Get Out of Yugoslavia Now
by Pat Buchanan - April 13, 1999
One argument being used to defend the U.S. intervention in
Yugoslavia is persuasive even to skeptics of the war itself. It goes like this: maybe the
war was a bad idea, but now that we're in it, we've got to fight it all the way to the
end, no matter what the costs.
Baloney, says conservative columnist and presidential candidate Pat Buchanan:
"Three weeks into Bill Clinton's Balkan adventure and America risks a
debacle. The human rights crisis in Kosovo has exploded into a catastrophe...
"With Milosevic still defying NATO, we are admonished that 'failure is not
an option,' the United States must do 'whatever is necessary to win.' Otherwise, NATO's
credibility will be destroyed. But this is mindlessness. If the war was a folly to begin
with, surely, the answer is to cut our losses and let the idiot-adventurers who urged the
attack resign to write their memoirs, rather than send 100,000 U.S. troops crashing into
the Balkans to save the faces and careers of our blundering strategists. Only a fanatic
redoubles his energy when he has lost sight of his goal. After the Gallipolli disaster,
Churchill went; after Suez, Eden went; after the Bay of Pigs, Allen Dulles departed the
CIA. Surely, this is a wiser, more honorable, course than a ground war in Kosovo.
Moreover, Americans will not support 'whatever is necessary to win.' We are not going to
turn Belgrade into Hamburg...
"And if we send in the troops, what do we 'win'? The right to say that NATO
defeated Serbia? The right to occupy Kosovo?
"...What the United States needs today in the Balkans is a least-bad peace,
patrolled by Europeans, where Serbs rule Serbs, Croats Croats and Albanians Albanians. And
if, in the negotiations to end this tragedy, Belgrade cries, 'No American troops in
Kosovo!' let us insist upon it, and bring our soldiers home from Europe, as Ike told JFK
to do nearly 40 years ago."
-- "The Mess They've Made", The Washington Post, April 13, 1999
