Norman Mailer, the writer strongly identified with the antiVietnam war movement 30 years ago, has now denounced the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia and the role of President Clinton.
In an article on the "Op-Ed" page of the Washington Post contemptuous of the President's lack of combat experience, the 76-year-old writer calls on him to "make peace" and "negotiate" with President Slobodan Milosevic. Criticising Mr Clinton's refusal to envisage sending ground troops into Kosovo, Mailer says that "the impeachment details had soiled the Presidency to a point where Clinton could not ask Americans to shed blood".
Mr Milosevic, described as "one of the wiliest, toughest, most treacherous, canny, tricky, ruthless and resourceful human beings", is portrayed as laying a trap for "an enraged Madeleine Albright" at the failed Rambouillet negotiations.
"NATO stepped into a trap whose depth is best plumbed by the weight of the malevolent tricks Milosevic had collected in his career. Did no one anticipate that an all-out ethnic cleansing would now begin immediately?", Mailer asks.
As soon as the bombing started, "Milosevic's atrocities increased probably by 50 or 100 times over what he had perpetrated before it all began.
"Yet such chaos and horror were further magnified by the horror of what NATO was doing to the Serbs. The average Serb, after all, had no more to do with this war than the average Kosovar. Chaos, therefore, was being laid upon chaos. And there was no military plan for a conclusion to the war. Just hopes plus unconscionable arrogance in NATO's exposition of its good motive."
Urging peace negotiations, Mailer writes that "Milosevic's problems in rebuilding are already great enough to force him to allow the final results to appear ambiguous. Clinton, in his turn, will be looking to retain enough face to enable his spin doctors gain a draw for him. Given that large Clinton heart which suffers so dependably for all of us, he is quite likely to make the cut."
Mailer says that "in large part, people who are bombed will never forgive the aggressor. We can hardly wish to meditate upon the detestation of America that we are seeding in all the poor populations of the world.
"If we as a nation are not willing to shed our blood to help the Kosovars, then it is time to disabuse ourselves of the notion that we can prevent genocide, actual or psychic. All we can do, using our present methods, is proliferate havoc."