Clinton's War
by Timothy Rollins

In what has become an increasingly rare display of fortitude and character, Congress has refused to either support the President in his little NATO war with Yugoslavia or to declare a state of war themselves to exist. That means that Clinton has to withdraw our troops within 60 days, thus ending an involvement that should have never begun.

Bill Clinton is a draft-dodger who has repeatedly put our men and women in uniform in harm’s way for reasons not all of which I can fathom. Even though the United States acted stupidly in backing Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War, I can at least understand that in that the administration at the time saw Iraq as the lesser of two evils. However, Bill Clinton does not have the diplomatic skills to forge an effective coalition to bring renegade leaders to heel in the Balkans the way George Bush did in Desert Storm.

In what will yet be another asterisk on his already stained presidency, Bill Clinton has once again been shown as a man without character that puts his own interests and agenda ahead of that of the people he swore an oath to serve. Such is not unusual from a man who has no meaning of the word honor. Is it any wonder then that the officer corps despises him as much as they do, and more so than any other commander-in-chief in recent memory, including Lyndon Johnson, who was behind another unwinnable war – you remember, Vietnam?

In his effort to distance himself from the generation that allowed Vietnam to occur, Clinton has allowed himself to walk right into the trap he sought to avoid. As a ground war, the Balkans are a quagmire that even top Pentagon brass has said cannot be won – and without a clear definition and intention of victory, then any action there is both non-essential and non-critical, not to mention a waste of human life.

Another evidence of Clinton’s failure to learn from the lessons of history is that the Balkans has been described as "being designed by God to resist aerial attack" (author unknown). Even in World War II, the highly mechanized German Army got their tails kicked by the Yugoslavs, who I might add, know their countryside a whole heck of a lot better than anyone else, satellite technology notwithstanding. One also needs to consider that Yugoslavia liberated itself from the Nazis, unlike the other countries that were overrun by the Nazis during the Second World War and which needed Allied help to free themselves.

Now that the remaining days of America’s involvement in the Balkans is numbered, what ‘Wag the Dog’ scenario will Clinton next create in order to deflect the people’s attention from his latest scandal du jour? The pending declassification of the Cox Report on China should make for some very interesting reading, regardless of the time of day. Who will Clinton’s next bogeyman be and how will he misuse our military personnel to go about covering his sorry butt?

Stay tuned. ***