Interview With Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone Magazine - part 2 - President Bill Clinton - Interview

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Dec 11, 2000

I think we may need some sentencing guidelines, but I think the impact, the practical impact of the ones we have has led to some people going to prison for longer than they should and longer than they would have under the old system. So there should be some more flexibility than there is.

Military Action in the Balkans

Mr. Wenner. I'm going to change the subject. The Balkans was your only major military engagement. What was it like to run a war night after night? I mean, was it your mentality in feeling that as all of that was going on as you go to sleep every night?

The President. Well, I went to sleep every night praying that it would end that night and that Miosevic would give in, praying that no other-----

Mr. Wenner. You were literally praying?

The President. Yes. Praying that nobody would die, no American would die, and hoping that no innocent civilians would die but knowing that they would.

You know, it's easy for people to talk about war when it's appropriate to use military force, but you have to know that once human beings start using big, powerful weapons, there will be unintended consequences. We wound up bombing the Chinese Embassy. Innocent people died. We hit a schoolbus. And we have the most skilled Air Force and the most sophisticated weapons in all human history.

In the Gulf war, which is normally thought of as a 100-hour war and a model of sort of technical proficiency, we had 41/2 months to settle in and prepare there, and still a lot of the American casualties were from friendly fire. The same thing happened even in the small engagement in Grenada, and President Reagan. These things happen. There are--once you start killing people, there will be unintended consequences.

Mr. Wenner. How do you get yourself personally comfortable--I mean, how do you get yourself, as a person and as a politician, ready to make that decision with a level of comfort you're now going to go ahead and do this?

The President. You have to be convinced that the consequences of inaction would be more damaging to more people and to your country. And in the case of Kosovo, I didn't think it was a close case. They had already killed several thousand Kosovars, and they were running a million of them out of their homes, 800,000. It was a clean case of ethnic cleansing.

And I thought the United States and our European Allies had to stand up against it. We couldn't let it happen in the heart of Europe. If we did that, we would lose the ability to stop it anywhere else.

Mr. Wenner. And wouldn't it be on your conscience in some way, for having failed to stop it?

The President. Absolutely. Look, it took us--one of the things that just tore at me--and in the end it didn't require much military engagement, although it required some--was how long it took me to build a consensus. It took me 2 years to build a consensus among our Allies for military action in Bosnia. And you know, what happened there was, after the slaughter at Srbenica we finally got--you know, everybody said, "Okay, let's go"--we did a few air strikes, and all of a sudden we were at Dayton and the peace talks. And for all the raggedness of it, the Bosnian peace has held, and it's better now because we turned back the tide of ethnic cleansing.