In the Hot Seat - 2 April 1999

Some of you may recall that from time to time, on the heels of some catastrophe in the news, I've remarked that all a commentator can say, after a natural disaster especially, is: "Isn't it awful?" But after that, commentary is useless unless it can help.

I think it's true also of, not all, but many protest marches which may make the protestors feel good, but the question remains: Did your public protest help solve or relieve the problem, the injustice, the crime you were protesting against?

I imagine everyone's instinct over the systematic massacres in Kosovo is to cover our faces at the pitiful ordeal of the endless droves of children and women and staggering old men, and then to wonder why passionate people in Macedonia and Montenegro and Athens - and in Sydney - don't feel the same way. And instead burn the American flag and wave posters carrying the grizzly sign "Adolf Clinton".

Perhaps, a not-so-innocent companion suggested, they didn't see the pictures. Well I'm quite sure that Yugoslav television did not interrupt its endless shots of wounded innocents in hospital beds to dwell on the new orgy of ethnic cleansing. And just as I'm sure that Yugoslav television slapped the pictures of bandaged children up against shots of Mr Clinton playing golf - a blunder, in the age of television.

As for the huge protests in Western cities and in far away Australia, I'm as puzzled as the Clinton administration was at the ferocity and range of the protest marches. In the cities of countries we'd come to count on as our allies. Sometimes even assumed that they're the same people who cried out time and again: "Why doesn't Nato come in with a large force?" By the way this is the first Nato war and Nato doesn't have a large force.

Well I think for once we have a disaster that has to be talked about if only because the reaction to the president's and the Nato decision was so unexpectedly questioned or opposed within a day or two of the first attacks. The most disturbing news from here is that the White House was bewildered by the early failure of the aerial bombing. I think we have to look at a deep background.

It's the oldest cliché of military history that the instinct of professional soldiers is to begin a new war by fighting the old one. I'm sure this has been true since firearms replaced the bow and arrow and the machine gun anachronised the rifle.

When Britain declared war on Nazi Germany in September 1939 those of us who'd been alive, and alive to the endless horrors of our fathers and uncles, in the trench war of 1914-18 - that 400-mile broken line of mud-paved, rat-ridden trenches from the North Sea all the way through France and straggling deep to the Swiss border - we, most of us including the British and French high command, had expected an invading wave of infantry across Belgium into France which would then be held until we dug in and dug a defensive trench line all over again.

But in, I think, 1934 - four or five years anyway before Hitler's invasion of Poland - an obscure French officer - a major - wrote an obscure little book which had even among the military a pitiful sale. It was called The Army of the Future.

It advocated an end to trenches and fortifications indepth, like the Maginot Line of which the French were greatly proud. It said the next war would be a war of movement by mechanised forces - mainly by invading tanks and murderous accompanying aircraft.

Well, the book was either ignored or belittled by the British and the French. Nobody asked the opinion of the Americans, who were experts in the tactics of the American Civil War, 1860-65. And at that moment, in the mid '30s, were training an army no bigger than the army of Sweden with wooden rifles and mock tanks.

This neglected book was written by one Major Charles de Gaulle. There was one man who was greatly impressed by it. His name was Adolf Hitler. He read it and acted on it - developed its thesis and invented the frighteningly successful blitzkrieg.

So the Second World War brought in the war of technology on the move but it was never enough, as the Russians, more than anybody, proved by beating Hitler in Russia with millions of men on the ground.

After World War Two the nature of war changed very little through the United Nations war in Korea.

And then came Vietnam, and it was as much of a shock to the armour-plated Americans as the blitzkrieg had been to the surviving professionals of the battles of the Somme and Passchendaele.

In Vietnam, once the Americans had admitted that the United States was sending in, not thousands of helpful technicians but 500,000 fighting men, it discovered that the latest bombing airplanes and the most up-to-date tanks weren't enough to cow and crush a million or more well-scattered guerrillas and thousands of little men each owning a rifle and a bicycle.

To the outrage and then the despair of the Americans they relived the dreadful discovery of the ancient Romans when they brought all their heavy armour and iron weapons to bear on the German barbarians in the north.

Edward Gibbon wrote a sentence he could just as well have written as a dispatch to President Lyndon Johnson: "All things became adverse to the Romans. Their armour heavy, the waters deep, nor could they wield, in the uneasy situation, their weighty javelins. The barbarians on the contrary were inured to encounters in the bogs."

Vietnam was a dreadful price to pay for the discovery that in a large, primitive, rural country, scattered guerrillas can withstand the very latest in bombing planes, that an elephant has a terrible time stamping out a million ants.

Then came 1991 and the Gulf War. Throwing Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait and chasing his crack Revolutionary Guard all the way to, well not quite to Baghdad, that was no part of the United Nations order and it was a war sanctioned by the UN.

It was done, you'll recall, with the advent - making wonderful night pictures on television - of the cruise missile. Everybody was all for this new war that used these bombers without men.

Since President Reagan, every president had picked up the odd phrase that if he had to go to war he would try to avoid, as much as possible, putting soldiers "in harm's way" or "putting our men at risk".

These new slogans must have brought great comfort to dictators who didn't ask their armies if they cared to be put in harm's way. And even more pleasure to religious dictators, whose young men were not only ready to die for their people but whose mothers were proud to have them go off and do so.

But before very long even the Gulf War, it appeared, could be won only with massive forces on the ground.

So now we have a new war and most, literally over 50%, of the country was not disposed to protest it because we knew, Washington knew, the White House practically guaranteed, that it could be won quickly by the new technology - cruise missiles, smart bombs.

The vice president on the first day said almost angrily: "We have no intention of sending in ground troops, of putting Americans in harm's way."

Well it took about 48 hours for us to discover that cruise missiles and the smartest stealth jets bombing installations and depots and barracks and dumps are not managing to touch the hundreds of small camps or random stations Milosevic used as launch pads.

No stealth jet ever made or conceived can stop two tough men with rifles going from door to door in a trembling village and shooting the families.

Milosevic is not only not giving in, but the measures we've taken to stop him seem actually to have helped him to expand his atrocities and go far to accomplish his prime aim - to force from their homes as many ethnic Albanians as possible. As I talk over a third of the Kosovo population of two millions have fled or staggered out, or are trying to do so rather than stay and be executed.

Here in America and throughout the alliance I think, more and more people are faced with the one big unanswered question: whether or not to send in ground forces. And, at the same time, more and more recall the disastrous consequences of the most recent attempts to save or protect an ethnic minority.

Saddam Hussein walked into the haven we declared would be safe for the Kurds in the north.

And the most painful memory of all: remember the United Nations bravely setting up safe zones inside Bosnia? Those zones turned into traps for civilians who could then be massacred by the Serbs.

As one old observer sadly put it: "Safe havens have been little more than an excuse for closing borders to truly desperate people."

I don't know if all these things were thought about in the White House and the Pentagon before the decision to go to war against Milosevic.

In the beginning the president said - had to say - that the war would be confined to, and would be won by, aerial attacks of one sort or another.

Now, over this weekend anyway, the latest tactic - bombing Belgrade - seems no more likely to shorten the war than bombing the Pentagon would touch the American high command wherever it had scattered to.

Mr Clinton in the seat of power is truly on a hot seat I doubt he ever saw or anticipated.

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