We can't handle Kosovo

Cluefon
    By Dan Dudis

I try to keep up with events in Bosnia— I mean Kosovo. I really do. I make a point of watching the nightly news—at least most nights. I read the Times' coverage of the bombing—at least the front page. But somehow, try as I might, I just can't will myself to keep informed about the events in Kosovo. The unrest in the Balkans has now spanned two administrations. After years of unfulfilled Anglo-American promises to "Clobba Slobba," as London's Sun put it, I just lost all interest in the situation. And after six sleaze-filled boom-boom years of Bill Clinton, LAW '73, international affairs seem more distant and less important.

And so, when I pick up the Times, I am not accustomed to headlines of such grave importance as those that report the NATO attack on Serbia. Out of habit, my eyes still stray to that troika of topics that has come to characterize the Clinton years: money in Wall Street, scandal in Washington, and mischief in Hollywood. As sick as I was of Monica, she in many ways exemplified the age. Hers was a silly, sex-soaked story that required little thought or involvement on the part of the American people. Monica gave us a year off from our responsibility to remain informed citizens.

Enter Kosovo. Actually, Kosovo had been hanging around just offstage for over a year. We might have heard about it at the tail end of the evening news—if we bothered to sit through the 20-plus minutes of Lewinsky coverage. It sounded like another Bosnia. And Bosnia took years to come to any sort of a resolution. A reasonable person might have deduced that the Kosovo situation would similarly go on for eons before we got involved. Even Slobodon Milosovic thought so. After years of slaughtering Bosnians with little NATO interference, he must have thought he had time to spare to complete the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo. We all miscalculated. NATO suddenly grew a backbone and declared that Serbian atrocities had to end. Within weeks, we were bombing Belgrade.

It was all so sudden—the way a tornado descends upon an unsuspecting trailer park. I remember turning on Peter Jennings the night before the bombing began. Suddenly, he was talking about massive military intervention, the strength of Serbian defenses, and the real possibility of casualties. This was no orderly, machine-like buildup to armed conflict like we saw in the Gulf War. The Gulf War was complete with timetables and lines in the sand. We knew months beforehand when and where the war would take place. Bombing Kosovo, on the other hand, seemed spur-of-the-moment and unplanned. It was an aberration—years of Serbian atrocities in Sarajevo had led to what? A settlement followed by a peacekeeping force. No, Kosovo was not going according to plan.

Unprepared or unable to awake from our Monica-induced, let-the-good-times-roll torpor, it's no wonder we found it hard to become engaged with what was going on in the Balkans. After a long weeknight of partying, my friends and I found ourselves watching the new Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn. I hazily remember Kilborn doing a CBS News Special Report skit about US soldiers being taken prisoners of war. I awoke the next morning to discover that the special report had been no joke. It was real.

Hazy. That sums up the conception most of us have of NATO's bombing of Serbia. It just seems so far off, so out of character in the midst of this decade of self-absorption. Concern over foreign affairs is just that—foreign. We have a president who inspires little trust in his people. We have a culture so self-referential it verges on masturbatory. We have a stock market that provides for our every want and whim. We are the generation that came of age during the '90s; the Cold War is nothing but words in a history textbook. We are unprepared for Kosovo. Where are you, Monica?

Recent Herald Columns by this Columnist:
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• March Madness?, 3/26/99
• The death match of Rudy and Hillary, 2/26/99
• Saying no to the big, bad Internet, 2/12/99

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