PUBLIC FORUM : MISSION IN KOSOVO NEEDS CLEARLY STATED OBJECTIVES, STRATEGY.

President Slobodan Milosevic has presented NATO with a threat to its very existence. How should it react? Bombings? What if they don't work? As a final resort? Ground troops (and the accompanying casualties)?

First, let's go back to why the United Nations and NATO were born. They were the direct result of World War II, a holocaust that took over 20 million lives. And this because the earlier League of Nations, formed after World War I for this very same purpose, blinked and failed to take timely actions when:

Adolf Hitler defied that body by sending German troops to occupy the Rhineland.

German troops were injected into the Spanish Civil War to defeat the Spanish loyalists and put dictator Francisco Franco into power.

Benito Mussolini defied the league by attacking Emperor Haile Selassie and annexing Ethiopia.

Hitler annexed Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland. (British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain called this act of aggression ``peace in our time.'')

Hitler overthrew and set up a puppet Austrian government.

Hitler invaded Poland, then Chamberlain finally said stop, you have gone too far. And hence, the start of World War II and its tens of millions of fatalities.

It appears that history is repeating itself. Slobodan Milosevic is now at the point where Hitler was when he moved his German troops into the Rhineland. We and our allies have tried to counter that move by our massive bombing campaign. Milosevic is being made to pay a terrible price. However, if these bombings by themselves are not successful, ground troops are the logical next step. Any blinking by NATO at this time would totally discredit it as an effective peacekeeping organization, and it would no longer have any appreciable effect on future blatant aggressions.

- Louis Robins

Van Nuys

The fundamental problems in the Balkans date back approximately 1,500 years. They have their origins in invasions and retreats, insurgencies and withdrawals of peoples of many ethnicities and religions.

Today's animosities in the region have been created and sharpened and ingrained for centuries. They are inherited with their mothers' milk. There have been numberless efforts to ``solve'' the resultant complex problems by European neighbors and the people themselves. One incident in Sarajevo in 1914 led to the ``solution,'' which could very easily lead to World War III.

There may, in fact, be no absolute and final ``solution'' for the peoples of the Balkans. And certainly, neither we Americans nor the United Nations have the right to impose one.

- Sidney D. Conkwright

Van Nuys

We are at war. What does the enemy think when he watches American television and commentators are saying, ``Should we rethink what we're doing because three soldiers got kidnapped?''

Should we be debating the decision that NATO and the United States made to bomb Milosevic into submission? How are the Kosovo Albanians going to return to their homes when the Serbs have burned down every house in dozens of villages? They started that before we started the bombing.

How are they going to rebuild their lives with all their passports and citizenship papers confiscated and their personal belongings burned to the ground with their homes and having been told, ``Don't come back''?

The Kosovo Albanians, who only want a restoration of the autonomy Milosevic took away from them 10 years ago, should now be given complete independence from Serbia. We have no choice but to bomb him into submission. You can't jump off a cliff and halfway down change your mind. We and NATO have no choice but to win the war now so the Kosovo Albanians don't get massacred like Milosevic did to the Bosnian Muslims.

- Robert A. Felburg

Costa Mesa

Being a veteran of the Vietnam conflict, I am familiar with what weapons can do to people and other living things. I have also become a cynic of the ability of the human animal to be able to learn anything from past experience.

What we fail to remember in all of our bloody history is that there are no real winners in war. We may defeat an opponent to the point where they can no longer wage war, but the thoughts and emotions that brought us to the stage of combat are still with the survivors.

It is clear the ethnic Albanians of Kosovo represent a threat only to the racial sensibilities of Serbian leadership. The Albanians in Kosovo appear to have no voice or power to protect themselves. Now, those who can do something have made the decision to do so. We and our NATO allies have made a commitment to defend an oppressed people not because of economic reasons but for moral reasons.

It may be that we did not calculate the Yugoslavian response adequately, either. All this sounds vaguely familiar to another miscalculated adventure we had in Southeast Asia some time back.

Simply bombing targets does not win wars or defeat the enemy. I learned a long time ago that you can bomb a place, spray pesticides on it and render it useless to the enemy, but you don't own it until you put a 17-year-old kid with a rifle on it.

Are we prepared for a ground conflict? This one is different. It is not open terrain. There are lots of population centers. And the Yugoslavian army is a bit higher on the food chain than the Iraqis are. We will have casualties. This may take a lot of 17-year-old kids before this is over.

Before we allow this to get out of hand, we might want to let our elected officials know how we feel.

- Vic Craft

Chatsworth

Especially after reading the story about the possible role of armed pro-Serb sympathizers within Macedonia who may have aided the capture of the three U.S. soldiers (Daily News, April 2), I see more and more eerie reminders of the U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia in the early 1960s. Then, as now, we started out in a peacekeeping role under a Democratic administration, which we then escalated into a major conflict which was extremely costly to our society in terms of lost lives and resources. The earlier counterpart to pro-Serb farmers were, of course, the Viet Cong, also drawn from the peasantry.

As Aug. 7, 1999, will be the 35th anniversary of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, it would be wonderful if every American too young to remember those years would study the events that led to 350,000 U.S. casualties in Southeast Asia. For those old enough to remember, it would be just as desirable to recall Yogi Berra's famous malapropism about deja vu.

- Bob McKay

North Hills

I was fortunate enough and blessed enough to have served in and survived World War II.

