Word: balkanized
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...they all support the American troops. They all hope that NATO wins, whatever that would mean. They all believe the Clinton Administration has botched the job somehow or other. But beyond the safe consensus, the problem of figuring out what to say, and what not to say, about the Balkan crisis is turning out to be the first test of the candidates' reflexes, a measure of their principles and their political skills. It is also demonstrating that contrary to the advice of the party wise men all winter, foreign policy may not be such an easy issue for the Republicans...
Instead of rallying Republicans, the Balkan showdown has exposed how divided the party is over America's duties in the post-cold war world. After days of tap dancing, by late last week the Republicans had cleaved fairly cleanly between two camps: those in Pat Buchanan's populist, isolationist fortress who were arguing we should leave Europe to the Europeans, and those who, belatedly in some cases, fell in step behind Arizona Senator John McCain, the former prisoner of war in Vietnam, and called for NATO to fight on even harder to preserve the credibility of U.S. power...
...Staff, were leery of any such mission, especially when its goals seemed vague. Now it is obvious that NATO could not have built up such a force before Milosevic had gobbled up Kosovo. And sending in ground forces in the face of Serb resistance would be bloody. Mountainous Balkan terrain makes for tougher fighting than Iraq's wide open deserts; Serbs would hold the high ground, including passes too narrow for tanks; mines salt the few roads and bridges. Such pitfalls loom large for officers who came of age in Vietnam. "Part of contingency planning," a Pentagon colonel says...
After the campaign's first moves, NATO is staring at a very real possibility of humiliation. Milosevic can crow: he has expelled hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians from sacred Serb soil; he has destabilized his Balkan neighbors; he has considering the takeover of Montenegro; he is pushing ahead with plans for a show trial of the three captive American soldiers. Against that, NATO's tally looks meager. And the geopolitical consequences of continuing to bomb are also piling up: deep strains with Russia; the possible chain reaction of instability in Macedonia and Albania; and above all the terrible tide...
Zeljko Raznatovic, a.k.a. "Arkan," may be the world's most notorious ethnic cleanser. In 1991, as the former Yugoslavia broke apart, his paramilitary "Tigers" pioneered the terror tactics that are the hallmark of the Balkan wars. Last week American and British officials said he and his men have unsheathed that same vengeful violence against Kosovo's ethnic Albanian population. And if his terrible status needed any further certification, it came from Louise Arbour, chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, who last Wednesday announced an indictment against Arkan for war crimes committed in the Balkans from...