Word: kosovo
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Recent years have seen amazing reversals of traditional political postures, none more amazing than on the issue of using military force. Although the pattern is mixed and shifting, in Kosovo and other recent military controversies liberals are more likely to favor military action and conservatives are more likely to oppose it. The folks who frothed about protesters undermining the war effort are now doing it themselves...
...face, this has the look of a victory for President Clinton," sniffed the Wall Street Journal editorial page the day after the Kosovo peace deal. The editors were unable to hide their irritation that the U.S. would not be humiliated after all, that NATO would survive, and that America had done good in the world at little cost to itself...
Critics of the Kosovo project--some of whom said we should stay out, some of whom said we should go in with ground troops, many of whom managed to say both these things, and all of whom predicted that the Serbs would never cave--are bitter. Slobodan Milosevic betrayed them! Doesn't he watch the Sunday talk shows? Doesn't he know that air power never works? Has he forgotten that he represents a centuries-old tradition of ethnic violence? Where is that quagmire he was supposed to produce...
...military force and treating this issue as fodder for a different and less important battle of politics and personalities. The intense suspicion of President Clinton by the Washington press corps and punditocracy and the extreme partisanship of the Republican congressional leadership heavily influenced the public dialogue on Kosovo. No one called Vietnam a quagmire for five years. Kosovo was declared a quagmire after about five days. Press suspicion and Republican partisanship are reasonable enough, but there ought to be a sense that criticism of a military operation in progress should meet a higher standard of seriousness because such criticism does...
...Kosovo critics generally took care to say they opposed the war but supported the troops. Even that usually meaningless ritualistic distinction, though, often came barbed with the innuendo that the draft dodger President did not support or respect the troops (or he wouldn't put them at risk so promiscuously). It was very clever to have figured out how to use Clinton's antiwar past against him when he decides to use force and when he decides not to. But this is just the kind of sound-bite strategizing that ought to be suspended for the duration...