Kosovo: Chronicle of a Mess Foretold

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Whatever the timetable for peace, Kosovo will remain a humiliating policy failure for the Clinton administration. This week's media reports citing military and intelligence told-you-so's signaled a rush in the corridors of power to dissociate from a policy that, at best, failed achieve its basic objective -- alleviating the suffering of the Kosovo Albanians -- despite bringing to bear the combined air power of the world's most powerful military alliance.

But the military failure was the inevitable consequence of a flawed political policy. Washington's strategy of designing a peace accord for Kosovo and then insisting both sides sign it or face the wrath of NATO has backfired badly -- plainly, the authors of that policy hadn't reckoned with the depth of Serbian attachment to the province, or with the fact that going to war to defend that attachment would actually strengthen, not weaken, Milosevic's standing among his own people. "The alliance simply didn't have the military capacity to force Milosevic to sign on to Rambouillet," says Thompson. One salient flaw was that NATO's sign-or-be-bombed ultimatum left it little option but to proceed once a Balkan thug had challenged the credibility of its threat. But launching a bombing offensive while repeatedly emphasizing that ground troops weren't an option amounted to NATO tipping its hand, leaving Milosevic to conclude that he could withstand the full extent of what the West was prepared to throw at him.

Milosevic planned to do more than just grin and bear it: While NATO began bombing his air defenses, he began a barbarous depopulation of much of Kosovo, raising the stakes and shifting NATO's immediate objective toward stopping the "ethnic cleansing" -- an objective to which an aerial campaign was poorly suited. And, of course, if ending the Serb offensive in Kosovo does indeed become the basis for a cease-fire, then Milosevic will still have prevailed in his resistance of Rambouillet.

"Rambouillet now is a nonstarter, and both sides are going to have give up something in order to negotiate a new accord," says Thompson. Adds Dowell, "There are going to be some extremely hard lessons learned out of this campaign -- we can't project our power if our prime concern is to avoid putting our military at risk, and we can't get involved in a centuries-old conflict without a thorough understanding of what's at stake on both sides." President Clinton may be a legendary quick study, but when it comes to the Balkans there's no such thing.