This is an excellent article
NEW YORK, April 27 - In a famous piece of 1968 news footage, a young
American officer leads his troops through a burning Vietnamese village - set
alight, it is suggested, to deny the enemy the support of sympathetic
locals. The correspondent, one Peter Arnett, quotes someone further up the
U.S. chain of command explaining, "We had to destroy the village to save
it." The officer's attempt to put a rational spin on the scene became one
of the most poignant moments of the war, a map of America's road from good
intentions to the hell of Vietnam. Today, many are asking if NATO has
embarked on a similar path in Kosovo.
BY ALMOST every measure, analogies between the U.S. war in Vietnam and the
NATO intervention in Yugoslavia fall flat. Vietnam was a ground war from the
start and at its height in 1968 involved 550,000 American troops in the war
zone and a full-fledged military draft in the United States to feed the
conflict. Vietnam was a war between two rival regimes seeking to dominate
one country. Kosovo is a separatist civil war tainted by ethnic and
religious hatreds and recent memories on both sides of atrocities against
the other.
Most importantly, Kosovo is not a war being played out against a
larger, global ideological struggle - what we called the Cold War.
Comparisons between these two wars generally cast less light on the
conflicts themselves than on the naivete of the one drawing the comparison.
THE SLIPPERY SLOPE
But in at least one way, the decade-long American war in Vietnam and
the month-long war in Yugoslavia have proven similar. In each case, events
on the ground quickly showed that making war to achieve limited political
aims was a deeply flawed idea. U.S. "advisors" sent to teach Saigon's army
to resist communist insurgents in 1961 found the job impossible without
American airstrikes and ultimately a half a million U.S. troops.
Still they failed.
Warplanes sent to end Yugoslav attacks on ethnic Albanian civilians
in 1999 soon found themselves flying over columns of refugees being expunged
from the region faster than ever before. So more warplanes were dispatched,
target lists expanded and invasion scenarios dusted off. In Vietnam and now
in Kosovo, the seemingly limited goals set at the outset of the conflicts
turned into open-ended commitments to "win," even when no one could or can
define what winning might be.
HO CHI MINH AND HITLER
Leave aside for a moment the question of whether something had to be
done to bring Belgrade to heel and concentrate instead on what NATO has
chosen to do. Whenever a modern western power contemplates the use of
military force these days, two dominant and competing lessons of history
hover over the decision.
One of them relies on U.S. experience in Vietnam, the other on Europe
's "appeasement" of Hitler in the 1930s. NATO appears to have heeded
neither, and the results so far have not been good.
A Yugoslav soldier "saving" a Kosovo village for Serbia, in the Drenica
region last month.
The first of these lessons is rooted in Vietnam, a failure which
threw many of America's institutions into crisis, including the military.
Many of the current generation of generals were the same young officers sent
by their country in the mid- and late-1960s to "pacify" Vietnam's rural
villages. In the years after Vietnam, these officers developed a doctrinal
aversion to what is referred to as "limited war" by armchair strategists
(like me, for instance.)
Retired Gen. Colin Powell turned that wound into a cure and gave it
his name: the "Powell doctrine," a strategy that called for the application
of overwhelming force anytime the nation's military was committed to battle.
Never again, he counseled, should the military be put at risk for the sake
of limited political goals. Fight to win or don't fight at all.
The Gulf war, Powell argued in his biography, proved the point. The
former general has not said as much publicly, but he may well suspect the
Kosovo intervention is proving it again, this time to America's detriment.
THE LITTLE CORPORAL
Still, many reject Powell's insistence that the U.S. military is an
all-or-nothing proposition. Among them is the man who now runs NATO, U.S.
Gen. Wesley Clark. He and many others point to the failure of Britain and
France to confront the upstart Hitler in the 1930s when he began swallowing
up neighboring regions in the name of "lebensraum" - living space for the
German people.
This faction includes many former anti-war protestors of the 1968
generation, ironically including three who now lead three of NATO's four
most powerful countries, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and Gerhard Schroeder.
While Clinton has resisted the mistake George Bush made in 1990 -
equating, and thus flattering, his relatively insignificant enemy by
comparing him to Hitler - the current baby-boomer-in-chief has embraced the
logic of the comparison. Explaining why NATO is fighting over Kosovo,
Clinton has repeatedly pointed out that World War I started in the Balkans.
THE WORST OF ALL WORLDS
In both Vietnam and now in Kosovo, the seemingly limited goals set at the
outset of the conflicts turned into open ended commitments to "win," even
when no one could or can define what "winning" means.
Of course, the president didn't mention that World War I began in
Sarajevo, not Kosovo. That would beg the question of why Clinton stood by
until late 1995 as Bosnian Serb artillery pounded Sarajevo, yet chose to go
to war over Kosovo.
That may seem like hair-splitting. Yet it gets right to the crux of
the problem facing NATO today.
Faced with two readings of history on which to base their actions -
the Vietnam-driven Powell doctrine and the apocalyptic analogy with 1930s
Europe - NATO rejected both. NATO limited its war to the air, choosing to
sacrifice real military effectiveness for the sake of limiting casualties
and domestic political backlash.
Yet NATO can hardly argue that it chose to confront the dictator
early. After all, Milosevic ordered his troops into action in Slovenia and
Croatia in 1991, followed up with Bosnia in 1992 and only got around to
ravaging Kosovo in March 1998.
Where NATO goes from here is difficult to say. Its early predictions
of a quick war that brings Milosevic to his knees were clearly wrong. Under
the cover of NATO air raids, in fact, Milosevic has created a reality on the
ground in Kosovo that will be impossible to negotiate away. Ultimately, NATO
is likely to prevail militarily. But at what price? And how will Kosovo's
Albanians now be returned to their homeland? NATO may well find that in
order to save Kosovo, it really was necessary to destroy it.
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