The ancient Greeks had a word that perfectly describes the recent U.S./NATO victory in Kosovo. The word is pyrrhic, from Pyrrhus, a king of Epireus, and it means simply a victory where the cost of winning outweighs the benefits of victory. In other words a pyrrhic victory is one in which you lose nearly as much as you gain — thus leaving one to wonder if the price of wining was worth the cost.

As Linda Bowles ably points out in a recent column in The Citizen, the U.S.-lead NATO victory in Yugoslavia is a dubious one indeed.

Why are we in Yugoslavia? To prevent the spread of a wider war — if the US and NATO prevented that, they in turn created a huge refugee crisis that they have yet to solve.

Was it to bring Slobodan Milosevic to heel? Well, for the moment, Milosevic still remains in power and seems bloody but unbowed.

Was the air campaign a moral crusade, so to speak, to stop further ethnic cleansing and prevent another Hitler? Slobodan Milosevic is not Hitler and while the killing of ethnic Kosovars is tragic, how much less tragic is the killing of innocent civilians by careless NATO bombs?

No, the war in Yugoslavia has not been a success and President Clinton has nothing, really, to feel proud about.

The U.S.-lead effort in Kosovo is just setting the U.S. up for a greater failure down the road when, one day, we will find, much to our regret, that we cannot be the world's moral policeman.

Dennis Sams
Fairburn

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