June 2, 1999

Gone Fishin'

Hospitals, television studios, power plants, water systems, computer networks. Boom. Boom. Boom. Didn't President Clinton state at the start of this little war against Serbia that his beef was with Slobodan Milosevic and not the Serbian people? If so, why target the civilian infrastructure? Apparently, because NATO can. In recent weeks, the Administration and NATO's PR-sensitivity to civilian damage and death has diminished. When the first errant bombs took out non-military targets -- remember the convoy of ethnic Albanians blasted by NATO's smart bombs? -- there was much hand-wringing by the NATO reps. These days, one of their bombs blow up people with whom Clinton has no quarrel, and NATO's spin machine pops out a quick utterance of regret: Yeah, yeah, yeah, now let's get on with it. How quickly everyone becomes desensitized. It's not merely computer video games and shoot-'em-up flicks that can coarsen and blunt one's reaction to violence. After two months of daily bombing, the air strikes, even the civilian-killing strikes, are no big deal. They fade from the television news headlines. And when the air campaign intensified last week, what was Clinton doing? He was vacationing in Yulee, Florida. What commander-in-chief takes time off in the middle of an intensifying war? Why didn't the Republicans squawk about the draft-dodger lazing in the sun while our fighting men and women are waging war? Perhaps the GOPers were otherwise occupied demagoguishly accusing Clinton of passing nuclear secrets to Beijing in return for soft money campaign contributions.

The war in Kosovo is an ugly mess. NATO maintains a bombing crusade that was initially supposed to last only days. The White House claims its only goal is to return the Kosovars to Kosovo in safety. But how can that be done without ground troops? National security adviser Sandy Berger, in off-the-record briefings with reporters, has been saying that victory can be achieved without forcing Milosevic from power. Yet Secretary of State Madeleine Albright declares NATO cannot deal with Milosevic. So will there be a resolution without negotiations? And what Kosovar is going to repatriate if Milosevic is still around? As a further complication, the Kosovo Liberation Army vows it will fight on until it achieves independence -- a goal not supported by the United States. So the ending that the Clintonites claim is within reach -- a peaceful Kosovo brimming with returned Kosovars and remaining part of Serbia -- is an illusion.

Logic? Who needs logic when you have a monopoly on air power? Supporters of Clinton's war -- which is a violation of the United Nations charter -- cheered the indictment of Milosevic as a war criminal by a UN tribunal. And by continuing the bombing last week, Clinton violated the 1973 War Powers Resolution, which forces the President to terminate military action after 60 days if he has not received explicit authorization from Congress for the use of force. (In Congress, there were few complaints, though Representative Tom Campbell, a California Republican, has been pursuing a lawsuit on these grounds against Clinton.) In the latest installment of the will-he-or-won't-he shuffle, news reports last week indicated that Clinton, who once promised no ground troops, was considering sending tens of thousands of US military personnel into Kosovo.

The disingenuousness of Clinton and NATO will not do much to bring peace and democracy to Yugoslavia. A Serbian democracy advocate, whose name was withheld, made this point in an dispatch distributed recently by the Institute on War and Peace reporting: "To ordinary Serbs, who have now been under daily attack by an alliance of 19 Western powers for more than two months, the word 'democracy' now conjures up images of cruise missiles, death and destruction. The association of democracy with aggression in the minds of most Serbs has also put the republic's liberals in a difficult position. How, they wonder, can they continue to champion a concept which their countrymen identify with brute force?" Many Serbs may be blind to the atrocities committed in Kosovo. But they know this is war against them, and they take it more seriously than does Air Marshall Clinton. You would too, if the bombs were falling on your power grid.

Clinton's original sin in Kosovo -- other than neglecting it for five years -- was believing he could win a war on the cheap, that he could be a great humanitarian interventionist without bearing the cost of such action. A few planes fly in and out. A few missiles are launched. Won't require a commitment. It's like sex with Monica Lewinsky. But now, two months later, he's bombing illegally. The refugee experts are worried the Kosovars won't be able to head home before winter. The Serbian opposition to Milosevic has vanished. Civilian casualties and damage mount. The pressure for grounds troops is increasing. And Clinton is on vacation.

Gore to South Africans: Drop Dead

Last week in Atlanta, Vice President Al Gore dropped one of his big-think speeches, this one praising the work of faith-based social service outfits and calling for Washington to fund religious-oriented charities that assist the needy. This was, in part, a response to the values-first pitch of Bill Bradley, the former Democratic Senator from New Jersey who is discomfiting Gore in the contest for the Democratic presidential nomination. The speech was also an occasion for Gore -- a stick-figure politician to many voters -- to trumpet his spiritual side. "Without values of conscience, our political life degenerates," he said. The Vice President hailed the "hunger for goodness" among Americans, and declared, "A politics of community can be strengthened when we are not afraid to make connections between spirituality and politics." Let's hope Gore's speech was not broadcast in South Africa. There, millions of poor people infected with the HIV virus would have had good reason to choke if they heard Gore express these noble sentiments, for the spirit-filled Veep has helped pharmaceutical companies deny South Africans easier access to anti-AIDS drugs.

