One of the primary complaints from many people about television news is that it's shallow, too brief and appeals to the low-brow. Well, CBS5.com, which is thorough with video, also has
a columnist on hand who writes lengthy, thoughtful essays about news, particularly news of the world. Frank Viviano addresses Afghanistan:
I won't pretend to be objective in making this part of the case. Over
five of the most harrowing years of my professional life, I worked as a
reporter in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo. In July 1995, I was just a few
miles from the town of Srebrenica, when 8,000 unarmed Bosnian men and
boys were lined up, executed and hastly buried in muddy trenches. Along
with a few other journalists, I spent the following weeks interviewing
survivors, the wives and mothers who will never forget happened there.
Nor will I.
The war in Bosnia went on, as it had for three years, unimpeded by the
presence of 40,000 UN troops with no clear mandate to intervene and no
weapons to match the heavy artillery, tanks and missiles of Serbian
insurgents supplied by Belgrade.
What finally brought it to a halt, five months after Srebrenica, were U.S.-led NATO air strikes.
It hadn't been easy for Bill Clinton to order those strikes. Echoes of
Vietnam sounded even more loudly in 1995 than they do today. Like
Clinton, I am a baby-boomer, come of age in the sixties and
instinctively wary of military solutions to geopolitical problems.
But Bosnia's echoes say that diplomacy is sometimes not enough – and
more important, that moral obligations do bind us together in a single
world. If we simply dismiss those obligations, when the evidence of
brutality is unmistakable and the motives for intervention are
unambiguous, where does it leave us?
Read in full.
