Word: airing
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Monday night, April 12, Bill Clinton made peace with his Yugoslav war. He was nearly three weeks deep into the air campaign by then, but for two hours he listened to participants at a White House conference chew over a familiar topic, "The Perils of Indifference." As Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel spoke passionately about Franklin Roosevelt's righteous leadership in a war against evil, Clinton leaned forward, totally absorbed. "You could tell he was thinking about his own war in Kosovo," says a friend who was there, adding, "The President and Hillary really pay attention to Elie." So when Wiesel...
Trouble is, few people disagree with the moral imperative of a war grounded in humanitarian principles. Milosevic's relentless pogrom in Kosovo ensures that. But from Day One, NATO's promise of victory by air power has seemed a limp match for the human costs of the campaign. And as the political leader who got the West into this war, Clinton is charged with the responsibility to make it work...
...that easy for NATO to "intensify" the air-only war as it promises. Over considerable resistance, Clinton barely talked NATO into approving plans for a naval embargo to cut off oil supplies to Serbia, and no one wants to hurt Western-leaning Montenegro, where the main Yugoslav port is, in the process. The low-risk, high-altitude bombing cannot grow markedly more effective unless the allies are willing to accept more casualties--theirs and ours. The Apache gunships are dribbling into Albania to begin their closer-to-the-ground war against nearly 400 Serbian tanks and armored personnel carriers...
...information imbalance last Friday, NATO blasted a Serbian state television station in Belgrade. A barrage of bombs hit the building before dawn, killing at least 10 of the estimated 70 people inside. But if the attack was brutal, it was also ineffectual. Serbian state TV was back on the air within six hours, broadcasting its regular fare, including a statement by the Serbian Information Ministry saying that "by targeting [Serbian TV], NATO aggressors have revealed criminal intentions that would make even Hitler wince...
...air war has played a big part in making such wild accusations credible with Serbs. Nothing lays the groundwork for propaganda like seeing parts of your hometown blown away. NATO has bombed targets ranging from bridges to office blocks in its attempt to weaken the Serbian war machine and break Milosevic's resistance. But with "collateral damage" now including Serbian and ethnic Albanian civilians alike, the strikes have also provided all the material that Milosevic's minions need to win over even die-hard skeptics. NATO, the propaganda insists, simply wants to kill Serbs at any cost. "Most people--myself...