In the spring and summer of 1998, the violence in Kosovo continued to intensify. It was now a three-handed poker game (or four-handed, if the Europeans were included). There were the Serbs, ever more aggressive. There was the KLA, increasingly bold, employing a shrewd strategy that ensured that, even when they lost a battle, they would be seen as martyrs because of the predictable violence of the Serbs and the preconditioned attitudes of the international audience. The KLA was counting on nothing less than Milosevic being Milosevic. As for the Americans, they were tilting toward limiting Serb brutality and hegemony in Kosovo, but not eager to move because of the formidable political hurdles facing the president and a natural reluctance to use force. The last thing Clinton wanted on his plate was any possibility of military intervention in the Balkans. The Europeans, unsure that they wanted to make any new military commitment in the Balkans, were waiting for American leadership. The Europeans were taking cover by talking about having a UN Security Council Resolution before they acted in Kosovo—an impossibility, as they well knew, since the Russians were bound to veto it.
The role of the KLA was to be crucial. When the Americans had tried to deal with Bosnia, their great problem was limiting the Serbs. In Kosovo they would have to stop Serb aggression as well as deal with a clever guerrilla army that delighted in triggering the most violent tendencies of the Serbs. No guerrilla organization had ever coalesced and surfaced as a major force more quickly than the KLA. By the start of 1997, it appeared mostly a figment of Albanian imaginations; by the first few months of 1998, it had, in the writer Tim Judah’s phrase, “emerged from the shadows.”1 In early 1998, the UN released figures showing that the KLA was responsible for thirty-one attacks in 1996, fifty-five in all of 1997, and sixty-six in the first two months of 1998, attacks which escalated in seriousness, the level of weaponry, and violence. It was very different from Bosnia. Whereas the Bosnians had not wanted violence and were the victims of it, the Albanians, or at least the KLA, wanted it so they would look like victims of Serb reprisals.
Bob Gelbhard, who had taken Holbrooke’s former job as America’s special envoy to the Balkans, soon managed to alienate both the Albanians and the Serbs. Some people in the Balkans and Washington pressed for Holbrooke’s return to the Balkans and the administration, but for a time Albright resisted. She and Holbrooke might in general want the same outcome in the Balkans, but their personal relationship was abysmal. Finally, with Sandy Berger (pushed by Wes Clark, who thought Holbrooke was badly needed on location) and Strobe Talbott arguing the case, Holbrooke was brought back in. He would eventually make some nine trips to Belgrade to deal with Milosevic. But his hand was weak because of the new triangular game being played on the ground, limited leverage from the White House, and wariness on the part of the Congress. Holbrooke’s real marching orders, unspoken but obvious as long as they were in an election year, were to buy time, try to get a settlement, and, if at all possible, make it look better than it was.
If Dayton had been difficult, Kosovo was even more difficult. Holbrooke found Milosevic not only manipulative as in the past, but furious at the way everyone was now aligned against him. He was angry that the Kosovars were doing to him what he had threatened to do to the West—create a Vietnam on his sovereign soil. He complained that he got little sympathy in the West, but in fact sympathy was hardly the word. He had a sense that the West was once again, however slowly, organizing itself to stop him. Holbrooke thought the KLA was every bit as tricky as Milosevic. Shuttling around the disputed territory in the late spring of 1998, he had visited an Albanian village where the KLA had deftly posed one of its guerrillas—armed with a Kalashnikov—next to him in every photo op. Holbrooke knew he had been badly used; he was learning once again that nothing was ever simple in the Balkans. Milosevic was enraged by the photo, thinking Holbrooke was helping to publicize and legitimize a terrorist group.
