Bill Kristol's Complaint

Topic: KOSOVO

Bill Kristol's Complaint

CommentMax
April 5, 1999 Robert Novak

Bill Kristol's Complaint Robert Novak April 5, 1999

Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, watching Sunday morning television March 28 from his home in Pascagoula, Miss., was so upset by ABC's "This Week" that he switched it off. What bothered him was Bill Kristol, the program's designated conservative Republican.

Kristol is editor of The Weekly Standard, and that weekend, his influential magazine's lead editorial (co-authored by Kristol) declared that "Republicans should be supporting" the NATO attack on Yugoslavia and indeed be "pressing for additional policies that will lead to victory."

On television that Sunday, Kristol went further. "Republicans have been misled by their ... hatred of Bill Clinton" in voting against the bombing of Kosovo, he said.

Asserting that they "should basically be supporting the president," he added: "I am worried about the Republican Party. They so dislike Clinton that they're in danger of becoming knee-jerk isolationists."

That sent Lott's blood pressure soaring, and the majority leader was not alone. Clinton's acolytes and some of his defenders in the press long have attributed criticism of the president to personal "hatred."

The overwhelming majority of congressional Republicans who warned that Clinton's bombing policy in the Balkans would be a disastrous mistake feel insulted by a fellow Republican dismissing them as governed by Clintonphobia and isolationism.

"There's no question that the trust (of Clinton) is at play, but members of the Senate would not let that cloud their judgment on something as important as this," Lott told me.

Dan Quayle, who employed Kristol as his vice presidential chief of staff, said he was unhappy that "opposition to these ill-conceived policies can be called isolationist." Lott, Quayle and other critics of the Clinton bombing have certifiable records as internationalists.

The fantasy of Kristol's formulation was demonstrated Thursday when Jack Kemp called for an immediate halt of air strikes, branding them "wrong" and "counterproductive." Another Clinton "hater"? Kemp, certainly no hater, for the last six and one-half years has steered clear of personal criticism of the president, while Kristol and The Weekly Standard mercilessly bombarded Clinton.

Sen. John McCain, until now the favorite Republican presidential candidate of liberal ideologues because of his stands on tobacco and campaign finance, is praised by Kristol for advocating bombing in downtown Belgrade and suggesting ground troops.

When I asked McCain on CNN's "Crossfire" Thursday night whether he agreed with Kristol's hate-Clinton theory, the senator lapsed into Senate-speak: "I respect the views of my colleagues." But McCain then urged a "healthy debate" in the GOP between his side and Pat Buchanan's: "It isn't just about use of force.

It's got to do with protectionism and free trade and a number of other issues that sort of symbolize the wings of the party." Where does that leave free traders like Lott, Quayle and Kemp? McCain's framing of the debate is as skewed as Kristol's.

What's really at stake was clearly propounded in the July/August 1996 issue of Foreign Affairs magazine in an article by Kristol and Robert Kagan, a Weekly Standard contributing editor (who also shared authorship of the recent editorial). In urging a "neo-Reaganite foreign policy," they proposed "benevolent global hegemony" enforced by an enhanced U.S. military.

Conservatives cannot prevail domestically, they maintained, "without the remoralization of American foreign policy." To John Quincy Adams' admonition for Americans not to go "abroad in search of monsters to destroy," they responded: "Why not?"

They are prescribing nothing short of an American imperium, with Kristol now even regretting lack of U.S. intervention in Rwanda. If the Central African quagmire is within Washington's sphere of responsibility, there is no calamity in the world that is outside America's responsibility. This is hardly the traditional Republican internationalism Dwight D. Eisenhower espoused when he entered politics in 1952 solely to protect a western alliance against Soviet communism.

The fallacy of puffed-up American supreme global authority is shown in the 1996 Kristol-Kagan article's reference to "Slobodan Milosevic's decision to finally seek rapprochement with Washington." An unidentified "Serb leader" is quoted as saying:

"Milosevic knows that all satellites of the United States are in a better position than those that are not satellites." The authors did not realize that Milosevic was more interested in keeping Kosovo as a province of Serbia than in qualifying as an American dependency.