GOP In Disarray Over Kosovo

Analysis By Jim Lobe

Today, however, that strategy is in a shambles. NATO's air campaign against Yugoslavia and growing talk about a ground war against Serb forces in Kosovo have deeply split the party. "We're completely incoherent on the most important foreign-policy crisis in Clinton's tenure," according to one aide to a prominent Republican lawmaker.

On one side are the "internationalists" who dominated Republican foreign policy through most of the Cold War -- politicians and former policy-makers who generally favor free trade and see the United States above all as an Atlantic power.

They either have strongly supported Clinton's participation in the NATO air campaign or criticized him for not doing more to reverse the situation in Kosovo.

On the other side are "isolationists" -- although they resist that label -- who ruled the Republican Party until World War II.

They generally believe Washington should not get involved -- least of all with ground troops -- in what is essentially a civil war in a remote region of Europe.

In many ways, the rift that has opened within the party over the past several weeks echoes the 1991 Gulf War, when a handful of Republican leaders, most notably Pat Buchanan, broke with President George Bush's crusade to expel Iraqi troops from Kuwait in the name of a "new world order."

Buchanan was relatively isolated at the time but now Republican far-right or "isolationist" forces, which include many adherents of the Christian Right, are more powerful -- particularly in the House of Representatives.

The two front runners -- Texas Gov. George Bush, Jr., and Elizabeth Dole -- have equivocated, although, as public opinion has rallied behind Clinton, they have been carried along and are now supporting the air campaign and now say they are willing to consider a ground invasion.

In contrast to the disarray among Republicans, Democrats -- who experienced their own debilitating split between "doves" and "hawks" from the height of the Vietnam War in 1968 until the end of the Cold War -- generally have remained united.

Like McCain, some Democrats have criticized Clinton for ruling out a ground war, and still others have voiced concerns about a possible "quagmire" in the Balkans.

For now, however, most prominent Democrats are backing the president's gradual escalation of the war, prompting some pundits to remark on a "role reversal" by the two parties with respect to the use of military force.

"Where once Democrats talked about 'the limits of power,'" a Los Angeles Times columnist wrote "now even (anti-Vietnam War) liberals...affirm the 'duty' to prevent humanitarian abuses -- at the point of American guns, if necessary."

Indeed, some arguments put forward by Republicans who oppose U.S. involvement recall what Democrats said during the Vietnam War.

"NATO is becoming an imperial army of the new world order," declared Buchanan. "In my judgment, we have no legal or moral right to attack Serb soldiers or civilians in their own country."

Buchanan, who describes his views as "the non-interventionist policy" pursued by George Washington and other early presidents, also assails U.S. participation in a "low-grade civil war that was not any problem ...until we got ourselves involved in it."

In an echo of the "Fortress America" policies of the 1930s, other Republican leaders say Washington risks becoming over- extended by getting involved in a region which at most is peripheral to U.S. interests.

Texas Republican Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison argued last week that Kosovo -- and its cost -- was diverting Washington from building a missile-defense system "that will shield not only the United States, (but also) our troops wherever they may be..."

Still others have echoed the isolationists of old who opposed all European political entanglements, arguing that Kosovo is essentially a European problem which should be addressed by Europeans.

Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe recently complained about a "European-American sensibility" in foreign policy and proposed recently that Washington "give (NATO allies) a time that we're going to be out. Let them prepare for it...and take over the ground war."

Ranged against these voices are internationalists, especially McCain and Indiana Sen. Richard Lugar, who support the military campaign and have been calling for stronger action, including ground troops.

McCain, a former prisoner-of-war in Vietnam, has argued that the NATO campaign is both a moral necessity given the scale of Serb "ethnic cleansing" against Albanian Kosovars, and a critical test of NATO's and U.S. credibility. "If we're in it, we have got to win it...," he said last weekend in one of his many TV appearances.

U.S. credibility has indeed become a major factor in the debate within the party over the last few weeks.

Former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, who initially opposed U.S. involvement in Kosovo as too remote from U.S. strategic interests, has argued more recently that NATO must either prevail in the ongoing conflict or suffer a series of similar challenges in the future.

McCain's position and outspokenness have been applauded loudly by Republican neo-conservatives, a small but influential group of mainly Jewish intellectuals who were Democratic hawks during the Vietnam War and gained key posts in the Ronald Reagan administration.

Led by Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, the "neo-cons," who have urged Washington to exercise a "benevolent global hegemony" in the post-Cold War era, have aggravated the Republican split by tagging fellow-Republicans who have not lined up behind the NATO air campaign as "knee-jerk isolationists."

Kristol has been calling for a U.S. invasion of Yugoslavia to ensure Milosevic's ouster.