Tag: Viet Nam

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Dien Bien Phu

The Japanese took Viet Nam away from France during World War II. At the end of the war, France– it’s manhood seriously in doubt, I suppose– tried to take it back. To do this– believe it or not– they accepted the assistance of some Japanese forces that had yet to be repatriated. You can’t make this stuff up.

Let’s go back a little further: history is incredibly rich in instructive detail about empires and irony.

The French chose sides in a long-standing civil war in Viet Nam, which had it’s roots in the 1850’s. Eventually, the French and their proxies simply elbowed aside the natives and took over. Why? History books simply tell you that the French “took control” as if there was something logical and reasonable about a European Nation walking into a foreign country on the other side of globe and taking control. It’s ours now. Your wealth will now flow into our pockets. You are now working for us.

With the defeat by Nazi Germany, France lost control of their colonies, to the Japanese. During the Japanese occupation, Ho Chi Minh agitated for a end to any foreign domination, and formed a guerrilla movement. When the Japanese were defeated, Ho proclaimed an independent Viet Nam. That seemed an insanely rational thing to do.

The French, deeply moved by the sad experience of being occupied by an evil foreign power, congratulated them and moved on.

Hoo hah! Did you believe that even for a second? No, France said, not so fast. They offered a puppet state to Ho; he declined.

It was the French and the Americans who defied rationality. The French decided to try to take Viet Nam back, as if they had some sacred title deed to the nation. After the negotiations failed, the French moved their armies in. A little cheesy, you might think. Having been soundly defeated by the Germans and restored to power by the Americans and British, they go marching into Viet Nam all bluster and courage and medals and parades. In fact, General Gracie, the British commander, allowed the Japanese to be re-armed in order to help the French retake Viet Nam from the Viet Minh!

It reminds me of those parties in New York where people you thought were political or literary enemies all gather together and toast themselves.  Kissinger and Truman Capote and Barbara Walters and Jackie Kennedy and Prince Andrew– all together, schmoozing.

Here is the fork of history– how many lives would have been saved if the French had simply admitted that they didn’t belong there in the first place, and if they had simply congratulated Viet Nam on their independence and moved on? Where would we be today? How many French, Americans, and Vietnamese, and Cambodians, and Laotians, would be alive and well and perhaps even prosperous today, if some asshole Frenchmen had not decided that it would do France’s honor some good if it could bully some Asians into submission and take their rubber?

Yes, what they wanted, I believe, was the rubber.

Let’s not be overly simplistic– the communist government in the North were no saints; they destroyed the economy and caused famine into the 1950’s. Russia and China interfered, using them for their own purposes. But the decisive matter is this: Viet Nam resisted both the French and the Americans because they wanted independence, and once the French and then the Americans were gone, they turned on the Chinese and the Russians and did just what they said they would do originally: take control of their own nation. Had the French departed in 1950 as they should have, they would have learned their lessons about management of the economy much sooner. The moderates would also not have been driven from all levels of government the way they were when civil war broke out.

The Americans, we are told in one documentary, confronted Chinese troops in Korea, which led them to believe that communist China must be “contained”. The glib voice doesn’t tell us how the Chinese came to be involved in Korea, of the arrogance of McArthur, and the diplomatic bungling, or the hubris of the allies. (China wanted to stay out, but the Americans blundered into the border areas in order to crush the North Koreans. China warned the U.S. that they had an interest in who occupied the towns near or on their borders– the U.S. ignored the warnings and were completely taken by surprise by the Chinese attack.)

So the French, in order to cut off a possible Viet Minh initiative into Laos, moved about 10,000 troops into a valley in North Western Viet Nam called Dien Bien Phu. Comments on Youtube in response to a documentary on Dien Bien Phu rhapsodize about the honor and courage of those 10,000 French.  These commentators want you, the reader, to be willing to do the same thing, because it’s so honorable and courageous, for your government, if they ask you do.

Are you mad?

What is “courage”, when placed in the service of idiocy and patriotism?  The French built an airstrip and fortifications and promptly found themselves surrounded by 50,000 Viet Minh. Even the possibility of retreat had been excised.

In early stages of the battle, the Viet Minh lost 10,000 casualties to 1,700 French. At that rate, you might think the French might eventually win.

But all the lessons the U.S. later took 13 years to learn were in full expression at Dien Bien Phu already in 1954.

