Resolved: U.S. Should Withdraw From NATO

In “Dare We Lead in the Balkans’ Pocket of Relative Reason?” (Commentary, June 27), Edward P. Joseph makes a plea for the U.S. to put its troops’ lives on the line in yet another little shard of Balkan real estate, left over from the breakup of Yugoslavia, whose “territorial integrity” must now be preserved. Never mind that Macedonia, like Bosnia-Herzegovina, did not exist as an independent nation for at least the previous 2,000 years.

Joseph inadvertently makes an excellent case as to why the U.S. should withdraw from NATO without delay. NATO was formed in the wake of World War II to protect Western Europe from the Soviets, who at the end of that war had the most powerful land forces the world had ever seen. It is completely ludicrous that, due to its NATO membership, the U.S. has been sucked into these petty ethnic disputes in the Balkans, which have meaning only to those people unfortunate enough to live there.

In his recent trip to Europe, President Bush was rather ill-treated by the leaders of several European countries, notably the French, the Germans and especially the Swedes. I suggest that the time has come for the U.S. to completely remove its forces from continental Europe and leave the Swedes, et al., to the tender mercies of Vladimir Putin.

John Martin

Victorville

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“Do as We Say, Not as We Do,” Robert Scheer’s June 26 commentary, misses the moral complexity of many of the deeds he cites to support his allegation that some American leaders are just as culpable as Slobodan Milosevic. He angrily alludes, for example, to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He may not know that Eleanor Roosevelt, shortly after returning from a 1953 trip to Hiroshima--where she met many of the survivors, some of whom had sustained horrible burns--stated: “I know we were justified in dropping the bomb, but you can’t help feeling sorry when you see suffering.”

With respect to Vietnam--Scheer’s prime example--Hubert Humphrey once said that our mistake was one of the mind, not of the heart. Armed with modern technology, the leaders of a nation guilty only of unenlightened self-interest can inflict as much or more suffering as an individual who, like Milosevic, acts from demonstrably evil motives.

Charlie Goodman

Sacramento