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Comments on this column:

Your recent piece where you asked how Americans would have felt if during our Indian wars Europeans, or some other outsider had invaded to put a stop to the killing. I had thought the same thing after reading that polls that find Russians, and many others strongly object to the bombing.

As we know, poll results can be tilted by choosing the right question, or asking the question in a leading way. As far as I know, none of the polls reported asked those questioned whether they advocate leaving the Serbs free to continue the genocide and ethnic cleansing to the bitter end. If not, what alternative would they advocate?

Speaking of "Bitter". The Library of Congress web site provides access to a ten year old Sate Dept comprehensive series of history of countries outside the U.S. The pages on the Balkans detail at least 1000 years of repression, attrocities, and slaughter. For example, the Albanians did it to the Serbs when they were dominate in the past. Now the Serbs are doing it to the Albanians. Every group has ample justification for hating their neighbors, if they want to hate someone.

I'm not favorably impressed by the Clinton Administration led NATO effort against the Serbs, but I would have been ashamed if nothing at all was done to halt what was going on.

John Pittman

---

I wish I had the answer to the Kosovo problem. One thing I know for sure, and history is on my side, what we are doing now is not the best answer for the long term. My heart goes out to the ethnic Albanians. I'm incensed by the lack of humanity shown by all parties. But I'm not convinced that one drop of American blood should be shed. Soldiers swear to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. Our Constitution says nothing about intercession for "humanitarian" reasons to counter morally reprehensible actions internal to a sovereign nation. It is a tremendous stretch of the imagination to justify any military action in Kosovo as in the national security interests of the United States. I'm frankly frightened and outraged that our legislators and President are so blinded by our allies and the press. We are rushing to repeat our own failures in Vietnam, Haiti, and Somalia. European history will not record this as a NATO action. You are absolutely correct that Yugoslavians will remember America as the monster aggressor. Exactly what communism taught them since W.W.II.

Information is the ultimate weapon. Unfortunately, information only creates "virtual" power initially. The problem in America is a cultural one demanding quick solutions. We want the McDonald's drive through war at 450 MHz. Information builds tempo slowly, requiring weeks, months, years. Soviet Communism took 70 years to implode. Technology has improved our ability to transfer information power faster and more broadly, but the ultimate receiver is still a human being. In the non-technologically oriented third and fourth (?) world countries a glut of rapid information may be wasted effort or counterproductive. Most American executives now struggle with prioritization of information from ever increasing sources. Imagine the confusion that will exist among the technologically less sophisticated citizens of the world. My answer is patience and information that is clear, purposeful, and consistent across the spectrum.

Jay Gothard

P.S. I'm a 21 year veteran Army Reservist and a Civil Affairs Officer.

Great column... if we showered the Balkans with millions of $10 bills and the map to the Galleria at Skopje, the fighting would end tomorrow!

Carl Swann

Your idea of over-informing the populous of Yugoslavia has some interesting points but what about the information itself sir? I would wonder how you would expect anything near the truth to be dealt to the people of Yugoslavia and particularly the Serbs when we don't deal with it ourselves in our own country.

Too many people rely too much on the news sources in this country without question. Further most people don't want nor need the truth and even armed with it could care less. So if this, "ignorant manipulatable populous" in the ranks of ordinary citizenship in this country can't get the point through our sophisticated information delivery systems, how could this ever be possible in Kosovo or Yugoslavia in general?

Add to this the impossibility of our "gaze" ever being situated long enough on a topic to actually create needed change and where are we? Your proposal is not to inform the populous in order to get a tyrant out of power but to manipulate the populous to get the justifiable end that you as an outsider want. What is the logical end to all of this? I would argue it is not arming everyone in order to instill fear of ones' neighbor as the route to civility. Good fences don't make good neighbors just haves and have nots. Sometimes things happen in ways we cannot control. If America feels the need to sublimate it's own historical inequities, i.e. the destruction of aboriginal people, with the military backing of another people then why not destroy itself and hand it all back to the original tenants of this continent first? When America starts owning up to its own mis-information policy and destructive nature of all it deems as "clear and present dangers" then it can justifiably look to solve the problems with it's neighbors.

The better idea here is to look for the solution to the problems internally before committing vast amounts of resources to problems externally.

Robert C. Enriquez

AND THIS FUNNY BIT OF HORROR, HOTLINKED BY ROBERT ENRIQUEZ:

A Mesage From Arm The Homeless Founder Pete Whippit:

Dear Friends,

When I was fighting side-by-side with Mau-Mau warriors in the blood-soaked sands of Arakas, I realized once and for all that, just as the famous economist Adam Smith once said, "Power comes through the barrel of a gun."

Or as Clint Eastwood put it in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly: "There are two kinds of people in the world. Those with loaded guns, and those who dig."

My friends, for too long, the homeless of America have had to dig.

Without guns, they lie at the mercy of drug-crazed urban predators, and skinheads whose idea of a fun night out is to set a sleeping homeless man on fire.

If you're like me, and you love guns, then you must love the idea of Americans who need guns the most and can afford them the least resting peacefully with a loaded .45 by their side.

Won't you help us? We need your time, your guns, and your tax-deductible contribution, and we need it today. A meal is good for one night, but a firearm is forever.

