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In the News
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Week of 9 April 1999 |
Vol. II, No. 30 |
In the News
NATO's air campaign to interdict Serbian aggression in Kosovo sent reporters running to arm themselves with the expertise of several Boston University faculty.
"This bombing cannot possibly degrade the Serbian forces in a way that is sufficient to keep them from doing what Mr. Milosevic wants them to do," says Angelo Codevilla, a CAS international relations professor, in a Boston Herald story on March 25. "This bombing is going to show the impotence of the United States."
Foreseeing a widening war and the possibility that other nations will take NATO's action as a precedent, UNI Professor Uri Ra'anan says in the March 27 Boston Herald, "Had we not acted, there would have been no danger of wider war at all. What we have done is create a major threat of spreading war." The director of the Institute for the Study of Conflict, Ideology, and Policy adds, "We've created a precedent for the Russians. They will use this as an excuse for armed intervention in Georgia, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, the Baltic Republics. What can we say to them?"
The Boston Herald on March 28 contains a story in which Michael Corgan, CAS associate professor of international relations, expresses doubts that the strategy of aerial arm twisting will be effective. "I can't think of any example where air power, other than the atom bomb, caused people to do something they didn't want to do," he says.
Associate University Professor Igor Lukes, assessing Slobodan Milosevic, the man in the crosshairs, says in the Boston Herald March 24, "He lacks the grand evil of the great dictators of this century. Yet he has the uncanny ability to position himself at the forefront of Serbian nationalism."
"It's a military campaign that doesn't have a military objective," says CAS International Relations Professor Andrew Bacevich in a March 24 story in the Boston Herald. "One of the lessons of Vietnam was that we should never try to that again. We should have clear, achievable results before we apply force. In this case the objective is very squishy."
Speaking on WGBH-TV's Greater Boston on March 29, Bacevich said, "On the face of it, it appears to me that this air offensive has been a failure." He said further that commitment by NATO of ground forces is "probably the least bad of a series of bad options. . . . The object is no longer about the humanitarian crisis. Intervention on the ground can't solve that. Intervention on the ground can perhaps preserve NATO and prevent the United States from being defeated."
In addition, in a Boston Herald story April 2 about Serbia's capture of three U.S. soldiers and threat to put them on trial, Bacevich says it "ratchets up the pressure on the administration to decide whether to continue its current course of action or make a radical course change." Codevilla adds,"The lesson is, war is war. There is no such thing as war on the cheap. The U.S. government has not taken war seriously."
"In the News" is compiled by Alexander Crouch in the Office of Public Relations.