In early 1999 as the possibility of war over Kosovo loomed larger, both the West and Milosevic misunderstood each other. The West thought that it would be just like Bosnia. The threat of bombing, or just a taste of bombing, would do the trick: Milosevic would eventually see the light and bend to our will. Milosevic thought he could divide the West one more time and the alliance would crack if it had to go to war again. He also seemed to believe that his Russian friends would stop any NATO military action, or at the very least grant him access to their newest missiles, which would weaken NATO’s strongest card—its use of airpower. Some seven years into the ongoing struggle with the West—a kind of constant brinksmanship—Milosevic had managed to retain the view of many a totalitarian figure before him. He believed that if democracies were slow to act, it was a sign of weakness; if they were affluent, then they were also decadent. In addition, because their politicians and their citizens feared paying the price of war, they could be bullied. He once told the German foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, “I can stand death—lots of it—but you can’t.”1 That might or might not be true, but as a NATO bombing campaign became ever more likely, Milosevic finally realized he was now caught in the very same nationalistic forces that he had done so much to create.
In January 1999, when the allies were trying to explain to Milosevic the inevitability of a NATO air campaign against him, Wes Clark once more warned him that the situation was dire. Was it true, he asked the Serb leader, that he had just a few days ago told Dick Holbrooke that it was his neck if he lost Kosovo? “No no, no,” Milosevic replied, “I never said that.” Well, then, what did you tell Holbrooke? Clark, quite puzzled, asked. “I told him I would lose my head, not my neck,” Milosevic said in clarification. Head or neck, it was all drawing to a close.
In the wake of the massacre at Racak and in an attempt to end hostilities without the use of force, Madeleine Albright called a conference of both the Serbs and the KLA at Rambouillet, a great French château near Paris. What ensued was not exactly a model of decorum for a peace conference, and it made Dayton, which had its own chaotic quality, look like a paragon of order, symmetry, and purpose. Neither side, the KLA or the Serbs, wanted to be there. The Serbs thought it was rigged against them, which it probably was, and the Albanians wanted independence instead of some kind of limited autonomy within Serbia, which was what the West wanted. The Serbs sent a B-level delegation; Milosevic did not attend nor did his top people. But even the Albanians had to have their arms twisted to attend, although if they did participate and the Serbs did not, NATO would almost surely go to war on their behalf. Serb stubbornness was nothing new for Western negotiators, but the Albanian intransigence was a major surprise. At one point Albright showed up, apparently believing that a final push by the American secretary of state would get it done. But she found the Albanians not that sophisticated about her position and power. They probably thought, said Dugagjin Gorani, an adviser to the Kosovar delegation, that she was a cleaning woman. “Give us five minutes,” one member of the delegation told her, “and go away.”2
Only pressure from Bob Dole, who was considered a hero by most Kosovars because of his support, eventually convinced them to sign the agreement. “We’ll abandon you if you don’t sign,” he told them. And so reluctantly and belatedly they did sign. Their coming aboard surprised the Serbs, who were sure the Albanians were too arrogant to accept a partial loaf. It was a sign of the lack of clarity within the administration that when Rambouillet essentially collapsed, no one seemed to be sure whether that was a good thing or a bad thing. As some senior administration members noted, Rambouillet at least allowed the administration to show to other NATO nations, still dubious about any military action, that the United States had walked the last mile to bring peace. The conference had failed because of Serb arrogance, and it was therefore now permissible to use force.
It is important to compare two sets of dates to understand the respective domestic and foreign policy pressures that were bringing this struggle to a denouement. Rambouillet began on February 6, 1999, and the Albanians reluctantly signed the agreement on March 18. The siege of Serbia was ready to begin. Back in America, Clinton had been impeached by the House of Representatives on December 19, 1998, and he was acquitted of the charges by the Senate on February 12, 1999. The siege of the White House was over. As Rambouillet fell apart and as the NATO deadline for bombing the Serbs approached in late March 1999, Richard Holbrooke made one last visit to Belgrade to talk with Milosevic. “You understand what will happen when I leave,” Holbrooke said, knowing that this was a last fateful moment when the dogs of war could still be leashed. “Yes,” Milosevic replied. “You’ll bomb us. You’re a big, powerful country and you can do anything you want, and there is nothing we can do about it.”3 The bombing, Holbrooke warned, and he had chosen his words carefully in conjunction with senior officers at the Pentagon, “will be swift, it will be severe, and it will be sustained.”
