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{293} Chapter eight Catholics and Bill Clinton (1993–2001) A plurality of American Catholic voters returned to the Democratic Party in 1992 after choosing Republicans in the three previous presidential elections. In many ways they received little in return for their votes for Bill Clinton. He started two wars about which they were unsure, failed to enact health care reform about which they were hopeful, and promoted abortion to such an extent that they were appalled. But thanks largely to the leadership of their church, they would have a powerful voice on all of these issues. Then, when peace interrupted war and prosperity arrived without health care reform, they swallowed their reservations on abortion and voted for him all over again. War and Peace: Bosnia and Kosovo The “American Century,” as Americans like to call it, began and ended on the Balkan Peninsula. Within a hundred years, “Balkanize” would debut as a verb and depart as a virtue. But war remained a vice. To Democratic presidents Woodrow Wilson and Bill Clinton it was an evil to be averted. “He kept us out of war” was the pacifist slogan that helped to reelect Wilson in 1916. “It’s the economy, stupid” was the parochial sentiment that helped to elect Clinton in 1992. Neither president could achieve peace through diplomacy, however, so they resorted to war. Wilson’s war would enable Yugoslavia. Clinton’s wars would disable it. Wilson’s war introduced air power as a supplement to ground forces. Clinton’s wars introduced air power as a substitute for ground forces. Yet the wars that both commanders in chief fought, and the peace that they forged, were the residue of their liberal internationalist designs—measured, multilateral , and moralistic. Unlike the First World War, which Congress declared, and the Treaty of Versailles, which Wilson himself negotiated, the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo, and the peace that followed them, garnered little attention and demanded {294} chapter eight minimal sacrifice from the American people. And the pronouncements of the American Catholic hierarchy about the latter conflicts were often as confusing as they had been clear about the former. World War I had made the world “safe for democracy.” The Bosnian and Kosovo wars would make the former Yugoslavia safe for demography. If liberal internationalists had relinquished all perspective in the excesses of the twentieth century’s first U.S. war, they regained it within the limits of the last. By reluctantly endorsing Clinton’s carefully circumscribed U.S. military role on the Balkan Peninsula, Catholic leaders and most of their followers indicated that they still wanted their country to save the world—just not all of it, and not all at once. Bosnia Shortly after an assassin’s bullet deprived Austria-Hungary of its next ruler, the bloodiest war yet ravaged the globe in the summer of 1914. After four years and sixteen million dead, there was a new map of the world and a reluctant empire in charge of it. Among the new nations that emerged from the ruins of a century of imperialism was Yugoslavia, a makeshift monument to Slavic self-determination. With the death of communist dictator Marshal Josip Broz Tito in 1980, however, this anxious amalgam of six republics, five nations, four languages, three religions, and two alphabets lost the solid sum of its brittle parts. When Slovenia and Macedonia sought to secede a decade later, Yugoslavia’s Serb strongman, Slobodan Milošević, begrudgingly let them go. But when Croatia and Bosnia tried, a triangular civil war erupted in 1992 between the mostly Eastern Orthodox Serbs, the mostly Catholic Croats, and the mostly Muslim Bosnians. The results, according to the U.S. Department of State, were rape, torture, and death camps perpetrated by the Serbs, which approached the actions of the Nazis in World War II.1 After the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 770, encouraging all nations to take “all measures necessary” to extend humanitarian aid to the war’s victims, both houses of Congress passed their own resolutions in August 1992 supporting the un action. But with the arrival in Washington the next year of a new president inexperienced in the ways of the world, America again became a reluctant empire.2 In the absence of executive initiative, the legislative branch took the lead on U.S. policy toward Yugoslavia’s civil war in 1993. Congress approved nonbinding resolutions urging President Bill Clinton to disregard the arms embargo imposed by the United Nations on all parties to...

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