Tony Blair and Bill Clinton are two schoolboys playing at war. Tin soldiers on the attic floor. Neither has been bloodied. Neither has the foggiest idea what it means to commit men to battle and death.

Clinton, in particular, never fulfilled his commitment even to the Arkansas Law School ROTC, commitment given entirely to preserve his political viability while deferring any possibility of draft during the Vietnam War.

There is great merit in having a commander in chief who has personally experienced the hell called war - although it is not a prerequisite (compare Maggie Thatcher) - but it is totally unacceptable to have a commander in chief who chose to avoid service and who nonetheless regrets not having had an opportunity to save the U.S. like FDR did.

That is scary!

Clinton has stated that World War I and World War II started in the Balkans (WWI, I agree, but WWII started with Hitler's invasion of Poland) and that he is trying to avoid World War III starting in the Balkans. I wonder what he thinks he has started.

That is really scary.

His touted ability to compartmentalize is causing difficulties. There is only one war going on. The air war and the ground war are not distinct. It's all one war. Clinton attacks in the air and then complains because Milosevic attacks on the ground and captures three soldiers. What did he expect? A response from the Marquess of Queensberry?

And then I hear this pouty-lip phrase, ``He better give 'em back.'' Good heavens! What does he think is going on? In World War II, there would have been no prisoners to give back. The soldiers would have fought until they died. These guys were untouched, except for the expected bruises from rifle butts. What were they doing out in no-man's land without support? There's a war going on. Doesn't anyone there know what a war is? Are they all incompetent? Or do they have some kind of kooky constraints like we fought under in Vietnam?

And then there is the obvious: When did Congress declare war? Yes, I know about the War Powers Act. That's supposed to allow the president to respond to attacks, not to launch strategic bombing campaigns. It's time for the American press to take a much closer look at Bill Clinton.

- William O. Felsman

Woodland Hills

NATO bombings must continue until all the Serbian war machine has been demolished. There is nothing anyone could say that would convince me that ground troops were a good idea, at least not at this point. The rugged mountainous terrain of Kosovo is full of ravines which are natural burial grounds. Serbian forces are at home there, and for us it would be worse than Vietnam.

Our air power is a natural vantage point that can look down at those ravines (where by now many thousands of dead Kosovars have been buried and will never be found.) I believe Milosevic is hoping for a ground war and is deliberately trying to induce us into something we could not win and which would lead naturally to World War III.

As a daughter of Armenian survivors of the World War I massacres in Turkey, I have come to see genocide and both world wars as massive and sadistically cynical real-estate enterprises.

We are blessed with a president who can lead the world, who is brilliant and profoundly humanitarian and looks for a global village on our beautiful blue planet (the only one in heaven), where religion and race and customs are allowed to be what they are and not perverted to the ends of greed and sadism.

- Mary Matosian Morabito

Temple City

The United States' policy of ``not targeting'' viscious tyrannical dictators is blind obeisance to a civility that is nonexistent in the pysches of these butchers.

We have the death penalty for those people who commit heinous murders. Yet we, unreasonably, allow mass murderers to freely pursue their lives of luxury while callously committing genocide?

Saddam Hussein, Milosevic and others of their ilk sit back and laugh at our naivete while thousands of innocent people die at their hands.

When will we wake up and come to the realization that eliminating one incipient Hitler in order to save the lives of myriad defenseless people is not only humane but the only practical remedy for an indefensible and patently foolhardy policy?

Every time we turn the other cheek we lose face!

- Zachary A. Charles

Burbank

The current NATO military action in Kosovo is the wrong conflict for the United States to be involved in. It is a conflict that has been going on among the Balkan people since the 1300s. It is a civil war, nothing else.

It appears that our leaders never learned any lessons from the Vietnam experience. In order for a nation to be successful in a war, the following elements must be present:

The issues must be clear to the people, and the people's support for military action must be rallied.

There must be a clear plan of action with objectives in focus.

There must be an exit strategy.

So far, I see none of these elements present. It appears that neither side is the clear-cut ``good guy.'' We seem to be taking the side of the ethnic Albanians and the Kosovo Liberation Army, but there are indications that they have been involved in drug trading and staged displays of so-called atrocities, alleging the deaths were by the Yugoslavian police and army, when bodies may have been from other areas and causes.

It is strange that the liberal Democratic anti-Vietnam War crowd are now the hawks. They are dooming us to repeat the mistakes of Vietnam by getting us into another quagmire in Kosovo.

We need to end this madness now.

- Armand M. Vaquer

Tarzana

It is obvious that the bombing of Serbia has increased the ethnic cleansing and the number of refugees leaving Kosovo, and there have been no changes in the goals of the Serbian government.

Now the nature of the bombing has changed, and the infrastructure of Serbia is being destroyed. At the present time there is no indication that the Serbian government is going to change its goal. The State Department has said, ``they are going to continue this bombing until the Serbians capitulate.'' The likely outcome of this bombing will be: The entire infrastructure of Serbia will be destroyed; Serbia will become a country entirely composed of refugees; Serbia will capitulate; the United Nations will take on the humanitarian role of restoring Serbia; President Clinton will declare that the United States must forgo a balanced budget in order to support the humanitarian effort; Serbia will be a country full of vengeful-bitter people.

As a result, there will be no winners of this war, there will be a lot of losers. The Kosovo refugees will lose, the Serbian people will lose, the United States people will lose, NATO will lose, and the United Nations will lose.

- Donald R. Ulbrick

Woodland Hills