THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, June 17, 1995 TAG: 9506160009
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A12 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Letter
LENGTH: Short : 37 lines
History has shown us that civil wars are often the most savage sort of conflict and the least likely to end until one side utterly vanquishes the other through devastating slaughter. Outside parties usually have little to no influence in effecting a lasting peace in these cases. One need only consider Ethiopia, Mozambique, Namibia, Rwanda, Somalia, Cambodia, Vietnam, Korea, Azerbaijan and the India-Pakistan partition to see the sad truth of this.
In most of these and other conflicts, the implacable hatreds that fuel the fires of warfare still simmer, waiting for some catalyst, spontaneous or contrived, to launch another orgy of killing. Bosnia will clearly prove to be such a war.
What worries me about all this is that with recent decisions by western leaders, we may be seeing the same kind of incremental involvement developing in the morass of Bosnia as we saw draw the United States into Vietnam after the French were driven out. There is a very real danger that we are about to repeat in the 1990s the history we did not learn from the lesson given us in the 1960s.
Sealing the Bosnian war within Bosnia's borders seems a more practical preventative than sending our troops into the conflict area as part of a proven ineffectual U.N. force. Twenty-five years from now, I don't want to see another monument to political myopia on the mall of the nation's capital, covered with the names of dead American military personnel.
ALLEN KREGER
Norfolk, June 2, 1995 by CNB