The Question of Why We’re Involved Is Not Being Answered

It’s happening again. President Clinton, who avoided military service and went instead to Oxford--with a side trip to Moscow--has reportedly placed American service people in harm’s way 61 times, and it looks as though number 62 is underway.

But why? Why are we again using of military force?

Caspar W. Weinberger, the secretary of Defense hired by Ronald Reagan, put forth some simple and sensible rules about the application of military force. First of all, the cause had to be important--force has to be used only in the pursuit of vital national interests. Second, the American people have to be behind that use of force. But if you meet these two requirements, then it’s OK to apply force. It has to be important to our country, and our people have to understand and approve what we’re doing.

That’s simple enough, isn’t it? We live in a democracy, after all, don’t we?

Except that this president is not doing these things.

In 1990, when America built up to what we hope will be our last major commitment of people to combat in a foreign land, President Bush made a number of prime-time speeches from the Oval Office to the citizens explaining, first, what was happening over there, second, why it was important to America’s interests and third, why we had to apply force. This took place over a period of months, with presidential assistants also making statements, on and off the record, to the media, to make the case in greater detail.

This sort of thing is important. Why?

This is America, and our country places a high value on human life, and we have learned to do so even for the lives of our enemies, which, I think is among the most honorable of our traditions. Lives are not to be risked lightly, nor are they to be taken lightly. There has to be a good reason to do such a thing.

In simplest terms, America may not--well, ought not--to place the lives of our own men and women at risk unless and until the president knows what to tell the mother of a serviceman who wants to know why her son died: “Mrs. Smith, we regret to inform you that your son has died in the service of his country, and here’s why it was that important to us.”

That is, as members of my generation like to say, pretty heavy stuff, but it has to be, because young Lt. Smith had a life and dreams and hopes for his own future, and that future is gone now, and we’d damned well better know why it all had to be taken from him.

We’re dropping cruise missiles and bombs on the country we used to call Yugoslavia, and I do not yet know why. I get two major newspapers every morning, and I watch CNN every day, but despite these facts, I do not know:

* Why this problem in a part of the world we used to call Yugoslavia is so important to the United States of America;

* why we are willing to put our young people’s lives at risk;

* what exactly we want to accomplish;

* how we will accomplish these goals;

* what will happen if things do not go exactly as planned.

You see, we’re supposed to think things all the way through before we send troops to a place where the body bags have already been unloaded from the transport aircraft. That is, the man who commits the troops to action is supposed to think it all through. Unfortunately, I am not certain that this process has been taken to its conclusion. Because if it had, the president would have told us--he does like to talk, doesn’t he?--the things we need to know.

President Clinton seems particularly intoxicated with cruise missiles. These are small robotic aircraft, rather like computerized kamikazes, which plunge into their preprogrammed targets with a high degree of reliability. They do this without exposing a pilot or flight crew to much harm, and to Clinton that must look pretty good. It enables him to kill people without losing any of his own and suffering the political consequences that come from losing American troops.

This will be different, however. We will be sending the missiles and the smart bombs into built-up areas. People who just happen to live in the wrong place may lose their lives. Why are we killing them? I do not know. I ought to know. Everyone in the country ought to know why we kill people.

It’s not as though any of this will come as a surprise. We’ve telegraphed our intentions pretty thoroughly to the Yugoslavs, Serbs, Kosovo Albanians or whomever the hell we’re trying to send a message to. So, they can hunker down in their basements every night (these things are done at night lest someone see and shoot at the cruise missiles, maybe hitting one) and wonder if they’re going to hear the first of many ka-booms! that America has arranged for their neighborhood.

In the 1960s, another Democratic president tried sending a message to Hanoi. They never got the message quite in the way we wished, and their essential reaction was, “So, what?”

When that happened, the president at the time did not have a response of his own figured out. This is another thing that you need to think about in advance: When the other guy says “So, what?” you have to face your own question of, “Now, what?” People at war are not notably cooperative with others, especially those who put weapons in their backyards. Given that their cooperation is not certain, and probably not even likely, given the fact that we are attacking a culture rather more primitive than our own (their society will not come to an end without cable television), and given the astounding mutual antipathy evidenced by the “tribes” (what else can you call them?) in the former Yugoslavia, what reason do we have for assuming that they will break under the strain of a few bombs and missiles?

In fact, if these people are left only with rocks, can we be certain that they would not use rocks as weapons against one another? They did not have much more than that a thousand years ago--when this antipathy began. Given that bit of information, what reasonable person will assume that an attack by American weapons will beat sense into their heads?

The next observation is equally bleak: Just because one side in a dispute is a bad guy does not guarantee that the other side is a good guy. Indeed, Yugoslavia looks to be place replete with bad guys and singularly bereft of good guys. So, whom do we want to support--and why?

American kids are again in harm’s way. Why? In the absence of a sensible explanation from our president, one can only speculate.