A prep course for the month-long World Cup soccer tournament, a worldwide pheno

pse of communism . Another element contributing to the credibility of the MSZP i

s that the party did not change its ideological stripes after the Berlin Wall fe

ll . Unlike Poland , where transformed ex-Communists ran as free-market democrat

s , the MSZP campaigned as unrepentant , if revamped , Socialists . This was pos

sible because of the liberal nature of Hungary 's `` goulash communism , '' so c

alled for its mix of some private enterprise with a planned economy . This relat

ively moderate climate under communism earned Hungarians a reputation as the hap

piest campers in the Eastern barracks . The MSZP benefited from the absence of s

ubstantive distinctions among the mainstream party platforms , political analyst

s said , giving image precedence over ideology : Polls show that voters regard t

he Alliance of Free Democrats , a party largely composed of former dissidents th

at came in a remote second with 70 seats , as principled , but inexperienced and

 idealistic . Voters held the current ruling party , the conservative Hungarian 

Democratic Forum , guilty by association for the economic troubles of the last f

our years . It won 37 seats , a humiliating drop from 164 seats in the 1990 elec

tions . The Young Democrats ' Party made a surprisingly poor showing , gaining o

nly 20 seats despite its earlier popularity . Voters perceived that the former a

lternative student party had moved too far to the right , positioning itself as 

a party of pragmatic yuppies . At this juncture , it seems premature to see a ne

w , regional Red Menace . The MSZP , democratically elected by a landslide , pro

poses no significant changes in national policy . While the prospect of former C

ommunists attaining power frightens some , especially in this part of the world 

, it should be remembered that the voters ' choices , in Hungary and the other e

merging democracies , are limited . As a Budapest intellectual observed , `` If 

everyone associated with the old regime was forbidden from power , then by defau

lt the country would have to be run by waitresses and bus drivers . ''

 The triumphant success of Operation Overlord and the ensuing Normandy campaign 

, launched 50 years ago Monday , led to the destruction of German armies totalin

g more than 250,000 men , making it the greatest success by the Western Allies i

n all World War II . Its very success , however , tends to lead modern-day histo

rians , in the brilliance of hindsight two generations later , to take it all fo

r granted , as a forgone conclusion . Yet it was far from that . Realization of 

the grim losses on Omaha Beach had , by mid-day on June 6 , caused Gen. Omar Bra

dley , a competent and `` unflappable '' commmander , to fear that his 29th and 

1st Divisions had `` suffered an irreversible catastrophe . '' He came within an

 inch of ordering withdrawal of the Omaha force representing the main bulk of th

e American D-Day effort . Such a Dunkirk-style evacuation , disastrous as it wou

ld have been , illustrates just what a risky and courageous undertaking it was t

o invade Normandy in June 1944 . It was , however , only one of the ways in whic

h D-Day might have failed . D-day was one of the greatest single achievements in

 all military history , a triumph of Anglo-American cooperation . The vast armad

a that set forth from England on June 6 was the largest that ever put to sea . I

n it were nearly 6,000 vessels of all sizes from vast battleships down to tiny i

nvasion craft at least 11,500 aircraft , 156,115 ground troops plus three elite 

airborne divisions . ( Of these the majority , by a margin of 10,000 , were in f

act British and Canadian . ) The intense risks involved in that gigantic operati

on , have reminded me of a conversation with Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf . It was sh

ortly after the Gulf War , and I had asked what had been his biggest headache . 

