[Which reminds me, the following is from Christopher Caldwell's column in the NY Press]
Have we really had so much time on our hands that for two years we brought the government’s business to a halt to reassess the time-honored institution of the secretarial blowjob? Don’t we wish we’d freed up a bit more of the president’s time to look into things like…oh, I don’t know…say, international terrorism?
Not that President Clinton would likely have made much use of it. Look at his preposterous adventure in Kosovo. It would be out of place to carp too much on the past, but let’s be clear about what that frivolous war was about. Milosevic faced an Islamic-terrorist uprising in Serbia’s southern possessions–backed by some of the same international sponsors we’re now at war with–complete with murders of children, kidnappings and bombings of police stations and public buildings. He responded by beefing up Serbia’s armed presence there. And when one of his units massacred 43 people (many of them guerrillas, it must be added), we let loose the dogs of war–or at least let loose Gen. Wesley Clark, to pose and preen like some sort of armed-to-the-teeth Albert Schweitzer.
It has hurt us gravely. Intellectually, it deprived us of the goodwill of the European center-right, who would be inclined to support us in a war against murderous Muslims. Politically, along with the West Bank "peace process," it led that part of the Muslim world that Understands Nothing But Force (and that’s exactly the part of the Muslim world that hijacked our planes) to think we were scared of Islam. And logistically, it deprived us of a great deal of Serbian terrorist expertise and most of our cruise missiles. It sure would be nice to have them back now, but we had to fire them at the bourgeoisie of Belgrade. We are short on rockets to fire at the people who hate us because we fired them all at people who, until the moment we did, loved us.
[Full text: http://www.nypress.com/14/38/news&columns/beans.cfm]
Carl
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