  • technological superiority may not prevail
  • the determination of the enemy should not be underestimated
  • an enemy with a deep and abiding knowledge of the terrain and culture will drive you crazy
  • a war should never be about settling scores or proving your manhood or making points: what, really, was the French interest in Indochina?
  • the full support of the nation is required for a long, drawn-out conflict
  • God knows that you are sacrificing the lives of others. God knows that you asked others to risk what you yourself would never risk for anyone: your life.
  • God knows that you were blinded by self-interest when you assessed the relative risks and benefits of the military actions you commanded.

How many of these lessons apply to Iraq?

They almost certainly apply to Afghanistan which, after 10 years of occupation, shows no sign of pacification.

Above, the monument to Ho Chi Minh.

It’s always been the oil. It’s never been about anything other than the oil. And the fact that naive Americans still fervently believe that it is about anything other than oil tells you a lot about how astoundingly successful the massive public con of “patriotism” has been. My goodness- it’s there, right in your face. It’s not even camouflaged. It’s Dick Cheney in the White House actually admitting that it’s about the oil. And the open question about whether George Bush ever, deep in his heart, did not believe it.

Invariably, the terms offered during negotiations after fighting has broken out and the costs have become clear are worse than those offered initially.

And so it was in Viet Nam: in 1953, the terms offered to the French were far less attractive than those offered at the start of the civil war in 1950. If you were the parents or wife or lover of a young soldier who died in the civil conflict before 1953— would a monument ease your sense of lost?

There is a magnificent monument to Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi. Isn’t it beautiful? You should read about Viet Nam in the 1940’s and 50’s and 60’s, and the wars, and the betrayals, and the genocides, and the Vietnamese intervention in Cambodia to put a stop the Khmer Rouge, and then the Chinese putting a stop to the Vietnamese… you should look at the monument and contemplate it’s stolid quiet complacency, the almost zen-like beauty of it’s ghostly visage against the horizon, and you will see history. You will see the millions of shattered and destroyed lives, the starvations, the tortures, the explosions and fires, the bombs and bayonets, the rivers of blood– there they all are, asleep, anesthetized, dreaming of the lives they might have lived, were it not for the grand mission of history embalmed in the monument by the name of a general or king or president for life… in this case, a dried up old corpse named Ho Chi Minh.

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Viet Nam 20 Years After Indifference

George Bush is about to travel to Viet Nam with a contingent of 200 business leaders, on the occasion of Viet Nam’s probable admission to the World Trade Organization. He will be attending the Asia Pacific Economic forum. Viet Nam hopes to showcase it’s emerging economy at this meeting: we’re ready to join the Asian tigers.

Bush has already met with Viet Namese Prime Minister Phan Van Khai.

It is 2006. In 1973, the U.S.-backed government of South Viet Nam collapsed and the U.S. army fled. Millions of refugees got into boats and ended up in refugee camps. Many were admitted to the U.S. The communist government of North Viet Nam unified the country and established a dictatorship. The U.S. went on it’s way to try to mess up Central America as much as possible, before watching the communist government of Russia implode (thanks largely to their disastrous attempt to foist a communist government on Afghanistan, leading to the triumph of the Taliban).

An objective person could be excused for wondering if there are lessons to be learned. In both cases, Afghanistan and Viet Nam, attempts to impose a friendly government (friendly to Russia, France or the U.S.) on a foreign nation conflicted with the nation’s own sense of identity and independence, and hostile political groups were able to take advantage and establish themselves as the representative of nationalist aspirations. The determination of the occupied to expel the occupiers was beyond the wildest imagination of the invader. Both Russia and the U.S. thought that superior technology and military might would, in the end, triumph.

What if the U.S. had decided, in 1963, to just leave Viet Nam alone?

What if the Soviet Union had decided, in 1979, to just leave Afghanistan alone?

Well, what if the Americans, who were funding the Mujahideen, who later became the Taliban, who later became Osama Bin Laden, had just minded their own business in Afghanistan as well?

And what if America had just stayed out of Iraq?

I think some generals already have come to the conclusion that as long as the U.S. remains in Iraq, they will be the focal point of opposition, and the opposition is always going to be led by the people most hostile to U.S. values and policies.

George Bush and his Republican apologists have been fond of saying that you couldn’t just leave Saddam in power. Well, you couldn’t just leave Viet Nam. And you couldn’t just not invade Cuba. And you couldn’t just not give military aid to the opponents of the Sandinistas. And so on, and so on. Time and time again, history shown that these kinds of grand schemes almost never work out.

