Hollow Holocaust: The President's Dangerous Humbug
Las week, just before a night of bombing that would send 100 civilians to their graves, Defense Secretary William Cohen crowed that Serbian Army officers were sending their families out of Yugoslavia. This was evidence, Cohen said, that the Serbs were seeing "the handwriting on the wall." But soldiers surrender when they see the handwriting on the wall. They send their families away when they fear that their wives and small children will get blown to pieces by random civilian bombings.
Such calculated obtuseness as Cohen's has typified the American war effort. The news was all over Washington last week that the White House had hired Leslie Dach, a veteran public-relations specialist, to manage an image makeover for the war effort. Presumably, Dach is supposed to produce a bunch of tearjerker videos about the Kosovar refugees that will do for our bombing what Harry Thomason's agitprop classic "Man from Hope" did for the 1992 Clinton election effort (thus giving a whole new meaning to the expression "military campaign"). As Hillary Clinton arrived at the Macedonian refugee camps for two days of moral preening in front of starving people, it was announced by CNN that its own Christiane Amanpour had obtained the first tv interview with Hillary since her "vast right-wing conspiracy" speech a year and a half ago. What a surprise! Amanpour is married to Jamie Rubin, Madeleine Albright's closest aide, who's now the top State Dept. Kosovo flack.