NEW YORK -- For a while, some days or weeks, Americans will put aside their puzzlement about President Clinton's decision to go to war against Yugoslavia because of Kosovo. They will support the war because "our troops are out there" and because only a person whose soul has died can stand the pictures of refugees and bodies without wanting to stop the carnage.
Then, if the air bombardment goes on, it will occur to them that down there on the ground getting killed are people called Serbs who never raised a finger against us, were once our allies and long to be allies again. That might lead them to say, how in heaven do we stop killing these people?The man who can help us do that is Slobodan Milosevic. And right now, the only way he can do that is to agree to surrender in the civil war with the Kosovars by allowing them to secede after three years from Serbia.
That would make him a traitor not only to himself but to the Serbs. They think of Kosovo not as the property of the Albanian Muslim majority there, but as the spiritual, historic and religious center of all Serbia, particularly the 69 percent Christian population.
I do not get emotional about the history of Kosovo. I am not a Serb. Serbs do. They lost a great battle to Turkey there in 1389. As a reporter in Eastern Europe, I learned that to Serbs the loss was not the end but the beginning of their hopes for national resurrection and so a holy place.
Serbs are as likely to give up Kosovo willingly because the Albanians want it as Israelis are to give up Jerusalem because the Arabs want it.
NATO is supposed to be for defense of its members. But it now attacks nonmember Serbia, after a pompous declaration from its Spanish head, because Serbia is led by a louse. Daydream: My old Serb friend, Milovan Djilas, stands in Geneva and orders the Spanish to get out of rebellious Basque territory.
The attack may bring about Serbian surrender on Kosovo, but not for long. Serbs' passion for another rebirth will rise again.
They will target the NATO occupation force, particularly the U.S. contingent, with guns and hate. Can we live with that? It was not guns but the hate of virtually the entire population that drove us quickly out of Somalia.
President Clinton talks about "credibility." In Kosovo, we are supposed to be fighting for human rights. But he inflicted an ever-bleeding wound on America -- destroying any American human-rights policy faintly worthy of the name.
Milosevic has a dictator's essential quality. He is ever ready to kill his own people to maintain and keep power. In that, he is no different from Saddam Hussein, or Moammar Gadhafi, or Iran's ruling ayatollahs, or the Sudanese leaders who murder and enslave countrymen, particularly Christians and animists -- or the murderers' bench known as the Chinese Politburo.
But Clinton let Saddam destroy the U.N. commission that was all that stood between Iraq and weapons of mass destruction. The United States is about to "punish" Libya for its role in the destruction of Pan Am 103 -- by trying two of Gadhafi's Libyan officers. He disallows court questions about his own part in the bombing!
The Politburo? With his own hand, and in his own act of betrayal of the Politburo's vast gulags of prisoners in China and Tibet, Clinton "de-linked" human rights from trade -- do as you wish, as long as you trade with us.
In the cases of China, Libya, the Sudan and the ayatollahs, military action was not asked for by us human-rights folk -- just the use of economic pressure against the dictators and against those allies who double-cross us and the prisoners by snapping up the trade we lost.
Clinton solemnly tells Americans that we may lose men and women in Kosovo. But he was not willing to lose any trade with China.
When other Americans say the war against Yugoslavia is moral, I am moved to think hard. When Clinton talks about it I am moved to nausea.
And don't tell me there are no solutions. First, tell the Kosovars they can have autonomy but that we are not going to kill Serbs and Americans for Kosovo's independence.
Then, at last, give utmost political and financial support to all those Serbs who will not give up Kosovo as part of their heritage but would give up Slobodan Milosevic tomorrow if we helped them -- early tomorrow.
New York Times News Service