Your brother in arms,

Pete Whippit

I appreciate your column on the war. The idea that we can have a nice clean war in which no Americans get hurt is silly. Air war destroys things but it doesn't loosen the grip of a tyrant. The bad guys have access to the best places to hide and they don't care if we blow up their people or things, at least don't care enough.

It is very foolish to think we can impose our will without cost. We are really irritating a lot of people and have damaged our relationship with Russia. Russia is weakened but still a large country, an important people, and a very dangerous enemy.

I have a friend who was over there in the previous "peacekeeping" farce and she said it is unbelievably screwed up, our efforts are misplaced, and too many of our own companies and allies are making money selling arms to both sides.

Walter

TRANSCOMPETITION

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Transcompetition: Moving Beyond Competition and Collaboration
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Hardcover, 240 pages
Published by McGraw-Hill
Publication date: April 1, 1998
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TRANSCOMPETITION
Moving Beyond Competition and Collaboration

by Harvey Robbins & Michael Finley
Copyright © 1998 by Harvey Robbins & Michael Finley

I've been getting calls from reporters lately. With the millennium drawing nigh, people are writing lots of what's-ahead stories. They want to know, what will the future look like. Will machines create an earthly paradise for us? Will we all watch 3-D TV all day long?

As if our best hope for the future are the gizmos we come up with.

I tell the reporters that the future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed. The war in Yugoslavia, which reminds many people of the past, is a good example. Because it is the first time I am aware of that an alliance of nations has decided to intervene in the affairs of a sovereign state that is abusing its own people.

It's a new thing. Alliances have waged war before, and often for ostensibly altruistic reasons -- the Allied Powers in World War II, the UN in Iraq.

But Yugoslavia is a leap into the void -- outside nations imposing their morality upon a bully that has not raised a hand against any of them, but is intent on butchering its own minorities.

It's as if, a century ago, the rest of the world warned the U.S. to stop killing the Indians and free our slaves, or they'd invade us. Our response would have been like Molosevic's today: MYOB.

It's a most frustrating war because our best values undercut our best tactics. We have the high-tech to kill everyone a dozen times. But our culture and politics are so high-touch and sensitive, we're afraid to kill anyone, and God help us if one of our sons is hurt over there.

Most Americans are of a mind today to commend the NATO countries for its attempted good deed. But we concede that it isn't working, and we wonder if a better way exists.

My partner Harvey Robbins and I wrote about emerging social technologies in our 1998 book Transcompetition (McGraw-Hill). In it we looked at the assortment of peaceful methods -- information campaigns, embargoes, strikes, class actions, and shunning -- for coping with neighborhood, workplace, and global bullies.

Transcompetition is the method we prescribed for encircling brutes in a lasso of truth, and tightening the noose until the brute understands there is no escape from it.

That approach ended apartheid in South Africa. It surrounds evil with attention and heaps shame upon it until it withdraws. It undermines top-down regimes from the bottom up, through the power of information.

It doesn't always work. A poser like Mussolini is easier to shame than an authentic brute like Stalin.

But it might work in Yugoslavia. Imagine a campaign to circumvent Milosevic's control of his country's media by going straight to the Serbian people. I envision NATO bombers dropping not bombs but gifts to the people of Serbia. I envision millions of airdropped information packages.

I would blanket the country with e-mails, diskettes, videotapes, audiocassettes, radio and TV transmission and good old paper, telling the Serbs in their own language what they cannot hear from their state-run media: what is going on in Kosovo, why other nations object, and what will be the outcome of Milosevic's cruel campaign -- estrangement from the world community.

The message mustn't be heavy-handed or propagandistic, and it must be spoken in a Serbian voice. In it we explain the concerns of the alliance, we profess our goodwill to the Serbs, and our sympathies with their aspirations as a people -- but also with the Kosovars.

The point of all this is to take away from Milosevic his greatest resource -- an ignorant, manipulatable populace.

Of course, the plan fails if the people reject the message, or if they accept it but are unable, as in Iraq, to muster leverage against their dictator. Not every Serb will agree with the message. But the hope -- the best hope peace ever has, that our adversaries love their children just as we love ours -- is that enough will acknowledge its truth that Molosevic will lose political momentum.

The other weakness of the transcompetitive approach is on our side. Our government is unlikely to overrule the received wisdom of the military and diplomatic establishments. Whatever effort is undertaken, they will want to be in charge of. When the choice is between delivering payloads and delivering the mail, generals today will likely choose the one they know best.

But we are dealing with an experimental technology here, a new way for people with relatively little power to leverage what they have. The key is that the whole world must be watching, and saying shame, and never averting its gaze.

What we see now is that dropping bombs cannot lead to peace. Win or lose this war, Serbs will hate the United States for 500 years now, because we attacked their country and its aspirations, and not the brute in charge. It may be too late for us in Yugoslavia to put the olive sprig in our teeth, and be believed.

We are talking about information power here, not flower power. An equal case can be made for dropping not love letters from NATO, but loaded handguns. Enough guns to make Yugoslavia a place where the bully comes knocking in the night at his own risk, because the power equation has been balanced.

And let's translate that poem by Robert Frost into every language in the region: "Good fences make good neighbors."

Have a better idea for resolving the conflict in Yugoslavia? Write Mike at mfinley@mfinley.com, and he'll post it at www.mfinley.com.