So Milosevic was now caught in the violent forces he had helped initiate. He had enjoyed some flexibility when it came to Bosnia; he had none in Kosovo. Nor did Western negotiators have that much flexibility to achieve what they wanted, negotiations in which they could pressure Milosevic to grant the Kosovo Albanians greater autonomy. In early 1998, the KLA was doing well, and its troops appeared better prepared for this kind of guerrilla warfare than the Serbs, who had been caught somewhat off guard. But then in July, things began to swing the other way as the Serbs brought more troops and heavier weapons to bear and extracted better intelligence. In July they succeeded in a large-scale ambush of some seven hundred Albanians, a major setback for the KLA. The Serbs now began to lash out with extra harshness, machine-gunning Kosovars, burning crops, and destroying villages. Thousands of Albanians, their departures expedited by Serb police and soldiers, began to flee their villages and move into the hills or neighboring countries. A humanitarian disaster began to loom once again. By August 1998, the UN placed the number of refugees at two hundred thousand. To Western journalists covering the Balkans, it looked all too much like a repeat of Bosnia.
In the fall of 1998, things were at something of a standstill. Wes Clark was aware that he was a greater activist than most of the other people in the military. His briefings both to senior civilians and the military became more and more pessimistic, and at the Pentagon he knew they were regarded as advocacy for war. Perhaps they were. When in late 1998 he spoke with General Dennis Reimer about how badly things were going, he suggested that Reimer ask for additional resources in preparation. “But we don’t want to fight there,” Reimer answered. Clark agreed, yet suggested that it would be wise to prepare, but felt Reimer was unmoved.2 Certainly Clark’s hatred for Milosevic was so great that he was anxious, some of the people around him thought, to find the right incident that would finalize American policy against him. Clark had studied Milosevic for three years. “I was probably unique among twentieth-century commanders in knowing my adversary so well,” he once said.3 He was sure he even knew when Milosevic was lying and when he had not thought out his lies in advance, for there would be a slight hesitation in his speech as he adjusted his words to his newest line. Clark had also learned to do a skillful imitation of Milosevic trying to con Westerners about his innocence of war crimes in Bosnia.
Clark had spent much of 1998 wanting to increase the pressure on Milosevic. In mid-October, Washington finally agreed—with the consent of the allies—to threaten him with NATO air strikes unless he backed down in Kosovo. B-52 bombers were moved from the United States to England as a way of enforcing the threat. When Holbrooke went to Belgrade in mid-October to deliver a final ultimatum, he took with him Lieutenant General Mike Short, who would be Clark’s air commander if there was a NATO air war—the better to impress Milosevic on the gravity of the occasion.
“So you’re the man who’s going to bomb me,” Milosevic said to Short. But Short quickly replied with a line that he and Holbrooke had already rehearsed: “I’ve got the B-52s in one hand and the U-2 surveillance planes in the other. It’s up to you which I’m going to use.”
Short was blunt and sure of his purpose, somewhat surprised to find himself in a quasi-diplomatic role, but hardly shy about speaking up. To prevent a NATO bombing, the West was demanding photo reconnaissance flights over Kosovo—without threat from Milosevic’s SAM missiles. Short told him to move them out of Kosovo. “General,” Milosevic said, “you cannot make me move my SA-6s. They have been in place for many years. A logistical nightmare [to move them]. It would be very difficult for me to move them. I cannot—do not ask me to do that. I will just turn them off and it will be all right.”
Short, who had not slept for two days, was on a short fuse. He had been watching the Serb missiles for the last six weeks and knew that Milosevic was moving them to a different site in Kosovo every day. “Mr. President,” Short said abruptly, “you’re pounding sand up my ass.” “What means ‘pound sand up my ass’?” Milosevic asked. Short said it meant pulling his chain—another phrase in American military vernacular, which the Serb appeared to understand. Then Short explained that he knew exactly what Milosevic was doing, where he was moving the missiles from, and where he was moving them to. “Now get them out of Kosovo!” Short said. With that, Milosevic seemed to realize that a stage of the game he was playing was over, and they had all advanced to the next stop on the board. It was time to acquiesce, if only momentarily. “You are right,” he said. “I will move the missiles.”4
A day later with rules for some kind of peaceful reconnaissance still stymied, Short turned to his Serb counterpart as the meeting was about to break up unsuccessfully, a failure that would eventually lead to American-NATO air strikes. Short, after all, was the air force man, and he alone in the room knew how formidable his high-technology weaponry was, how much it had advanced in the seven years since Desert Storm. “Why don’t you go out now and drive around your city and take one last look at it as it is today, because it will never look that way again,” he said. Then he added, “I’m sure that you’ve spoken to your Iraqi counterparts about what to expect. Well, you can forget what the Iraqis told you. Our air might is far greater and far more lethal and accurate today. Iraq was just the beginning.” The bombing, he promised, would be precise, quick, violent, and all-encompassing. “Nothing here will ever be the same, if we do this,” he warned.
