[beckett]

I know what he wrote (Serbia was a threat to the United States).

If you know he wrote that, just give me the quote. That'll settle it.

If you want to email him it's fine with me, although the likelihood of a timely reply is somewhat dubious, no?

[JohnGalt]

I generally receive timely responses from the folks I e-mail when I read something online; I am not a public intellectual, but I sense that public intellectuals see the importance in conversing with their consumers, so this will be a test case with the esteemed VDH. That said, I linked to the article and here is what jumped out at me:

Then we learned of slaughter in Bosnia and Kosovo — committed by Europeans and tolerated by Europeans. Mr. Clinton did not make the argument that Mr. Milosevic threatened the U.S. — imagine the outraged reaction, had Madeleine Albright with slides and intercepts proved that Serbia was seeking gas and germs that could threaten Americans.

So too a petulant, though wealthy, Germany and South Korea resent their dependence as American protectorates, reflecting their own sense of impotence through face-saving unease with the same benefactors who kept psychopaths like Milosevic and Kim Jong II out of their comfortable and opulent havens

Is he suggesting that Albright could have made the case that Serbia posed a threat to the United States (or was he just being cynical? which of course is another question_ ; did he really think that Milosevic intended to invade Germany?

These lines did not strike me as examples of careful thinking but of politicking for a particular pre-conceived point of view. Since his emergence in February, I have not taken him seriously on national security question because he seems to have a strange view of these 'past few years' of foreign adventures.