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A L S O+T O D A Y
From Baghdad to Belgrade Captives face trial
T A B L E+T A L K The new Ms.: Feminism redefined or glossy new packaging of the same old? Elaborate in the Politics area of Table Talk
R E C E N T L Y Arm the KLA? Limp Willy? "Pec is burning! Where are the ground troops?" Humanitarian enclave? Beginner's guide to the Balkans - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
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Covering Kosovo like Monica Can the White House wage war when every private Oval Office strategy battle gets leaked to the media? BY JAKE TAPPER | WASHINGTON -- It's Day Seven of the air war against Slobodan Milosevic and his genocidal hoodlums, and the ass-covering and finger-pointing is well under way. White House decision makers are waking up to find their every private utterance about strategy on the front pages of the day's newspapers and going to bed at night watching cable chat shows -- which had until recently been devoted to All Monica, All the Time coverage -- filled with blather about Kosovo. White House decision makers are not happy. One senior administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, complained that coverage of the Balkans is more disturbing than Zippergate. "When the president meets with his political advisors, people expect that the meeting will be leaked in the next 20 minutes," the official said. "During the Lewinsky scandal, you'd pick up the paper every morning and there would be a blow-by-blow analysis of meetings inside the White House. But I don't think people expected that to happen with the military, and with international matters." There are actually several similarities between media coverage of the Lewinsky scandal and the Kosovo crisis. Pundits, you'll recall, declared the president defeated and impeached early in the intern drama. Likewise, in Kosovo, "We're only in Day Seven and already the press corps wants us to declare defeat before it's even begun," the official said. And a quick scan of cable news shows will find a lot of the same smug faces from the Monicacophony, now passing themselves off as Kosovo experts, spewing Quik'n'easy sound bites on an issue as old and complex as the Balkans. There's the Wall Street Journal's John Fund and publisher Mort Zuckerman on MSNBC; their seats must still be warm. It's not hard to detect relief, even glee, in the hosts: "We're ba-a-a-a-a-ck!" But this time the topic isn't semen or cigars -- it's mass displacement, slaughter and genocide, a mini-Holocaust that should be too serious for talking heads who don't know Kosovo from a casaba. War is not a time to throw out opinions hastily formed. But then, when it comes to opinions hastily formed, Clinton himself wasn't helping matters when, on the day the bombing began, he confessed that he'd been "reading up on the history of that area," like a grad student dilettante. The president's draft-dodging notwithstanding, it's tough to argue with Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. -- a man who knows war all too well -- when he described this administration's foreign policy as "feckless." N E X T+P A G E+| More leaks than a colander - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - |
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