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Pastimes : Kosovo -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: robnhood who wrote (5345)	4/24/1999 8:55:00 PM
From: George Papadopoulos	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 17770

Yaacov, here is something I found after spending my whole day reading Superman and the ad inserts of the New York Times;) intellectualcapital.com How to Destroy NATO by Melvin Goodman Thursday, April 22, 1999 NATO's 50th-anniversary summit begins tomorrow in Washington; it is the largest meeting of heads of state and government ever held in the nation's capital. The confused and confusing policies of the Clinton administration, however, should assure that the events resemble an inquest more than a celebration. Every aspect of the NATO alliance, including membership, strategic concepts and war fighting, will come under the microscope. Underestimating Milosevic The current war in Kosovo will prevent any real celebration for NATO. Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright and Secretary of Defense William Cohen overruled the Joint Chiefs of Staff and naively believed NATO could repeat in Kosovo what was accomplished in Bosnia three years ago. In Bosnia, however, NATO's air attacks were accompanied by pressure from Croatian and Bosnian ground forces. In Kosovo, there are no ground forces to exploit the judicious, if not timid, air operations. A majority of NATO members already believe that, in the future, NATO must seek the approval of the U.N. Security Council before taking military operations beyond its zone of membership. Albright and Cohen underestimated the will of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and advised the president that the Serbs would cave in with the mere threat of force. The initial NATO attacks on remote air-defense targets in northern Serbia were irrelevant to Milosevic's goals in Kosovo. NATO's highly scripted, risk-averse air attacks against Serbia have had no impact on Milosevic's ruthless killing squads in Kosovo. NATO members now differ over their capabilities against ethnic instability throughout Europe's southeastern rim, and they overwhelmingly oppose Albright's "strategic concept" for preserving stability in and beyond the European continent. Even before the anniversary celebrations, Albright's radical views on a new strategic concept to expand NATO's mission from territorial self-defense to crisis management in non-contiguous areas assured an acrimonious weekend in Washington. Albright sees the Balkans as the gateway to resolving confrontations in the Middle East, the Persian Gulf and even the Transcaucasus. But if peacemaking becomes the new core function of NATO in the "wider European continent and beyond," in Albright's words, then the United States will have to pick up the tab for every flash-point situation in Eurasia. The Europeans reluctantly agreed to Albright's efforts to expand NATO's membership; they will never agree to her efforts to expand its mission. The flaws of NATO expansion The war in Kosovo has exposed the flaws of NATO expansion. The three new members -- Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic -- have little enthusiasm for the military operation and have provided only minimal support. The ill-conceived campaign of expansion has turned a successful military alliance into an ungainly political-military consortium with no clear enemy and no clear mission. Expansion also has expanded NATO's geographical commitments while diminishing its military capabilities. The expansion of NATO, moreover, threatens the most important elements of the post-Cold War security order in Europe. These include the end of the division between East and West; the moderation of Russian national security policy; and the reduction and limitation of strategic and conventional weapons in Europe. NATO expansion has even blocked the most important U.S. security objective in Europe -- the formation of a long-term strategic relationship with Russia. Ironically, Russia offers one of the few chances for ending the crisis without a wider war, but the Clinton administration has only belatedly begun to play the Russian card. The president and his secretary of state have one additional card to play in order to interest both Russia and the European members of NATO in a new security architecture for the post-Cold War era. Until now, the Clinton administration has had a knee-jerk negative reaction to Canadian and European interest in a "no first-use" policy for nuclear weapons. But such a policy, as well as U.S. withdrawal of its nuclear bombs from Europe, would give some credibility to U.S. interest in counter-proliferation within NATO. The unwise U.S. sanctioning of a CIA presence in U.N. inspection efforts in Iraq, which has ended inspection efforts there and compromised international monitoring elsewhere, has undermined U.S. efforts to attract a greater European role in counter-proliferation generally. Celebrating a big blunder NATO would like to use its birthday party to celebrate its role in ending the Cold War, but now its credibility as an alliance is tied to its ability to deal with the powder keg in the Balkans. The U.S. campaign to expand NATO has undermined the cohesion of the alliance and complicated NATO's ability to deal with Russia in the Balkans. The use of NATO's conventional military power has strained the strategic arms-control dialogue with Russia and has persuaded Moscow to rely more heavily on its relatively inexpensive nuclear arsenal. The war in Serbia has turned an anniversary celebration into a council of war and has exposed the expansion of NATO as the worst mistake in U.S. policy toward Europe since World War II. Melvin A. Goodman is senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and co-author of The Wars of Eduard Shevardnadze. He is a regular commentator for IntellectualCapital.com.