As Bombs Continue Falling, So Do Clinton Ratings

by Christopher Caldwell

Think of what happens to a maternity ward or a nursing home that runs out of water, and you'll realize that Mikhail Gorbachev was right in saying the West has decided "the only way out for them is to destroy Serbia, destroy the entire nation." Gorbachev is not exactly a trustworthy voice where American power is concerned. But since Al Gore, Bill Cohen and our other video-game Pattons claim to be operating in the noble Cold War tradition of muscular American diplomacy, it's worth noting what our most courageous Cold War supporters -- the Soviet dissidents -- think about our little adventure. Alexander Zinoviev (in Le Monde) thinks the West is going totalitarian. Alexander Solzhenitsyn (at a poetry ceremony) compared the NATO invasion of Serbia to Hitler's.

Americans aren't exactly rushing to agree. Gallup polls show Clinton dropping into a precipitous end-of-administration swoon, with his lowest approval ratings in three years. (By next week they could be 10 points lower.) In February, Americans were "satisfied" with the way things were going, by 71-26; last month it was 58-39; now it's 51-46. The various horses the President rode in on aren't faring well either. Support for ground forces has lost its majority. So, amazingly enough, has support for our air strikes -- which 82 percent favor suspending. The percentage of people who say they're "not at all confident" in Clinton's conduct of the war has doubled in the past month, to 25 percent. This was in the days before the Cox report on Chinese espionage hit the fan. So Pat Caddell and other pollsters are right to say that the whole drop is Kosovo-related. Where they're wrong is in assuming that Americans are bottom-line simpletons merely outraged at our inability to win this war.

There's more to it than that.

It is true that part of the reason for Clinton's drop was outrage at his incompetence. For example, the Christian rightist Gary Bauer said we ought to "stand up" to China for having the temerity to object to its people getting killed in random bombings. "Just last month," Bauer said, "we witnessed a communist government-endorsed and orchestrated anti-American hate rally at our embassy in Beijing. The result was major damage to American property and an ambassador who was both physically threatened, demeaned in the eyes of the world, and trapped for days... The party of Reagan must not offer a status quo foreign policy for the new millennium." Oh, boo hoo! Bauer goes absolutely berserk because some of our "property" is damaged and the political hack James Sasser feels "demeaned." But we send three of their perfectly innocent citizens to Kingdom Come and the Chinese are supposed to lap it up.

As Bauer says, it's a shame we've lost the world's respect. But one would like a little acknowledgment that we've lost the right to the world's respect. A lot of the outrage in this country is moral, and a lot of what's driving the President's poll numbers down is a well-founded national sense of shame. Americans who have thought long and hard about Kosovo still haven't a clue what we're doing there, and no American or NATO official has yet condescended to tell us. Last week, when we began to hit Serbia's water supply and step up our direct attacks on civilian targets -- 300 schools, by one account -- the eerie NATO spokesman, Jamie Shea, used it for a gag-line. Bragging that the previous night had seen a record number of attacks, he noted the clear weather and added, with a coy smile, "I have every reason to expect that that record will be beaten quickly." Get it? Kill a few of their children, that'll make 'em see the light -- ha!

Without championing Slobodan Milosevic, whom I'd certainly hate to live under, it seems clear that his indictment for crimes against humanity in the International War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague has weakened our moral position more than it has his. Milosevic is accused of killing 340 people to date. That's sad; it is not, however, particularly impressive as a "genocide." Nor does it come close to the 100,000 dead Bill Cohen keeps hinting at. Where is the "convincing evidence" we had that thousands had been killed before we began bombing? Not in any evidentiary forum, apparently.

There is, in fact, only one incident that antedates the allied bombing at all: the Racak Killings last January. In other words, we decided to destabilize Europe and the world over the kind of incident that happens in an American high school every month or two. And since then, Milosevic has been killing military-age men to save his country. We've been killing children to save our expensive airplanes. By the way, who has killed more children in the course of this engagement -- Clinton or Milosevic? Just asking.

The indictment, and the U.S. response to it, are incoherent. The United States is (probably to its increasing relief) one of seven nations that has not endorsed an international criminal court for war crimes. The U.S. position on that issue happens to be the right one, but if you are going to take recourse to international law -- indeed, if you're going to say there's any such thing -- you can't claim it applies to ex-Yugoslavia but not to the rest of the world. Prosecutor Louise Arbour says, "Although the accused are entitled to the benefit of the presumption of innocence until they are convicted, the evidence upon which this indictment was confirmed raises serious questions about their suitability to be the guarantors of any deal, let alone a peace agreement." In other words, there is no presumption of innocence.

Madeleine Albright is treading on dangerous territory when she says that "the indictments clarify the situation because they really show that we are doing the right thing." Really? What if Milosevic gets acquitted? Will Madeleine respect the res adjudicata, call off the war and apologize?

Of course not. We're in this position in the first place because we're ruled by people who have lost the habit of self-examination. Take Al Gore, who in a speech last week urged eroding the separation of church and state: "Whether they are religious or not, most Americans are hungry for a deeper connection between politics and moral values." Oh, very hungry! Starving in fact! We could eat a moral horse! That's perhaps why Gore, for the first time in perhaps a decade, conquered his revulsion for House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt long enough to join him in backing a Draconian juvenile-justice bill.