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Arianna Huffington, of course, has never been known for modesty. Or consistency. I didn't hear the die-hard Republican express any retrospective regret for her party's various invasions of Grenada and Panama or incursions into Nicaragua. But she did criticize her fellow Republicans for caring more that President Clinton had oral sex on Easter Sunday than that NATO bombed Belgrade during Orthodox Easter. Of course, one hesitates to ascribe tribal motives to Huffington (nee Stassinopoulos), but there is the Greek Orthodox connection. She did not seem the slightest bit upset that instead of eating their Easter eggs, good Orthodox Serbs carried on killing and dispossessing Albanians during the holiday. As far I can remember her only mention of Kosovars was when she quipped about the array of NATO mistakes, "What's next? a Kosovar in a pear tree?" No mention of the Kosovars dead in the ditches or shivering in the muddy fields of Macedonia.

NATO in denial By Tom Hayden

The rest of the teach-in showed the bizarre range of jejune arguments against NATO intervention. The Serb Voters' Alliance's Bill Doric did not refer to the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo at all. He seemed to be suggesting that since Serbian-Americans had won lots of Medals of Honor, any suggestion that what Belgrade was doing was wrong was the equivalent of anti-Semitism. A Serbian doctor was so deeply overcome at the damage to the ozone layer caused by NATO bombing that she could not remember that over a million people had been thrown from their homes by Milosevic. Cluster bombs dropped by NATO are wrong, while Serbian land mines all around the border are, well, unmentioned.

The speakers who did mention nasty things happening in Kosovo often did so to make the point that reports about them were exaggerated. They seemed more outraged by comparisons between the Holocaust and the Kosovar refugees' suffering than they are by the suffering itself. "It's raining, and people are uncomfortable," acknowledged Richard Walden of Operation USA, "but it's not as bad as it was in Rwanda." Saul Landau, rejoicing in the almost self-parodying title of Hugh O. La Bounty Chair of Applied Interdisciplinary Knowledge at Californian State Polytechnic University, Pomona, at least admitted he was "bothered" by what Milosevic was doing. Bothered? The verb is intriguing. Landau seemed "bothered" about genocide, but incensed that Belgraders can't watch their racist government's propaganda on TV because of cruel NATO bombers.

And this being Los Angeles, some of the speakers threatened to hit the Democrats where it hurts -- in their campaign coffers -- to retaliate for their stand against genocide. Lila Garrett, the president of Southern California Americans for Democratic Action, recounted how she had told House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt that she would raise no money for Democratic candidates until they had repudiated the president over NATO's war. She had presumably raised money all through Clinton's bombing of Iraq, Afghanistan and Sudan, and kept it up while he scrapped welfare, signed NAFTA and presided over a hecatomb of death-row inmates. But now that he had been trapped into waging war on a government committing genocide, she had qualms of conscience.

As I left, happy to have been the most booed and heckled speaker, I worried about this nation's political health. These people, on the left and right, really had not noticed the war in the Balkans for the last nine years. It was so easy for them to throw slogans at the issue, and dust off their arguments about Vietnam, but no one grappled with the moral and geopolitical issue at hand: how to stop someone from killing and exiling a whole people.

I'm surprised to find myself at odds with many former allies, and allied with the likes of Madeleine Albright, whose successful attempt to stop intervention to curb the genocide in Rwanda, for instance, I bitterly criticized. But at least the Clinton administration is redeeming itself slightly with its comparative courage on Kosovo. I don't foresee such redemption for those who, once again, are willfully looking away from Milosevic's murderous Balkan master plan.
salon.com | May 27, 1999

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