(Via Milinet)
Fairbanks Daily News-Miner
July 12, 2000
Bill's War Crimes
By David Hackworth
In 1992, American warriors were sent to Somalia to feed the
poor. A
few months later, "Wild Bill" Clinton took charge and changed
the
rules of
the game from feeding to fighting. By 1993, American policy had
become "shoot first, ask questions later."
Folks around the globe are wondering: Has the United States
returned
to its Wild West past where trouble was too often resolved from
the
mean
end of a gun or a rope?
The world has plenty of reasons to ask. Since our aborted
Somalian
misadventure, U.S. bombs were dropped in Bosnia and Croatia and
continue nonstop over what's become our permanent bombing range,
Iraq.
Then there was the futile "peaceful" invasion of Haiti, followed
by
the 1994, near-nuclear high-noon in Korea. I was at ground zero
there
at the
time and almost witnessed my first atomic fireball. No wonder
the two
Korean presidents are as much into unification as squirrels are
into
acorns--togetherness beats glowing for 250,000 years.
And, of course, there's the aspirin factory in Sudan that
missiles
disappeared by mistake. And the Afghan camp built to train
CIA-sponsored
Freedom Fighters that went up in smoke from missiles that missed
their intended terrorist target, Osama bin Lad en.
For a former peacenik, "Wild Bill" has slapped a powerful lot of
leather during the past eight years. Apparently, there's nothing
more
dangerous
than a former flower child with his hand on the trigger of the
world's most awesome military arsenal.
Now, Amnesty International wants to sock Clinton, Tony Blair,
Gerhard
Schroeder and the rest of NATO's leaders into the slammer for
war
crimes committed during last year's 78-day NATO bombing campaign
of
Serbia.
Amnesty wants to do unto "Wild Bill" and fellow gunslingers like
Nuremberg did unto Hitler's shooters.
They rightly say that churches, hospitals, bridges and roads
packed
with civilians, and TV stations, are not military targets. And
that
using
CBUs--baseball-sized bomblets that have a high dud rate and
cause
horrible casualties to civilians, especially children who pick
them
up thinking
they're a toy--constitutes a war crime.
For sure, a trial would tell present and future world leaders
that
the military solution used recklessly isn't morally OK even if
they
see themselves as good folks with the purest of intentions.
A Nuremberg-type trial for the world to witness would also send
the
lesson to world leaders--present and future--that the military
solution no longer works. Not only does the military hammer
seldom
resolve conflict anymore, it's gotten too destructive.
Once long ago, circa year 1000, wars were mainly fought on sunny
hills and open plains, between the principal combatants.
Warriors
slashed and hacked away until one side won. But then gunpowder
and
industry came along, causing war to move from intermittent,
contained
mayhem to more frequent, and bigger, worldwide violence.
But a thousand years after the Magyars raided Constantinople,
huge
cities such as London, Berlin and Tokyo--filled with
civilians--had
become the battlefield. During World War II, whole countries
were
being reduced to rubble.
Following that global holocaust, conflict between the Soviets
and the
West morphed into MAD-Mutually Assured Destruction. MAD was as
mad as
it gets--total insanity.
Today, with silos bristling with enough weapons to destroy this
planet a hundred times over, highly educated and supposedly
civilized
scientists
and engineers are busy making even more apocalyptic weapons.
Smart
horror devices to lase, spray, fire or release destruction
capable of
zapping more human beings in an hour than have been killed in
all the
world's wars put together.
Even though war has proven very profitable for big business and
just
peachy keen for certain American politicians, we need another
way to
resolve conflict. Because these days after a fight, there are no
longer any winners.
So let the trial begin. It might just keep planet Earth around
for
another hundred years.
Retired U.S. Army Col. David Hackworth is America's most
decorated
veteran. His column is distributed by King Features Syndicate.
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