Mid-1998 was not a good time to push ahead too aggressively in the Balkans. As the Lewinsky scandal unfolded and impeachment became a real possibility, both Berger and the president were tiptoeing through a potential minefield. The last thing they wanted was military intervention in Kosovo. A recalcitrant Congress had been resistant to sending even a limited number of American soldiers to Bosnia and had never really liked using them as peacekeepers because, despite the promises, it could become an open-ended commitment. The Congress would certainly not be enthusiastic about bombing threats against Belgrade for fear of what the next military step might be. The Pentagon, as always, resisted military intervention, and the Europeans were once again sounding cautious about any additional use of force. Moreover, the Clinton administration was facing an off-year election in the fall, with every reason to believe the central issue would be the president’s personal behavior, and the outcome would help the Republicans. The last thing a besieged presidency needed was to fight politically (and militarily) on another front.
The equation facing Milosevic was familiar and once again quite tempting. The Western powers, which had come together briefly three years earlier on Bosnia, were again divided as he moved on Kosovo. The leadership in the United States was obviously distracted, and eventually, as talks with the West progressed over Kosovo, the Americans appeared to be anxious for some kind of paper accord, willing to go for agreements that gave the appearance of a settlement. Ever aggressive, Milosevic pushed forward, but what was bluff and what was real was hard to tell. To those who had watched him in the past, he was playing an old, familiar game: two steps forward and one step back in order to have his way in Kosovo. Or as Javier Solana, the head of NATO, described it, talking about the limited assault the Serbs were conducting in Kosovo, never pushing so hard that the West would respond—“a village a day keeps NATO away.”1
But Milosevic himself was at least a partial victim of the dynamic he had created. Kosovo stirred so many emotions in all Serbs and was so basic to his political power that if the bluff did not work and NATO did strike back, he could not easily let go as he had in Bosnia. He might have to fight and let his nation and his people take a pounding for a time—just how long, he would have to figure out—before he conceded anything to the West. Then, instead of betraying the Serb cause, which was sure political death, he would be seen as a descendant of Tsar Lazar, six hundred years before him, who had died rather than surrender, though unlike Lazar, he would surely live to become a hero while his people died and bore the brunt of the suffering.
If Washington was not yet ready to act, people in the administration were taking up their positions. Albright was a hawk. Cohen and the Chiefs were dovish. Clinton and Berger were in the middle, pulled toward choices they did not want to make, hoping to slow down the clock in the Balkans and buy time. To use force in the Balkans, they had to bring in the Europeans as well, and to do that, we had to make more of an attempt to find a settlement with Milosevic. Even if the kind of settlement the Europeans wanted was impossible, we still had to go through the motions of trying to find it in order to prove our good intentions before they would come aboard. But one other important hawk was already aboard, not in Washington, but a major player nonetheless: General Wes Clark. His views by 1998 were close to those of Albright. He believed that Kosovo was a replay of Bosnia, that Milosevic was the primary instigator, that he would negotiate only as a ploy, and that until he was stopped, nothing could be settled. Like Albright he also believed only force would work. When the West negotiated, it used words and thus played into his hands, because words and promises were meaningless to him.
By early 1998, Clark was absolutely sure they were going to have to use force, and the greater the military might they could flash at Milosevic, the more likely they were to get what would be considered a successful settlement. But within the military establishment, Clark’s appointment as supreme commander in Europe was controversial, both underlining and aggravating the tensions between the civilians and the military that had existed from the moment the Clinton administration took office. If everyone had eventually come aboard for the policies that had brought the Serbs to Dayton, then the profound differences that divided the Pentagon and the White House over the foreign policy of the United States and the role of the American military in peacekeeping operations were still largely unreconciled. Even Dayton had remained something of a bone in the throat for both sides. The question of how aggressive the military was going to be in pursuing those Serbs who were trying to undermine the Dayton Accords was not easily resolved at first. In the most difficult command of all, Clark would find himself constantly caught between these opposing factions.
