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Molly Ivins
Molly Ivins
28 Jan 2009
What Would Molly Think?

JANUARY 31, 2009, IS THE TWO-YEAR ANNIVERSARY OF MOLLY IVINS' DEATH. THE FOLLOWING COLUMN WAS WRITTEN BY … Read More.

31 Jan 2007
Molly Ivins Tribute

MOLLY IVINS BEGAN WRITING HER SYNDICATED COLUMN FOR CREATORS SYNDICATE IN 1992. ANTHONY ZURCHER IS A CREATORS … Read More.

11 Jan 2007
Stand Up Against the Surge

The purpose of this old-fashioned newspaper crusade to stop the war is not to make George W. Bush look like … Read More.

Molly Ivins May 25

SAN ANTONIO — The national surplus of gloom-mongers is near critical mass. Such a mighty performance by the boo-hoo chorus deserves attention in its own right.

Not that there's a shred of cheer in the events at Littleton, Colo., or Kosovo. Kosovo is a loser if ever we looked at one.

Still. Yet. However. It seems to me it would be easier to accept the judgment that Kosovo and everything we've done about it have been an unmitigated disaster if the folks making those pronouncements had ever had a good word to say about anything.

As a remarkable specimen of the Chicken Little genre of commentary, I offer the following gem from Charles Krauthammer: "The result is the Kosovo campaign, already famous for its ineptness: its absurd recapitulation of Vietnam escalation strategy, its confusion of aims, its timidity of means, its slowness to respond to unexpected contingencies."

Krauthammer achieved this state of utter despair after watching the Kosovo bombing campaign for all of two weeks, during much of which there wasn't any bombing because of the weather. In Vietnam, it took most of us about eight years to get around to noticing that, on the whole, it wasn't working.

Sure, we might have saved ourselves and the Vietnamese a world of pain if we'd noticed sooner, but does two weeks strike anyone else as a trifle ... premature? Not that I'm calling anyone a Nervous Nellie — anyone feeling perfect confidence about our actions in Kosovo is clearly delusional. But history, which has been a little overburdened lately with having to provide analogies for Kosovo, does prove the futility of the complaint "But it's not going according to plan." It never does, that being one of the oldest rules of war.

With few exceptions, the minute the shooting starts, everybody's best-laid plans promptly go to pot. Nothing surprising about that.

As for the equally bootless complaint that we should have foreseen that Slobodan Milosevic's reaction to the bombing would be to accelerate ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, what difference would it have made if we had foreseen it? Would that get us off the hook of having to try to do something about it?

It is unclear to me how seeing or foreseeing even more repellent behavior by Milosevic changes the obligation to try to stop him. Now, means are different — we can always quarrel about the means.

The other day, The New York Times ran an op-ed piece by Robert McNamara, of all people, which actually offered a useful piece of advice. He suggests that we start the equivalent of a Pentagon Papers project on Kosovo now so that we will have a record of how and why these decisions are being made.

McNamara and his North Vietnamese counterparts have been at several conferences where they try to figure out how they misread one another long ago. All that anyone can try to do about a terrible mistake is try to learn from it, and if we're making one now, we should be prepared to learn from it.

Back in the useless-advice category, we find several people acidly suggesting that our problem is that we did not understand what a nasty man Milosevic was. I don't think we were laboring under the illusion that Milosevic was a nice guy at heart. I was under the impression that was why we felt obliged to do something about him.

Nor is all the whining about how bad this operation is coming from the media. Tom Friedman, one of the cooler analysts, recently wrote a sardonic lead: "Boy, I sure hope the Clinton team loses this war in Kosovo, because if it wins, there will be no one to pick up the Nobel Peace Prize. ... Everyone in this administration has already blamed everyone else in this administration for failure in Kosovo."

My favorite school of commentary, so far, is from those who know so little about Kosovo that they should have their own TV talk shows. Come to think of it, many do, and what they discuss are not the rights and wrongs or even the strategy of the situation but how the situation in Kosovo will affect the chances of several presidential candidates. As though the death of thousands of people had no higher meaning than how it might affect the fate of Dan Quayle or Lamar Alexander.

There is actually a Conventional Wisdom on this burning topic, so many have held forth on it. (Gore down, McCain up, Buchanan up, Dubya down).

France's Francois Mitterrand is reported to have observed of the Rwandan holocaust a few years ago, "Genocide in such countries is of little importance." Out of frustration with a campaign that is not going well (after a few weeks), out of impatience with a story line that's getting old (more refugees reporting atrocities), out of boredom and cynicism and inanition, we seem to be in some danger of coming to precisely that conclusion.

I have deep doubts about the wisdom of what we are doing in Kosovo — who doesn't? — but it does not seem to me that the petulant frustration of a spoiled child who cannot get his way at once is a useful reaction to what we always knew was a horribly complicated situation. What I have yet to hear from any of the many critics of this operation is a better idea.

Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. To find out more about Molly Ivins and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 1999 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

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