Published Friday, May 28, 1999, in the San Jose Mercury News:

We got into this nasty little war to save innocent civilians in Kosovo.  Now we are punishing innocent civilians in Serbia.

This is no longer just the occasional bomb or missile gone accidentally astray, although that continues as well; now such accidents occur in the context of a cynical, calculated campaign by NATO to victimize the entire civilian population—to make life such hell for them that they turn against their elected president, Slobodan Milosevic.

“If NATO wants to overturn the government, this is not the way to do it,” a Serbian woman in Belgrade said. “I am absolutely certain this will not make people revolt against their government—they will revolt against whoever is doing this to them. NATO is terrorizing 6 million civilians in large cities in Yugoslavia. Making people’s lives miserable is not solving any problem.”

Officially, NATO still says it is bombing military targets. But this week senior military officials admitted they also want to damage the quality of everyday life for the people of Serbia. At the same time, they are intensifying the bombing. NATO now has 1,000 planes over Yugoslavia, about 700 of them ours. The bombing goes around the clock, up to 500 missions a day. Thursday it began to hit suburbs around Belgrade.

This week also brought the indictment of Slobodan Milosevic as a war criminal, which he surely is. But whatever impact that might have had on Serb civilians is overwhelmed by their conviction that NATO is committing war crimes against them.

President Clinton’s earlier denials that we were at war with the Serbian people apparently are “no longer operative,” as Richard Nixon would have put it. We are destroying Yugoslavia, little by little, day by day.