The Clinton people had thought of Colin Powell as a hostile and unsympathetic force; they had tried to get along with him at the time, but in retrospect, after he left office, they tended to see him not just as a general who had disagreed with their foreign policy, but as a political opponent, a partially closeted Republican of considerable influence. He, in turn, tended to think of them as neophytes whose rhetoric was greater than their willingness to back it up, the lineal descendants of the architects of the Vietnam War. If the administration had found a sympathetic figure in the military, someone whose beliefs at least to some degree paralleled those of the top civilians, it was John Shalikashvili, who had become chairman of the Joint Chiefs after Powell retired in 1993, and whose tour had ended in 1997. Shalikashvili was viewed by the Clinton people as being far more helpful; yet the more helpful he was to the civilians, the greater the suspicions about him remained at the Pentagon.
What was largely unseen, not just by the public at large but by most Washington insiders, was the constant tug-of-war that went on between the administration and the senior military over the top posts. This political game was of great consequence, but no one spoke openly about what was going on, and it was just barely covered by the media. It reflected not merely the divisions in the government, but divisions in the Congress and in the country as well—differences that had a profound effect on the foreign policy of the United States. Among certain circles in the Pentagon, there was a strong belief that the Clinton people had made a practice of shying away from aggressive officers who were classic combat leaders in favor of men who were more amenable. Thus some senior military people admired Shalikashvili but worried that in some way he had allowed himself to become too close to the Clinton people.
In fact, Shalikashvili had worked with great ease with the Clinton people—much of what they wanted was what he wanted. In certain areas—the strengthening and unification of Europe, the expansion of NATO—he as a man of Europe was far more internationalist in his orientation than some of the Clinton people, and was probably a good deal ahead of them in their thinking. But Shalikashvili’s beliefs had in general coincided with those of the administration. During his tour as chairman, he had made some progress in trying to bridge the gap between the military and the White House. But that did not mean that resistance to much of what he believed had ended within the very conservative culture of the military, especially his own service, the army. There, he was regarded with some skepticism. To some hard-liners in the Pentagon, Shalikashvili had been chosen by the White House because, as an immigrant and a new citizen, he might be a little too grateful to the civilian officeholders, and a little bit too much in awe of the president of the United States—in effect, an easy mark for the shrewd and manipulative Clinton, as he was viewed in the Pentagon. Not everyone who watched Shalikashvili at work during his four-year term agreed. To them it was not that the White House had gotten Shali, but that Shalikashvili, with stronger beliefs on many issues than the Clinton people, had gotten the White House.
Some thought that Shalikashvili, in tandem with Bill Perry, had a clearer vision of the future of European security than the administration itself, and certainly a stronger view than most people in the State Department. Together Shalikashvili and Perry had been a more formidable force than State in pushing for one of the central decisions of the Clinton administration, the expansion of NATO into formerly communist countries, including Poland, which bordered on Russia, without appearing to threaten the Russians. Here insiders credited Shalikashvili with considerable influence. He far more than most senior military men (and more than most senior State Department people) believed in a unified Europe. This Europe would include most of the old Warsaw Pact nations, where brand-new military ties with the traditional Western democracies might create not just a larger military alliance, but might even enhance democratic forces within each country with the military serving as an important democratic spine. The broader impact of NATO might take the military, sometimes in the past an antidemocratic force in this part of the world, and make it a pro-democratic force, as these nations struggled through their embryonic experience with democracy. Shalikashvili had also pushed for an additional program, the Partnership for Peace with the Russians, not merely to engage them in joint maneuvers and create healthier relationships, but also to reduce their traditional paranoia about the West (much of it historically well justified). That was especially important if NATO was to be expanded to the Polish-Russian border. Little noted by a national media that did not take things like this seriously, the NATO expansion would stand as one of the more notable achievements of the Clinton administration, one that took place with remarkably little domestic debate.
