cost/benefit arithmetic

[Doug Henwood]

[Chris Caldwell in this week's New York Press]

Cheerleaders for the operation say Clinton Is lucky the public Is behind
him. But the perfunctory support that Americans always show when "our boys
are In harm's way" should not deceive us. There is no deep American support
for this mission - none. This is most apparent In the poll ABC took on the
day of the bombing, in which the network asked whether "it would be worth
the loss, of some American soldiers' lives if the United States could help
bring peace to Kosovo." Only 37 percent said it would; 59 percent said It
wouldn't. But the support is actually far, far weaker than that, because
ABC had the nifty idea of breaking that 37 percent down to figure out how
many lives Americans had in mind when they gave their answer. Would it be
worth 10? a hundred? a thousand? What ABC found is that once you got up to
100 Americans, a solid three-quarters of the country was dead-set against
it. When you get up to 1000 dead Yanks, you're at 91 percent opposed. In
other words, Americans are absolutely, 100 percent in favor of acting to
stop genocide, as long as it's merely a matter of a self-aggrandizing moral
"stand" that puts none of us in danger At the end of the day, we don't
think It's worth 10 of ours to save 10,000 of theirs.

That's how we got into this, of course: the bureaucratic machismo of a lot
of Washington policy types who avoided the last war and now hope to prove
their manhood and their moral superiority....