Time and time again, the militarists are proven wrong by history, and proven right by their own delusions: they are always ready to enter a new quagmire.

 

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The Fog of McNamara

There is a remarkable moment in “Fog of War” when Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, and architect of the Viet Nam War, states that the U.S. should never enter a war without the support and assistance of it’s allies.

Everybody knows that for all the window-dressing applied to the support of Great Britain and Poland and a few other states, the U.S. entered Iraq not only without the active support of most of its allies, but with their active opposition.

It’s a hard lesson to learn.

But then, the point of “Fog of War” is that every assumption has to be re-examined in the light of experience and new information. Robert McNamara has more experience than most. I’m not sure what he’d make of the Iraq war. He might observe that another piece of wisdom America should have learned by now is that when the reasons given for military action prove to be invalid, instead of finding new reasons, find new actions.

If Bush had said right from the beginning that the U.S. would now be the world’s marshal, patrolling countries near and far, saving citizens from the abusive practices of dictators and bullies, and building democracies where none existed before, we might be able to have an honest and interesting debate about how it should be done, and or even whether it should be done. We could talk about whether the United Nations should play a part, or not, and whether the U.S., like Gary Cooper, should walk down Main Street alone at High Noon,

[added 2023-05-16]

Well, screw McNamara, if he thinks that was the problem.  The problem was not that the U.S. did not have a plausible path to victory: the problem was that the U.S. had no business getting into those wars in the first place.  The problem was that the U.S. frequently intervened not on behalf of democratic, liberal political parties and leaders, but on behalf of authoritarian leaders who could be counted on to turn over their economies or raw goods to U.S. corporations.

 

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We Were Soldiers: The Lies We Tell Ourselves

I don’t know how many ways it needs to be said, but Hollywood’s passion for fibbing while claiming to tell a “true” story is and always will be one of the most contemptible facets of modern American culture. We just can’t stand the truth.

I’m not talking about factual errors, or even the not unreasonable telescoping of events into a cinematic time-frame. I’m talking about exaggeration and distortion.

In the story told in “We Were Soldiers”, Lt. Col. Moore’s 1st Battalion/7th Cavalry command position was almost over-run when Company C failed to hold off advancing PAVN. It was an exciting battle sequence, and allowed the movie to show Moore himself in action.

In real life, Company C decimated the PAVN so badly that the attack never reached the command position.

In “We Were Soldiers”, the breakaway 29-man platoon led by Lt. Herrick chases a PAVN “scout” off onto a ridge where they are cut off from the rest of “C Company”. In real life, they were chasing nobody: they merely advanced too far. I suspect Director Randall Wallace thought it would be more exciting to show them chasing somebody.  Better yet, it would make Lt. Herrick look less stupid.

In the movie, only one man appears to be left alive of the 29 in the breakaway platoon. In reality, 20 of the men were still alive. That’s a rather big fib. Only 9 of the men were killed, though 13 were wounded, including the platoon leader.

In “We Were Soldiers”, victory is dramatized by Lt. Col. Moore leading his troops up to the PAVN command bunker area, as Lt. Col Nguyen Huu An flees his command post in the tunnels. That did not happen. Nor did the dramatic confrontation between Moore and the PAVN machine gun position (with the exciting arrival of the helicopters at just the right instant). Didn’t happen. Why is it in there? I don’t know. To show that helicopters are good?

A French Bugle was found, a few days after the events of the movie, in the same general area. I don’t care about that inaccuracy. It’s close enough, and it doesn’t materially affect your perception of the events at Ia Drang.

In 1965, the Huey “slicks” did not have machine guns mounted on their sides. An infantry man with an M16 defended each side of the chopper. Not as impressive cinematically, I guess.

A few days after Ia Drang, a far more horrendous battle took place as the relief battalion was about to be airlifted out, near a landing zone designated Albany. The 2nd Battalion/7th Calvary was spread out in a long column of 400 – 500 yards when attacked by surprise by a fresh regiment of PAVN. According to Jack Smith, most of the early casualties were due to friendly fire as panicked soldiers surrounded by PAVN snipers fired everywhere and anywhere. After a horrendous three-day battle, the survivors were air-lifted out. Casualties: 151 killed, 121 wounded.

Hal Moore, Jack Smith (son of Howard K. Smith, the ABC newsman), and other soldiers of the U.S. 7th Calvary travelled to Viet Nam in October 1993 to meet with their PAVN counterparts at the scene of the battle. There are pictures of them standing together and shaking hands.

