Razorbak, (OT) Time Magazine Analysis- Any idea of the cost to the US of this thing?
The President weighs his choices as Slobodan
Milosevic betrays little sign of desperation amid
NATO's growing assault
By Michael Duffy and Douglas Waller
April 12, 1999
Web posted at: 12:09 p.m. EDT (1609 GMT)
Bill Clinton has the visage of a wartime President. He
looks tired, friends say, because the war's first week
kept him up virtually around the clock. Days were
spent selling the war to aides and Congress, and nights
were filled with chats with leaders around the world.
As a bid to encourage NATO unity, Clinton told his
closest counterparts, Gerhard Schroder of Germany
and Tony Blair of Britain, to call him whenever the urge
struck. They took him up on the offer. "He doesn't care about time zones,"
explains a friend. "He tells these guys, 'Call me anytime, day or night.'" Those
conversations, which were frequent and interminable, abated last week, but
the strain the war has taken on Clinton isn't hard to see. During Thursday night's state dinner for Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji, Clinton dueled with drowsiness, rubbing his eyes as cellist Yo-Yo Ma played a spirited Gershwin tune.
Clinton is settling into the fight in other ways. In the first few days of the air
war against Serbia, he telephoned the Pentagon every evening to make sure
all the American pilots had returned safely from their bombing runs. Two
weeks later, Clinton no longer calls; the generals, he knows, will ring him if
anyone gets shot down.
And last week Clinton executed the most important order of the war since
its beginning on March 24: he granted a request from NATO Commander
General Wesley Clark for 24 Apache helicopters and 18 long-range missile
launchers. Those weapons might not sound pivotal in a war in which three
different kinds of American heavy bombers have already seen action, until
you consider the nearly 3,000 fully armed support G.I.s who follow those
weapons everywhere they go. Even as Clinton, his aides and his allies
insisted that they were not contemplating a ground war, the President was in
the process of moving soldiers onto Balkan soil.
Before giving a green light to the chopper mission, the President passed the
war's first week by studying Pentagon target plans, testing allied support for
such a move and asking top advisers for their opinions. One weekend
morning, while Clinton worked the phones with leaders overseas, National
Security Adviser Sandy Berger, Secretary of Defense William Cohen and
Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Henry Shelton shuttled for an hour
between the Oval Office and the patio outside, alternately answering
Clinton's questions and enjoying an incandescent spring day. Finally the
aides left the President alone to decide whether to deploy the Army's air
cavalry. A few minutes later, Clinton summoned Cohen and Shelton back in.
"I want to go with the Apaches," he said.
If all goes according to plan--and few things in war ever do--those choppers
will begin arriving this weekend in Albania. More helicopters and their
accompanying troops, tanks and armored infantry carriers may follow,
though the Army is still sorting out details of the deployment. Meanwhile, the
allies' air war continues to accelerate. With clearing weather over the strike
zone last week, NATO doubled the number of daily bombing runs,
demolished several key targets and rolled over a Serbian-proposed
Orthodox Easter cease-fire. Just a few weeks after Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright predicted a "relatively short" campaign, Clinton and his
allies are settling in for a long siege, giving war a chance to work and praying
that Slobodan Milosevic may be more inclined to abandon Kosovo after
weeks of bombardment.
The allies have little choice. Short of an all-out ground assault, which no one
seems to want, or withdrawal, which no one can bear, the Administration
contends that the only option is to increase the pressure. Which means that
less than a month after it began, the Balkan mess is quickly becoming a test
not only of military skills but of wills: Which side, Serbia or NATO, will first
lose its stomach for war?
In that game, Milosevic has been NATO's best ally. By displacing and
deporting more than a million Kosovars, he has generated worldwide
sympathy for the refugees and turned an American public that was skeptical
about the operation into wary believers. Pictures of thousands of refugees
loaded into boxcars and stories of parents separated from their children
helped NATO argue that the war is just and the enemy evil. Realizing his
blunder, Milosevic last week closed the Kosovo border to refugees and
drove any ethnic Albanians still trying to flee back into the province. (He
then reopened the border last Friday night to force out an additional 1,500
rain-soaked Albanians.) "Milosevic played into our hands by doing
disgusting things and then having them filmed," says a top NATO diplomat.
