Here is a clue of the WH and NATO's intention : I'm afraid you won't like what you read.
They have finally found a goal : finish the war before April 24 th, in time to celebrate NATO's 50 birthday... How utterly pathetic.
Serb's Resilience Puts Air Strategy in Doubt
New York Times
Mar 30 By CRAIG R. WHITNEY
Serb's Resilience Puts Air Strategy in Doubt
By CRAIG R. WHITNEY
RUSSELS -- Increasingly dejected by the inability of their dazzling weapons to bring Slobodan Milosevic to heel and stop the ethnic purge of Kosovo, NATO leaders wonder: What next?
President Slobodan Milosevic has been impervious to a week-long battering by cruise missiles, "smart" bombs, stealth planes and high-tech bombers. An armed invasion has been ruled out by NATO, and the existing strategy has only one option left: bombing Yugoslavia's nerve centers in the heart of Belgrade, with all the risks of civilian casualties.
The alternative, NATO's top civilian official said today, would be to acknowledge that the premise behind the bombing, that a sufficient show of power would batter Milosevic into accepting Western prescriptions for Kosovo, was fatally flawed. And that, in turn, would mean admitting that the world's most powerful alliance, with the world's most powerful air force, was helpless to stop the authoritarian leader of a small Balkan country from victimizing his people.
"We may not have the means to stop it, but we have shown we have the will to try," the NATO official, Secretary General Javier Solana, said in an interview on Tuesday.
For the first time, other allied officials began talking privately about the possibility that the bombing might not work. That was not the view of Gen. Wesley K. Clark, the top allied commander, who would not comment today on reports that he had requested permission to strike the ministries in Belgrade but not been given a go-ahead.
But in a telephone interview, he acknowledged that Milosevic was no pushover. "We're up against an intelligent and capable adversary who is attempting to offset all our strategies," General Clark said. "There are risks -- and no certainties -- in this."
The only certainty, the general said, was that the Serbian police and military forces would continue to be "attacked, degraded and disrupted" by the bombing unless President Milosevic called off the Serbian attacks on ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.
Despite the failure of this strategy so far, General Clark maintained a resolute stance. "The political consensus is building, political will is building and resolution is strengthening," he said of the allies.
With that strategy being questioned in many European news media, Prime Minister Yevgeny M. Primakov of Russia made a lightning trip to Belgrade today to see if Milosevic is ready to talk peace.
He is, Primakov reported this evening to Chancellor Gerhard Schröder in Bonn, but with the defiant condition that the allies would first have to stop bombing. The proposal was summarily rejected.
"The core of the proposals was: Stop NATO attacks first, then we'll negotiate," Schröder said after Primakov left Bonn for Moscow. "We could not accept that."
That left the allies where they have been for the past week, hoping that punishing attacks would persuade Milosevic that he has no choice.
But if that does not work, as Solana explained in the interview, there is little the allies can do except to say that at least it had tried. It was too late, Solana said, for NATO to send in ground troops even if any of the allies wanted to do such a thing.
"We have not prepared for a force on the ground," he said, except after a peace settlement accepted by the Serbs. Planning for a combat operation to fight their way in, he said, would take time the allies could not afford if they hoped to spare further agony to the civilians of Kosovo. In any case, President Clinton and other allied leaders have repeatedly promised the public that it would never happen.
The only way Americans and European troops would be prepared to enter Kosovo, the allies all agree, would be as part of an peacekeeping force, with the consent of both the Albanians in Kosovo and the Serbs who rule over it.
A week ago the allies were insisting that Milosevic withdraw his forces from Kosovo and sign the peace agreement that was worked out in France last month in negotiations at Rambouillet castle, outside Paris. The agreement provided for autonomy for the province under Serbian rule for a three-year transition period, and 28,000 NATO peacekeepers to enforce it.
Soon after the Serbs rejected the agreement, their forces stepped up operations in Kosovo, systematically driving Albanians out of their towns. Even as bombs began falling, Serbian soldiers and police forces continued laying waste to Albanian settlements, pushing tens of thousands into Albania, Macedonia and Montenegro, and leaving the fate of thousands of others unclear.
Now, Secretary General Solana said: "All our energy should be concentrated on stopping the killing and helping the refugees. We are going to continue the bombing until we can guarantee that the killings stop and will not restart. The first objective was always to stop the killing on the ground."
But Solana suggested that the allies might no longer insist that Milosevic sign the Rambouillet agreement before the bombing stopped. From Washington, Reuters reported that a White House official also said, "We wouldn't wait for a signature to stop the bombing necessarily."
Some NATO diplomats here suggest that so much has happened in Kosovo since the Albanian negotiators signed the accord March 18 that it may no apply anyway.
Far from backing off when the bombs started falling, as he did four years ago in Bosnia where he showed little evidence of sentimental attachment to the Bosnian Serb cause, President Milosevic is instead doing his best to turn the bombing to his advantage. The wholesale flight of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo has led many NATO officials to suspect that his plan is to claim much of the province in any future peace deal as Serb-only territory.
NATO officials here are on the defensive, insisting day after day that it was not their bombing that sparked the Serbian attacks or the huge civilian forced exodus from Kosovo, but a long-planned Serbian "ethnic cleansing" strategy.
"It represents a master plan that was conceived and well on its way to being executed before the first NATO bomb was on its way to a military target," the alliance's spokesman, Jamie P. Shea, said today, comparing the Serbian campaign to Stalin's Great Terror purge in the 1930's.
Yet if the alliance's plan was to prevent that strategy and bring Milosevic to his knees through bombing, it was based on a misjudgment of his determination.
He caved in Bosnia but, as Richard C. Holbrooke, the special American envoy to the Balkams, made clear in his memoir on that war, Milosevic appeared to have nothing but contempt for Bosnian Serb leaders. Most important, he did not feel much emotional attachment to the lands they were fighting for.
He clearly does feel emotionally attached to Kosovo, where he celebrated the 600th anniversary of a Serb defeat at the hands of Turkish invaders in 1389 with a ringing appeal to Serbian nationalism. As president of Serbia then, he also ended the province's autonomy.
Asked how long the impasse might continue, Solana said he was sure the bombing would be over before April 23, the planned start of a summit meeting in Washington to celebrate NATO's 50th anniversary.
Still, he added, "This is not a problem that was created in 24 hours, and it will not be solved in 24 hours."
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