There is something wonderful and even beautiful about such a moment. Men who once tried to kill each other in fierce battle now wisely shake hands and share memories. But there is something also deeply disturbing about it, and what is disturbing is not the shaking of hands and the smiles in the group photos. The disturbing part is that these friendly gatherings betray the utter purposelessness of Ia Drang, and every other battle of the Viet Nam War and almost every other war. In the truest sense of the word, the soldiers at Ia Drang were absurd.

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The West Wing

Just about the only television show I watch semi-regularly nowadays is “West Wing”. And The Simpsons. But let’s stay with “West Wing” for a minute.

I have to note here though that the only reason I don’t watch very much television is not because most television is crap, though it is. The fact is that there is a lot of good shows on television too. The trouble is that there are way too many commercials. Did you know that the Dick Van Dyke Show, in the early 1960’s, was about 28 minutes long? The average sitcom today is about 20 minutes. Where did the other 8 minutes go? You need to ask?

In tonight’s episode of West Wing, the President had to make some fateful decisions about possible military action to rescue hostages in Columbia. The story, which parallels reality rather closely, develops after the government gives Columbia $15 billion to fight the drug trade. After a remarkable speech about the utter futility of the drug war, the waste of money, the 80% of the U.S. prison population that consists of drug users, and so on, the dialogue takes a turn on Viet Nam. One of the President’s top advisors warns that he should not repeat the mistake of Viet Nam, which was… what? What was the mistake? The advisor said the mistake was that the U.S. entered the war on the side of a corrupt and unpopular government, and that it did not have clear objectives, and did not have a clear exit strategy. That was the mistake of the Viet Nam War.

The West Wing is one of the few television shows that really is unabashedly liberal. Don’t believe for one minute all that nonsense from Conservative commentators on the so-called “liberal” media– it simply aint true. West Wing is the exception, not the rule.

But the advisor’s explanation about why the U.S. lost the war in Viet Nam buys into a conservative revisionist position that is itself a desperate attempt to rehabilitate the idea of U.S. subterfuge of foreign governments for its own self-interest.

The Viet Nam War began because the U.S. and France refused to accept the results of an election in 1956 which produced a socialist government of a united Viet Nam. With both French and American encouragement, a group of rebels seized power in the South and created a pro-capitalist regime. When the new regime proved unpopular– after all, the people elected the socialists– the U.S. was forced to step in to support the government, and fight a proxy war against the North Viet Namese government, which, reasonably, was determined to reunite the country.

Where did France go? Those silly Frenchmen! They decided that backing a self-seeking, corrupt, illegitimate government against the popular wishes of its own people was a losing proposition! The fools!

The North did not remain democratic, really, but we don’t know what would have happened if the South had not seceded and the U.S. had not involved itself. It doesn’t really matter– the fact is that the U.S. interfered in the domestic policies of a sovereign state and paid the price for it. That’s why they lost Viet Nam. It had nothing to do with unclear objectives. The objective was, in fact very clear: the maintenance of a pro-American proxy state in the region at whatever cost to civil rights and democracy. The problem was not that the Americans did not have an exit strategy: given the objectives, there was no need for an exit at all. And the problem was not that the government of South Viet Nam was unpopular and corrupt: that was at least partly a consequence of U.S. policy, not an impediment to it. Had the U.S. stayed out, chances are quite good that that corrupt government could never have sustained it’s position.

The writers and producers of “West Wing” should know better.

But it’s a great show. It’s subtle, sophisticated, topical, and relevant. That’s rare in television. What’s even more rare is the overt political nature of the program: it is quite frankly Democrat in perspective. The Democrats should be proud.

The Republicans, if they were really smart, would be working on their own television drama by now. On the other hand, they already have a dozen: Law and Order, NYPD Blue, and just about every other cop show on television. They almost all show that respect for civil rights and the assumption of innocence is an impediment to justice and fairness. They almost all propagandize for unlimited police powers. They almost all feed into the right wing paranoia that has led to the creation of America’s idiotic drug and gun laws.

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Quagmire

The U.S. likes to call itself the “World’s Only Superpower”. Superpowers, of course, have responsibilities. Right now, for example, there is a disastrous civil war taking place in Sierra Leone, the poorest nation on the face of the earth. At least 100,000 civilians have been driven into refugee camps and are facing starvation or cold-blooded murder. Where is the world’s cop? At home debating a stained dress.

A few years ago, a civil war broke out in Rwanda, which led to the deaths of more than 200,000 people. Where was Uncle Sam?

