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

To: Neocon who wrote (9758)	5/25/1999 3:50:00 AM
From: JBL	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 17770

Futile Bombing By William Raspberry Monday, May 24, 1999; Page A25 "Exactly what will we negotiate?" my friend wonders. He was responding to a recent column on Kosovo, in which I suggested negotiation makes more sense than the continued aerial bombing as a way of putting an end to the debacle. "Seems to me," says Dennis Cuddy, "that given what the refugees have been saying, we will have to ethnically cleanse the Serbs from part of Kosovo before they will feel safe to go back. So we end up doing what we bombed [Yugoslav President Slobodan] Milosevic for. More gently, presumably." Cuddy's wry comment underscores yet another crack in a growing chain of cracks in the framework of the American and NATO policy in Serbia. British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook and U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright have been busy over the past few days papering over some of the more embarrassing cracks. For instance, they insist the reported divisions among NATO members are nonexistent -- no matter that Americans are scrambling to back away from their initial no-ground-troops policy while the Germans, among others, are increasingly adamant against the use of ground troops. "We are well-coordinated," a paperhanging Albright said Friday on ABC's "Good Morning America." "We are very supportive, all of us, of an intensified bombing campaign in which we will prevail." Not to be outdone, Cook smells victory just around the corner. At least that's how his particular wallpaper pattern would have it. Milosevic is "depressed" and "taken aback" that the allies have managed to hold together for more than two months, he told reporters at the British ambassador's residence here, on the same day. "I don't see any signs that the Yugoslav army, at the present rate of attrition, is going to hold out until August, September," he said. Attrition? He makes it sound as though the Serbian soldiers are taking such heavy losses that they can't possibly hang in there much longer. They're already deserting in droves -- and taking their trucks with them, we are being told. Maybe it's all true, but the impression one gets here is that our people can't find the soldiers -- at least not the ones who have pretty much finished up the ethnic cleansing the NATO bombing was supposed to halt. We've taken to bombing anything that can remotely be called a military target (as well as the occasional "collateral" embassy). And when we do find the right soldiers, it turns out, tragically, that they are in close proximity to the people we're supposed to be rescuing. We can accuse Milosevic of using these innocents as "shields," but it doesn't change the fact that the bombing makes less and less sense. Cook and Albright could, of course, be right. Maybe Milosevic will fold, and fairly soon. But two other possibilities seem at least as likely. First, the fact that we're running out of targets we dare hit could mean that Milosevic has less reason than ever to fold. Does anyone think he'll wave the white flag to prevent the third bombing of an ammo dump, or keep us from blasting a tertiary bridge over some insignificant stream? And then there is this gruesome possibility: He will decide to give up on Kosovo but first seed the countryside with land mines. He might not be able to occupy the territory, but neither will the returning ethnic Albanian Kosovars. It wouldn't even be a Pyrrhic victory; the ethnic cleansing will have succeeded brilliantly. How many more reasons do we need to try to push this thing in the direction of negotiation? But, as Cuddy insists, what precisely do we negotiate? Actually, the circles of NATO and Yugoslav interests do have some overlap. I doubt that we can bomb Milosevic into submission -- haven't we already proved that he is willing to sacrifice his country if it means his personal survival in power? -- but surely he would prefer that the bombing stop. We, of course, would like to stop it. That's one area of common interest. We say we're concerned about the safety of the ethnic Albanians when they return to Kosovo. Might not Milosevic be concerned about the safety of the Kosovar Serbs when the ethnic Albanians return? He'd still resist the idea of NATO peacekeepers -- it would seem to him an occupying army -- in Kosovo. But what about U.N. forces with a Russian contingent? Surely there's more. It's not negotiation that has become futile. It's the bombing.