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Politics : Bill Clinton Scandal - SANITY CHECK -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Zoltan! who wrote (40045)	3/25/1999 6:20:00 AM
From: JBL	Respond to of 67261

From the Washington Post WASHINGTON - During a private White House session with President Bill Clinton this month, the visiting Italian prime minister expressed concern that a NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia might lead to a wider Balkan conflagration. What, Massimo D'Alema asked Mr. Clinton, would the United States do if President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia refused to back down and instead stepped up his military offensive against the Kosovo ethnic Albanians? According to Italian sources, Mr. Clinton seemed unprepared for the ''What next?'' question. Instead of replying, he turned to his national security adviser, Samuel (Sandy) Berger. After a brief hesitation, the sources said, Mr. Berger responded: ''We will continue the bombing.'' As NATO mounts its first attack on a sovereign country in its 50-year history as a defensive alliance, the reservations of such members as Italy and Germany appear to have faded. But the concerns raised by the Italian prime minister remain pivotal to the success of the U.S. strategy in the Balkans and have gone largely unaddressed, at least in public, by American policymakers. U.S. officials from the president down have said that the primary reason for Western military intervention against Yugoslavia is that the Kosovo fighting could spark a more general Balkan war. In remarks Monday outside the White House, Mr. Clinton expressed fears that continued ''Serbian aggression'' could create a large-scale refugee crisis and destabilize Albania, Macedonia, Montenegro and Bosnia. Even two North Atlantic Treaty Organization members, Greece and Turkey, could be dragged into a wider conflict, he said. The counterargument, expressed by some Balkans experts and diplomats from neighboring countries, is that a NATO attack on Yugoslavia might fuel Albanian nationalist sentiment throughout the region and contribute to the very instability it was meant to prevent. U.S. officials insist they have no intention of permitting NATO to act as ''the air force of the Kosovo Liberation Army,'' but a prolonged bombing campaign would probably tilt the military balance in favor of the guerrilla army, which has set its sights on total independence for Kosovo. The present U.S. strategy hinges on a calculation that Mr. Milosevic will back down after one or two rounds of air strikes rather than risk losing Kosovo altogether and incurring enormous damage to his military infrastructure. But many Balkan specialists wonder what will happen if he does not yield. The Clinton administration has refused to consider sending NATO ground troops to Kosovo in the absence of a peace settlement. ''Milosevic is calling NATO's bluff and has been doing it effectively for six weeks now,'' said Ivo Daalder, who was a White House adviser on the Balkans during Mr. Clinton's first term and now is with the Brookings Institution in Washington. He says that his former administration colleagues have ''no post-bombing strategy'' and ''no answer for what happens if Milosevic doesn't sign'' a Western-backed autonomy plan for Kosovo. Mr. Daalder would like to see the administration support ''a de facto independent state of Kosovo'' if Mr. Milosevic refuses to back down. But he is worried that allied unity will begin to fray after a few days of air strikes. ''There is a danger,'' he said, ''that after four days of bombing, the administration will declare a victory and hope that nothing happens to spoil the birthday party'' - a reference to NATO's 50th anniversary next month. The political efficacy of bombing is also under question. ''Air strikes alone will not be sufficient to stabilize the region,'' said Janusz Bugajski, director of East European studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. He envisions a ''prolonged bombing war'' leading up to ''a point of no return'' in which the Belgrade government's losses are so severe that it is no longer able to control Kosovo. In this case, he said, the administration would be faced with a stark choice: send in ground troops or ''recognize Kosovo sovereignty and independence.'' The U.S. calculation that Mr. Milosevic will eventually back down reflects the widespread view of him as a pragmatic if ruthless politician concerned primarily with his own survival. In the past, he has shown that he is willing to sacrifice large amounts of territory - as he did in both Bosnia and Croatia in wars earlier in the decade - to preserve his power base. But such comparisons may be misleading, because Kosovo is a province of Serbia - Yugoslavia's dominant republic - and has been central to the Serbian national identity since the 14th century. Nationalist feeling of another sort, on the part of ethnic Albanians, poses another major risk for U.S. strategy. Tensions in Macedonia, where many ethnic Albanians live, and in northern Albania have increased sharply in the last week following the start of an offensive in Kosovo by the Serbian-dominated Yugoslav Army in anticipation of the NATO bombing campaign. Ethnic Albanian refugees from Kosovo have been pouring into Macedonia and Albania. The Albanian government has responded by mobilizing what Prime Minister Pandeli Majko described as ''the biggest number of troops on our northern border since World War II.'' Macedonia, meanwhile, has sealed its border with Yugoslavia in an attempt to block more refugees. Macedonia, a former Yugoslav republic with 2 million people, is at the center of most Balkans tinderbox scenarios. It was the setting for two brutal Balkan wars at the beginning of the century that served as an overture to World War I. ''Everybody has some kind of a claim against Macedonia,'' said Barnett Rubin, a Balkans specialist with the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. In the past, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Albania and Greece all have expressed designs of one kind or another on Macedonian territory.