When civil war broke out in Bosnia, George Bush took one look, heard the word “quagmire” whispered somewhere softly in the wings, and ran for cover. Not only did he not support military intervention—he actually tried to prevent the Bosnian Moslems from acquiring weapons with which to defend themselves against Serb aggression. But, hey, Bush had “character”, whatever that was.

Every time the U.S. considers military intervention in some far-flung part of the globe, a chorus of nay-sayers (including Colin Powell generally) raises their voices and squawks the one magic word that stops the Pentagon dead in their tracks every time: QUAGMIRE.

The application of the word “quagmire” to Viet Nam first occurred, as near as I can tell, in the title of David Halberstam’s excellent book on the subject, “The Making of a Quagmire”, which was published—get this – in 1965.  Yes, eight years before the U.S. began its exit.  That is a remarkable piece of foresight.

Unfortunately, contemporary journalists don’t understand what the problem with Viet Nam really was. They think the problem was that most Americans didn’t really, heartily support the war. They think the Viet Cong were so unrelentingly savage that our “good” boys, with their innate decency and “character”, were corrupted by their involvement.

The real problem was that we chose, as usual, the wrong side to support. In 1954, the remnants of post WW II Viet Nam, were partitioned by the United Nations into a North and South, under two different governments. The keystone of this agreement was a promised election in 1956 which would be fair and open and involve all opposition groups, and which would reunite the two partitions into one nation under one government.

Unfortunately, the regime of President Diem, which ruled the South with the support of the French, realized that it could not control the results of the election and postponed it. Diem also began to systematically repress all opposition political leaders and parties. When it became clear that he had no intention of giving up power, the remnants of the army that had liberated Viet Nam from the Japanese (the Vietminh) began organized opposition to the regime. The French were unable to dislodge the Vietminh so the Americans thought they would give it a try. They believed that the Chinese and Russians were aiding the Vietminh, and that if Viet Nam fell to the communists, Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia, and the rest of Asia would be sure to follow: the infamous Domino Theory.

At first, the Vietminh included a diverse coalition of political forces, including socialists, Catholics, and other democratic movements. But the corruption of the Diem government and the intensity of the fighting soon polarized the competing forces until the Vietminh, under the umbrella of the National Liberation Front led by Nguyen Huu Tho, was dominated by communists.

The Diem regime never did control the countryside around Saigon. South Viet Nam’s army, the ARVN, was commanded by political appointees more loyal to Diem than to their own generals or the war effort itself. They were arrogant and oppressive and they alienated the peasants who lived in the small villages around the Mekong Delta. As a result, the Viet Cong were easily able to operate, hide, and control large areas of the countryside.

The American “advisors” sent by Kennedy were efficient and sensible, but some of the most important early military initiatives were hamstrung by ineffective local leadership and corruption. U.S. ambassador Nolting continued to send cheery reports back to Kennedy, while reporters (including legendary figures like Peter Arnett, David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan, and Francois Sully), who actually traveled into the battle zones, were accused of disloyalty for reporting what they saw. What they saw were villagers who were hostile to government forces, ARVN battle groups that avoided fighting whenever they could, incompetent commanders, and bad planning. They saw an insurgent force that was quick, efficient, and brutal, and which commanded the respect and loyalty of the general population. They saw, at the battle of Ap Bac, 200 guerrillas defeat a combined force of U.S. and ARVN regulars ten times their number. Halberstam was one of the first to realize that the combination of domestic politics (Kennedy couldn’t afford to look “soft” on communism) and local corruption, including the dependency of the Diem government on U.S. military support, could lead to a unresolvable situation. It was not necessarily in the best interests of the Diem regime to bring an end to the war.

America was pouring in aid at the rate of $1.5 million a day. A lot of this money lined the pockets of Ngo Dinh Diem and his brothers, Can, Luyen, Thuc, and Nhu, and his sister-in-law, Madame Nhu, and his other cronies. It is quite possible that Diem never was interested in defeating the Viet Cong, thereby removing the incentive for lucrative American aid. It would be hard, otherwise, to comprehend the massive stupidity of the South Viet Namese government.

