In an interview with Salon last week, Dole recounted the first time he heard the name of the tiny Yugoslav province that is now dominating global news headlines. "In 1989, we started getting these letters from Albanian-Americans who were telling us what was happening in Kosovo," the former presidential candidate and Senate majority leader recalled. "Like everybody else, you had to get out your atlas and find out where it is."

Those letters, which gave first-person accounts of the brutality of the regime of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, motivated Dole to become an expert on the region. He led a delegation of seven senators on a tour of Kosovo soon after, in the summer of 1990. He wrote bill after bill expressing his outrage at Milosevic's rule. He devised a legislative strategy to funnel U.S. funds directly to the democratic leaders in the region, sidestepping the corrupt Milosevic regime.

He passionately urged diplomats, senators and Presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton to pay attention to the "continuing repression of the democratic movement in Kosovo," as he said on the Senate floor on June 28, 1990. "I am particularly concerned about the potential for increased violence against the population in Kosovo."

But no one was listening.

"Sometimes these things are just so hard to move," Dole said in the interview. "But you look back and -- just the deaths, 250,000 refugees, a million still not in their homes -- the destruction's gotta add up in the billions. You add it all up over a decade, and they're staggering figures. We can argue that there have been ethnic hatreds for 600 years, religious hatreds, but these people were living side by side till Milosevic started stirring the pot."

Anyone looking at the current quagmire in Kosovo and wondering if any of this could have been avoided should spend a few minutes reviewing what Dole's been trying to tell us for the last decade. Back when Clinton was still governor of Arkansas, Dole was telling then-President Bush that the "situation in Yugoslavia grows more grave by the minute." Before Milosevic had turned his armies toward Bosnia, Dole was urging the Senate to issue an ultimatum that Milosevic cease his "perverted agenda of slaughter." Seven years ago, Dole said, "We are late. I just hope we are not too late."

"He's been out there for a decade saying we need to get involved," says Mira Baratta, Dole's Senate foreign policy advisor from 1989 until Dole retired from the Senate to run for president in 1996. "And no one's been paying attention. Or they pay attention for a while and manage the problem, but they don't solve it."

With all the uncertainties of the current NATO operation -- whether the campaign of airstrikes will ultimately work, how long the GOP Congress' whimsical support for the operation will last, whether President Clinton will eventually agree to send in ground troops -- one must also wonder if the tragedy of Kosovo could have been avoided had anyone been listening to Dole.

"His perspective as a World War II veteran provides him with a very critical perspective and really influences his attitudes," Baratta says. "He believes that we have a fundamental American interest in Europe, and, two, that we saw the extermination of the Jews in the Holocaust attempted, and that 'Never again' actually means something. He fought against the Nazis in Italy, so when he sees the images of the Albanians being put on these trains out of Kosovo, I wouldn't be surprised if he's thinking about World War II and the Holocaust. In terms of mind frames, that's a fundamental part of understanding him."

In June 1990, after hearing Ambassador Max Kampelman's descriptions of human rights abuses and the importance of protecting minority rights in Yugoslavia, Dole offered a non-binding "Sense of the Senate" resolution, which urged Milosevic to "to assure the full protection of the human and civil rights of the Albanian nationality" and "to begin a genuine dialogue with democratic groups in Kosovo."

Sense of the Senate resolutions are just talk, and talk, as we know, is cheap. Dole still hadn't witnessed any of Milosevic's oppression firsthand, and the collapse of the Soviet Union dwarfed any American concerns about Yugoslavia.

But just a couple months later, in August 1990, Dole led a delegation of seven Republican senators to Eastern Europe. Along with stops in the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria, Dole and his colleagues made a point of adding visits to Zagreb, Belgrade and Pristina to his itinerary.

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