Political Quotes

“a month ago, April 7, as the war in Yugoslavia began to assume its present form, President Clinton spoke to the U.S. Institute for Peace. It was an important statement about the nature of conflict in the years to come. ``Clearly,'' he stated, ``our first challenge is to build a more peaceful world, one that will apparently be dominated by ethnic and religious conflicts we once thought of primitive, but which Senator Moynihan, for example, has referred to now as post-modern.'' I am scarcely alone in this; it has become, I believe, a widely held view. A recent article in The Wall Street Journal began by asking: ``Does Kosovo represent the future or the past.'' The distinguished Dean of the John F. Kennedy School had an emphatic answer. . . . Joseph Nye, a Clinton Pentagon alumnus, forecasts a brave new world dominated by ethnic conflicts. There are thousands of ethnic groups that could plausibly argue they deserve independence, he estimates, making it imperative for the U.S. to decide where it should intervene. ``There's potential for enormous violence,'' he says. In this spirit, just yesterday, The Times spoke of ``The Logic of Kosovo.'' With the cold war over, the country needs to devise a new calculus for determining when its security is threatened and the use of force is warranted. Kosovo is a test case.…”