Holbrooke thought Milosevic was oddly fatalistic and much less afraid than he was back in October when the Americans had last threatened to bomb. Holbrooke was not sure what had changed him. Perhaps it was the bombing that had taken place during Desert Fox, when the United States had attacked Iraq for seventy hours and then stopped, and Milosevic believed that he could withstand that kind of bombing. Or perhaps he had received from sources within NATO some sense of the limited nature of the NATO bombing orders and believed he could withstand that, too. Or perhaps it was simply a complete mood swing—that happened often enough with him. Whatever the reason, he was much less terrified than he had been a few months earlier, displaying an odd cockiness bordering on indifference.
The Joint Chiefs had accepted the idea of bombing the Serbs without any great enthusiasm. NATO and the White House were aboard, although what level of bombing and which targets remained unanswered questions. It was what the administration wanted, Sandy Berger had given the key signal, and Bill Cohen, filled with doubts, never an enthusiast, went along with it, especially because ground troops were being excluded, which would limit the hostility of opponents in the Congress in the early days of combat. Opposition would still be there, but it would be lurking rather than openly voiced, in most cases. But as the first step in a military action was taken, the Pentagon had its foot on the brake just as it had on exactly the same issue for exactly the same reason six years earlier. There was no agreed-upon Plan B. As Powell had often asked, what happens if the bombing does not work?
In the Tank, which was the sanctum where the Chiefs met, the talk had been an unusual blend of both acceptance and doubt. The only enthusiasm for bombing Kosovo was among some senior air force people eager to show what airpower, without ground troops, could do in situations like this. It might help end an important interservice argument that had lingered after Desert Storm. The air force thought that it had not been given proper credit for what it believed was its dominant role in the Desert Storm victory. By the time the ground forces were finally unleashed, the air force people privately believed, the Iraqi forces had been effectively demoralized, if not already defeated. According to that view, the subsequent remarkable four-day ground action had been little more than a tidying-up exercise of a beaten and disheartened Iraqi army.
This was not the first chapter in an old, old argument, nor the last, but Kosovo would allow the air force one more shot at showing what it could do, by unleashing maximum firepower against technologically inferior opponents. Because the casualties were likely to be minimal, it was a seductive path for political leaders facing a dilemma here or anywhere else. Still there were reservations, service by service, especially among the army and the marines, who might be the institutional losers in a mission like this. If those reservations had not been voiced that forcefully in the discussions inside the Tank, being muted because of a sense of which way the play was going, they could be heard as a kind of softer background chorus within the Pentagon in the days and weeks that followed. A policy that placed everything on airpower and therefore went against the most elemental philosophy of the U.S. army, and that had no proviso in case airpower failed, made people unhappy.
So it began, the administration’s second act of war over the Balkans in four years. It was to be waged, the civilians and the military men had agreed, if at all possible, entirely through airpower. That was the strength of America and thus the strength of NATO. Or as Sandy Berger sometimes said privately, that was where the West’s great advantage lay—an advantage of perhaps one thousand to one in airpower, whereas if it was a struggle with ground troops in terrible terrain, the advantage dropped to seven to one and the terms began to favor Milosevic. Moreover, the Yeltsin government had signaled the allies that while the Russians were unhappy about NATO’s use of force against fellow Slavs, they would not come to Belgrade’s defense or give the Serbs their newest surface-to-air missiles, which might have made it much more difficult for NATO.
But even so, the White House was in effect tiptoeing into the war, acutely aware of congressional opposition at home and the fragility of the alliance overseas. When the bombing began on March 24, the administration had not made a complete commitment. That night Clinton inserted one critical sentence into his statement, a sentence that would be at the heart of the divisions and the ambivalence of the NATO command in the next three months, reflecting all the unreconciled divisions of the last six years. “I do not intend to put our troops in Kosovo to fight a war,” Clinton said. Months later, after it was all over, his top civilian people would privately admit that his statement might have been a considerable mistake. The top military people thought it was, in fact, a catastrophic mistake because it had given the wrong signal to all kinds of people, most notably Slobodan Milosevic.
Ironically, the line may have originated with one of the sterner critics of the administration’s Balkan policy, Ivo Daalder, a resident scholar at the Brookings Institute, a former member of the NSC staff and very much an activist on Balkan policy. Daalder, who eventually wrote two thoughtful books on the Bush and Clinton Balkan policies, had become by then one of those talking heads favored on the more erudite television and radio shows, a blossoming star of the more refined media Rolodexes. Because of that, the White House, as it liked to do with such figures, was trying to bring him in on the policy, giving him an early look at it in the hope that if he appeared that night after the announcement was made, his criticism would at least be muted.