In June 1963, a Buddhist monk, protesting political and social discrimination against Buddhists by the Catholic Diem and his brothers, doused himself with gasoline and set himself ablaze in a public square in Saigon. This signaled the beginning of a summer of protest by Buddhists that gained increasing popular support. Diem’s response? His soldiers broke into Buddhist temples, looted their treasuries, and arrested Buddhist monks and nuns. A move more calculated to incite mass protests and rioting could not be imagined. On November 1, 1963, with tacit U.S. approval, a group of conspirators under the leadership of General Duong Van “Big” Minh turned their troops on Saigon and drove towards the Presidential palace. Diem was captured and killed. Seven more coups or attempted coups would follow. The quagmire was in full tilt. The U.S., blindly, foolishly, willfully plunged into the greatest debacle of its history.

When General Colin Powell talks about Bosnia, he tries to sound like some wizened old war horse who’s seen it all and can’t be fooled into risking the valuable lives of his young, well-trained killers on some frivolous mission to merely save people’s lives. He talks about Viet Nam, as if he thinks he understands all there is to learn from that experience, but experience doesn’t teach you right from wrong. Sometimes, he merely sounds resentful of the military disgrace. One senses, beyond the petulance, a fundamental commitment to the selfsame principles that caused the Viet Nam debacle in the first place, namely, that the guiding principle of foreign policy should be military strategy. At times he sounds like the living embodiment of Metternich’s dictum: “War is too important to be left to the politicians.”

The failure of the U.S.’s involvement in Viet Nam was entirely due to the social, cultural, and political realities of South East Asia. The U.S. made only sporadic and half-hearted attempts to force the South Vietnamese government to try to develop some kind of popular support. When Diem refused to fight corruption in his own government, reform his armies, and win the loyalty of the hamlets and villages in the Vietminh dominated areas of the countryside, the U.S. should have walked away, with the realization that victory was not only unlikely, but impossible.

What does “quagmire” mean in terms of current realities? The key difference between Viet Nam and Rwanda and Bosnia and Sierra Leone is that the latter three nations are not proxies for a world superpower conflict. They do not require the U.S. to make an alliance with unsavory dictators, and pour in military aid to prevent some expansionist foe from gaining the upper hand. And Russia is not only not interested in manipulating the crisis, but incapable of financing proxies. Cuba is out of the picture. China cares only about internal security. The U.S. is free to intervene on behalf of freedom, peace, and justice for all. They are free to be the good guys. How ironic that they no longer want to play.

March 22, 1999

Well, NATO has finally decided to try to stop the Serbs from “cleansing” Kosovo. And some critics, like Senator John McCain—future Republican presidential candidate– are already complaining that the U.S. does not have a credible exit strategy. Look, folks, we just got here!

A more interesting question is this: will the NATO attacks lead to peace? Will the Serbs be more willing to negotiate now?  If bombs and missiles are so effective, why is Saddam Hussein still ruling Iraq? Won’t this lead to intransigence, and a brooding hatred for all things American, and an intensified desire to defy NATO, knowing full-well how unlikely it is that we will ever see ground troops?

The inherent absurdity of bombing Serbia into submission is that bombing does not threaten the interests of the ruling class. Ruling classes everywhere know how to ride disaster: you reinforce the troops, barricade the palaces, and control the distribution of scarce goods—ensuring that you yourself will never suffer the slightest privation. The war footing ensures the success and acceptance of martial law. The crisis justifies harsher repression than usual. Milosevic cannot be threatened unless bombing reduces his country to total ruins and the people rise up in rebellion against him. But NATO cannot go that far, for it would be charged with committing atrocities against civilians, and it would almost eliminate the possibility of any kind of peaceful coexistence afterwards, between the Serbs and the Kosovars. So NATO must be content to strike military targets.

Slobodan Milosevic will be unmoved by the destruction of military installations and buildings as long as he can maintain his control over the army and government. I suspect that the only way he can be prevented from carrying out further atrocities is for NATO to invade with ground troops. At this point, NATO seems extremely reluctant to make that step.

March 31, 1999

And now they have hostages. Three American soldiers captured in Albania. And Bill Clinton goes on TV and announces that that is why he doesn’t want to bring in ground troops. He might as well say to Milosevic, “if you can tolerate the bombing for a few more weeks, we’ll eventually get frightened and go home.”

The whole point of intervention was to force Milosevic to stop the “ethnic cleansing” of Kosovo. I don’t know why anybody would have thought at any time that bombing alone would achieve this objective, when it has not achieved anything like that anywhere else in the world where it has been used (with the exception of Japan, after Hiroshima and Ngasaki).

And if the Americans are going to panic with every single casualty, they might as well go home right now, and relinquish the title of “World’s sole remaining superpower” because a superpower has a responsibility and a superpower does whatever it takes to stop genocide.