Bosnia betrayed.

• Author: Jordan, June
• Position: United States policy on intervention

I used to wonder what it must have felt like to be a grownup living in Germany or in the United States during World War II. How did anybody hear about the Nazis? Did everyone believe the news? Did anybody care?

I always wanted to imagine that only bad people didn't know what was happening; only bad people could choose to ignore or else accommodate to evil. This had to mean that regular good people locked arms within minutes of the first reports and then powerful good people went without food and sleep until they figured out what to do. And then, of course, they did it: They moved whatever and whomever needed to be moved to stop the genocide.

But today was cloudy. And tonight it's raining. At dinner, I had to accept or reject a small piece of lemon pie, and then I had to decide for or against a second slice. Mostly, this is the way I live: watching the weather, and making decisions of extremely little consequence.

My friends are not much different. One of them just flew back from a boring job interview in Colorado, and to celebrate his return, we played tennis for an hour. Another friend turned fifty, and well-wishers came around for birthday barbecue.

But every night, I keep waking up. There is now a visible rash on my neck. Is this the trivial big picture in which yet another Muslim girl is savagely attacked and raped? Is this the pedestrian frame of reference in which yet another Muslim village explodes in flames? More than 20,000 Muslim girls and young women repeatedly and repeatedly raped!

Systematic rape makes me nauseous, even as an idea. And I am dark. I'm black, in fact. And a whole lot of folks find me and mine definitely undesirable. And I do not require some megadose of anything to imagine me and mine the object of "ethnic cleansing," and I really have a problem with a program like that. I really do.

And I cannot understand why people wonder about what kind of health care Bill Clinton will finally propose, or if he will ever forget about the deficit and focus, for example, on South Central L.A. If "ethnic cleansing" doesn't get to you, if the comic-book specter of Ross Perot is more disturbing to you than the documented and relentlessly ruinous assault Muslim girls and young women, then things are pretty clear. There is nothing to wonder about.

Bill Clinton, who cravenly capitulates his constitutional civilian power to the military, utterly lacks a value system hinged to the survival of human life and dignity, which is why he...