-Caveat Lector-
By Ariana Huffington:
Backfire In Kosovo
Filed March 29, 1999
``Today, war is too important to be left to politicians. They have
neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic
thought.'' These words, uttered 35 years ago in ``Dr.
Strangelove,'' apply with a vengeance to President Clinton and his
Kosovo team.
If there had been any strategic thought behind the decision to bomb
Serbia, it is hard to detect. The principal rationale put forward
by the president to justify military action -- ``to deter an even
bloodier offensive against innocent civilians in Kosovo'' -- can
already be declared an abject failure. Not only has the bombing
failed to deter Milosevic, it has led to the bloodiest offensive
yet against innocent civilians: summary executions, torched
villages, young men rounded up in concentration camps, thousands
used as human shields in munitions factories and tens of thousands
driven out of Kosovo in forced marches.
With journalists, observers of the Organization for Security and
Cooperation in Europe and representatives of humanitarian agencies
all gone, Milosevic has a license to kill and attempt to empty the
province of ethnic Albanians. The NATO offensive -- the largest air
war in Europe since 1945 -- has turned a war criminal into Serbia's
fearless protector and eliminated any internal opposition.
All these tragic outcomes had been anticipated by our intelligence
forces but ignored by the administration, which also stood the
Powell doctrine on its head. Developed by Colin Powell as a result
of his experience in Vietnam, it asserted that any military action
must be fought with a clear exit strategy and with all available
means, or not at all. It appears to have been replaced by the
Albright-Berger doctrine: Drop the bombs and cross your fingers
that they force the enemy to the bargaining table.
``This is a policy,'' NBC military analyst Dan Goure told me,
``that has failed spectacularly in Iraq, where bombing has
alternated with callous neglect. And now we are bombing Milosevic
to get him to sign the Rambouillet agreement, which was really a
set-up. Did anyone really believe the Serbians would accept the de
facto independence of Kosovo?''
Every explanation offered last week for the bombing exploded over
the weekend. ``Our mission is clear,'' the president said. ``To
demonstrate the seriousness of NATO's purpose.'' But NATO has never
looked less serious and more at odds with its purpose, which has
always been defensive in nature. As for the president's claim that
the military action was necessary ``to build an alliance with
Europe for the 21st century,'' this alliance is being severely
tested as a direct result of the bombings -- with Italy and Greece
questioning the continuation of air raids and anti-American
demonstrations throughout Europe. And with Russia siding with
Milosevic, Mikhail Gorbachev for one believes that ``we are sliding
toward a new Cold War.''
In light of all that has followed our military action, Madeleine
Albright's claim that ``our own economic prosperity and security''
are at stake in Kosovo rings both ludicrous and desperate. But the
secretary of State was only dutifully echoing the president, who
earlier in the week at a Washington fund-raiser tried to turn the
air raids into a pocketbook issue, speaking of the ``direct
personal benefits to Americans.''
During his address to the nation two days later, the president
tried altruism instead, appealing to humanitarian moral
imperatives. It was hard to see, though, why Kosovo was more of a
moral imperative than Rwanda, where 500,000 people were massacred,
or Chechnya, where 80,000 were killed, or Algeria (60,000), or
Turkey (30,000). And the president's policy of both engaging and
toasting the butchers of Beijing has not been in the slightest
affected by the humanitarian consideration of more than a million
human beings dying in Tibet from starvation, torture and execution.
So it is not surprising that even the supporters of military action
in Serbia have a hard time articulating why we are there.
``Congress and the American people,'' said Sen. John McCain
(R-Ariz.), ``have good reason to fear that we are heading toward
another permanent garrison of Americans in a Balkan country where
our mission is confused and our exit strategy is a complete
mystery.''
There is something seriously wrong when senators who know the most
about war have to hold their noses and shut their eyes before they
can vote to support the air strikes. And there is something truly
bizarre when one becomes nostalgic for Henry Kissinger. But
compared to the Clinton foreign policy team, he has been sounding
incredibly clear-headed. ``Our military actions,'' he said,
``should be confined to those in which we can explain to the
American mothers who lose sons why it was undertaken, and with
arguments that look as good at the end of the crisis as at the
beginning, a principle we did not follow in Vietnam.''
Perhaps the high anxiety that gripped the White House when an
American fighter pilot was shot down had to do with the fact that
if he had died we would not have been able to tell his mother what
he gave his life for.
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