-Caveat Lector-
>From Int'l Herald Tribune
> Paris, Wednesday, June 9, 1999
>
>
> Kosovo War Bringing Out Clinton's Best, Aides Assert
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> -- By John F. Harris Washington Post Service
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> -- WASHINGTON - It was the kind of occasion that reminds senior White
> House officials that access to the president is not always such a
> wonderful thing.
>
> On the night of May 7, it fell to the national security adviser,
> Samuel (Sandy) Berger, to track down President Bill Clinton on a
> political trip in Texas to share the latest bad news from the air war:
> NATO missiles had mistakenly destroyed the Chinese Embassy in
> Belgrade.
>
> The anger at the other end of the line was swift and unmistakable.
> ''He was upset that it happened, baffled by how could it happen,
> insistent on getting an explanation of what went wrong,'' Mr. Berger
> recalled.
>
> But Mr. Clinton's storm may have been as noteworthy for what it was
> not.
>
> The errant bombing was the kind of event that in an earlier time might
> have triggered profanity and blame-casting, followed by self-pity and
> self-doubt, according to many past and current Clinton advisers and
> friends. But Mr. Berger heard none of this: ''He wanted people focused
> on how to fix the problem rather than going on a witch hunt. He
> focused on how we deal with this and keep moving forward.''
>
> There has been a different Bill Clinton on display during the Kosovo
> crisis. In the past, Mr. Clinton has been a president who was given to
> seeing merit on all sides of an argument and who sometimes swerved
> between policies in the face of criticism. But in the past two months,
> despite suffering through waves of bad news, second-guessing by
> experts and declining approval ratings, Mr. Clinton has held
> steadfastly to his underlying goal of ending repression in Kosovo on
> NATO's terms.
>
> Is the president, after more than six years in office and countless
> personal and political crises, a changed man?
>
> ''He whines less and fights more,'' said a longtime friend and
> political strategist, James Carville. ''He understands he's going to
> get bad news and accepts it.'' To be sure, some of Mr. Clinton's
> familiar traits - a tendency to lurch into crises and to improvise his
> way out of them - also were on display in these recent months.
>
> Critics say the Kosovo war could have been avoided in the first place
> through more farsighted diplomacy. Once the war began, many military
> experts said Mr. Clinton failed to see that the air campaign would not
> work in a short time.
>
> But such complaints will look like quibbles if Yugoslavia follows
> through on its stated acceptance of the North Atlantic Treaty
> Organization's demands, presidential aides say. Still uncertain,
> various advisers said, is what effect the alliance's apparent victory
> will have on the 19 months left in Mr. Clinton's time in office.
>
> Some presidential aides and friends are describing Kosovo in
> Churchillian tones, as Mr. Clinton's ''finest hour.'' But by all
> indications, he is eager for the hour to pass rapidly.
>
> On Thursday, the day President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia said
> he had accepted NATO's demands, Mr. Clinton welcomed that announcement
> in the Rose Garden, then pivoted to remarks on Medicare and
> environmental protection. His radio address Saturday was not a
> reflection on the alliance's first war but a pledge to devote more
> federal attention to mental health issues.
>
> The abrupt change of focus was no accident. Public unease over the
> Kosovo conflict, several advisers said, contributed to what various
> polls have shown is a steady drop in the president's public approval
> rating.
>
> Clinton aides expect no dramatic spike in his popularity in the wake
> of a successful Kosovo exit. A Democratic strategist who is
> influential at the White House said that to the American electorate,
> foreign policy for the president is like snow removal for a big-city
> mayor: You get little credit when things work well but are punished
> when they don't.
>
> But several current and former close advisers were struck by the
> relative detachment with which Mr. Clinton watched his approval
> ratings fade in recent weeks. For nearly four years, after his
> humiliation in the 1994 midterm elections, keeping approval ratings
> high was a paramount project of his presidency. Mr. Clinton, friends
> said, expressed alarm when the numbers dropped even a point or two;
> during the battle last year over his impeachment, one aide said, he
> ''was forever spouting poll numbers.''
>
> From the White House vantage point, Mr. Clinton's survival - whether
> fighting for re-election or trying to avoid removal from office in the
> Monica Lewinsky scandal - depended on keeping those numbers high. They
> were also essential to doing anything more ambitious, providing the
> stick with which he could prod congressional Republicans and Democrats
> to join him in fashioning a centrist agenda.
>
> But a friend who was with the president when a new batch of anemic
> ratings arrived on his desk reported with surprise: ''He did not
> flinch. He was calm about it.''
>
> This is not to suggest, aides said, that Mr. Clinton is oblivious to
> public perceptions.
>
> The day after the Chinese Embassy bombing, Mr. Clinton complained to
> Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain that news coverage was not fully
> presenting the moral dimensions of the war, according to notes of the
> phone call shared by a White House official. Referring to reports of a
> Serbian atrocity, Mr. Clinton told Mr. Blair: ''If we had one TV
> picture of the 15 men being roped together and burned alive, people
> would be wondering why we haven't leveled the place.''
>
> For all the belligerence of that remark, Mr. Clinton's handling of the
> crisis hardly suggests a battle-hungry president ready to let the
> consequences be damned. Instead, what Kosovo represents is his growing
> ability to integrate the uneasy mix of moralistic and pragmatic
> impulses that guide his foreign policy.
>
> Once, these two sides seemed in constant battle for control. Mr.
> Clinton the moralist expanded the 1993 U.S. peacekeeping mission in
> Somalia; Mr. Clinton the pragmatist pulled troops home once there were
> U.S. fatalities. In the 1992 campaign, the moralist accused President
> George Bush of ''coddling dictators'' with his China policy; in
> office, the pragmatist concluded that there was little alternative to
> continuing Mr. Bush's policy.
>
> In Kosovo, Mr. Clinton decided that the moral and political
> implications of letting Serb-led Yugoslav forces overrun and
> ethnically cleanse Kosovo were unacceptable. But he also decided that
> only bombing, rather than the ground troops that many experts said
> were necessary, represented an acceptable cost.
>
> In recent weeks, a foreign-policy adviser said, Mr. Clinton began
> reluctantly to reassess that judgment, confronting the possibility
> that even sending in ground troops might be preferable to a defeat.
>
> As a confidant put it, in Kosovo the president believed, ''This is
> something big; this is something important.
>
> ''There was a sense that if this costs him points, at least it was in
> the service of something moral.''
<<Or, "freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose ...">>
A<>E<>R
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