No Blood, No Guts - Kosovo conflict rife with President Clinton's rhetoric

National Review, May 31, 1999 by Peter Collier

Clinton's generation goes to war.

At Omaha Beach in 1994, during a lull in the ceremonies surrounding the 50th anniversary of D-Day, reporters watching Bill Clinton noticed a misty look come into his eyes. He then gave a heartfelt glance at the cruel sea where so many men in the invading army had died before reaching the shore, and knelt. He picked up some rocks and arranged them in the shape of a little cross, then bowed his head.

It was a bravura example of the gestural politics that this president has so completely mastered. But one wonders, what exactly was Clinton praying for (besides, one hopes, blessing on the dead)? We can be almost certain that he prayed that the cameramen trailing him were capturing the inspired visual soundbite he had just created. And we can infer, from statements he has made since then, that he might also have been praying for the drama of a high-stakes world crisis similar to the one of a half-century ago that would allow him, a president condemned to govern in a tranquil and prosperous time, to acquire a legacy larger than "It's the economy, stupid."

Clinton fitfully looked for that legacy in places like Somalia and Iraq. He did not look in China or North Korea, although he might have found it there. He finally settled on Kosovo, of all places. This is how it would work: He would assemble a grand alliance to fight an ethnic fascism grown delusive as a result of systematic appeasement and save an imperiled people. Justified by multilateralism and clear humanitarian purpose, the mission would be brief and exemplary, with a subtext of punishing a nasty tyrant, a virtual war conducted without great cost at 40,000 feet, weather permitting.

Kosovo now is a killing field saturated with the blood of hapless Albanians, a forbidding landscape rich only in ironies. Chief among them is that this legacy war is being waged by an elite that has always seen its generational mission as giving peace a chance. For America's European allies, this is a war of the Third Way, with the Laborites and Social Democrats and Greens who grew up demonstrating against Reagan's missiles in Europe now flying bombing missions over the continent to punish a former Communist apparatchik they wouldn't dream of offending if Communism were still a force. For Clinton himself, it is an antiwar movement's sort of war. Out of one side of his mouth he says that he fights in behalf of a "moral imperative"; out of the other side he says, "Hell no, we won't go!" All things at once and nothing for sure, he threatens, as always, to cancel himself-and us-out.

CLINTON'S WAR

His aides have bristled at the notion that Kosovo is "Clinton's war." Yet it is exactly that, manifesting the president's many anxieties as commander in chief. It is a war waged with squeamishness about U.S. military might and vigilance for any evidence of the arrogance of American power. In rhetoric it is a war about a climactic struggle between good and evil; in implementation it is a "conflict" that requires resolution, not victory, and whose high point is the release of three soldiers abducted while not fighting.

In joining the need to punish a bloody tyrant to the need to feel good about himself, Clinton, as always, represents the sensibility of his political generation. One thinks of the pivotal moment in Primary Colors, the story of his alter ego Jack Stanton, when an old friend and political operative explains to a young campaign worker that, while Jack and his wife might seem a little compromised now, it must always be borne in mind that, back when they were working with McGovern to rescue the world, they were "just golden."

In this claim of exceptionalism lies a generation's foundation myth and an insight into Clintonism. This goldenness is comprised of an idealism and moral passion that were not present in American life before the personal became political. It has remained pure and untarnished ever since in spite of all the tawdry pragmatism and embarrassing narcissisms.

It is Clinton's good fortune that there has always been someone to flatter this conceit and urge it on. During the impeachment hearings, it was the feminist enablers who reassured him that he was morally superior to the perverted voyeurs who accused him. And during Kosovo it was no less than Elie Wiesel-a one-man ethical certification process- who appeared at a White House soiree to affirm Clinton as not only equal to the leaders of World War II in his great crusade, but actually superior to them. When FDR had the chance to save hundreds of Jews on the doomed ship St. Louis, Wiesel said, he failed to act. But now there is Kosovo, and "this time we do respond." This episode of moral flatulence occurred on the same day Clinton was found guilty of lying under oath by a federal judge.

Decentered and distorted, history has been the squid's ink Clinton has used to cover himself in Kosovo. We go there to avoid another Munich, he and his people told us in the early days of the air war. But does the fact that we have already negotiated with our enemy not make us Chamberlain before the fact? Milosevic is another Hitler, they said. Yet if this is so, shouldn't we do everything humanly possible to trap him in his bunker and pour poison down the air holes, or at least stop calling him Mister? If we are in Kosovo to forestall another Holocaust, why haven't we gone at the Serbian S.S. with everything in our arsenal to keep them from stacking up the bodies?