Shalikashvili had never come up with a Shali Doctrine to replace the Powell Doctrine. But it gradually appeared that he was trying to change—or at least make adjustments to—the core philosophy of the army, particularly in something relatively new, the complicated peacekeeping missions potentially created by the collapse of the old order. What he would later say (quite discreetly) was that he had largely agreed with the Powell Doctrine, which was that you did not undertake military missions unless they were completely outlined, the force levels were agreed upon, and the exit strategy was clear. Indeed he would recall a moment when the Balkans were heating up and Powell as chairman had asked to send a number of American troops to the Macedonian border to make sure that the fighting did not expand there. Shalikashvili had called Powell, slightly surprised by his request, and said, “Colin, you want to put some of our troops in Macedonia?” Powell said yes, and it had been done quietly and under UN command, though the troops were never engaged in fighting. What Shalikashvili wanted to change, he said, was the Weinberger Doctrine, created by Caspar Weinberger, who was something of a godfather to Powell during his rise in government and had said that military intervention should be used only if the vital interests of the United States were at stake. It was the word vital that Shalikashvili was taking issue with.
What Shalikashvili had wanted was more flexibility in the use of the army’s forces. The military has acronyms for everything, and the acronym here was perfect, OOTW, or Operations Other Than War. He was well aware that now the Cold War was over, military missions were bound to change. In those days Shalikashvili would go around saying that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs did not have the right to put a notice on his door saying, “I’m sorry—we only do the big ones,” and signed “John Shalikashvili.” He did not, however, by any means represent the majority opinion within the army or the military; his views were still rather unconventional, and the resistance within the culture he was taking on ran deep and strong. He was opposed by men innately uncomfortable with change, uneasy about the direction of policies that took them into uncharted waters, and deeply suspicious of the incumbent politicians, in whom they had little confidence. Shalikashvili had been ahead of most of the chiefs in pushing for American troops to go into Bosnia as part of the Dayton peacekeeping mission, and he had used considerable leverage to bring the force to an adequate level, adjudicating among the CINC, or commander in chief, on the ground, General George Joulwan, and the army chief of staff, back in Washington, General Dennis Reimer. Joulwan wanted around thirty thousand men at first, and Reimer, with a great deal more on his plate and limited enthusiasm for the mission, some friends thought, suggested a reinforced brigade of some five thousand men. What Shalikashvili wanted was about a division, or roughly twenty thousand men, and he told that to Joulwan, though as a sweetener he gave him extra intelligence capabilities so Joulwan could monitor not just the tensions between the various military forces they were separating, but also the reduction of heavy weaponry and some of the civilian mischief that might go on. The army had been something of a hard sell, because it was the branch of service that would have to do the heavy lifting and put the most men on the ground. It was already struggling to keep its budget from being cut and here it was taking on additional responsibilities.
If Shalikashvili was going to change the army, he had not only to change the vision and the training, but also the top personnel. In his search for officers who had a comparable view of what the army’s missions might become, Shalikashvili had at a crucial moment reached out and helped get a fourth star for a dazzlingly bright young officer named Wes Clark, even in the face of formidable opposition within the army. Clark had been Shali’s J-5, or chief of plans on the joint staff, and he had performed exceptionally well, his analytical abilities of the highest order. Clark was a classic quick study, and his talent for cutting through immensely complicated issues swiftly and thoroughly had long ago set him apart from most of his peers. No one doubted his brightness, the sense that he was the most modern of officers. General Edward (Shy) Meyer, army chief of staff from 1978 to 1983, remembered how smart and alert Clark had been as a division commander at Fort Hood. Clark had been the first officer at that level to talk not just about traditional unit readiness—clean barracks, shined boots, low absenteeism—but to discuss some of the new problems of modern military life—teenage suicide and spousal abuse. Meyer decided that Clark had understood sooner than most that the new professional army, where fewer and fewer soldiers actually lived on base (and where pay scales now had to compete with those of the civilian economy), had to deal with infinitely more complex concerns that reflected the full range of the contemporary domestic social malaise.
