NATO Bombing Civilian Deaths

Re “Civilian Deaths Erode NATO Credibility,” May 31: I have a question to ask those who feel NATO owes the world an apology for civilian deaths incurred during the current bombing campaign in Yugoslavia.

Is the American public so credulous as to believe that today’s so-called smart weapons can distinguish civilians from members of the military--thereby eliminating collateral damage completely? So naive as to be influenced by Slobodan Milosevic’s public relations campaign to convince the rest of the world that the war is NATO’s fault--not his?

Just as well then to apologize to France for degrading the beach at Normandy in 1944 or to France, Belgium and Luxembourg for damaging the Ardennes Forest during the Battle of the Bulge.

At last count the score was Milosevic, 800,000 lives uprooted and destroyed; NATO, 800. Who owes whom an apology?

D.E. RANSFORD

Hacienda Heights

*

I tend to agree with Diane Nichols (letter, June 1) that a people and culture (the Kosovars) who virtually disown their daughters because they have been horribly raped by Serb troops don’t deserve much sympathy from America or the West.

On the other hand, we should probably blame ignorance and religious dogma imposed on them. In a little-noticed news dispatch from the Vatican (April 14), the pope has criticized relief agencies in Albania and Macedonia for administering morning-after pills to these traumatized women. Are we any better?

ANDREW VAN HUSTEN

Diamond Bar

*

Michael Kazin (“For Left, It’s Finally Post-Vietnam,” Opinion, May 30) leaves out the most crucial argument made by opponents of the U.S. war on Yugoslavia: that our own government is committing crimes against humanity in the Balkans in the name of deterring such crimes by others.

To those who ask, “But what can we do about Milosevic?” I reply: As Americans, our responsibility is to first answer the question, what are we doing about our own government’s reign of terror on all nationalities in Yugoslavia, killing children and elderly alike? There are many who defend these attacks on crowded cities and civilian infrastructure as “humanitarian” who are ignorant that such a policy is illegal under international law; but no one has the power to police the world’s self-appointed policeman. Do they think Los Angeles should be bombed by other countries because the U.S. government was found complicit with the genocide of 200,000 Indians in Guatemala’s dirty war of the 1980s? Or do they feel safe in decreeing the fate of others, because they cannot imagine such a thing ever happening to us?

As for how to stop Milosevic (and the KLA), if the U.S. had been willing to put the money into peace that it has put into war, the inter-ethnic conflict would never have exploded into mass violence. But then there wouldn’t have been a fire for U.S./NATO to put out, justifying its occupation and expansion into a new region.

LEONE HANKEY

Los Angeles