"He's waking up to the fact that he's been stupid."
But he has also outmaneuvered the alliance so far. In just 10 days he has
taken total control of the breakaway province, pushed more than 500,000
ethnic Albanians from Kosovo and created a huge humanitarian problem for
his enemies. He believes he can outlast NATO, letting time open rifts
between hawkish nations like the U.S. and Britain and such skittish ones as
Italy. Already he has scored a small--though probably
unanticipated--victory, by dividing leaders of the U.S. military and
diplomatic corps into bickering, rear-covering camps. cia officials have been
leaking word that they had warned the White House of the refugee problem.
Pentagon officials accused NATO war planners of being too timid.
Secretary of State Albright's detractors singled her out for underestimating
Milosevic. Albright publicly denied the charge, but privately she seethed
over the damage to her carefully cultivated image. Clinton called her with
reassurances last week after an acidic piece appeared in the Washington
Post. "I read the newspaper for facts," he told her, "and I didn't see any in
that story."
But the second-guessing at home may have emboldened Clinton to increase
the war's pace, as foreign-policy owls in both parties argued, in effect, "We
shouldn't be doing this, but if we are, let's win it." Allied forces last week
boosted their bombing from about 200 to 400 sorties a day, added daytime
attacks to nighttime ones and started to isolate Serbian forces inside
Kosovo. And Clark, looking for more firepower, has sent a long wish list to
the Pentagon. After a quick trip to Brussels last week, Secretary Cohen
weighed in with orders to give the general whatever he wants. The Pentagon
deployed 88 more aircraft to the region over the weekend, bringing the total
of aircraft there to 700.
Pentagon officials kept up the steady roll of videotapes showing imploding
bunkers and damaged industrial sites, and after a 90-minute closed-door
briefing Thursday afternoon, Senator John Warner, the Virginia Republican
who chairs the Armed Services Committee, came away optimistic. "The
degradation of his military is appreciable," he announced. That was not
enough for some of Warner's colleagues. On Friday a bipartisan group of
nine Senators and House members returned from a tour of NATO facilities
with Defense Secretary Cohen and called on Clinton to begin to prepare
allied forces for a land war and the nation for the casualties that will go with
one. "It is important for the Administration to reinforce the point to the
American public that NATO's efforts could require many more weeks or
months to succeed," their letter to Clinton stated.
As the war's pace has increased, so have civilian casualties. Pentagon
officials conceded that at least one 500-lb. bomb, apparently from a U.S.
warplane, fell some 600 ft. short of its target and hit an apartment complex
near Pristina, killing 10 civilians. Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon called
it an unfortunate but unavoidable cost of war.
No allied pilots perished in the war's first two weeks--a streak of luck that
cannot last forever. The Apaches are fearsome tank killers at night, but their
mission and their sensitive, high-tech gear also make them vulnerable to
ground fire. Skimming low over the trees at little more than 150 m.p.h. with
lights out, their pilots wearing night-vision goggles, the choppers have radar
that can spot armored columns three miles away, and they can unleash 16
Hellfire missiles, plus scores of 70-mm rockets. The helicopters will be
guided in to their targets by an armada of spy drones and surveillance
aircraft. "It will give us," boasts Bacon, "the capability to get up close and
personal to the Milosevic armor units." But it will also give the Serbs a
chance to get dangerously personal as well. The slow-moving Apaches will
show up like lighted Christmas trees on Serb radar.
The Pentagon knows too that the Apaches and rocket launchers won't be
able to deter the irregular gangs of Serb thugs from terrorizing Albanian
Kosovars any more than the supersonic aircraft have. "These are small-unit
operations that are pure brutal tactics at the point of a gun or at the tip of a
knife," concedes Army Colonel Joseph Kaufmann, director of the
Pentagon's Balkan task force. "Consequently they're able to disperse well."
But if the strategy for war is relatively clear, the plan for halting it isn't.
NATO's corridors, so recently filled with debates about whether to go into
Kosovo, now echo with talk about how to get out. "Nobody has a clear
crystal ball on this," admits an alliance official. The cautious compromise of
Rambouillet seems a naive pipe dream in a land where compromise has been
banished. Most Kosovar Albanians--to say nothing of the Kosovo
Liberation Army--would never accept Belgrade rule. The White House has
yet to endorse independence for Kosovo, but once Albanian Kosovars are
returned, vows a senior aide, "they're going to run the place, and that's a
fact."
