COLUMN: Supporting beliefs with U.S. troops

From Andrew Exum's, "Perilous Orthodoxy." Fall '99 From Andrew Exum's, "Perilous Orthodoxy." Fall '99For the moment, forget Staff Sgt. Andrew Ramirez. Forget Staff Sgt. Christopher Stone. Forget Spec. Steven Gonzales. Instead, picture a young girl being carried from her homeland by her father, made a war refugee at the age of six. Picture the hundreds of thousands of civilians slaughtered by Serbian gunmen. Picture in your mind Balkan grain fields turned into mass burial sites by the monstrous atrocity that has been slouching toward Bethlehem since the end of the Cold War. "President Slobodan Milosevic is a criminal," Elie Wiesel wrote in Newsweek. "Those who believe that there are nonviolent ways to stop his inhumane actions against Albanians are naive. They forget the nature of the century." Wiesel, a survivor of the Holocaust and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, stops short of drawing parallels between the barbarities of Nazi Germany and the horrors of Serbia, but he forcefully argues that "Milosevic has followed an intolerable path of violence and destruction that must provoke revulsion in every civilized person." Revulsion, yes, and also reaction. If that's true, though, then why is America more concerned about walking into another Vietnam-like blunder than actually doing what is right? It's almost as if we haven't mastered the lesson we learned by reacting to the Holocaust so late, after so many atrocities had already been committed. Sure, you can say that the situations in Nazi Germany and present-day Serbia are different but I guarantee that the soldiers who first step foot into Kosovo will experience much the same feeling felt by the 64th and 99th infantry divisions when they liberated Dachau in 1944. "We followed the screams," wrote one soldier 50 years after his experience. Wiesel writes that "a nation is great not because of its wealth or its military might; its greatness is measured by the way it uses or abuses its wealth of power. In other words, its greatness derives from its commitment to moral principle." Moral principle has been something America has struggled with lately. Whose moral principle, if any, are we supposed to follow? With regard to Kosovo, however, America seems to be united on what is right and wrong. The confusion derives from what we're to do about it. Seventy-one percent of Americans in a Gallup poll taken last week felt that ground troops are necessary to bring peace to the Balkans but you'd be hard pressed to find more than a handful eager to send our boys over there. Since Vietnam, we're less concerned with the reasons for going to war than the safety of our soldiers. Few Americans can stomach the thought of their neighbors, sons and friends marching off to war in a country largely removed from our economy and well-being. But strategic bombing of the type we've seen in the past two weeks has not and will not get the job done. There is no reason not to end this with ground troops right now. Concerns about this being another Vietnam are misplaced. The lessons of that war have been put to use over the last 30 years, culminating in the destruction of the Iraqi army in the space of 100 hours. We now have a military that is no longer trained to fight against an opposing army arrayed on a well-defined battlefield. Today, the military is trained to fight in situations where the line between enemy and civilians is often blurred and the goals are more complicated than destroying everything in sight. One anti-war activist on College Green yesterday said that we should wait to hear both sides before we take action, but before too long, there may be only one side left to hear -- that of the aggressors. NATO pointed out freshly-dug mass graves littering Kosovo over the weekend and British intelligence has simultaneously reported that 100,000 Albanian men are now missing -- vanished without a trace. It now appears that if we wait any longer, there won't be any ethnic Albanians left to enjoy a free homeland when we eventually halt Serbian aggression. The time has arrived for action. Set aside the path of caution and forget the politics for a minute. Do what is right and -- most importantly -- do it now.