The Only Exit ... Secretary Albright Must Resign

by William Westmiller
[email protected]

Special to The Libertarian Enterprise

          Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has presided over one of the worst foreign policy disasters in United States history. Assuming the mantle from a distracted President, the Secretary abandoned the principles of a critical international treaty, committed the United States to an offensive military adventure, and seriously jeopardized our moral standing with nations around the world. Her resignation should precede a full reversal of the policies she has promulgated and implemented.
          Whatever her intentions, Albright is the architect of a "new vision" of intervention and assault, which will destroy peaceful relationships among nations for decades. While calling for stability in Europe, she instigates a policy to destabilize a nation which has never threatened its neighbors. While applauding peace, she inaugurates an air war designed to cripple a former ally. While chanting freedom, she enslaves an entire nation to the whims of an Alliance gone berserk. Ignoring reality or truth, she is drunk with the imagined power to impose her own reality through the force of arms. Her perception of the world must be repudiated by the United States Congress and by her own President.
          Her efforts have been encouraged and supported by the military elite of NATO, which desperately pursues hegemony as a remedy for peaceful coexistence. Unhappy with the prospect of an assured defense against any military invasion, the Organization has initiated its own military assault in a desperate effort to justify its own somber existence. Rather than surrender power and position to the prospect of a diminished peaceful alliance, the Organization has abandoned its principles of civil defense in favor of an offensive military adventure. Madeleine Albright is their benefactor, savior, and hero.
          Albright's executive superior, embroiled for months in his own defensive maneuvers, must assume responsibility for his own distractions and the consequences for international peace. The President seems to believe that the bombing campaign was a response to "ethnic cleansing" of Kosovo. He's mistaken. Bombing was Albright's penalty for Yugoslavia's refusal to allow foreign troops to occupy one of their provinces. The Serbs had agreed to equal protection for Kosovars, even to political autonomy for the province of Kosovo. The only reservation it expressed to a peaceful settlement of a civil war was an indefinite occupation of the province by NATO military troops. For that affront, Albright chose to bomb their nation back to the stone age. Her frustrated act of war against Serbia left the Yugoslav government with no alternative but to eliminate the terrorist Kosovo Liberation Army, which had occupied nearly half of the province. The forced expulsion of ethnic Albanians was a response to NATO intransigence, not a precursor to NATO's military assault. The President should recognize that Albright's fruitless war was and remains a serious mistake. He should demand her immediate resignation.
          The next step must be an immediate termination of the bombing and a thorough repudiation of any offensive intentions against peaceful nations. This apology must be made strongest, first, and foremost to the Russian people. President Clinton should personally travel to Moscow to plead for the assistance of Russian troops in establishing a peacekeeping mission in Kosovo, at our expense. This is the only hope for ending Albright's foolishness and establishing an environment for the settlement of a civil war in Yugoslavia. Russia may be the only nation that Serbia can accept as a civil force for peace, given the conduct of the other European nations. NATO and the United Nations should promptly endorse any reasonable terms the Russians can obtain from Yugoslavia and the Kosovo rebels.
          Even more important than the resolution of a foreign military conflict, the people of the United States must reconsider our role in the world. If we are to be a vehicle for peace among nations, we cannot allow our visceral responses to pain and suffering to dictate our national interest, or our conduct toward other nations. There is prejudice, evil, and a multitude of innocent victims everywhere in the world. If a few images of suffering are to determine the application of our military power, then we shall surely be the victims of our own good intentions. The combatants on both sides in Kosovo are Marxists and Communists who put no value on human life, except as it serves their quest for power. If we reduce our own ethics to the level of "might makes right", the enemies of freedom and liberty will have won.
          A great nation can admit its mistakes and turn back to a just path. Our power and strength is in our love of liberty, not in our military muscle. It is not inhuman to make errors, but it is a grave fault to pursue them to our own doom.

William Westmiller
California Coordinator of the Republican Liberty Caucus
Past Candidate for the Republican Nomination for (CA24) Congress
Former National Secretary and California Chairman, Libertarian Party

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