SEN. John McCain put a severe chill on history yesterday when he said “this will be the great shame” of the administration.
The Republican from Arizona was, of course, talking about how Bill Clinton had been playing this deadly game of poker with Slobodan Milosevic with all his cards facing upwards.
McCain has constantly maintained Clinton made a catastrophic blunder when he said that ground troops in Kosovo were not even a remote option.
“You don’t win a war by telling the enemy what you are not going to do,” McCain has said.
In fairness to the harsh reality of this mess, Clinton has had to deal with 18 other governments in NATO.
Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R-Texas) told CNN yesterday from Macedonia: “We wouldn’t have the allies with us” if we pressed a ground war. She is right.
But House Republican whip, Tom Delay (Texas) put another chill into history.
If Clinton took ground troops off the table because he couldn’t get NATO backing – and going it alone could seriously undermine NATO – then it’s hard to cry blunder.
But if it was because we are just so militarily weak that we couldn’t handle it, then, as McCain said, “this will be the great shame” of the administration.
Delay on “Meet the Press” yesterday blamed “excessive rhetoric and underwhelming force.”
He then gave a scenario of just how slim our arsenal is. It is scary.
“We have less than 70 cruise missiles … 700 pilots short … 18,000 sailors [short] … we don’t have enough live ammunition for training [for tanks].”
Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) conceded that the air war “may not be moving at the pace we would like … but we have to prepare for any eventuality.”
But it was retired general Colin Powell who obscured his real military genius with simple, if disturbing, common sense:
“Air power may work. But it is in the hands of Milosevic as to when it works … the danger with this strategy [is it is] in the hands of Milosevic when he decides to blink.”
Powell said the war was all about “going all out … war involves casualties … you have to accept the casualties.”
In plain words, our present strategy has come down to this: We have to persuade, persuade Milosevic to let our troops in.
We have simply come to a stage where we are letting the bully control when he wants to leave the schoolyard.
For all the talk of how successful the air war has been by the promoters of this strategy, what in God’s name has happened to those Apache helicopters which were going to wreak havoc on the Serbian troops – and avoid bombing mistakes on ethnic Albanian civilians and Chinese embassies?
They are already in place, but apart from two disastrous accidents, they haven’t seen action.
Despite the military victory in the Persian Gulf War, former President George Bush said he may have made a mistake by not going all the way to Baghdad to take Saddam Hussein out.
If Milosevic is not physically driven, from Belgrade he will sue for peace at a round table and boast that he won the war.
The naysayers will try to convince you that we have no strategic or political advantage by being in Kosovo. Those who say that are thundering imbeciles.
Let’s forget our righteous humanitarian efforts for just a second. Does anyone think that Russia, China, North Korea, Saddam Hussein, Khadafy and the madman of Iran aren’t watching this whole conflict through a microscope?
They want to see just what our resolve and strength is. And if they come to the conclusion “not much on either count,” you couldn’t blame them for being right.