Friday, April 9, 1999 --- New York (APJP) -- The 24-hour cable news operations and major morning newspapers are going out of their way to undermine the NATO air campaign in Yugoslavia by attacking -- surprise! -- the Clinton Administration.

The venerable Tom Friedman put the latest version of the second-hand blame game best in his New York Times column this morning:

"...one finds that the Joint Chiefs blame Secretary of State Madeleine Albright for dragging them into a morass. The State Department blames the Pentagon and the NATO allies, the C.I.A. says it predicted the war would go badly, the Vice President is worried that it's going to sink his election chances, the Congressional Democrats want to dump the whole Clinton foreign policy team for failing to anticipate Serbian behavior, and the Republicans don't know what they want but they all agree it's Bill Clinton's fault."

And, of course, the press gladly plays along. In fact, they play by their own rules:

Accept every leak regarding internecine debate at the Pentagon as a major story and spin it to seem like a unique and unprecedented situation -- despite the fact that debate over attacks on Iraq during the Clinton and Bush administrations was actually hotter and heavier -- in an effort to demoralize not only the public but our own men and women in the service.

Forget the fact that in Iraq, ground troops were deployed well over a month after the air campaign had commenced -- not to mention that said deployment was a snap compared to what military planners face given the terrain and weather in Yugoslavia, which make both air and ground deployments far more complex.

Ignore first-hand accounts of mass slaughter, lest they actually justify NATO's course of action. Photographs of dead and mutilated bodies -- at least the few that have managed to find their way to American news organizations -- might sway public sentiment in Clinton's favor.

Compare deployment of ground troops to the ever-popular Vietnam -- but don't let on that Serbian troops in Kosovo have literally run out of gas and supplies, with the current situation holding the potiential of becoming Slobodan's slo-mo Bay of Pigs.

Don't mention that we've torn Milosevic a few new holes on the domestic front -- his economic and manufacturing base is nearly destroyed, and his inner circle are publicly sending mixed messages, a sure sign that panic and infighting have set in.

And above all, downplay the overwhelming factual proof and historical record -- let alone the afore-mentioned word-of-mouth evidence -- that show Slobodan Milosevic to be an autocratic, barbaric thug interested only in establishing a sort of Greater Serbia as his personal fiefdom by getting rid of those bothersome minorities by whatever means necessary and using his own people as "human shields." Don't even suggest that his record of political and military accomplishments matches or exceeds the various regional toadies who aided and abetted the Nazi conquest of Europe.

Instead, blame the explosion of refugees and accelerated ethnic cleansing on Bill Clinton. That should hurt those all-important "poll numbers" the press tries so hard to dismiss -- unless, of course, the numbers go South on Clinton in a big way, in which case you can bet your bottom dollar that we will never hear the end of it.

Imagine what would happen if this same flawed logic -- Slobodan stepping up his atrocities after NATO began pounding Serbian targets, therefore Bubba's to blame -- were applied just over half a century ago. By the last week of August, 1944, the press would have been declaring the invasion of Normandy -- the beginning of the end of the Thousand-Year Reich and the Holocaust -- a failure. Pundits and opinion shapers would have been calling for an end to the "tragic and costly incursion" which had cost thousands of American boys their lives -- as the highest echelon of the Third Reich pumped up "production" capacity at their production facilities at Buchenwald, Dachau and Belsen. Roosevelt would have been castigated for poor judgment and "caving in" to "lesser" powers in the Grand Alliance.

Meanwhile, here we are on the verge of the 21st century. An autocratic dictator is doing everything in his power to destabilize southeastern Europe, foment ethnic hatred, kill "foreigners," and endanger established and emerging democracies in his own neighborhood. And much as I don't like bombing or war, it seems to be the only message Milosevic understands.

My advice -- ignore the press, who have become an army of journalistic Neville Chamberlains. Support the effort to make all of Europe safe for democracy -- including the air strikes, which take time but are clearly succeeding. And hope that NATO permanently deals with Slobodan and his henchmen -- whether or not it includes war crimes trials.