ABSTRACT
The world lost one of the most courageous and coherent men of our time. Indeed, his passing leaves a vacuum of thought and of action in the crucial North Atlantic Treaty Organization that will threaten the defense of the Western world. A suave former fighter pilot and former German defense minister, he was a lean, dark-haired man with a compelling stare. In his varied positions, he had overseen crucial parts of the democratization of the German military, coining the popular new name of “burgher-in-uniform” or “citizen-soldier.” But it was the disgraceful failure of first Europe and then the United States, and finally the United Nations, to respond to the massacres in Bosnia that clearly haunted him during his last three years. The West is impoverished indeed. For the challenges are increasingly frightening. And the poisons unleashed by Western impotence over Bosnia surge through the bloodstream of Europe ever more virulently.
