Why the United States is at War with Serbia

What have the Serbs ever done to hurt us, or endanger “American security?” Nothing anyone can think of.

The Serbs sacrificed bravely to block the Turks from enveloping all southern Europe 500 years ago. They think we should remember. They also did a good job of bleeding dry a fairly astonishing number of German divisions from 1940 to 1945, thus indirectly keeping that many troops and tanks off the beaches of Normandy and out of the forests of the Rhine. They thought we might remember that, too.

Instead, we’re supposedly bombing the homes and offices of these perfectly nice folk because their dictator of the hour has been treating his Muslim minority somewhat churlishly down in Kosovo.

And he certainly has. He’s a very bad fellow, and I join in hoping Mr. Milosevic goes to hell sooner rather than later. But once we get done here, are we next going to invade Turkey to create a free and independent Kurdistan? Will we then send the entire U.S. Army across the Himalayas to take on the Red Chinese in order to guarantee a free and independent Tibet? Why not?

CNN devoted an hour-long “special broadcast” to a little show-and-tell on the Geneva convention last week, parroting the White House line that the three American soldiers grabbed down along the Macedonian border can’t be put on trial but instead have to be treated as prisoners of war, and not a single dissenting voice is allowed 30 seconds of airtime to cry out “What war? NATO’s pinstripers and Madeleine Albright have been wriggling like contortionists for weeks now, insisting we’re not at war, since if they admitted we were at war they’d have to admit Billy Jeff has violated his oath to protect and defend a Constitution which declares only Congress can declare war.

What do you think we’d do if we caught three fully-armed Iraqis in funny headgear slipping across the Canadian border? We’d put them on trial as terrorists, of course. Yet when some foreign country does the same with armed U.S. soldiers at a time when American planes are bombing the bejezus out of them, we whine “You can’t dooo that; it’s against the ruuules.”

Which rules? The ones that used to say you can’t purposely bomb civilian targets, like police and power stations?

Boy Bill and a bunch of other former Vietnam war protesters sit in their padded leather chairs eagerly rubbing their palms together over a colorful Balkan map, picking out a menu of targets they hope will “bomb Milosevic to the bargaining table,” for all the world as though hundreds of thousands of lives weren’t expended from 1965 to 1973 demonstrating the futility of just such a strategy while one Boy Clinton led anti-war demonstrations at Oxford.

Meantime, no one recoils in horror when I point out that the laws of nations make a limited exception that allows mass murder only if the person ordering the killing can claim he’s been duly appointed to command the forces of a nation “at war,” and that since our Congress has declared no war in the Balkans Mr. Clinton is thus not only a traitor who has forsaken his sacred oath, but also a mass murderer, indictable at The Hague as well as in Belgrade, should they ever get their hands on him. No, this is all now treated as perfectly routine.

Why are we at war in Serbia? Because the Serbs wouldn’t do what Bill Clinton told them. That’s all. It’s personal, which means we now enjoy the same form of government as the French under Napoleon.

In his new book, “All Too Human,” former Clinton intimate George Stephanopoulos describes Mr. Clinton growing wrathful with Anthony Lake about how things were going in one of his earlier junkets, the little adventure in Somalia:

“We’re not inflicting pain on these (persons who engage in sexual intercourse),” Mr. Stephanopoulos heard the president say. Then, his face reddening, the president yelled “I believe in killing people who try to hurt you. And I can’t believe we’re being pushed around by these two-bit (male sexual organs).”

For his April 8 column Capitol Hill Blue, Doug Thompson interviewed Samuel Wilson, a former political worker in Clinton’s second campaign for governor. Wilson told columnist Thompson he remembered the candidate encountering a critic at a campaign appearance in a small town. After the critic told Clinton he was nothing but a “two-bit politician” and walked away, Clinton turned to a campaign aide and said “Write down the name of that (person who commits incest.) When I’m back in office, he’s a dead man. ”

“I don’t want to think he wanted to kill him literally, but I’m sure some sort of revenge was inflicted later on,” Wilson recalled.

A White House staff member told Thompson that at one meeting, Boy Clinton told staff members he wanted everyone in Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr’s office audited by the IRS.

Several people in the meeting told the President he shouldn’t do that, the staff member remembered. “He slammed his fist down on the table and said: ‘I can do any goddamned thing I want. I’m President of the United States. I take care of my friends and I (have sexual intercourse with) my enemies. That’s the way it is. Anybody who doesn’t like it can take a hike.”

Or move to Belgrade, apparently.