Serbia — 21 April 1999

I have been trying to ignore this but the situation refuses to go away. Short and Sweet. Either we should stay out or tell Milosevic (if we haven’t been able to figure out how to eliminate him already) that we will send 300,000 troops in (150,000 are needed). Maybe that will get him interested. I’m not sure we’d actually have to send them in to get him to buckle. I like what Thatcher did with the Falklands — sent in the Royal Navy and everybody knew after that not to screw around with Thatcher’s Britain. The point is that if we announce in advance that we refuse to send in ground troops and the history of modern warfare is that air wars against guerrillas in foreign countries don’t work (if not on the desert of Iraq then why in the mountains of Yugoslavia?), Milosevic has no reason to fear us. NATO is being shown to be a paper tiger and Clinton is losing the Year 2000 election for Al Gore showing the Democrats being afraid to pull the trigger and ultimately getting sucked into longer and bloodier conflicts that they can’t figure how to get out of. My Chinese friend thinks that the US is furthering NATO by opening up this front in Serbia — I don’t think we are that strategically astute and far-sighted. The whole affair is embarrassing and is further proof of the US as an unreliable country.