Word: nato
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Republican- controlled Congress may try to gut the U.N. peacekeeping budget, in light of the Balkan experience. Dissension was not afflicting the U.S. alone though. In Germany the Suddeutsche Zeitung last week put on its front page a classified wire sent to Bonn by the German ambassador to NATO, Hermann von Richthofen, a grandnephew of the World War I flying ace known as the Red Baron. His complaints centered on what he styled an arbitrary U.S. push to expand NATO eastward rapidly and to lift the arms embargo on Bosnia, which he said would strain the alliance "to the limits...
...strange wire indeed. The German government, or at least the Defense Ministry, has been an agitator on behalf of faster NATO enlargement. Chancellor Helmut Kohl's own Christian Democratic Union, meeting in a party congress last week, passed a resolution recognizing that the Bosnia embargo may have to be lifted. Kohl personally endorsed the measure, saying failure to protect Muslim sanctuaries was a "disgrace." Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel said Germany "stands morally close to the American position." In practical terms, however, it stands apart...
...York last week, Kofi Annan, the U.N. Under Secretary for Peacekeeping, bridled at the charges of U.N. do-nothingness. "I believe the United Nations has been made a scapegoat," he charged, by "member states who do not want to take the risks." An official at NATO headquarters summed up U.S. frustrations: "It's because the Europeans say one thing in New York and something different here...
...Bismarck who said the Balkans were not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier. Bob Dole and other conservative hawks have long made it clear that they do not consider the Balkans worth the bones of a single American ground soldier. Yet they seem quite prepared to sacrifice NATO on the altar of Bosnia. Destroy NATO for what? Certainly not to save Bosnia. That they admit is beyond doing. No: for the simple satisfaction of pretending to save Bosnia; for the warm, smug feeling that comes from lifting a finger too little and too late in a lost cause...
...Muslims began this round with a fierce surprise offensive in late October that won them 95 sq. mi. of Serb-controlled territory and quiet applause from the U.S. Now that the gambit has backfired and the Bosnian government is blaming everyone but itself, Dole is pushing for more NATO bombing, for lifting the arms embargo and for other forms of flailing unilateralism...