US Is Wary of Area's Rugged Terrain
The London Times
March 30, 1999 BEN MACINTYRE IN WASHINGTON
PRESIDENT CLINTON is coming under increasing pressure to draw up plans for the use of ground forces in Kosovo, despite repeated assurances that the US Administration has no intention of becoming embroiled in a land war.
American political leaders and foreign policy analysts - from Republican presidential hopeful Senator John McCain to Henry Kissinger - have argued that Mr Clinton should at least raise the possibility of going beyond airstrikes, if only to keep President Milosevic guessing.
"We have to exercise every option," Mr McCain, a Vietnam veteran and former PoW, said. "If Mr Milosevic was convinced that ground troops are an option we might exercise, I think it could lend impetus to convincing him that he cannot win."
Dr Kissinger argued that troops might be unavoidable. He said: "We have to take whatever measures are necessary, even reluctantly introducing ground forces." Arlen Specter, another Republican senator, suggested that only European ground troops should be sent in to fight on European soil.
US officials are acutely aware that Kosovo represents a far more treacherous potential battlefield than the flat deserts of Iraq.Echoing the US military philosophy that "we do deserts, we don't do mountains", Colonel Bill Taylor, a Vietnam veteran and head of political and military studies at the Washington Centre for Strategic and International Studies, said: "You're talking rugged land, high mountains, deep ravines - it's a messy, Godawful terrain." |