Shalikashvili had known Clark since he was a lieutenant colonel, thought him very bright, perhaps a little too brash, but possessing the kind of talent that the army badly needed at that level. In June 1996, Shalikashvili wanted Clark to take the SouthCom job, based in Florida, which would make him a CINC and a four-star. SouthCom, or Southern Command, essentially Latin America and eventually Latin America plus the Caribbean, was viewed by a number of senior military people as the ideal testing ground for an officer ascending to the highest level because he had to deal with all the problems that were endemic to the underdeveloped world—poverty, drugs, and uncommonly fragile civic institutions. It was, as Shy Meyer once said, where you always sent a hot guy because he could learn the most, and where a talented officer who was too rigid in his vision would not be able to handle the wide range of difficulties he would encounter. Shalikashvili agreed and thought SouthCom would be the perfect testing ground for Clark.
Not many people at the upper level of the army favored the idea. Clark had always evoked strong feelings within his own branch of the service among those who felt he represented its best qualities, those who felt he represented some of its lesser qualities, and, on occasion, those who thought he represented both. When it is time to name a CINC, the traditional procedure is for the army, through the chief of staff, to suggest its candidates for the slot, and for the chairman to make the choice, then hand the selection on to the secretary of defense and the White House. But the army did not have Clark on its list. So when Shalikashvili nominated him for the SouthCom post, Dennis Reimer, the chief of staff, was most unhappy and resisted. Shalikashvili reminded Reimer that the chairman still had the right to pick the CINCs, and he asked Reimer, as a personal courtesy, to sign off on the selection. Reimer did so, however reluctantly. The army’s attitude was clear: Well, he’s not really the man we want for this one, but if you really want him, you can have him. That meant the army itself would have been quite content to cut Clark loose and let him retire as a three-star, and that he got a command and a fourth star only because of one man.
A year later the job of SACEUR opened up when George Joulwan left. The Clinton administration had been less than enthusiastic about him, feeling he should have enforced the Dayton Accords more aggressively. The job was crucial, probably the best command in the army (“the prince of Europe—the most powerful man on the Continent,” one high-level officer called it). Again the army handed in its list, and again Clark’s name was missing. Again Shalikashvili told Reimer that he was going to name Clark for the command and suggested that Reimer sign off on the selection. This time, however, Reimer refused to do it, which meant that the chief of staff of the army was in out-and-out opposition to the chairman on perhaps the most important army personnel selection of his tour. With the Balkans a constant cauldron and with Kosovo as yet to be dealt with, a commander was being sent to Brussels that the army system disliked and distrusted. It was not a good omen for what was to come.
In time, because Clark was by chance both a Rhodes Scholar and from Arkansas, and in the view of many traditional army men, highly political, a belief arose that the Clinton administration was behind him. But contrary to what many people in the military thought, Shalikashvili noted years later, the White House had never pushed for Clark or asked how he was doing or tried to influence his career. Certainly, because he had worked closely with a number of civilians, most notably Holbrooke, before and during Dayton, the civilian activists were supportive of him. Equally certainly, knowing that the SACEUR job was opening up, Clark had, in the way that senior military men often did in situations like this, quietly lobbied for the job, letting some of the top civilians know he wanted it. But as for the president himself, when Clark was nominated for his two CINC posts, Clinton had merely asked Shalikashvili rather casually if Clark was the right person for the job. Nevertheless, the belief that Clark had a Clinton connection persisted—not necessarily an asset in a military culture that deep into the president’s second term remained suspicious of him and the people around him.
What the army disliked about Wes Clark, Shalikashvili believed, was an unusual amalgam of the personal and the professional. For all his obvious talents, he was too brash and cocky, too sure that his way was the right way, and therefore not a good listener and difficult to deal with. In addition, people felt that he was so driven and so absorbed in his mission—far too self-absorbed, it seemed to many of his critics—he could be quite hard on the people who worked for him. He lacked the warmth and humanity that truly great commanders need—traditionally highly desirable characteristics in a man who sends younger men and women off to battle. There was more than an element of truth in that belief, Shalikashvili thought. Clark was not the warmest of men; rather he always seemed to bristle with the singularity of military purpose—almost uncompromising if anything ever got in his way. He might be careful and attentive about the condition and the training of his men, and he might send them if needed into battle under optimum conditions, but he did not generate any paternal feelings—the old man is a hell of a guy. Nor did he gain one of the those wonderful old-fashioned nicknames that the army traditionally likes to bestow upon its commanders, signifying respect and a kind of reluctant admiration—Cold Steel, Iron Mike, the Gunfighter, Lightning Joe, Buffalo Bill, Coal Bin Willie. He was known as Wes instead of Wesley—that was accommodation enough.