His immediate response : `` the media . '' Separately I put the same question to

 Sir Peter de la Billiere , the British commander in the Gulf , and received the

 identical answer . ) Schwarzkopf told me that , in the Gulf , he had gone so fa

r as to ban all TV sets in his headquarters , lest any of his staff be influence

d by what they saw on CNN 's instant coverage of the battlefield . With D-Day in

 mind , I asked him what might have happened if CNN had been on Omaha Beach on J

une 6 , 1944 where the U.S. . Army suffered some of its most severe casualties o

f World War II . His reply : `` There would have been no D-plus-2 . '' In contra

st to Vietnam , and the Gulf , civilian populations during World War II were wel

l shielded from the impact of battlefield carnage . U.S. censorship discreetly f

orbade the showing of photographs or film of any dead or badly wounded GIs . And

 of course there were no television cameras . -O- History can play strange trick

s ; D-Day could so easily have gone terribly wrong . Secret papers recently rele

ased in London now suggest that , by 1944 , it was by no means impossible for Hi

tler actually to have won the war improbable as that may seem today . In the fir

st place , the invasion might have taken place in 1943 or earlier . Stalin wante

d an invasion Operation Sledgehammer as early as 1942 . So did the U.S. . Joint 

Chiefs of Staff , who were impatient with apparent British lethargy . But Britis

h caution , and in this instance good judgment , prevailed . It was the disastro

us Dieppe landing of August 1942 , where the Canadians lost 3,369 out of a total

 force of 5,000 , that illustrated the catastrophe that would almost certainly h

ave overtaken any premature all-out invasion of northwest Europe . Success in Ju

ne 1944 was predicated very largely on massive Allied superiority in the air whi

ch had not yet been achieved the previous year . Equally in 1943 the British and

 Americans had neither the numbers of tanks , nor more crucially of landing craf

t , that were essential to success . Secondly , there was the weather , always p

articularly unpredictable in Normandy and on the English Channel . To get the ri

ght combination of tides and moon , there were only a few days in June 1944 that

 were acceptable . As it happened , the invasion was postponed on the decision o

f the supreme Allied commander , Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower , from June 5 to June

 6 because of bad-weather reports . Had it been called off yet again , the next 

possible date would have been June 18-19 . But on those days , the worst storm i

n 40 years struck ; 800 vessels were destroyed together with the whole American 

floating harbor called Mulberry . Thus , if postponed to June 18-19 , the Anglo-

American invasion force would almost certainly have suffered the same fate as th

e Spanish Armada in 1588 scattered and sunk without a shot being fired from shor

e , in this case by Gen. Erwin Rommel 's German defenders . Thirdly , D-Day coul

d equally have failed if the Germans had had access to anything resembling Briti

sh Ultra intelligence and were `` reading our mail '' as we were indeed reading 

theirs . In this way , Rommel would have known where we were going to land , ena

bling him to rush some of his 60 available divisions ( including 11 powerful Pan

zers ) to the threatened area . An absolutely essential ingredient of Allied suc

cess on D-Day was the skillful ( and British-initiated ) deception scheme , Oper

ation Fortitude . By pretending to have a whole army group under the swashbuckli

ng U.S. Gen. George S. Patton in readiness in southeastern England , the Allies 

deceived the Germans into believing that the main invasion effort would take pla

ce in the heavily defended Pas de Calais . This was a logical invasion zone ; th

e channel was narrowest here , and it offered the shortest route to Paris and th

e industrial German Ruhr . But it was also the most heavily defended . Operation

 Fortitude succeeded so well that it fooled Hitler into keeping a whole German a

rmy , the 15th , tied down uselessly in the Pas de Calais even after Patton 's U

.S. 3rd Army had landed in Normandy , six weeks after D-Day . What might have ha

ppened had Fortitude failed is suggested by two disasters that overtook Bradley 

's U.S. 1st Army . During a landing exercise off Slapton Sands in April , fast G

erman patrol boats sneaked through the Royal Navy screen to sink two LSTs . Six 

hundred American assault troops of the 7th Corps were killed more casualties tha

n they suffered in the June 6 landing on Utah Beach . If the German patrol boats

 and submarines had been properly alerted by their intelligence on D-Day , losse

s inflicted on the Allied armada could have been devastating . Then , when landi

ng on deadly Omaha Beach , Bradley 's men ran unexpectedly into a first-class Ge

rman division , the 352nd , the only one of its standard in Normandy . Casualtie

s were appalling , higher than anywhere else though slender in proportion to wha

t was at stake , and in terms of the whole costly battle of Normandy . If Bradle

y had been forced to withdraw from Omaha , and had it been repeated on the Briti

sh and Canadian beaches ( where , thanks chiefly to Fortitude , the landings had

 met only limited resistance ) , the cutting edge of the D-Day forces would have

 been lost . Almost certainly a large proportion of the indispensable invasion c

raft would have been lost too . Such a reverse would have meant the almost certa

in postponement of another Overlord attempt to the following summer of 1945 . Th

e Americans were under strong pressure from the `` Pacific First '' lobby of Adm

. Ernest King , the chief of naval operations , to transfer forces and landing-c

raft to the Pacific . With British manpower critically depleted , the main effor

t against Germany would have been American . Under the rain of Hitler 's `` secr

et weapons , '' the pilotless V-1 missiles ( which began landing , and causing t

errible damage and civilian losses , one week after D-Day ) , Britain 's economy

 and morale would have been seriously impaired . It was Rommel 's hope that , if

 he could destroy the Allies on the western beaches , Germany might be able to f

orce Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to some kind of stalemate peace in the east . T

he 60 German divisions deployed in the west could conceivably have tilted the ba

lance against the Red Army , which had already suffered millions of casualties .

