U.S. Involvement in Kosovo Debated By CALVIN WOODWARD .c The Associated Press WASHINGTON (AP) -- This decade -- never mind this century -- has been awash in blood, but the world's great power has been selective in using force to stanch the flow. Multiply the loss of life in Kosovo by a magnitude of 100, and still it does not equal the toll in 90 days of Rwandan slaughter. Mass starvation in North Korea brings food shipments but no force from the United States to break a repressive regime's relief bottleneck. Sudan's civil war has left almost 2 million dead, and counting. How the United States picks its enemies can bear little relation to the scale of suffering it wishes to ease, even when intervention is conducted on largely humanitarian grounds. ``Any justification you can use for getting involved in Kosovo applies even more so to other conflicts,'' says Gideon Rose, a national security official in the first Clinton administration. ``There is not a coherent intellectual rationale for doing just Kosovo but not a whole variety of other interventions.'' The naysayers -- and there are many -- will fall quiet if the NATO attacks on Yugoslavia somehow result in a stabler, safer life for Kosovars without major casualties among the allies. For now, foreign policy analysts are hard-pressed to see a logical pattern that would explain why Somalia, but not Rwanda; why Bosnia, but not Sierra Leone; why Kosovo, but not so many other places where tyrants crush their people or their neighbors. ``If we're going to do humanitarian interventions, I'd rather do them in Africa because more Africans are dying,'' said Michael Mandelbaum, a European and national security scholar at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. ``Africans are suffering more and they don't have wealthy neighbors that can actually do something for them.'' As Kosovars push for more autonomy, so do others whose pain is not seen on TV -- among them Tibetans, Turkish Kurds, Tamils in tiny Sri Lanka and ethnic groups in Indonesia, where the bloodletting comes with a propensity for cutting off heads. With so much going on, it probably is unfair to ask why the United States does not step in here and there, says Rose, senior editor at Foreign Affairs magazine and former associate director for Near East and South Asian affairs in the National Security Council. He says it may be more on the mark to ask why it does, when it does. The U.S. decision not to support -- in effect, not to allow -- a sturdy and swift UN peacekeeping force in Rwanda in 1994, when at least 500,000 minority Tutsi and moderate Hutus were killed in one of history's worst bloodbaths, still weighs on the conscience. Visiting Rwanda last year, President Clinton pledged ``never again must we be shy in the face of the evidence.'' The slaughter came six months after 18 U.S. soldiers were killed in a firefight in Somalia during an operation remembered as costly and messy, even if it did save thousands of Somali lives. Washington's taste for intervening in humanitarian crises not strongly and directly tied to American interests, soured. So, why Kosovo? Analysts largely accept the hard-nosed proposition that Europe is strategically more important than Africa. They are divided on whether the Balkans are an important part of Europe. In pitching intervention to a public always wary of foreign entanglements, Clinton cited a ``moral imperative'' to move against the brutality that killed more than 2,000 people in Kosovo and displaced perhaps a quarter of the population. ``That is why we have acted now, because we care about saving innocent lives,'' the president said. Clinton also has tried to make the case that the conflict threatens instability well beyond Yugoslavia's borders, in other countries along the ``major fault line'' of continents and religions: ``We act to prevent a wider war, to defuse a powder keg at the heart of Europe, that has exploded twice before in this century with catastrophic results.'' Asked whether the administration believed the killing in Kosovo has been anywhere near as massive as elsewhere, Clinton spokesman Joe Lockhart said: ``The White House doesn't compare things like that.'' ``I think it's been a real hallmark of this administration that we have around the world, whatever continent it's on, we've been involved in trying to bring peace,'' he said.
