
              Conspiracy Nation -- Vol. 6  Num. 71
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                    ("Quid coniuratio est?")
 
 
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THE CIVIL WAR IN BOSNIA
   
[Page: E2300]
   
   ---
   
   HON. GERALD B.H. SOLOMON
   
   in the House of Representatives
   
   WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 6, 1995
   
  * Mr. SOLOMON. Mr. Speaker, it is tragic enough that we are being
    driven into the morass of a civil war in Bosnia. The tragedy is
    compounded by the fact that we are driven by a President whose
    attitude on the military was set in the late 1960's. There is no
    evidence that his attitude has changed.
   
  * I have seen no more eloquent commentary on this tragedy than
    Wesley Pruden's column in yesterday's Washington Times. I place it
    in today's Record, and urge everyone to read it.
   
   
   [FROM THE WASHINGTON TIMES, DEC. 5, 1995]
   
   (BY WESLEY PRUDEN)
   
`I did not take the matter lightly but studied it carefully, and there
was a time when not many people had more information . . . at hand
than I did.'
   
`I have written and spoken and marched against . . . war. One of the
national organizers of the Vietnam Moratorium is a close friend of
mine. After I left Arkansas last summer, I went to Washington to work
in the national headquarters of the Moratorium, then to England to
organize the Americans here for demonstrations . . . .'
   
`From my work I came to believe that . . . no government really rooted
in limited, parliamentary democracy should have the power to make its
citizens fight and kill and die in a war they may oppose, a war which
even possibly may be wrong, a war which, in any case, does not involve
immediately the peace and freedom of the nation.'
   
Well, of course, that was then, when young Master William's very own
rear end was on the line, and a large target it made, too. But this is
now, when the only `incoming' he has to worry about is the errant lamp
thrown across the presidential bedroom. By parties unknown, of course.
Hillary's contempt for the men who wear the uniform of her country is
well known, too, but like the master, the missus hides it skillfully
when the chocolate chips are down, as they were yesterday when she
invited reporters into the White House to see all the nice Christmas
decorations.
   
The boys soon to be at the front occupy the first lady's deepest
thoughts. Her dearest wish is for something she and the marching
bands, with streamers flying, insist on calling `the peace process,'
oblivious of the cruelty in the cliche and of what everybody beyond
the Beltway understands by instinct, that the Bosnia `peace process'
is to peace what Velveeta is to fine old Stilton.
   
`I also want everyone in America to support our military personnel who
are going into Bosnia in the cause of peace,' says Miss Hillary. She
understands that if our boys can put their lives on the line to level
killing fields drenched in the blood of a millennium of ethnic
carnage, the most she can do is grit her teeth, suppress her '60s
disdain for American soldiers, lately reprised at the Clinton White
House, and urge everyone to send the boys at the front a Christmas
card.
   
She wants Americans to remember the families the troops will leave
behind, too. `People who take risks for peace, which is what we have
seen in Northern Ireland or now in Bosnia, need to be supported.'
   
Bill and Miss Hillary come late to their regard for the troops, and as
sincere as they no doubt are--after months of practice at Miss
Hillary's bedroom mirror the president can finally snap off a salute
as crisply as any arriving boot at Parris Island--they don't
understand that the rest of us need no tutelage in holding our
fighting men in deference, honor and even awe. We were doing that when
Master William was safe in the embrace of the friendly streets of
London, leading cheers for Ho Chi Minh.
   
Only in America can commander-in-chief be an entry-level job, but you
might think that a president with Mr. Clinton's military background
(as governor, he was commander-in-chief of the Arkansas National
Guard, and brooked no sloppily filled sandbags when the Ouachita River
leaped its banks every spring) would choose discretion, not
flamboyance, as his guide. Imagining himself as Henry V at Agincourt,
he dons a dashing leather bomber jacket, with the patch of the 1st
Armored Division on his breast, for the patrol to the mess hall. But
neither patch nor jacket makes him George S. Patton or enrolls him in
the happy band of brothers. The gesture inevitably invites his troops
to see him as a little boy on a tricycle, waving a stick sword,
boasting that his daddy can lick the other daddies.
   
Mike McCurry, the president's press man, calls this the `theme of the
week' strategy, and this president has more themes of the week than
Baskin-Robbins has flavors. The president, he says, `wants to focus on
making the humanitarian case' for sending troops to Bosnia, especially
in this `season of hope.'
   
The intended point, in the familiar Clinton tactic, is that anyone who
gags and retches at the cynical manipulation of tragedy is naturally
someone who opposes humanitarian gestures, who feels no tug at his
heart in the season of the Prince of Peace.
   
Rep. Ike Skelton, a Democrat from Missouri, is one such ogre. He told
the House yesterday that the Clinton policy--he was too polite to call
it the re-election strategy--`puts our troops in a snake pit while
we're angering half the snakes.'
   
Snakes abound when you join civil wars, as young Master William tried
to tell Col. Holmes at the University of Arkansas in that famous
letter of phony piety 30 years ago. Nothing has changed.
 
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Aperi os tuum, decerne quod justum est, et judica inopem et 
  pauperem.                    -- Liber Proverbiorum  XXXI: 8-9 

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