Chuzzlewit, NATO may have let itself be persuaded by the U.S. State Department -- more specifically, by Madeleine Albright. Unfortunately, the State Department appears to have misjudged the situation (unlike the Pentagon & the CIA).
That is the brunt of the argument of an article in the Washington Post today. I commend it to your attention.
State Dept. Miscalculated on Kosovo
By Thomas W. Lippman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 7, 1999; Page A1
As the clouds of violence
darkened over Kosovo throughout
1998, Secretary of State Madeleine
K. Albright argued repeatedly that
Yugoslav President Slobodan
Milosevic would respond to the
threat of force.
That conviction underlay U.S.
negotiating tactics last fall, when
Milosevic appeared to back down from a campaign of repression in the
province of Kosovo under the threat of NATO bombing. It was a basic
assumption driving the peace conference at Rambouillet, France, in
February, when Albright and her colleagues expected Milosevic to
accept a U.S.-brokered deal rather than face a NATO bombardment.
And it was reflected in the belief at the State Department that when
airstrikes began Milosevic would probably back down after a few
visible targets were hit.
These miscalculations about the efficacy of the threat, and a collective
underestimation of Milosevic's defiance, have led the United States and
its allies into an air war in Europe that has produced some of the same
negative consequences they said they were trying to head off, and
forced the NATO alliance to modify its political goals.
State Department officials dispute the notion that Kosovo is "Albright's
war," as one said it has been called. Nevertheless, the NATO pounding
of Yugoslavia embodies bedrock principles of Albright's view of the
world. Born in Czechoslovakia and twice a refugee as a child, Albright
believes that the United States and its allies must unite to check
aggression, especially in Europe, because they will be drawn into wider
conflicts if they do not. She also has said many times Milosevic
represents a last vestige of a nondemocratic Europe that was plagued
by war for much of this century, and that his record shows he will
destabilize a large swath of the continent unless bottled up.
That view has been embraced by the alliance and has framed NATO's
deliberations about Kosovo. At the same time, the Yugoslav leader's
defiance, and the mass deportation of Kosovo's ethnic Albanian
population by Serb security forces, represent the response to NATO
bombing that Albright and her advisers had calculated as least likely.
Albright and her closest aides expected Milosevic to behave like a
"schoolyard bully," as one senior official put it, backing down after a
few punches were thrown. They admit they were unprepared for the
scope and speed of the deportation campaign. By contrast, senior
Pentagon officials expressed doubts before the war that Milosevic could
be moved by air power, and CIA Director George J. Tenet warned that
the Serbs might respond with a campaign of ethnic cleansing.
While administration officials have argued that the bombing was
necessary to try to stop a campaign of ethnic cleansing that began a
year ago, they also said that nobody predicted that Milosevic would
respond by forcing civilians onto trains and deporting them, a scene
not witnessed in Europe since the depths of World War II.
"As we contemplated the use of force over the past 14 months, we
constructed four different models," one senior official said. "One was
that the whiff of gunpowder, just the threat of force, would make
[Milosevic] back down. Another was that he needed to take some hit to
justify acquiescence. Another was that he was a playground bully who
would fight but back off after a punch in the nose. And the fourth was
that he would react like Saddam Hussein," the president of Iraq, who
hunkered down through Operation Desert Storm in 1991 and still holds
power.
"On any given day people would pick one or the other," this official
said. "We thought the Saddam Hussein option was always the least
likely, but we knew it was out there, and now we're looking at it."
Albright's thinking about Milosevic, aides close to her said, has been
driven in large part by events of half a century ago in Europe.
"Madeleine Albright, more than anyone else in this administration, is
driven by her own biography," said one senior U.S. diplomat. "Time
and again, she raises the sights to the moral and historic issues." She
believes deeply that Adolf Hitler and other tyrants could have been
deterred if confronted early, and has applied that view to her
diplomacy in Yugoslavia.
Albright's conviction that Milosevic could be persuaded by the threat of
force was strengthened by his initially promising partial compliance
with a cease-fire agreement brokered in October by special U.S. envoy
Richard Holbrooke – an agreement Milosevic accepted after NATO's
initial decision to use force if necessary.
"Today," she said on Oct. 27, "the alliance is able to report that the
President Milosevic is in very substantial compliance [with U.N.
Security Council resolutions on Kosovo] . . . and that this compliance
is sufficient to justify not launching airstrikes at this time. This is an
important and welcome development. It would not have happened if we
had not combined diplomacy with the threat by NATO to use force."
That experience, combined with the memory of how NATO airstrikes
and a ground offensive by Croatian troops had induced Milosevic to
accept a peace agreement in Bosnia, reinforced the belief that Milosevic
would back down rather than fight, or at least retreat after a few
missile strikes, officials said.
"What happened in Bosnia and in October showed that the threat of
force can work, not that it will work, and therefore it was worth trying,"
an aide to Albright said.
Given the outcomes of those earlier confrontations, administration
officials said they are still baffled by Milosevic's refusal to accept the
U.S.-sponsored peace agreement that was offered to him at
Rambouillet.
While it would have required an end to repression of the Kosovo
Albanians and promised them wide-ranging political and
administrative autonomy, it would also have allowed some Serb troops
and security forces to remain in the province, maintained Serb
sovereignty for at least three years – guaranteed by NATO – and
provided security for the province's minority Serb population.
It also would have required the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army to
disarm, and U.S. officials said Milosevic was promised that the United
States would take steps against the ethnic Albanian group, such as
freezing its bank accounts, if he accepted the agreement and the KLA
refused.
"We walked right up to the edge of appeasement" at Rambouillet to craft
a peace plan Milosevic could accept, one senior official said.
The only conceivable reason Milosevic would have rejected that deal –
even after a last-minute effort by Holbrooke to convince him that force
was imminent unless he signed – is that "he's detached from reality. His
mind just can't process new inputs," another official said. "He never
even asked Holbrooke for any changes in the text."
The Kosovo rebels and representatives of Milosevic participated at
Rambouillet because they were, in effect, ordered to do so by Albright
and the foreign ministers of the five other countries in the so-called
Contact Group: Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Russia.
Milosevic and the rebels were not to arrive at Rambouillet with delaying
tactics or plans for drawn-out negotiations, according to Albright's
scheme. They were to arrive prepared to accept the peace plan within
two weeks, subject only to minor modifications. "Showing up is not
going to be good enough," Albright said.
State Department officials now say they had to have a detailed peace
plan because the European allies said they would carry out the threat
of force only if the Serbs were clearly refusing a reasonable offer that
the Kosovo representatives had accepted. At the time, though,
Albright's aides offered a different reason for the ultimatum and the
tight timetable: They said she was tired of fighting the same fires over
and over again, and wanted the Kosovo issue resolved well before
NATO's 50th anniversary celebration this month.
In an appearance at the Brookings Institution yesterday, Albright
declined to reflect on what she might have done differently in the past
few months.
"We will have plenty of time to go back and look at what we did or did
not do," she said. "I am completely focused on what we are doing now
and what we have to do in the future."
washingtonpost.com
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