 The Soviet economy was under severe strain , and as its supply lines grew longe

r , so proportionally did German logistical problems ease . If D-Day had failed 

, at best continental Europe would have been subjected to another year and certa

inly the most terrible year of war before liberation . Hundreds of thousands wou

ld have succumbed to starvation . The `` Final Solution '' would have consumed t

he last remnants of European Jewry . Finally , Hitler 's scientists had been wor

king for years on an atomic bomb . They might have been unlikely to have achieve

d it by 1945 ; but , with greater certainty , the Allies would have dropped `` F

at Boy '' in Europe , not Japan . With Allied ground forces stalled in the west 

, then in all likelihood the war would have ended with the Red Army occupying al

l of a `` nuked '' Germany , confronting the Allies with a largely communist Wes

tern Europe . The recently released papers from the British Public Records Offic

e show Hitler by April 1945 planning self-immolation accompanied by a terrible W

agnerian Gotterdammerung of destruction in Europe . With the war continuing thro

ugh 1944 and 1945 , it would have given him much greater opportunity to destroy 

Paris at his leisure . That none of these dread scenarios took place depended ve

ry largely on two men Eisenhower , and his ground-forces commander , Gen. Bernar

d Montgomery `` Monty . '' One of Montgomery 's sharpest American critics was Ei

senhower 's tough chief of staff , Maj. Gen. Bedell Smith , but he confessed aft

er the war : `` I don't know if we could have done it without Monty . It was his

 sort of battle . Whatever they say about him , he got us there . '' Almost equa

lly indispensable , as superbly qualified to weld together harmoniously all the 

disparate Allied forces , was Ike . But the detailed planning , and actual comma

nd of all the invasion forces , he had entrusted to Montgomery . As of D-Day , M

ontgomery was the one man on either side who could have lost the war that day . 

It almost certainly would have been lost , if in addition to the big ifs of timi

ng , air superiority , weather and success of the Allied deception plan , Fortit

ude Monty had accepted the plans he inherited in January 1944 . These had prescr

ibed a wholly inadequate landing by three divisions . From the very beginning , 

Monty insisted the Allies land five divisions on a 50-mile-wide beachhead . As i

t turned out , although final victory was to be delayed another year ( not least

 through disagreements over strategy between the Allies ) success at D-Day assur

ed the fall of Hitler . It also shaped the modern world . With U.S. predominance

 in the war manifestly established as her troops in Europe grew from parity with

 the British to a ratio of 3 to 1 , D-Day was the moment when America took over 

lead of the alliance . Today 's frontiers in Europe and the structure of the 50 

years of peace that followed hark back to that success . Without it , what remai

ned of Europe would surely have been left to face liberation by the Red Army . -

O- ( Historian Alistair Horne , co-author of `` The Lonely Leader ; Monty 1944-4

5 '' ( Harper Collins-USA , Macmillian-UK ) was training in England for the Guar

ds Armoured Division when D-Day was launched . )

 American policy on Rwanda is difficult to understand . Statements made by Madel

eine Albright , the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations , indicate that Rwanda

