I was on a trip, away from the news media for the most part, from Friday through Sunday. Catching up with the war coverage late yesterday reading the NY Times, I was amazed at how intense war hysteria has become among liberals. It really is like Vietnam all over again. Anthony Lewis was virtually frothing at the mouth in his NYT column Saturday, e.g.:
"So we must carry the air war much further, especially against [Milosevic's] armed thugs on the ground in Kosovo. They should be harried, trapped, deprived of heavy weapons, fuel and communications: driven out by force. ...
"NATO must now begin to assemble ground troops, ready to enter Kosovo as a fighting force if necessary or to be a protection force for returning refugees if and when the Serbian forces are gone. Ruling out ground forces at the start was a grievous political mistake, convincing Mr. Milosevic that we were not serious. A majority of Americans, and a larger majority of Britons, now favor the use of ground troops....
"We have to face a hard fact: The United States and its allies must be in this for the long haul. ... James Hooper of the Balkan Action Council is right when he says, 'The Balkans are the new Berlin: the test of Western will.'"
As for the "collateral damage" all this mindless muscle flexing is causing us, I would point to the following article, also from the NYT, which appears today:
Hostility to U.S. Is Now Popular in Moscow
By Michael Wines
Moscow --The NATO bombing of Yugoslavia may or may not free the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, but a thousand miles away, it has already had a profoundly liberating effect. After eight long-suffering years, it is once again acceptable -- even de rigueur -- for Russians to dislike Americans.
Enough Russians have embraced animosity, and with such sudden fervor, that some experts here say it threatens to become the guiding force in a relationship with little else going for it.
[snip]
Russia's anti-American angst over Yugoslavia may understandably puzzle Americans. Russians and Serbs share an Eastern Orthodox tradition, but Yugoslavia, after all, has no border with Russia and was not even a reliably pro-Moscow ally during the days of Soviet empire. Its President, Slobodan Milosevic, is hardly the sort of leader most governments would willingly endorse.
But Russians view the bombing of Yugoslavia through a different and darker lens. To most of them, the NATO bombing campaign is the latest and most flagrant instance in which the United States has rubbed Moscow's nose in its new second-tier status.
Rightly or not, Russian illusions about democracy and the American character already have been shattered by Russia's disastrous introduction to capitalism, said Sergei M. Rogov, who directs the Institute for the Study of the U.S. and Canada here.
Many Russians were led to believe that the United States would spend billions of dollars, Marshall Plan-style, to ease Russia's transition from Communism to market capitalism, he said. When the money failed to arrive and the transition foundered, the Russian reaction was to feel betrayed.
"The outcome," he said, "created the perception that the United States was doing it on purpose -- trying to undermine Russia as an economic and political competitor."
American military policy has only reinforced the average Russian's suspicions, he said.
"Russians felt that we ended the cold war and started to behave nicely by dissolving the Warsaw Pact, withdrawing troops, cutting arms," he said. "And thus the very maintenance of NATO was seen as strange. But the enlargement of NATO, with NATO absorbing former Soviet clients -- that was interpreted as a symbol of Western mistrust toward Russia, and some even said hostile intentions."
NATO intervention in Yugoslavia, in addition to the American and British bombing of Iraq, has only galvanized Russian fears that the Soviet propagandists may have been right -- and that Americans are in fact bent on imposing their will on the world, by force if necessary.
The weight of such disillusionment might be more bearable were the United States' relationship with Russia strong. But Rogov said the two nations' relations are in deep crisis, with disagreements over everything from economics to military and strategic policies.
Vyachaslav Nikonov, who directs the Russian research institute Politica, agrees.
"I don't think it can influence the relationship between the two countries, because the relationship is nonexistent," he said. "Except for I.M.F. issues, I don't think there is an agenda."
[end of excerpt]
Carl Remick