What form that self-rule would take is still undecided. One problem is that
parts of Kosovo--particularly in the north and west--contain the Serbian
Orthodox Church's holiest shrines. Giving Milosevic access to the region in a
postwar world would reward Serb aggression. But not letting the Serbs in
might be worse, making lasting peace impossible.
The solution to that problem may be partition. Under one scenario, only a
small parcel--perhaps no more than 10% of the province--would be
partitioned off for Serb holy shrines and the tiny Serb population that
remains. Russian troops, whom NATO wants to join the peacekeeping
contingent, would supervise this area, while the alliance's soldiers watch over
the rest of the province--probably for years.
Simple as it may seem to carve Kosovo up, doing so could tilt the balance of
power in the Balkans. A British diplomat was worried last week that a
"rump Albanian Kosovo" would be just the kind of undernourished state that
would unify Albanians in countries such as Macedonia, Greece and
Montenegro. That could trigger a push for a Greater Albanian state that
would include parts of several nations--a one-way ticket to chaos.
One need look no further than the border refugee camps to see how fragile
the Balkans remain. While conditions improved for more than half a million
ethnic Albanians who had managed to flee Kosovo since the air war began,
the states to which they fled were convulsed. Inside Macedonia and
Montenegro, officials struggled to hold together governments stunned by the
economic and social costs of the influx. Meanwhile, relief organizations
scrambled to build tent cities, and NATO diverted transport planes from the
war effort to rush in food, which the refugees were consuming at the rate of
about 250 tons a day. About 120,000 people were to be convoyed or
flown out of the Balkans for temporary resettlement around the world; the
U.S. first agreed to house 20,000 refugees at the American naval base at
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, but then backed off when refugee organizations
complained that the facility was too far away.
Milosevic, meanwhile, is still maneuvering to settle the crisis on his terms. His
unilateral cease-fire offer last week was followed by hints that the three U.S.
Army pows he had would be freed if NATO agreed to an Easter bombing
halt. NATO ruled out any suspension, and former Cypriot President Spyros
Kyprianou, who flew to Belgrade to win the G.I.s' release, came home
empty handed. In a classic example of wartime double-talk, Yugoslav
government officials declared that "peace has been restored in Kosovo."
Milosevic claimed to be "negotiating" for the Kosovars' safe return to their
homes with ethnic Albanian leader Ibrahim Rugova--a man who State
Department officials believe is under house arrest.
Clinton dismissed Milosevic's offers as hollow and vowed that NATO "was
determined to stay united." Albright was to fly to NATO headquarters in
Brussels on Sunday to give 18 other foreign ministers a stay-the-course pep
talk. That shouldn't be hard: public support for the operation is high in
European capitals, and most of their leaders have been burned at one time
or another by promises Milosevic has made and later broken.
At least one of the region's leaders--Montenegrin President Milo
Djukanovic--is still hoping for a quick resolution. "I believe the war is
coming to an end," he told TIME. "It was good that there was some peace
initiative launched from Belgrade. It was insufficient, but encouraging."
Milosevic seemed undeterred by the isolation. U.S. intelligence officials and
diplomats say they've picked up no evidence that he's cracking under the
bombing or considering any serious diplomatic feelers. Serbs--even as they
are watching TV shows on how to explain bombing to their children--are
ready to canonize him as the hero who has stood up to the world's
superpower. And the White House has been careful so far not to label him
explicitly a war criminal, to the relief of some NATO officials who realize the
alliance may still have to negotiate with him. Asked last Thursday if he
thought Milosevic was a war criminal, Clinton dodged. "The important thing
to me," he said, "is to stop the killing, to stop the exodus, to see the refugees
return, to see them safe, to see a solution that gives them the autonomy they
were promised, to have an international peacekeeping force that will prevent
this from happening again."
--With reporting by Edward Barnes/Podgorica, Johanna McGeary/Skopje and Jay
Branegan, Mark Thompson and Karen Tumulty/Washington |
