Anyway, here's the text of the page if your interested. -- adam
April 21, 1999
Kemp to Quayle on Kosovo (April 6)
Memo To: Political commentators
From: Jude Wanniski
Re: Leading on Kosovo
Following is a memo Jack Kemp of Empower America sent to former
Vice President Dan Quayle earlier this month. Kemp apparently sent
the memo to some of the GOP leaders on Capitol Hill and Robert
Novak asked Quayle about it on his CNN show last Saturday
(4/17/99). We linked to that interview Tuesday and you can catch up
with it today. The Kemp memo, you will see, is remarkable in its length
and harshness in its criticism of the bombing campaign. Kemp has not
endorsed Quayle’s presidential candidacy, but they appear to see
eye-to-eye on the Balkans.
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Memorandum To: Dan Quayle
From: Jack Kemp
Subject: Leading on Kosovo
Thanks for calling Sunday. Here’s the memo you asked for on my
"take" on the situation in Kosovo:
The road to hell is paved with good intentions, which is where we are
surely headed in Yugoslavia unless a Republican leader emerges to
clear a path toward a more positive outcome. The fact that so many
leading congressional Republicans shared in the design of the
administration's failed policy tells us that there is little room for partisan
criticism of the President, but enormous room for constructive criticism.
Because you are a serious candidate for the presidency yourself, and
I've taken myself out of the competition, it could be that you are the
man to fill this crying need -- to prevent what could easily become the
biggest American foreign policy failure since the Bay of Pigs.
Early on, regrettably, a few leading congressional Republicans bought
into the President's poorly conceived strategy, giving it a gloss of
bipartisianship by voting to support the bombing. By doing so, they put
us on the path to war and put the vast majority of Republicans in a very
tight corner. A number of the other Republican presidential contenders
have either joined in support of intervention, remained silent, or
straddled the issue with vague statements. Now, having been dragged
into a genuine foreign policy debacle, the American people find
themselves in a quandary. We not only blundered to this point through a
bipartisan miscalculation. We also face a slippery slope that promises to
end in much greater violence, human suffering and loss of life.
Will we, as I believe we must, have the courage and the ingenuity to cut
the devastation on both sides, stop the ill-conceived war immediately
and help construct a diplomatic solution? And if we do, how can we get
out without rewarding Milosevic’s despicable behavior and without
destroying our credibility in the process? Or, will we be lured deeper
into a bloody quagmire under the delusion that we have no choice but to
fight our way out, no matter what the costs in human life?
Politically, these questions are so tough for Republicans, and
emotionally, the "fight-response" is so powerful when our troops are in
harm’s way that most of our colleagues will fail to see a way out of the
morass. They will find themselves sucked deeper into war. That’s why I
believe you can help lead America out of the cul-de-sac into which
we’ve stumbled. For a presidential contender, what I am suggesting will
be risky. It will take courage to stand against this war and to show
America where her long-term self-interests really lie. It will, in short,
require a vision of what America’s foreign policy should look like in the
21st Century.
There are only two serious reasons for the U.S. ever to have
considered transforming NATO from a successful defensive alliance
into an agent of offensive action. The weaker of the two reasons is that
humanitarianism requires it. Kosovo -- at least before NATO’s
bombing turned it into a major humanitarian catastrophe -- has been a
humanitarian disaster but no where near the same magnitude of scores
of other such civil wars taking place around the globe. If
humanitarianism justifies and requires our military intervention in
Kosovo, it means that we would truly become the policeman of the
world. Humanitarianism is a slippery slope into war and as a general
proposition should never be the sole, or even the primary, reason we
risk spilling American blood on the battlefield.
The stronger of the two reasons for is that we put our credibility behind
the transformation of NATO into a police force and now must proceed
to victory at all costs in order to preserve our credibility. That is, the
consequences of not winning are too serious to endure. Henry Kissinger
believes the bombing was wrong but that once begun there is no retreat;
that unless we go into Kosovo with an occupying army to guarantee
Kosovar independence we will legitimize the massive ethnic cleansing
stimulated by the bombing and thereby abandon our credibility.
Kissinger states forthrightly that he believes we have no choice but to
violate Serbian sovereignty, wrench Kosovo away from Serbia and set
it up as an independent protectorate of NATO. By so doing, Kissinger
acknowledges we will be assuming for ourselves the same despised role
played by the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires in the Balkans.
Yet, in spite of so undesirable an outcome, Henry still believes we must
continue along this course because he can conceive of no other escape
from the President’s disastrous intervention.
Several Republicans in addition to Kissinger, all of whom I hold in
equally high regard (such as Bob and Elizabeth Dole, Steve Forbes,
George W. Bush and John McCain), also have concluded that no
matter how weak the case for war in Kosovo may be on the merits, we
are now inextricably involved, and we must, therefore, do whatever is
necessary militarily to "win." We are in the bramble; it is impossible to
back out gracefully. Therefore we must fight our way out the other side.
