NATO Bombing of Serb Targets

Tom Clancy is perhaps not reading as many newspapers and watching as much CNN as he should (Commentary, March 26). The president has made it clear that we are bombing Serbia to stop its atrocities against the Albanian majority in Kosovo and to try to achieve some kind of peaceful resolution on the question of Kosovar self-government. Period.

Clancy should read more history too. He ought to be aware that warfare and ethnic hostilities have a way of spreading beyond borders in the Balkans. The president is quite correct in dealing with the Serbs now, rather than at some point in the future where more than Serbia might be involved.

CARL W. GOSS

Los Angeles

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I agreed with half of your double banner head on March 25: “NATO Missiles Slam Yugoslavia.” But I choked on my oatmeal when the second line stated: “Clinton Cites Moral Imperative to Act Firmly.”

When will you stop this rehabilitation process of a man who is anathema to millions of Americans?

JESSIE G. DeMASSA

Huntington Beach

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Bomb a sovereign country fighting a civil war in order to force them to the peace-negotiating table? Not only does this defy common sense and logic, it contradicts the reasons Clinton dodged the draft and protested Nixon’s bombing of Vietnam. And he says the Republicans are hypocrites.

DAVID C. HALL

Glendora

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The U.S. was the instigator and major molder of the U.N. as an instrument of mediation and world peace. But today, we don’t pay our dues to it and we ignore it as a mediating body.

Instead we have created another body, NATO, that by its very construction divides the world into East and West.

Yugoslavia has traditionally been considered an Eastern country. Military intervention by an alliance of Western countries into the affairs of that nation, without consulting the U.N., does not sound to me like a recipe for peace--short-term or long-term.

JEAN KRAMER GLASSER

Van Nuys

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Thank you, NATO! Too bad you were not there in 1939 to stop the other European maniac of this century.

REGINA HERCEG

Manhattan Beach

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As soon as we are done with bombing Serbia to secure an autonomous status for the people of Kosovo, let’s start bombing Turkey, which is massacring the Kurds, to give the 20 million Kurds a country.

Did I say anything wrong?

ATTO VOJDANI

Mission Viejo

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So The Times thinks that an air assault will stop the violence in Kosovo (editorial, March 24). How naive. These people and their ancestors have been warring for hundreds of years. We have no business putting our military at risk in their civil war. Yes, the atrocities are horrible. But so are they in many other spots in the world--and Clinton has not considered intervening there.

Obviously, many questions need answers before we commit our military to Kosovo. What is our overall strategy? What if airstrikes do no good? Will we commit ground troops? What constitutes success? What is our exit strategy? Who can trust Clinton to do the right thing? Why hasn’t Congress been asked for direction?

ROBERT L. FRANZ

Placentia

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Much has been made about the cost of the B-2 Stealth bomber and virtually nothing about the lives it has saved while being utilized in Kosovo. Defense Secretary William S. Cohen said, “The aircraft performed according to its capabilities” (March 25). How magnanimous of him. Since Cohen has made it clear he believes the cost of the bomber to be too high, I ask Cohen and others of like thinking: How much are American lives worth?

As the widow of a young American killed in Korea (five days after his 21st birthday and the birth of our daughter on that birthday), I’ll tell you. It is invaluable. The cost goes on and on and on; it never stops. It starts with the life taken from that young man, carries over to the emotional damage done to his young widow and to the daughter left behind to grow up without ever having even seen her father.

This is the greatest country in the world; the leader and guardian of the free world. We have an obligation to provide the very best and latest in technology, not only to serve that obligation, but more importantly to protect the young Americans we put in harm’s way. Twenty-one aircraft indeed! On a contract that started at over 100!

PEGGY L. PAULSEN

HALBERG

El Camino Village

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We may have to destroy Kosovo in order to save it.

JOHN C. HARRISON

Mission Viejo