I confess, I originally had some problems with our getting involved in Kosovo. My original thought was, if the U.S. was trying to stop Georgia from seceding, we'd be a little upset if Belgium took it upon themselves to intervene and insisted on stationing troops in Valdosta.
I got even more concerned when one of our supposedly "invisible" super-secret Stealth fighters went down. Thanks to our extremely well-trained search and rescue teams, the pilot was rescued and returned home. But how much do you want to bet that, after his "peacemaking mission" to Serbia, Soviet Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov went home with more than just dirty socks in his luggage?
Then there's the apparent futility of trying to make peace in the Balkans. The whole area is just a mess, and it's been a mess for centuries, with ethnic hatreds going back to the 1300's. Despite the ancient nature of the conflict, however, some people feel compelled to blame the failure of peacemaking efforts on Bill Clinton and his alleged "lack of moral authority." As if Slobodan Milosevic was sitting in his office one day and said (insert Boris Badenov voice here):"Look, Natasha!! It says in 'Daily Bugle' that President Clinton is receiving oral sex from intern! Now we can be killing Albanians!"
Actually, the main reason Milosevic and every other tin-horn dictator in the world seems to think they can thumb their nose at us is the fact that we've set their victory threshold so low. The tyrants of the world know that in order to credibly declare victory, America has to, in the words of Conan the Barbarian, "crush enemies, drive dem before us, and hear de lamentation of der women." In contrast, all our enemies have to do is kill a few Americans or put a captured pilot on CNN. They learned well the lesson of Somalia, which is that America is loath to absorb any casualties whatsoever. We could barely stand the loss of the plane. One reporter asked if we planned to ground all the stealth fighters "now that we've discovered that they're not as stealthy as we thought." Good thing he wasn't on Omaha Beach, or Tom Hanks would never have saved Private Ryan. (Note: I haven't seen the movie yet, so if they didn't really save Private Ryan, don't tell me. It'll ruin the ending.)
We need to get serious, folks. To quote Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, "war means fighting, and fighting means killing." We're very, very good at war, but we're not bulletproof. If we're going to intervene, we shouldn't kid ourselves that Americans aren't going to get killed or captured. We need to ask the hard question: is it worth it? Should we risk American lives to save a bunch of people whose names we can't even pronounce? Or is there perhaps another reason behind what's happening here?
Let's be honest. A bombing campaign is not going to save a single Kosovar. Our attack aircraft can rip open a Serbian tank like a freshly-cooked pan of Jiffy Pop, but you don't need tanks for ethnic cleansing. You just need enough thugs with assault rifles, and Yugoslavia apparently has a higher thug-to-civilian ratio than all three "Godfather" movies, with a Joe Pesci film festival thrown in for good measure.
No, this whole thing is about more than Albanians in Kosovo. What's happening to them is tragic, but it's a symptom of the main disease, namely Milosevic himself. He's Yugoslavia's uber-thug, a man who cheerfully orders the death or displacement of half a million people to keep Yugoslavia all Serbian, all the time. And his constant yammering about a "greater Serbia" warns us that he may have his eye on bigger things than Kosovo. The guy's a noxious weed, and the time to prune him back is now, before he's snarled all over the Balkans like kudzu.
You don't necessarily need ground troops for that. You need ground troops if you want to physically move an enemy off a piece of ground, and Lord knows we don't want to occupy Yugoslavia. But you can use air power to put an armored division in the hurt locker. You can break a lot of sophisticated and expensive equipment. You can seriously degrade Milosevic as a threat, and hopefully keep a little dictator from becoming a big dictator. And yes, THAT commitment is worth the effort. But we have to realize that that commitment means we may lose some planes, and yes, maybe some pilots. Nobody wants that to happen, least of all me. But the only one who has an invisible plane is Wonder Woman, and she ain't here.
©1999 Jerry D. Rhoades, Jr.