 is viewed as a traditional peace-keeping problem , when it is really a `` Call 

911 ! '' problem . Traditional peace-keeping calls for a negotiated cease-fire f

ollowed by the arrival of lightly armed multilateral forces who monitor and obse

rve . Rwanda , on the other hand , is a case of planned , systematic murder of m

en , women and children who happen to belong to a particular group the Tutsi . B

oth the self-proclaimed government of Rwanda , which has armed the death squads 

who are doing the ethnic killing , and the rebel Rwanda Patriotic Front fighters

 , do not want to stop fighting until they can finish the genocide or dominate m

ilitarily . Waiting to intervene until there is `` progress toward a cease-fire 

, '' in Albright 's words , is like a doctor telling a heart attack victim , `` 

Take two aspirins , and call me in the morning . '' Giving one or both of the fi

ghting groups in Rwanda a veto on international intervention is the height of fo

lly . If anything is going to destroy the credibility of the international commu

nity in the area of conflict resolution , the American policy is going to do it 

. The Rwandan crisis has all of the characteristics of a situation requiring urg

ent action : Rwanda is inflicting emotional and financial pain on the world comm

unity . Let 's face it , whatever we do in Rwanda , there will be a bill to pay 

one way or another . Rwanda has become simultaneously a failed state and a deleg

itimized state . It has failed because the previous government has self-destruct

ed into semi-anarchy . It is delegitimized because the new self-proclaimed gover

nment is by definition a pariah because of its determination to exterminate an e

ntire ethnic group . A significant population is at risk . Indeed , in areas con

trolled by the death squads , the Tutsi have essentially been wiped out . Genoci

de is qualitatively a lot worse than any of the normal human rights situations w

e worry about around the globe China , for example . For the above three reasons

 , the appropriateness of international intervention could not be more apparent 

. The fighting is clearly not susceptible to an early cease-fire , and even if a

 cease-fire could be arranged , the endangered populations would still be endang

ered wherever there are death squads still roaming the countryside . In addition

 to the demand that a cease-fire be on hand before the dispatch of troops , the 

United States is making matters worse by insisting that any U.N. troops work fro

m the outside to protect Rwandans fleeing the fighting in camps in the border ar

eas . That tactic would only increase the number of refugees spilling over into 

neighboring countries , which cannot handle the ones already there . The only wa

y what is left of the Tutsi population can be saved is for troops to work from t

he center so that death squads will be intimidated into melting into the general

 population . By standing in the way of African troops intervening in Rwanda und

er `` combat '' terms of engagement , the United States is effectively imposing 

upon the Security Council the same rule that it applies to itself . That is to s

ay , the administration sees no vital American interest engaged in Rwanda , and 

therefore does not want U.N. troops to have a muscular mandate even though Afric

an troops would be willing to take on such a difficult and dangerous assignment 

. Is the U.S. government worried that such an operation would constitute a slipp

ery slope to eventual American troop involvement if the military situation gets 

worse rather than better ? With such a `` what if '' policy , the United Nations

 is effectively paralyzed from doing anything except traditional peace-keeping ,

 which is exactly where it was during the Cold War . It may be too late to save 

the Tutsi of Rwanda . After three weeks of systematic killing that must be calle

d `` genocide , '' we can probably only learn some lessons for the `` new world 

order , '' which seems to be eluding us . First , we should remember that while 

five big powers in the Security Council can veto action , they cannot force the 

Security Council to take action . That takes nine votes . When the Americans sou

ght Security Council approval for military action against Iraq after it invaded 

Kuwait , a majority vote was not ensured . The non-aligned members of the counci

l were dubious at first . Thanks to the hard work and support of Ethiopia and Za

ire , the council voted to use force against Iraq . After the current wimpish ap

proach to the genocide in Rwanda , will the three African Security Council votes

 be with us in the future when we need support for an action we consider to be i

n America 's vital interest ? It may not be a sure thing . Second , Rwanda and B

osnia appear to be setting a new ugly pattern in post-Cold War politics . Small 

groups of determined fanatics are willing to ride a wave of hatred and ethnic fe

ar in order to obtain power or remain in power regardless of the human cost . Fo

rmer communists in Serbia are now ethnic nationalists . Hutu extremists in Rwand

a saw democracy coming and decided that genocide was the price to pay for remain

ing in power . Where there is a history of ethnic animosity , it only takes a si

mple `` Kill them before they kill us '' to set off the powder keg . Internation

al inaction in Rwanda and insufficient action in Bosnia are sending a signal to 

nasty people everywhere : `` You can get away with it now . '' Finally , the Uni

ted States and other important powers should start working to give the United Na

tions the ability to put out fires while they are still smoldering . The U.N. se

cretary general proposed such a rapid reaction capability in his `` Agenda for P

eace '' proposal of July , 1992 , which has so far received very little attentio

n . If the Agenda for Peace cannot be implemented throughout the world , why not

 start it at least in Africa ? At the opening of the Holocaust Museum , Presiden

t Clinton pledged that `` we will never allow another Holocaust . '' Another Hol

ocaust may have just slipped by , hardly noticed .

 WASHINGTON Last year , the caretakers of the Capitol blasted clean the corrodin

g statue of `` Freedom '' that is perched above the imposing domed building . To

day , the rest of the once-revered institution is finding itself in need of some

 serious clean-up and repair . Once again , scandal has landed on the grand marb

le steps of the U.S. Congress with last week 's indictment of Chicago Rep. Dan R

ostenkowski . And although the accusations against the powerful congressman are 

unproven at this point , they still seem to have succeeded in confirming the pub

lic 's worst suspicions about an already scarred and battered body of government

 . Polls taken last week suggested that the majority of Americans believe most m

embers of Congress are corrupt , and they furthermore believe that Congress is m

ore corrupt today than it was 20 years ago . But former members , including some

 who left under the cloud of the House banking scandal of 1992 , as well as Cong

ressional watchdogs believe that there is today a heightened sensitivity among m

embers regarding their behavior . They believe that , while the lax rules of Con

gress , the perquisites and privileges still lead to occasional abuses of power 

, the actions outlined in the Rostenkowski indictment are atypical . What is so 

striking about the list of charges against Rostenkowski , says former Rep. Vin W

eber of Minnesota , `` is that it stands in contrast to the standards members ar

e setting for themselves now . '' Weber , who left Congress in 1992 after 12 yea

rs ( and 125 overdrafts on the now-closed House bank ) , believes that , a decad

e ago , members were more cavalier , were in fact aggressive , about racking up 

the free lunches , the trips to Barbados , whatever perks or privileges they cou

ld find . He believes that behavior was fostered by the great respect and admira

tion , even awe , the public once bestowed on elected officials and the institut

ion . `` People bowed and scraped a little too much in the old days , '' says th

e former House Republican . `` We did have an imperial Congress in terms of the 

way the public treated elected officials . So the members thought , ` I must des