Holbrooke, dealing from limited leverage from Washington, was delighted by Short’s brusque, undiplomatic performance and, watching Milosevic in those October meetings, thought he was truly terrified by the prospect of NATO bombings. Sweat rolled down his face at tense moments. But Holbrooke was aware of the timing of the meetings. Held just before the American election, they were designed to get as good a settlement as possible without using full leverage—the most important missing ingredient being armed ground troops as verifiers. He knew, therefore, that any agreement they reached had a limited shelf life. It might work for a time, but Milosevic always looked for wiggle room, and when he did, the ability to stop him might be limited. It would also be limited because it lacked the participation and the goodwill of the KLA, which would almost surely set out to exploit it.
In early November, the American people voted in the off-year election, and though his name was not on any ballot, in many ways the election was about Bill Clinton. He might as well have been running for a third term so much was he, or at least his character, the issue, plain and simple. This election was about his relationship with the American people and he had done, to the surprise of many, extremely well. The Democrats had not lost a few seats, they had gained several. Once again in a corner, Clinton had made a stunning comeback, which underlined his curious and somewhat schizophrenic relationship to the American people. He was not revered as Ronald Reagan was, and it was doubtful that he ever would be. Many Americans who voted for him liked him and thought him quite skilled, but they had learned not to trust him and voted with a certain skepticism. It was as if they had learned, after dealing with him over the years, what he was good at and what he was not good at, which of his promises to believe and which to disregard.
They understood that in political matters as well as in his personal life Clinton was a great flirt and seducer. He was too nimble of mind and feet, and too many conflicting political winds were blowing around for him to be steadfast. Affection, admiration, respect (other than in Hollywood, that great center of artificial emotion, where he was more of a favorite son than Ronald Reagan) might come to him in the future, if and when he was replaced by men who were less interesting and less charming. Then everyone would be able to sit around and talk about how good he had been at empathy, how well he spoke at times of national mourning, and what an exciting cliff-hanger it had been watching him dodge his more righteous and virtuous pursuers on the right. And, of course, how well the economy had done. It was no small thing that the country was in the midst of an almost unprecedented boom. In the meantime, what the American people had with him was, stated bluntly, a deal.
He did not fool them. Nor was he, as he sometimes seemed to believe, smarter than they were. Not at all. It was a relationship of convenience: the American people were every bit as smart about him as he was about them. They seemed to have a sincerity meter with which they could judge him and measure his trustworthy quotient at any given moment. He might be imperfect, but they knew what they were getting, and they suspected the alternatives being offered up were probably a good deal worse. He only fooled them when they wanted to be fooled. Whatever else, however, Clinton offered no meanness of spirit, and it was his particular gift, and that of his wife, to unsettle his many critics and opponents so much that it made them seem mean of spirit. It was as if he were always calm and they were always angry. He would gain the center, they would get the fringe. That was no small political skill, to drive your opponents toward mental imbalance and the political extreme. His enemies, particularly those younger conservatives who had come to Congress so full of their own rectitude and so certain of their ideological truths, hated him and his wife with a passion that went well beyond the ideological and became so violently personal that it was almost always self-defeating. Thus in their anger did they play into his hands.
