Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, June 10, 1995 TAG: 9506120022
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Well they should be.
Sure, there was an element of luck. O'Grady escaped serious injury when his F-15 was hit last week by a Bosnian Serb missile; he eluded capture for 51/2 days, surviving in the end on bugs and rain water; he eventually made radio contact with a flyer in his own squadron. You don't do all that without a little luck.
It took a little luck, too, for the Marines to land 40 men and two helicopters deep inside hostile territory, pick up O'Grady, then hustle back to safety without a casualty.
But even more than luck, the all-American mission took courage and skill, good training and leading-edge technology, careful planning and close interservice collaboration - a level of military discipline and professionalism, in other words, that contrasts sharply with the outrages committed by cowardly Serb forces in their war of "ethnic cleansing" against civilians who share the Balkan peninsula.
The episode was a rousing success. Sadly, that can hardly be said of the Bosnian story as a whole. Many other humans at risk are not being rescued, and won't be. By avoiding and deferring difficult Balkan questions when the former Yugoslavia was disintegrating, policy-makers in Washington and other Western capitals have ensured that the question now - what to do in Bosnia? - is all the more difficult.
The success of the rescue effort indicated the high-performance capability of the U.S. military today. Americans, however, should not be lulled into thinking that our entry into the war, particularly with ground troops, would bring easy victory, or victory without sacrifices.
Nor, on the other hand, should Americans let the rescue lull them into forgetting why there had to be one in the first place. A U.S. jet, conducting a nonaggressive flight as part of a desperate United Nations and NATO effort to maintain some semblance of an internationally accepted arrangement, was shot down by the faction intent on thumbing its nose at human decency and international order.
The world continues to speed toward a day of reckoning in Bosnia for which no plausible scenario is pleasant. If a trail exists between the alternatives of a wider war or allowing aggression to prosper, it is getting more faint and harder to discern by the day. We take joy in the rescue; alas, it can't make more visible a path to genuine peace.
Memo: ***CORRECTION***