Sales Pitch For a Balkan Farce

The answer is “Madonna.” Formulate the question.

The question is: What is the name of the discotheque, located in Slobodan Milosevic’s
hometown
of Pozarevac, and owned by Milosevic’s son, Marko, that NATO might bomb as a “signal” of
seriousness?

Last week, after NATO bombed Pozarevac, The Post reported:

“NATO military sources said the attack on Pozarevac was designed to send a chilling signal
to
the inner circle of the Yugoslav leadership, which includes several members of Milosevic’s
extended family. . . . ‘We are going to draw the noose around them until it starts to hurt,’ said a
senior U.S. policy-maker. ‘When people like Marko start to feel the pain of this air campaign,
then Milosevic might wake up and come to his senses.’ “

Milosevic is frightening. So is the thinking of that “senior U.S. policy-maker.”

Nowadays no diplomatic farce is complete without a cameo appearance by Jesse Jackson.
Media
raptures about his brokering of the release of the three U.S. soldiers have underscored for
Milosevic America’s aversion to even the mildest costs of combat. But, then, surely Milosevic
noticed when President Clinton visited with the family of one of the captured soldiers. A nation
serious about military objectives would not advertise its distress about three prisoners.

“I think,” says Yale’s Donald Kagan, author of “On the Origins of War,” speaking of the
United
States today, “you have to go all the way back, nearly 2000 years, to the Roman Empire, to find a
single power so preeminent compared to all others.” True, but neither economic nor military
preeminence necessarily translates into effective power, absent a certain hardness that could be
called Roman.

Perhaps somewhere near Brussels is a warehouse stuffed with ballpoint pens, stationery, ash
trays and other things emblazoned with NATO’s logo. Perhaps NATO intends to stay in business
until all that stuff is used up. Or until the bombing campaign achieves the objectives about which
NATO says it will not compromise. Whichever comes first.

Clinton says the bombing may continue into the summer. It probably will not, for two
reasons.

First, before Milosevic is toppled by his supposedly disgruntled military (NATO’s hope du
jour),
NATO’s determination to continue punishing Serbia may be sapped by television pictures of the
wretchedness NATO is trying to produce in Serbia, as when the power goes off in pediatric and
geriatric hospital wards. Second, Clinton surely shares the high estimate of himself that “a senior
administration official” recently expressed to the New York Times. The official explained that
Clinton, although he has ruled out compromise with Milosevic, will be able to compromise:
“Once Clinton decides that’s what he’s going to do, he’ll sell it. If Nixon could sell the fall of
Saigon as peace with honor, Clinton can sell this.”

More farce: Gerald Ford was president when Saigon fell. But when there is no penalty for
failure,
failures proliferate — like these senior administration officials who are saying these astonishing
things about the debacle they have produced.

Unless the emptying of Kosovo becomes the first Balkan diaspora to be reversed, what
Clinton
will try to sell as a NATO success will be Milosevic’s success in radically and permanently
altering the demographics of that province. Even if the Kosovars had homes to return to, they
know that sooner or later — years, perhaps decades, hence — whatever compromise
“peacekeeping” force is cobbled together to make Kosovo safe will leave. Serbia will still be
what and where it is — fierce and next door. Kosovars know that a synonym for “safe area” is
Srebrenica.

NATO’s minuet of capitulation has begun, accompanied by the U.S. media’s celebration of
Jesse
Jackson’s “success.” How likely is it that Milosevic, Jackson’s partner in prayer, is going to be
deposed and put on trial?

It is deeply demoralizing, and perhaps even de-moralizing, for civilized people to watch
justice
traduced. In recent years Americans have been mesmerized by the extremely public spectacles of
O. J. Simpson essentially getting away with murder and Bill Clinton essentially getting away
with perjury and obstruction of justice. Now Milosevic may be getting away with war crimes on
a scale not seen in Europe since the Third Reich collapsed 54 years ago this week.

It collapsed as Soviet soldiers reached the center of Berlin after that city had been bombed
for
several years and pounded by artillery for weeks. And some of the city’s trams were still running,
a fact that may not be known by those who are conducting today’s war, 30 years after they
militantly sang, in the words of an old spiritual, “Ain’t gonna study war no more.”