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Clark's Role in Kosovo Exemplifies His Traits
His use of the word "destroy" had not been cleared with Washington or London, and some officials in both capitals complained that Clark had overreached. Clark said his goal was to convince Belgrade from the outset that resistance would bring dire consequences. "No one said I had to get everybody's approval," he said in an interview.
It was not the only time that Clark's news conferences produced red faces at the Pentagon, said a former military official in Washington: "He would always be out front of where policy was."
Cohen did not speak to him until the seventh day of the war, when several U.S. soldiers at Yugoslavia's border were taken hostage. "The relationship had already soured by then," Clark said. He said that his antagonists in Washington blocked him from speaking with President Bill Clinton once during 11 weeks of combat.
Clark's management of the war was complicated by the absence of a strong NATO consensus about how to wage it -- Italy and other allies favored light strikes and bombing pauses, while the United States and Britain generally sought an aggressive escalation once it got under way. Clark also had competing goals to juggle, having been told by Washington to minimize casualties -- a task he met mostly through high-altitude bombing of fixed targets outside Kosovo proper -- while also protecting Kosovo's ethnic Albanian population against artillery fire, house-burnings and expulsions by Yugoslav forces.
Sandwiched between European pressure for air raids against Yugoslav forces inside Kosovo and the Air Force's unyielding conviction that such raids would have no impact on Milosevic, Clark chucked a strategic bombing plan given to him by subordinates and chose to "cut and paste different elements of different plans that he thought were most appropriate," according to a subsequent study for the Air Force by the Rand Corp.
The result, the report said, was "a continuously evolving coercive operation featuring piecemeal attacks against unsystematically approved targets."
Clark and others at NATO headquarters had to scramble because they assumed, in error, that Milosevic would capitulate after a few days of bombing. Rand called this a "misjudgment of near-blunder proportions that came close to saddling the United States and NATO with a costly and embarrassing failure."
"We called this one absolutely wrong," Navy Adm. James O. Ellis Jr., then NATO's commander in southern Europe, said in a postwar briefing to military officials. That "affected much of what followed: . . . lack of coherent campaign planning . . . [and] the race to find suitable targets."
The number of aircraft assigned to the bombing started at 366 and rose to nearly 1,000 by late May. NATO personnel at the air operations control center in Italy swelled from 400 to 1,300. The process by which targets were cleared was not streamlined until more than six weeks into the war.
Even so, about 500 civilians were killed by accident, according to a study by Human Rights Watch. In the interview, Clark blamed much of the disarray on the U.S. target planning staff, which he said was too distracted by the threat of conflict in Iraq and did not follow his orders. He also said "it was the best that could reasonably have been anticipated," given that his superiors in Washington blocked "realistic military planning."
But Clark also acknowledged some responsibility, explaining that "I tried too hard to prevent . . . [the war], as opposed to just preparing it, by working the diplomatic piece" in concert with Holbrooke and other Western envoys.
Clark waged unsuccessful battles with Washington in March and April for permission to deploy missile batteries in nearby Croatia and to begin planning for a possible ground war -- an option that Clinton had ruled out in a speech delivered the night the bombing began, with Shelton's advance knowledge.
Clark had to fight with the Navy to have an aircraft carrier placed under his command. He also had to fight for repairs to roads in northern Albania that might eventually be needed for a ground invasion. And he had to fight to attend NATO's 50th anniversary summit in Washington, on the 30th day of the war, after Cohen initially insisted he stay in Europe.
But Clark's biggest wartime dispute concerned a request -- made only four days before the war began -- for the deployment of Apache helicopters. |
