A Turn in the War
by Emil Guillermo

That’s it. I’m back with pacifism. What brought me back to my senses was the "oops" heard round the world.

In this day of surgical strikes and push button wars, America had become somewhat blasé about the war.

We were bombing for what—forty-something days? Who was keeping count? We’ve got the NBA and NHL playoffs to occupy our considerable arithmetic skills. Then we had Littleton, which allowed us to be horrified by violence while conducting greater violence on the world stage. And then there’s the mad twisters—God’s war on man—through Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas. We’re busy. Our military force had come up with a way to do war that didn’t conflict with our lives—or our concerns. We were "doing" war in a way that meant no body bags. At least for us. A war that targeted just the "bad guys."

The way we were just cruising along, you started to wonder when "it" would happen. By "it," I mean the inevitable snafu. Even Joe Montana in his prime threw over or under Jerry Rice’s head, albeit on another kind of bomb mission. And this being the military, you knew that one of these days, we’d hear it. When the sound of war, the cluster bomb chorus, would have a slightly different rhythm.

Boom. Boom. Oops.

We heard it last week. U.S. planes dropped four bombs on the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, with initial reports at three dead, 20 hurt, two missing.

How do you say, "Surgical strike, my ass"? How do you say that in Chinese?

The term "surgical strike" is a nice metaphor. But you don’t see doctors doing appendectomies with cluster bombs. Not really.

War enthusiasts will point out that the bombs did in fact do their job. They were just aimed at the embassy instead of the Yugoslav Directorate for Supply and Procurement. Now that’s a target for bureaucracy haters. Apparently the two buildings are about 150 to 200 yards apart.

In other words, imagine a scenario where your surgeon was set to do a prostate operation, but decided to work up your colon instead. Or how about a left hand amputation and instead they cut off a leg. That’s the kind of snafu we’ve got here.

At least it’s the same body. But we don’t have much of a leg to stand on.

NATO has apologized, but somehow it’s not good enough.

As always, human error is to blame. American officials told reporters it was all because CIA analysts used outdated maps. That’s a bad sign when the bombs are smarter than the people who deploy them.

The whole thing has revealed the stupidity of the surgical strike, the heart and soul of our new-age war, a war without our involvement.

And it has complicated the whole diplomatic arena.

Somewhere there is a NATO official kicking himself, saying, "Why did it have to be China? Why couldn’t it have been a small African or Latin American embassy? But China?"

Not to be inordinately disrespectful, but I dare say, there’d be hardly a ripple of concern if the embassy the U.S. bombed was any other country other than China. Call it the Falklands or Grenada principle. Oh some would. But Grenada is Grenada and China is a superpower.

China was the very worst possible country, at the worst possible time, triggering off the worst possible reactions.

In Beijing, protesters have smashed through concrete at the U.S Embassy, shouting anti-American slogans. Who can blame them? The Chinese would be well within their rights to consider the bombing a declaration of war.

Of maybe China could have detected a "stupid bomb" coming toward its embassy with some of the satellite technology the U.S. sold them, which brings us to another major complication.

At present, President Bill Clinton and many Chinese Americans are all for opening up trade with China. Some say they want it so much, they’re willing to give China other incentives like technological secrets with militaristic uses. In a global arena, making China part of the World Trade Organization just makes sense.

But China has others in America seeing red. They’re the ones reliving the Cold War and see nothing worthy in getting too close to China. They’re attempting to use Wen Ho Lee and the China spy caper to muck things up.

And then there’s China. It’s always been against the war in Kosovo. But as long as it was out of this mess as a principle, world players were willing to chalk it up to one of those things they all agreed to disagree.

Now the bombs have screwed it up, and it will take surgical diplomacy to suture up the wounds.

In the meantime, maybe it will get Americans thinking about the war in earnest. And maybe we can address the basic conflict many of us have.

But Clinton seems intent on bombing away. But his response to the embassy bombing has been inadequate. While expressing regrets, he remained firm. "What is barbaric is what Mr. Milosevic has done," he told reporters. "What is barbaric is the intentional ethnic cleansing he has provoked."

That sounded good in the beginning. And I admit, the act of ethnic cleansing is so offensive, that I was willing to put aside my distaste for violence. In the beginning, but no more.

Ethnic cleansing is wrong, and something needs to be done. But what would Gandhi have done?

In that spirit, Jesse Jackson recently provided an opening. But it was not taken. Now just two weeks after he obtained the release of American POWs, American reservists are heading to Europe, and not for suntans on the Adriatic. The war seems less clean than ever, and smart bombs are dumber than we thought.

For me, the bombing of the Chinese Embassy brought it home: Wrong target. Wrong war.