Congress and Yugoslavia

It’s no surprise that Congress is befuddled by what might be best to do in Yugoslavia (“Congress Can’t Get a Grip on Kosovo Policy,” April 14). That’s why it’s a good thing that we have a president who has been both decisive and humane. No doubt, if the problem had been left in the hands of Congress to decide, or to the United Nations, all this ethnic cleansing would have been perpetrated amid endless talking and hand-wringing, with no clear penalty for the leader and the country behind it.

JULES BRENNER

Hollywood

*

Congress did not get the U.S. into Kosovo, Clinton did. Congress cannot get a “grip” on the Kosovo policy simply because there is no policy. Had a policy been established, the Clinton administration would not have to make a raid on Social Security funds in order to pay for yet another of his customarily reckless and irresponsible capers.

TOM WITMAN

Redondo Beach

*

I read NATO Secretary General Javier Solana’s sermon on Kosovo (Commentary, April 13) with no small dose of incredulity. His logic: Because Yugoslavia would not sign NATO’s diktat (i.e., Rambouillet accords), the Serbs, apparently, were not interested in peace. Bombs will now teach them to give peace a chance. In the meantime, as we watch civilians killed by collateral damage, homes pulverized, refugees fleeing, refugees bombed, bridges destroyed, schools blasted, passenger trains incinerated and entire neighborhoods vanquished by NATO bombs gone astray, we many indeed pause to reflect on the nature of the “stability” NATO has brought to the region.

So many peaceful, intelligent options were available to the gods of NATO. So many lives, Serbian as well as Albanian, could have been spared the brutalities of this war.

MILAN DRAGICEVICH

Los Angeles

*

The news on the crisis in Kosovo is rife with cognitive dissonance. Serbs in Yugoslavia and around the world seem to share a singular view that the NATO air attacks on the Milosevic government are a moral outrage and that Serbs are being unjustly brutalized. But they rarely comment on the ethnic cleansing and the inhuman atrocities being practiced on the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. Why is that? Don’t they know what has been happening to their own neighbors?

KEN SHEFFER

San Dimas