BE OUR GUEST: IT'S TIME U.S. TURNS ATTENTION HOME

Bill Zellmer is a freelance writer who resides in Cape Girardeau. He previously worked as city editor of ---- in Sarasota, Fla., and owned a bi-weekly newspaper in Arkansas.

~

Former Democratic senator turned national columnist Thomas Eagleton is calling for immediate air strikes against the Serbs. As usual, deciphering Eagleton's exact meaning is like marching in wet sand is he advocating that only England and France participate, or is he suggesting a U.N. action that would be led by American airmen?

What, specifically, would be the limits of the objective? At one point the columnist once, briefly, a liberal Democratic candidate for vice president seems to be suggesting only air strikes; at another, he appears to urge all-out war aimed at toppling Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic.

"The crisis will be resolved only by going to the source," he says. "Why not sooner rather than thousands of lives later?" Interesting, this hard line by liberal Democrats, including America's most famous draft-dodger, cherubic Bill Clinton, the suddenly enormously popular presidential candidate. But then it's an election year, and foreign policy is one area where George Bush has indicated some expertise and, to his detriment, his chief area of interest. So the Demos must adopt an even harder line.

Bush, to his credit, has displayed remarkable caution and restraint, perhaps even wisdom. But the argument raises a more significant philosophical question: In the new world order, when do we send American men and women into war?

Bush critics hasten to point out that he rallied the allies into war to free Kuwait, and Republicans, to their folly, continue to talk about freeing Kuwait. It's a vacuous argument. The first objective was to preserve the free world's oil supply in Saudi Arabia, a perfectly legitimate cause. The world's industry and transportation run on oil. Hussein threatened our supply. So we drew a line in the sand.

Freeing Kuwait was secondary; we didn't rally the troops until the Saudis were threatened. Of course some of our allies buy some of their oil from Kuwait so it was necessary to drive the Iraqis out of Kuwait as well. And it was important to crush Hussein's war mach~ine. Surely most Americans understood the facts. They probably also realize that Kuwait remains a rather sad and mean-spirited little monarchy.

In the thorny Bosnia dispute, Bush has raised the best question: Whose sons do we sent into harm's way first? Air strikes would mean, quite likely, that planes would crash on Serbian soil, casualties would occur, prisoners would be taken. How would we get them back? All-out war? Is it worth the price?

Even Eagleton seems to acknowledge that U.N. intervention would lead to a nasty ground war. "Ground engagements will inevitably take place ... lives will be lost."

The collapse of communism and the end of the Cold War have given many Americans cause to reconsider our expensive and often misguided foreign policy. And it should. The original premise of raising an army was to protect our shores. Then the goal became to protect our interests in this hemisphere and finally abroad.

Fine, but that's where the line ought to be drawn. Our interests. A selfish view, granted, but in fact America paid an enormous price for the death of communism. We've done our job, we can no longer afford to play world policeman. We no longer have any reason to want the part. Pride alone pride of being the biggest, the best is not enough.

Let the others bear the cost of defending their shores. When are any of these temporary despots going to pose an actual threat to the remaining superpower, albeit a broke superpower? Not anytime soon.

I have no quarrel with getting the nuclear threat out of Iraq, but let's face it, even with Soviet help the best Iraq could do was jury-rig a guided missile that could barely reach our $4-billion-a-year ally Israel. It'll be a long time for any of them can build missiles that will cross oceans.

The atrocities and suffering in Bosnia are terrible. So is the suffering in Somalia, Afghanistan, South Africa and a dozen other hot spots around the world.

But it's not up to America to resolve all the world's problems. Trying to do it for the last 40 years has proved a costly proposition, though in the end the free world prevailed at least over the main threat, the Soviet Union.

Eagleton and others, panicking, suggest Milosevic poses a threat to other parts of Eastern Europe, that we are looking at a new dictator with expansionistic ideas. A new Hitler, Stalin? Well, maybe, but not likely. And, anyway, let's take a hard but pragmatic look at the situation.

It's not our problem. Not now.

At the moment, the U.N. may have a role to play, particularly in taking emergency aid to the victims of the war. That will involve the U.S., though its role must be limited.

How broad is the U.N.'s role? Is the U.N. going to attempt to halt, militarily, all the ethnic fires spawned by the collapse of communism? By what authority? If it does, then it may be that the U.S. will have to play a larger part. But in European matters that concern us only peripherally, the leaders must be European. We've borne the cost too long. It's well past time for us to pour our attention, energies and resources into erasing the federal deficit and spurring economic grow~th.