It's a Soft Rain's Gonna Fall

 Recently, in Yugoslavia, NATO forces plunged Belgrade into darkness by taking out the city's main power plant. The weapon used was not a smart bomb, but a so-called "soft bomb"-a projectile which exploded over the power plant and sprayed threads of highly conductive graphite over all of the electronic equipment, causing massive short-circuits. Using this technological marvel, NATO says it's able to disable an enemy's technology without loss of life or permanent damage to property. The graphite bomb, however, is only the first in a whole series of "soft" weapons. For example:

• NATO plans to destabilize Serbian society by flying over Yugoslav High Schools in specially equipped Blackhawk helicopters and dropping crates of black trench coats, Marilyn Manson CD's and "Quake" computer games. A second wave will drop thousands of VHS tapes of Oliver Stone's movie "Natural Born Killers." "We were just going to air-drop Oliver Stone," a Pentagon spokesman explained, "but that plan fell apart when we started arguing about whether or not to give him a parachute." When asked about the human-rights implications of possibly turning Yugoslav teens into mad killers, the spokesman, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said "Nah, everybody knows that'll never happen. But it'll make the adults really, really paranoid."

• In an attempt to destroy Serbia's mass media, specially equipped Air Force electronic-warfare aircraft will fly over Serbia, replacing transmissions from destroyed TV stations with reruns of shows that just ran the same episodes three weeks ago. When news of the plan leaked, the president of Serbia's main TV network, Twentieth Century Lisica, said "We are not afraid. The American networks did it from January through April and they survived."

• Meanwhile, powerful jamming stations along the Albanian border will replace regular radio programming with recordings of Al Gore reading his book "Earth in the Balance" and Hillary Clinton reading "It Takes a Village." "We give it fourteen, maybe fifteen hours," commented General George S. Muckenfuss, the inventor of so-called "Lit-War" and the military genius behind the operation, code-named BORED WITLESS. "After that, the whole country will be sound asleep. We'll be able to take Belgrade with a troop of Girl Scouts." Girl Scouts of America President Elinor J. Ferdon could not be reached for comment.

• Pentagon officials refused to confirm or deny reports of plans to infiltrate Monica Lewinsky into Slobodan Milosevic's offices in an attempt to disrupt the Serbian regime. Inside sources, however, report that the scheme, code-named Operation HOOVER, had to be scrapped when the other half of the plan, Whitewater prosecutor Kenneth Starr, refused to participate. Starr reportedly complained that a mission to Yugoslavia would create a time conflict with his perjury trial of every woman in the country who says President Clinton did NOT make sexual advances to her. "We considered replacing Starr with Johnnie Cochran," the source said, "but Cochran declined when he couldn't think of a word that rhymed with 'Milosevic' ." The World Court was thus spared the dilemma of considering whether dropping lawyers on a hostile power violates the Geneva Convention.

• The Pentagon has enlisted the services of the computer programmer who developed the "Melissa" virus to create a new virus that American deep-cover agents will use to infect Serbian computer networks. The insidious virus, code-named "Scrambled Eggs," will infect all Serbian government e-mail and word-processing programs, turning certain key words and phrases into anagrams. For instance, references to "Slobodan Milosevic" will appear as "Divine local bosoms," thus weakening Milosevic's hold on power by making him look silly. Officials discounted the possibility of a countervirus strike by Yugoslavian hackers that would turn the name "William Jefferson Clinton" in all official correspondence into "Stiff clown in lonelier jam." Russian President Boris Yeltsin ("Noisy blister") declined comment on his country's participation in the plan.