Last year, in South Africa -- where one-quarter of pregnant mothers in some areas are HIV-positive -- President Nelson Mandela signed into a law a measure that would allow South African firms to manufacture low-cost generic versions of the high-price AIDS-busting drugs produced and sold by major Western drug companies. Under international trade rules, a country can engage in such "compulsory licensing" to combat a national emergency. With 22.5 million people living with AIDS in sub-Sahara Africa, the emergency seems real enough. The law also would permit the country to buy drugs when they are found to be cheaper in other nations and import them to South Africa -- a practice called parallel importing. (Drug manufacturers often sell their products at different prices in different nations, with the cost varying as much as by a factor of ten.)

Not surprisingly, the transnational drug companies were not keen on this legislation. They fear their profits will be undermined by a gray market of low-cost AIDS drugs, which can run $10,000 a year. (Average annual income in South Africa: $2600.) The drug-makers scurried to try to block the law in South African courts. In the United States, they turned to the Clinton-Gore Administration for help. The White House obliged, threatening South Africa with sanctions if it does not yield. The drug industry found a friend in Gore, who, as chairman of the United States/South Africa Binational Commission, has leaned on the South Africans to repeal the medicines law. The Administration has been quite forceful in this campaign. On April 30, the US Trade Representative placed South Africa on its "watch list" for unfair trade practices, citing Pretoria for its attempt to abrogate patent rights. One of the charges in the USTR's report was that South African "representatives have led a faction of nations in the World Health Organization (WHO) in calling for a reduction in the level of protection provided for pharmaceuticals." Since when, in the face of a global public health crisis, is speaking out at international organizations for affordable drugs an unfair trade practice? It's telling that the Administration has not sought to pursue its complaint before the World Trade Organization, where a trade gripe of this sort ought to be registered. Presumably, this is because the Administration's case is not strong enough to win a favorable WTO ruling. Instead, the Clinton-Gore gang has chosen to exert political pressure. It's possible that the drug manufacturers have a legal argument, and not just greed, on their side. But if that were the case, Gore should let the appropriate international tribunals resolve the matter rather than act as an enforcer for the industry.

On April 8, consumer advocate Ralph Nader and James Love, who runs the Nader-founded Consumer Project on Technology, wrote to Gore, accusing him of having "engaged in an astonishing array of bullying tactics to prevent South Africa from implementing policies, legal under the rules of the WTO, that are designed to expand access to HIV/AIDS drugs." The two noted that several European nations maintain extensive trade in parallel imports of pharmaceutical drugs and that the United States itself has issued compulsory licenses on pharmaceutical products. "It is gross hypocrisy," they said, "to act as if South Africa is an outlaw in the world community because it is considering the use of compulsory licensing for essential medicines....Africa is confronted with a public health crisis of historical proportions. Of course South Africa should use compulsory licensing to expand access to essential medicines....Why should President Nelson Mandela, Deputy President Thabo Mbeki and Dr. Nkosazana Zuma [the Health Minister] permit their population to be defenseless simply because Glaxo Wellcome and Bristol-Myers Squibb want the power to set prices for US taxpayer funded and government developed HIV/AIDS drugs in Africa?" The United States, they added, "is literally asking South Africa to abandon the lives of millions of infected citizens in order to receive reductions in US barriers to trade or economic aid." They called for the Administration to consult with public health groups regarding this controversy.

Gore, as of last week, had not written back. He may have been too busy hungering for goodness.

You'll Never Eat Dinner In This Town Again

In the most recent issue of George -- the one with the obligatory Star Wars tie-in cover-shot of Liam Neeson -- Ann Coulter contributed a column as thin as her frame that daringly takes on that pressing issue of dating in Washington. The right-winger who wrote a book arguing for Bill Clinton's impeachment reaches the stunning conclusion that men in Washington are not as adept at asking out women as their fellow XYers in New York. The piece was a meager swing at that hackneyed column topic: Washington-versus-New York. It's not worth engaging Coulter on her basic premise, but it's clear she knows nothing about the nation's capital when she observes -- for no apparent reason -- that Washington restaurants "close at 8 P.M. A few really, late-night places stay open until nine or 10, but even these sometimes close unexpectedly at eight....[E]veryone is home watching TV all the time." That's about as wrong an observation as a sentient person can make. Trust me, Washington does not shut down by the time Crossfire ends. Its restaurants remain open far into the night -- some serving beyond Larry King Live and up until Nightline. Has Coulter never visited the neighborhoods of Adams Morgan or Dupont Circles once the sun has slipped from the sky? Certainly, John Kennedy and other staff members of the magazine have dined in Washington. So why didn't they catch this flagrant error?

The closing time for DC restaurants is not an important matter (except for gourmands who reside in Washington), but Coulter's cavalier dissemination of this misinformation does provoke wonder about how she handles other facts in her book and columns. In any event, Coulter does need to get out more. With or without a date.