Some have suggested that this implies a relentless bombing campaign to
force Milosevic to give up Kosovo. Others insist that a massive ground
assault is necessary to throw the Serbs out of Kosovo. Some contend
that it would be safe and sufficient to arm the KLA insurgency so the
Kosovar Albanians can carry out a guerilla war and win their
independence or fight the Serbs to a standstill inside Kosovo -- a form
of "Albanianization" of the war.
But Dan, as difficult and perilous as the Republican Establishment
makes stopping the war sound, I am convinced that continuing the war
is immeasurably more dangerous. The false premise on which the
Establishment’s line of reasoning rests is that peace around the world
hangs on whether or not people believe America is prepared to go to
war to preserve it. World peace cannot rest on American threats of
violence, bombs at midnight or the "bully" tactics of President Clinton. If
this is where American foreign policy is heading in the next century, we
are in big trouble.
Of the three war options in Kosovo, arming the KLA looks most
attractive on its face because it would seem to permit us to continue the
war from afar long after we have run short of cruise missiles. I believe,
however, that this strategy rests on a false premise, which mistakenly
analogizes Kosovo to our successful efforts during the Cold War to arm
other resistance groups who were fighting Communism. The logical flaw
in drawing this analogy is that the successful efforts in Latin America,
Africa and Afghanistan worked precisely because they involved a
calculated strategy of siding with one faction in a civil war to combat a
common enemy that threatened the U.S. directly -- Communism. We
threw in our lot with some rather nasty people during the Cold War, not
because we were particularly interested in seeing them rule but rather
because we had a very definite and well defined interest in preventing
Communism from spreading anywhere else around the world. We face
no common enemy in the Balkans.
In arming the KLA -- a group funded by drug money that the State
Department contends has committed terrorist acts -- we would run a
huge risk of fanning the flames of Muslim fundamentalism against a
former Christian ally. Israel’s foreign minister, Ariel Sharon, warns that
there are Hezbollah people, mujahidin forces and Bin-Laden people, all
working with the KLA. Arming the KLA is the fastest way I know to
turn Bill Clinton’s disingenuous warnings about a Balkan "tinder box"
into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Arming the KLA would almost certainly
destabilize the region even further -- not to mention the horrible
precedent it would set. If we become the KLA’s arms merchant, should
we also assist the Tibetans against Beijing, the Chechans against
Moscow, the IRA against London, the Kurds against Turkey, Quebec
against Canada and the Basques against Madrid? See where this goes?
It would lead to enormous pressure to enter into every "war for
independence" that came along. It is Wilsonianism run amok and the
logical extension of an emerging Clinton doctrine.
I believe the way out of this box begins, but does not end as the Clinton
Administration insists, with the Rambouillet proposal. I believe we must
elicit Russia’s assistance to transform the Rambouillet proposal into a
workable framework for peace. The President insists that the only way
out of his fool-hearty war is to embark on "relentless bombing" to
impose a fatally flawed peace. Instead, if we would stop the bombing
and listen carefully to the signals being sent by the Serbian government,
I believe we would hear Belgrade accepting three of the four
Rambouillet conditions: 1.) a cease fire with withdrawal of Serbian
military forces from part or all of Kosovo; 2.) some form of self
government for the Kosovar Albanians; and 3.) allowing the refugees to
return to their homes. The one condition rejected by Serbia, the same
condition that doomed the Rambouillet proposal from the outset, is the
stationing of NATO troops in Kosovo as a peacekeeping force.
Dropping this fourth condition is, I believe, the key. Instead of insisting
on stationing NATO troops in Kosovo, I believe a combined force
made up of the OSCE monitors that left in the wake of the war and
other military forces acceptable to Belgrade (Russian for example),
would allow Serbia to retain its sovereignty at the same time it gave
NATO, and more importantly the refugees, a high degree of certainty
that the ethnic cleansing will not recur. A fifth condition touted by a
growing number of people is removal of Milosevic from office. I agree
with Henry Kissinger, in this case, that such a condition is unnecessary
and likely to be counterproductive.
Our greatest hope for peace in the Balkans is an economically
prosperous region.... We must prevent bad economic policy from
undermining any political settlement that emerges. It was the IMF that
created a tinderbox out of the Balkans at the end of the Cold War. The
result of the IMF’s deadly economic medicine of the late 1980s has
been to bankrupt the entire Yugoslav economy, destroy the currency
and unemploy the people. We should be doing everything possible to
prevent the IMF from re-entering the region and undermining efforts to
rebuild the economies.
The Joint Chiefs resisted this war because they knew that no
fundamental U.S. interests were at stake, and they understood better
than anyone the impossible demands the Clinton Administration was
placing on the military. The military professionals also understand that
no military "solution" can ever hope to solve what is, at heart, both an
economic and a political problem.
Ronald Reagan won the Cold War not only because of his nerve in
confronting the Evil Empire but also because of his ability to recognize a
mistake like the one he made in Lebanon and reverse course before he
made a bad situation worse. What would Ronald Reagan do in
Kosovo? First, he would never have gotten us in, but had he made the
mistake of getting us involved, he certainly would not have allowed a
misplaced sense of machismo to compound the mistake with more
mindless violence.
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