It's Flight Or Fight

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Even so, the subject of ground troops was Topic A at the fringes of the conference. The British in particular heated up the atmosphere with lots of talk about "permissive" and "nonpermissive" environments, "softening up" and "invasion without consent."

But if Blair and his team are ready for a land assault, Clinton and his are not--at least not yet. In the spectrum of presidential advisers, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright is more disposed than most to the use of all means necessary--the code phrase for ground troops. But Clinton is hanging back, and Pentagon officers, who oppose any ground war, will keep advising him against one. Like Clinton, powerful members of Congress believe Americans are not willing to make the sacrifices required by a Balkan ground war.

Perhaps as a result, Washington is determined to squelch rising suspicion that ground troops might well be needed to defeat Milosevic. The Pentagon, the White House and NATO spokesmen spent much of the three-day summit insisting their sustained bombardment of Yugoslavia was paying off. Officials rolled out numbers to tick off progress: after 3,000 target strikes, 16 early-warning radars were gone, half of Serbia's MiG-29s destroyed, two oil refineries eliminated, 25% of stored fuel wiped out, all four vital rail and road links to Kosovo damaged. Never mind that 3 of every 4 bombs were falling on big, empty, static targets already hit. Alliance spokesmen were sure that new strikes on Milosevic's Tito-era villa, on the broadcast studios of state-owned Serbian TV, and on the 23-story tower housing his Socialist Party of Serbia and his daughter's radio and TV stations were going to undermine Milosevic's domestic support. "We are winning," NATO commander General Wesley Clark told the summiteers. "He is losing, and he knows it."

Unfortunately, Milosevic hasn't given any sign of that. So NATO leaders quietly concluded a summit that was more symbolic than substantive. They made solemn proclamations: We will stick together. We will prevail. We will intensify the bombing until Milosevic capitulates to the terms we have already laid down.

But it's not all that easy for NATO to "intensify" the air-only war as it promises. Over considerable resistance, Clinton barely talked NATO into approving plans for a naval embargo to cut off oil supplies to Serbia, and no one wants to hurt Western-leaning Montenegro, where the main Yugoslav port is, in the process. The low-risk, high-altitude bombing cannot grow markedly more effective unless the allies are willing to accept more casualties--theirs and ours. The Apache gunships are dribbling into Albania to begin their closer-to-the-ground war against nearly 400 Serbian tanks and armored personnel carriers and 43,000 troops--more, not fewer, since the bombing began--still vigorously cleansing Kosovo. But refugees report that Serbian soldiers have shed their uniforms to patrol the roads on stolen tractors, disguising themselves as civilian convoys. An Apache pilot will be hard pressed to make the right call on whether to strike a convoy that could contain the oppressor or the oppressed. A footnote: as more Apaches arrive, the number of G.I.s in Albania, 350 a month ago, will soon grow to more than 5,000.

What overshadows everything is NATO's failure so far to stop the slaughter. Washington will call the summit a success simply because the 19 hung together. But the unity doesn't extend much beyond a consensus that the best thing these nations can do is hang together--for now. There are hints of cracks to come. Some of the allies are worried that NATO is dangerously remiss in failing to rev up planning for a ground campaign. Still others--recoiling from the live possibility of putting "our boys" on Balkan ground--are pressing for any negotiated way out. And few in the alliance can yet name the specifics of a peace plan: some nations dread the idea of an independent Kosovo; others embrace it. What Clinton and his confreres have left unsettled is just how they intend to fight this war to the finish--and that, more than any photo-op cheeriness, will determine what kind of alliance 21st century NATO will turn out to be.