But at Clark’s level that was not too critical a debit, Shalikashvili believed, because as CINC Clark would not really mesh that much with the troops, and his subordinates—the division and brigade and battalion commanders—could fill the gap in humanity. More important was the truly superior professional and intellectual ability he would bring to the job; that would be badly needed in Europe with the Balkans still an unfinished crisis and likely to blow. But within the army’s structure doubts about Clark ran deep. He was not just too brusque or too cold or too driven. He was in some way alien to the military culture. What those who liked him saw as his confidence, those who did not like him saw as overconfidence. What those who liked him saw as singular purpose, others saw as an overdose of personal ambition. Few senior officers were neutral about him, and a considerable part of the traditional senior army leadership was made uneasy by him. Was he really one of theirs? Was he too political, too likely to grandstand? Did his ambition reach too far?
Clark was named to the most important army command just as the Balkans were about to explode again. Given his personality—he was a classic type A, perhaps even type AA, singularly aggressive and driven, a man who did not believe in downtime—he was not likely to be a passive player. He had gone through his own evolution on the subject of the Balkans. When he had first started out as a player in the Balkans, pre-Dayton, he had shared the military’s general apprehension about getting involved there. In 1993, after commanding the First Cavalry Division, he had come to Washington to serve the JCS as a J-5, the officer in charge of strategic plans for political military affairs. His predecessor, Lieutenant General Barry McCaffrey, spoke to him almost immediately about the Balkans, of how difficult a venue they would be, and that it might take several hundred thousand men on the ground to end hostilities there. Clark had essentially accepted that view. Then in 1994 during one of his first trips to the Balkans, Clark had made an appalling blunder. The administration was struggling with the aggressiveness of the Bosnian Serbs when he visited the area. General Michael Rose, the senior British officer in the region, suggested that Clark meet with the Bosnian Serb leaders. Clark was not supposed to do that, but Rose apparently thought it could be done in private—which it was not. Clark unwisely met with General Ratko Mladic, the brutal Bosnian Serb commander, and, even more unwisely, exchanged hats with him. There had been a flash flood of criticism, and for a brief moment his job had hung in the balance.
Holbrooke, still unsure of Clark—he was brash, he was bright, but did he know how to listen?—had rallied to his side and helped save his job. Their relationship had not started auspiciously. They had met earlier in Washington on an intergovernmental committee on NATO expansion that Holbrooke had chaired, and it had gone badly. Clinton had already decided on NATO expansion, but at that meeting Clark, the Pentagon’s representative, had challenged Holbrooke—as if the decision had not yet been made. That quickly turned into a firefight. The decision to expand, Holbrooke said, had already been made. “Are you accusing me of insubordination?” Clark then snapped. A real hot-head, Holbrooke had decided, but things had gradually been smoothed out.
