|
DAVID
GREGORY, host:
As Serbs continue to move north out of Kosovo, NATO troops and ethnic
Albanians returning to their villages are finding that the gruesome evidence
of atrocities the Serbs left behind. There's plenty of it--mass graves,
charred, dismembered corpses and bones sticking out of shallow graves.
In one village, residents say Serbs killed 155 unarmed men, women and
children back in April. In another, Dutch soldiers found 20 burned bodies,
while British soldiers in yet another village found piles of bullet-riddled
clothing.
We're joined now by one of the most provocative figures on the American
political landscape, Pat Buchanan. Mr. Buchanan,
as you all know, was a senior adviser to Presidents Nixon and Reagan.
And after rattling mainstream Republican presidential candidates with
his strong showings in 1992 and 1996, he's back on the campaign trail
again. He joins us now from Washington. Mr. Buchanan,
good to see you again.
Mr. PATRICK BUCHANAN (Republican, Presidential Candidate):
Good to talk to you, David.
GREGORY: This is what you've said about the conflict in Kosovo. 'This
war is a strategic blunder that may prove the ruin of the most successful
alliance in history. It's an illegal and unconstitutional war launched
without authorization by Congress.'
Mr. BUCHANAN: Right.
GREGORY: When you see the pictures like we just showed, the discovery
of the corpses, of the bodies, of the evidence of mass graves and atrocities,
do you still call this conflict a blunder?
Mr. BUCHANAN: Oh, yeah. I mean, those--none of those
people were dead before this war began. These are all casualties of this
war, a war launched by the United States and NATO against a thug and a
political war criminal whom we should have known would engage in precisely
these kinds of atrocities. We were told that we were going to war to prevent
what you've just shown pictures of. So we clearly did not prevent it.
In that sense, it was a blunder. It was a...
GREGORY: So you're not--you don't believe that it was going on before
NATO started dropping bombs?
Mr. BUCHANAN: Oh, listen, there was, I think, 90,000
refugees there, and there was 2,000 dead in the war in 1998. You had a
nasty, ugly little civil war going on. But we didn't have tens of thousands
dead. We didn't have tens of thousands raped. We didn't have a million
and a half people driven out of their homes. We didn't have Serbia smashed.
We didn't have Kosovo in ruins. We didn't have the Balkans destabilized.
And we did not have the United States basically almost at sword's point
with Russia and with China. This war historically will be seen as an utterly
worthless war and, I believe, a strategic blunder.
And as you see, David, the Europeans began to form up their own European
military force. You can see that what I said about its impact on NATO
is already coming true.
GREGORY: And the impact is what?
Mr. BUCHANAN: The impact...
GREGORY: It breaks up the alliance?
Mr. BUCHANAN: I think ultimately the impact is--is not
a bad thing. It is Europe taking responsibility for its own destiny 45
years after the end--excuse me--55 years after the end of World War II.
That would be a good thing. Bring the American troops home to the United
States of America. They have no business fighting wars in a Balkan peninsula
which has been battling, where they've been killing one another long before
we were a nation.
GREGORY: But--but isn't that the same isolationist argument that would
have kept us out of World War II?
Mr. BUCHANAN: We didn't get into World War II until Hitler
declared war on us, David.
GREGORY: Did Milosevic declare a kind of war that we couldn't stand by
and let happen?
Mr. BUCHANAN: Look, Milosevic has been engaged in war
against Slovenia, he lost it; against Croatia, he eventually lost it;
in Bosnia, he eventually lost it. He was going to lose Kosovo. But the
idea that we had to get involved, the reasons for that really escape me
entirely. It was a low-grade civil war. It would have been a good thing
for America to try to stop that war and bring an end to it.
GREGORY: But you call the evidence of--of this kind of atrocities on this
scale a low-grade civil war and the casualties of a low-grade civil war
instead of a--a--a genocidal maniac in the Balkans along the lines of
Hitler?
Mr. BUCHANAN: David--David--David--David, get control
of yourself. Genocide means the mass murder of an entire people. What
we have seen is ugly ethnic cleansing, people driven out of their homelands.
We saw it happen to the Germans after World War II. From 1945 to '48,
15 million driven out without virtually a word of protest by the United
States, by the Poles, by the Czechs, by the Russians. It was horrible,
but I don't believe we should have gone to war with Stalin over it. We
should have tried to stop it. There are evils going on all over this world.
You read about the horrors, but you don't solve those horrors by launching
this war.
GREGORY: But that's a pretty...
Mr. BUCHANAN: Those bodies, David...
GREGORY: But that's a pretty easy argument to make, isn't it? I mean...
Mr. BUCHANAN: Those bodies, David, were put in those
graves after we launched this war to defend those very people.
GREGORY: Isn't it true that it's a pretty easy argument to make that we
are now and have been, since the end of the First World War, a European
power that has to lead and can't follow Europe into--into taking care
of this dirty work?
Mr. BUCHANAN: Look--look, this is like saying that we
ought to prepare in Washington because General Lee might be coming back
up the road to Washington, DC. Europe has been at peace for 45 year--for
55 years. For the last 10, the Soviet empire that was the great enemy
of the United States in a war that was our war, the Cold War, in which
I was very much an advocate of aggressive action and supported every diplomatic
and military initiative we took in that war...
GREGORY: Let's listen--go ahead.
Mr. BUCHANAN: But when your own war is over, for heaven's
sakes, the Europeans have more people than we do, more troops than we
do, more money than we do. Can they not handle Slobodan Milosevic, a thuggish
leader of a country of 11 million people when they have 350 million?
GREGORY: Let's listen to President Clinton talking last Thursday to the
nation about the end of the war, what it accomplished. Listen to this.
President BILL CLINTON: (From June 10) We have given confidence to the
friends of freedom and pause to those who would exploit human difference
for inhuman purposes. America still faces great challenges in this world,
but we look forward to meeting them. So tonight I ask you to be proud
of your country and very proud of the men and women who serve it in uniform
for, in Kosovo, we did the right thing. We did it the right way. And we
will finish the job.
GREGORY: Thirty seconds till the break. Quick comment.
Mr. BUCHANAN: Quick comment. The--the job he's talking
about is the permanent occupation of Kosovo by America, 7,000 American
troops who have no business in there when we could turn that over to the
Europeans. What happened was evil. We did not prevent it. We exacerbated
it and enlarged it.
|