Monitor: International comment on the prospect of Nato air strikes against Serbia

All The News Of The World

AIR STRIKES for their own sake will be valueless unless they bring the Serbs back to the negotiating table or halt the carnage being wrought in Kosovo. Neither seems a possibility. A stronger possibility is protracted involvement in a conflict that will cost lives and set members of the international community against one another. Any action taken now must be with the broadest possible international consensus.

Hong Kong Standard

THE KOSOVO crisis has been handled in such a hare-brained fashion that one can only conclude that no lessons were learned at all from dealing with the Serbs in Bosnia. It is the duty of the Clinton administration to present a plan of action to Congress. What we have heard so far is strategically ill-defined and open-ended. It is clear that a major loss of credibility has affected Clinton at home as well as abroad for a number of reasons. Still, this country is bigger than one man, and there is an obligation to take American commitments and responsibilities seriously.

The Washington Times

EITHER NATO strikes and takes away a piece of land from Yugoslav rule - thereby provoking a Slav-Orthodox wave of solidarity, or Nato makes a fool of itself as a result of its many many empty threats - thus even downgrading its geo-political success in enlarging to the East. The long preparation for the decision to crush Serbia's power of oppression has not strengthened but only weakened Nato. In the end, it will not be important to realise which details were right or wrong but only whether Nato withstood the provocation.

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

AN ARGUMENT can be made for the need to interpose international troops between the irresistible force of the Albanians' Kosovo Liberation Army and the immovable object of Slobodan Milosevic's army and police. But to stretch that intervention into a neo-Wilsonian version of selectively promoting indiscriminate nation-state building seems foolhardy. And can anyone imagine creating a new state by bombing?

USA Today