As J-5, Clark had not been impressed by the various proposals for a settlement that were on the table before him. But gradually he was pulled toward greater activism after spending time with men such as Holbrooke and Chris Hill, and, most of all, by witnessing Milosevic’s handiwork close-up. It was events on the morning of August 19, 1995, that made the war intensely personal for Clark. He was part of a convoy going from Mount Igman to Sarajevo when a tragic accident took place. The Mount Igman to Sarajevo road, which Clark and other Americans trying to work on peace proposals had to travel, was known as one of the worst in Europe, winding, unprotected, unreinforced, a nightmare in peacetime and a double nightmare at a time when the Serbs often fired at anything that moved. Holbrooke, who was leading the peace mission, had argued the day before with Milosevic, demanding that he authorize safer passage, but Milosevic had been deliberately unhelpful. The next day two vehicles started out in a convoy to Sarajevo, Holbrooke and Clark in an American humvee, and three of the top deputies on the Bosnian issue, Bob Frasure, Colonel Nelson Drew, and Joe Kruzel, in an armored personnel career. Somehow the APC went over a cliff and tumbled down the mountainside. Clark raced down the mountain to try to help, oblivious to cries from others to watch out for mines, only to find the bodies of his three friends, men much respected and admired by their peers. The American team was devastated, and Clark did not forget the senselessness of those three deaths, nor that Milosevic had lied to them and forced the trip when he could have made it much easier and safer. Clark’s feelings about Milosevic were from then on, some friends thought, sealed in blood.
There was no doubt after the accident that the person who influenced Clark the most was no longer Holbrooke, but Milosevic, in Clark’s mind a pathological liar always playing for time. At one meeting with the Serb leader just before Dayton in 1995, Holbrooke momentarily left the room and Milosevic started working on Clark, trying to impress him and perhaps hoping that he could get further with his bluster with a military man than a civilian. He boasted that if he was allowed to handle an election in Bosnia, he would be able to do it and bring the Americans the outcome they wanted. After all, he had so much control over events that he could make those Bosnian Serb puppets dance to his orders. If that was true, Clark shrewdly asked Milosevic, then what about Mladic’s unspeakable war crimes at Srebrenica? Why, if Milosevic had all that power, had he allowed Mladic to murder thousands of Muslims there? “Crimes not mine,” Milosevic answered. “Crimes those of Mladic. I warn Mladic not do this, but he not listen to me.” Clark just sat there and thought to himself, “Yes, you can completely control an election and yet you can’t stop your own general from mass murder. I don’t think I believe much of what you say anymore.”
Clark arrived in Brussels quite hawkish in the middle of 1997, and as tensions between the KLA and the Serbs escalated, he became more of an activist. To him it was a replay of events in Bosnia, and he believed that Milosevic was completely responsible for the increased turmoil. That, of course, put Clark in conflict with the senior military back at the Pentagon on two levels. First, they wanted as little military activism in the Balkans as possible, and second, they were not entirely sure that the Serbs were the sole guilty party. Many senior army officers had considerable skepticism about, and contempt for, the Albanians and the KLA, believing that they might be patriots, but they were also drug dealers and black marketeers. By early 1998, with the administration preoccupied with the Lewinsky affair, Clark become absolutely certain that Milosevic could not be stopped without the use of force.
What made Clark doubly sure was the massacre of the Jashari family. Adem Jashari was a leading KLA fighter and activist, and a previous Serb assault on his home and attempt to arrest or kill him had failed. But on March 5, 1998, the Serbs surrounded the Jashari compound and attacked the family, which was trapped in the basement, with artillery and grenades. Carnage resulted. Besarta Jashari was with her grandmother when someone threw a grenade into the basement. “Grandma was blown into the next room,” she later said. “My sister started begging for water. ‘Mama! Mama!’ she cried.”2 But her mother had already been killed. All told, the Serbs had killed fifty-eight people, including eighteen women and ten children under the age of sixteen.
After that Clark was convinced that the Serb leader felt no compunction about killing Albanians. In fact, Milosevic had once told Clark that the Serbs knew how to handle Albanian nationalists—they had done it once before. When was that? Clark asked. “In Drenica back in 1946, right after the war,” Milosevic replied. How did you do it? Clark wondered. “We kill all of them,” Milosevic said. “It took several years, but we kill them all.”3 So Clark began to advocate the use of force against the Serbs—at the least the threat of bombing—with both the top civilians and the senior people at the Pentagon. He believed that was the only way Milosevic would negotiate. Otherwise, he was always going to test the limits. The phrase Clark used was that Milosevic was “bumping the high-jump bar,” that is, he was like a high jumper trying for a new record, bumping the bar after every jump. Only the use of force by NATO, Clark believed, would stop him.