Times Leader:
May 12 1999 LEADING ARTICLE
A BALKAN TRAGEDY
The reckoning beckons: its name is failure
The diplomatic consequences of the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade might in time be contained; the political fallout may not. A single crass mistake has compounded the already growing public unease that the conduct of this war is fundamentally unserious. Nato is floundering; and this is not because the Alliance cannot prevail against Slobodan Milosevic, a vastly inferior adversary, but because of the crippling constraints laid on its commanders by their political masters.
President Clinton, in the closing years of his presidency, has proved his absolute inadequacy as a Commander-in-Chief, stumbling on a stage that is bigger than his talents can match and performing with hesitancy, frailty and fear. His Joint Chiefs of Staff have long told him that an air war minus the threat of ground troops would not force Slobodan Milosevic to bend to Nato's demands. That was manifestly the case. It has always been the case.
This truth was inadvertently underlined yesterday by Robin Cook. Rebutting Belgrade's claims to be withdrawing some troops because their "mission" in Kosovo was complete, the Foreign Secretary said that Serb artillery, troops and paramilitary were still in action in the province, and digging in on the Kosovan side of the Albanian border. At his side, Sir Charles Guthrie made explicit what Mr Cook had only implied; Nato's air campaign, which he conceded would have to continue for far longer than Nato had planned, "can slow the killing but cannot stop it".
What this tells the public is that however much damage bombing is inflicting on Belgrade's military infrastructure, it is neither winning the war nor, crucially, saving Kosovan lives. The US will not even send into battle the Apache attack helicopters which could do most damage to Serb armour and troops. The gratuitous public ruling out of a combined air-ground campaign, even a limited one, has made Serb forces harder to attack from the air. Instead of being forced to mass them in defensive positions, Mr Milosevic has felt free to fan them out and order them to concentrate their firepower on the destruction of Kosovo's hapless civilians.
Tony Blair, Jacques Chirac and Lionel Jospin continue to insist that this war will end only on Nato's terms. So too does Germany, despite the risk that a revolt by the Greens tomorrow will bring down the governing coalition. Rudolf Scharping, the Defence Minister, and Joshka Fischer, the Foreign Minister and leader of the Greens, joined forces yesterday to persuade their parties' pacifists that a hasty deal with Belgrade would be a false, temporary peace, "massively undermining our security". But the G8 agreement which Gerhard Schröder is in Beijing trying to sell avoids any mention of Nato. It has the smell of just such a disastrous compromise.
Both politically and militarily, time is running out if disaster is to be avoided. The war of public opinion is being lost. Already edgy about civilian casualties, voters will not tolerate more of the same if they sense that Nato is bombing not to secure a durable peace and the refugees' return to Kosovo but another "accord" for Mr Milosevic to tear up when it suits him. Militarily, as we report on page 10, the build-up of combat troops falls far short of what would be required to police a political settlement, let alone to deal with residual Yugoslav military opposition.
The sombre reality, known to Mr Blair, is that this war will not be serious until Mr Clinton listens to the Pentagon, rather than the latest opinion poll. He has never countenanced a campaign plan; and in the absence of one, even air power has been misapplied. Bombing started on a modest scale from a high altitude; its ad hoc escalation lacks the indispensable ingredient, planning for an air-ground campaign. No such thing is being contemplated even now; none can be, unless Mr Clinton is prepared to order American participation.
But Mr Clinton has retreated into the semantic ambiguities for which his presidency has become infamous. His conception of the paramount strategic interest of the United States would appear to be the avoidance of humiliation, not by force of arms but through verbal victories. War on the cheap is an oxymoron. The Kosovans have already suffered disastrously from this half-war. For Nato, for European peace and for Britain, the true, high reckoning beckons: it is called failure.
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