The things that enraged the Republican right and the fundamentalists about Clinton—his apparently loose ways, his infidelity not merely to his wife but to his own words, his co-opting of issues and ideas that had once belonged to them—did not greatly bother the American people. They did not care deeply about the state of his marriage. If they suspected promiscuity, they believed it was none of their business. They would probably prefer to like him a bit more, and certainly to trust him a bit more, but the country was being run well, the economy was surging, and he seemed on domestic matters to be surrounded by talented, able people. He worked hard and was obviously smart. Whoever succeeded him, either from the left or the right, would probably not fit the national mood at the turn of the century as well. Clearly, he was centrist and fair-minded and modern, and he wanted to do the right thing for as many people as possible.
Clinton had made the Democrats, at least momentarily, the party of the middle class, not the poor, even if the very wealthy were once again the principal beneficiaries of his administration. In truth, on its own the party was without a center. But issue by issue, image by image, he had carved out a center, and he had done it so shrewdly that he had managed to push the Republican Party much farther to the right than it wanted to be. For many of the young and the people his own age who had voted for him, his political contradictions were not that different from their own. Some of the older people, for whom the cultural and political gap was a little wider, believed that he got the job done and that, in addition, a good deal of the criticism leveled against him was simply unfair, unacceptably harsh and personal. He was doing a good job, that was the deal, and that was why they had elected him.
They knew he was flawed and they accepted his flaws. They might have preferred a more virtuous candidate, but thirty years of living in a media age, where high officials had come under the ever more intense scrutiny of an increasingly sensationalized media, had taught the American people to be somewhat skeptical of those seeking the presidency—or any other high office. For soon Newt Gingrich and some of his more righteous colleagues in the Congress were shown to be leaders whose morality was greater in theory than in practice, men who were casting stones while forgetting that all high-level American politicians now lived in the same glass house.
The American people had become, however involuntarily, a great deal shrewder about political morality in the more than three decades of the marriage of national television and national politics. During that time, for example, the Kennedy family, regarded in the early days of the age of televised politics as the ultimate in romantic politics—all those good-looking, wealthy people who married other good-looking, wealthy people—had been systematically dipped in ex post facto smut. Gradually, the booming celebrity-scandal industry in both print and television had immunized the American people. Ordinary voters might not formulate an equation in which it was presumed that the very nature of the ego required for a life in politics was excessive and that therefore other aspects of political behavior might be excessive as well. After all, it drove talented men to reject a normal, balanced existence, with loving wives and children and normal working hours and far greater financial rewards, and instead to risk everything by seeking high office and great power, a course that often left family wreckage in its wake. But it seemed obvious that something like that demanded a certain genetic overload (or imbalance) and that very condition might often have a sexual manifestation. There were no longer any great surprises in this area.
So the American people kept their part of the deal. Somehow they sensed that politics, perhaps like Hollywood and sports, was different, that many who were most successful in this profession were not exactly normal people seeking normal jobs and dealing with normal temptations, and that in politics the lust for office and power was often accompanied by other exceptional lusts that went well beyond the norm. No wonder then that, year by year, the American people were less disillusioned when that turned out to be true. They accepted more readily an equation that previous generations might have had more trouble with: that Bill Clinton was at once absolutely brilliant as a politician, both gifted and original, and deeply flawed as a man, both reckless and self-absorbed, and that these seemingly contradictory characteristics were not unrelated. It was in the nature of being a great politician that even when he was paying full attention to you, he was self-absorbed, determined to make you like him, thinking not of you, as it seemed, but only of himself.
What had helped Clinton in the off-year election was a broad public dislike of many of his pursuers. His luck had held once again. Though the Republicans had tried to make him and his morality the central issue of the election, the people of the country apparently had a greater aversion to his various critics than they had for him: the special prosecutor; Linda Tripp, who had wiretapped a young woman who was supposedly her friend; the Republican leadership; and the smut-crazed media, particularly its television pundits, who feasted on the story and talked and talked about it on the air, the people whom the writer Calvin Trillin called “the Sabbath gasbags.”
But if Clinton had dodged a potentially lethal bullet, he remained in political terms seriously but not mortally wounded, and his moral authority was greatly diminished. The election news was generally good, but he still faced the terrible threat of an impeachment proceeding.