On the afternoon of Clinton’s speech, Miriam Sapiro, an NSC staff member, called Daalder to outline what the president was going to say and to express her hope that he would support the policy. Of course, Daalder said, he would support greater activism on Kosovo—but what was the president going to say about ground troops? “We’re going to say we have no plans to put in ground troops,” she answered. “You can’t say that because if we have no plans to put in ground troops, we ought to fire the person responsible for drawing up the plans,” Daalder said. “So either you don’t have plans and you’re incompetent, or you’re lying, so you can’t say that.” Then almost unconsciously, for the line was thin between being a man of the NSC and a man of Brookings, he suggested using the word intention, saying “something like we have no intention of using ground troops.” A little later a sentence to that effect was in the speech, inserted at the last minute by Berger without the knowledge or approval of Albright. That left Daalder wondering if he was responsible, and whether what he had said on the phone to Sapiro was as big a mistake as he had made in quite a while. That night when he went on National Public Radio to critique the speech, he was very hard on the ground-troop exemption.
No matter what the origin of the line, the sentence represented what the Clinton people considered a mandatory political step. They had not even been able to get congressional approval for peacekeepers a few months earlier when Holbrooke was trying to lower the level of violence. What they wanted now instead was congressional acquiescence, and the price of acquiescence was that sentence about ground troops. If they had left open the possibility of ground troops, there would have been a congressional uproar. So they had made what appeared to be a commitment not to use ground troops, even though it was not necessarily a promise—it was a hedge, intend being the most flexible of words. “We do not want to send ground troops” might have been more accurate.
It was the compromise of all compromises. It would be hard, six years into the Clinton presidency, to think of a sentence more important within the bureaucracy. It summed up with surprising accuracy all the contradictions and the ambivalence of America as a post–Cold War superpower. We were willing to go to war to bring an end to Milosevic’s recklessness and some stability to the Balkans. Yes, Kosovo was important, yes, it was worth going to war over, but was it a cause worthy of the lives of our young men and women on the ground? Was there any support for it in the Congress, in the media, in the country? Did we need to rally our people to the cause even as we fought?
Again it was an ad hoc policy, and ruling out ground troops, or seeming to rule them out, was at that moment perhaps the most logical—and easiest—next step to take. But at the Pentagon it rekindled all the old fears and doubts about how steadfast this administration was going to be on this issue. To many military men, it was not a mere throwaway line; rather it seemed to be carved in stone. They had to assume it was their marching orders. What it said to them was We want this one but how far we are willing to go, we still don’t know. Check with us later. It was a reminder of the ambiguity of the Vietnam decision-making, of civilians who were willing to enter a war zone without any of the hard decisions having been made. As one senior officer said, as far as the military men were concerned, it was accommodating to your political fears even before you put your military strengths into action, especially in a war where the most important lever against a clever authoritarian bluffer was your ability to make him think he was facing the maximum use of power, not the minimum.
That sentence also reflected the White House view that it would be a quickie, a short war; the NATO bombing as it had worked in Bosnia would work just as rapidly this time. White House spokesmen, talking with reporters, made it clear they felt the bombing would last only three or four days; eventually its spokesmen let it be known to reporters that Madeleine Albright had talked that way to them. Indeed she had gone on television that first night with Jim Lehrer and spoken about the war being over quickly. “I don’t see this as a long-term operation. I think this is something . . . that is achievable with a relatively short period of time,” she told Lehrer. Or as Lieutenant General Mike Short, who would be in charge of the bombing, later said, “I can’t tell you how many times the instruction I got was ‘Mike, you’re only going to be allowed to bomb two, maybe three nights. That’s all Washington can stand. That’s all some members of the alliance can stand. That’s why you’ve only got ninety targets. This’ll be over in three nights.’ ”4
Again, a certain division was at work here. Later, after the war had gone on much, much longer and the early prediction had become something of an embarrassment, some of Albright’s people would insist that she had not pulled that figure out of the air; the Defense Department and the CIA must have thrown those estimates at her, they claimed. There were, however, people who thought the war might be more difficult than it might seem on the surface. Within the first few days, Walt Slocombe, the undersecretary of defense for policy, went to the Senate to make the case for the bombing, met with about twenty-five senators, and took a considerable pounding. At one point Robert Bennett of Utah asked him how long he thought the bombing would go on. It will go on until Milosevic stops doing what he’s doing, Slocombe answered. Then Bennett said, “I know you can’t give us a day for it to end, but if it goes on beyond a certain time, how long would it have to go on before you were surprised?” Three months, Slocombe answered.