Lehrer the Indispensable gave us Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Brent Scowcroft. They said many shrewd things, which included a devastating enumeration of President Clinton's defective strategies. But all of them insisted that we had now no alternative than to see the operation through.

The question is intellectually and, of course, geostrategically interesting. Having gotten to this point, do we need to accept the proposition that there is no alternative to victory?

1. We have lost the war we set out to win. The estimate as of yesterday, Day 13 of the bombing, was that the remaining ethnic Albanians would be routed out of Kosovo in five days. Already 1.1 million are displaced. There is zero prospect that in the next four days the remaining Serbs in Kosovo can be got to stop in their tracks and head back home, either because they are now dead; or because they are forced by NATO military to abandon their objective.

2. What would we then do with the refugees? The infrastructure of their lives is gone: their homes burned down, the farmland laid waste, schools and hospitals destroyed. A huge number of household heads are missing, many of them executed. In the past three weeks in Kosovo we have come close to deracination: a people uprooted. There is less talk among serious people about getting the Kosovars back to their homeland than about getting them settled in places like Guam.

3. Since we have lost the purpose of the war, which was to safeguard the Kosovar population in place, we ask then, What should we accomplish for the refugees? The answer is obvious: We must find new homes for them. What can we do to straighten out the aggressors?

Well, to invoke the military discipline of starting out at the extreme end of technically doable things and working down to the other extreme (do nothing), a) we could drop an atom bomb on Belgrade.

Are we going to do that? No. b) We could treat Belgrade in the way we treated Dresden and Tokyo in the Second World War, which is to say, all but obliterate it. Our idea of war changed drastically between 1918 and 1942. In the first war 90 percent of casualties were military. In the second, 50 percent were military, 50 percent civilian. Between 1945 and 1999 the Western conscience revolved against random killing, indeed against random damage. One reason we declined to bomb a particular building in Belgrade last week is that there was rumored to be a Rembrandt in it.

c) We could mobilize a ground force with instructions to fight its way either north through Kosovo to Belgrade, or down to Belgrade from Hungary. The figure most frequently given to accomplish this is 200,000 fighting troops.

What then would we do? Well, arrest Milosevic. We couldn't even get the satisfaction of stringing him up, inasmuch as Nuremberg justice is out of moral style. We could, eventually, give him life without possibility of parole. We would be left with the problem of governing Yugoslavia. The people of Croatia and Slovenia and Montenegro and Macedonia, who are a twitchy ethnic assembly, would have vital interests in what would then evolve.

And who would preside over the experience? President Clinton is awfully good at speaking at funerals. He would have a huge opportunity to do a lot of these. Granted, the United States would have a very black eye. We had gotten into the Balkan mess in order to prevent something from happening. It happened anyway. We made no serious provisions to anticipate the need to house the refugees, presumably because our goal was to circumvent any need for massive refugee problems. We didn't stop the Serbian soldiers and executioners in their tracks because we didn't have the right counterforces. We didn't have an army-we had only a peacekeeping force in Macedonia and life there was disrupted when three soldiers disappeared. We suddenly recognized an urgent need for Apache helicopters. Well, they weren't there, not in anything like the force required to do the job. They were in Germany. At least they were closer than the aircraft carrier it turns out we needed-the Kitty Hawk was doing business in Asia.

The hell of it is: In a well-governed society, we would make our expiation by getting rid of the disastrously incompetent commander in chief, as the British got rid of Eden after the fiasco in Suez in 1956. It is ironic that instead of doing that, and acknowledging the catastrophic dimensions of our venture in Yugoslavia, we are considering a "need" to press further, to accomplish nothing.

Term-Limits Suicide

NEW YORK, MARCH 16

Consider term limits and Charles Canady. Let us posit that Americans are interested in politics on a scale running from A to E. A-Absolutely not interested. B-Barely interested. C-Concerned, though only with issues that directly affect them. D-Decidedly partisan on most issues. And E-Enthralled by every detail of political goings-on. E is Robert Novak, A is the 10-year-old trying to get into Little League, whose attention you could not entice even if a nuclear explosion went off, unless it postponed the ball game. Probably voters who run from C to E know Mr. Canady, primarily as one of the 13 House managers who appeared before the Senate.