If he was losing the war on the Apaches, Clark knew that he would win on other fronts. They could not turn him down on everything, and as one colleague said, the Apaches might always have been as much a feint as a real move: “Wes probably sensed that there was a good chance they wouldn’t let him use them, but he also knew that if they turned him down on this, they would have to give him something else.” But a month into the war the tension points were still considerable, and all of the senior players were becoming edgier and edgier. Nor was international public opinion that good. It tended to focus more and more on what NATO was doing—any bomb that went astray, the hitting of a column of Kosovar refugees—and less and less on what Milosevic had done.
There was still no clear sign of Western will. Of the various senior partners, the British were the most aggressive, the French the least. France was most anxious to set limits on bombing targets, worried not so much about what would happen to Milosevic, but about its long-term relationship with the Serb people if Belgrade was bombed. Some of that tension reflected traditional friendly ties to Belgrade; and part of it reflected instinctive French resistance toward what they considered excessive flexing of American will on the Continent. But certainly part of it also represented something new in the post–Cold War order: an undertow of opposition from former allies—the French, of course, in the lead—to American moves, now that America stood alone as a superpower, a most natural resentment of a rich and powerful nation on the part of those who felt America did not take their wishes seriously enough or consult with them enough.
By that time Clark had become even more passionate about using ground troops. Their enemy, he began to warn, was now the calendar. With nearly a million Kosovars forced to leave their homes, thousands of them living in the hills, they were all facing a humanitarian disaster of enormous proportions when the cruel Balkan winter came. If they were going to help the refugees with a ground operation, they probably had to make the decision by early June in order to get the troops there before the cold weather hit. Clark talked about needing some sixty to ninety days once the order was given. Sooner, he emphasized, was better than later. That meant that time was already pressing in on them. Clark’s unofficial deadline for a decision to put the wheels in motion was June 10.
What probably helped save the alliance was that in late April all its members were to meet in Washington for the fiftieth anniversary of NATO, which had been formed in 1949 to limit Soviet aggression in central Europe. In a staggering omission, Clark was originally not going to be invited. His relationship with his Pentagon superiors had deteriorated so much that neither Cohen nor Shelton had wanted him to attend. Some of that, it was believed, also came from the White House, where Clark was considered too aggressive in talking about the need for ground troops. The White House also feared that he was looping around them and linking up with the British, who were also pushing harder and harder for ground troops.
In the end, Clark was invited, indeed, he had to come; it would be a scandal if he did not. He had used Javier Solana, the head of NATO, to press his case, which pleased neither the top military people nor the civilians. His orders, however, were clear. He was to behave with minimum visibility and not to talk about ground troops. He would later recall his arrival for the first meeting, seeing the host American team, headed by Clinton, Albright, and Cohen, and receiving glares from some of its members that told him, in effect, to stay away.
The NATO summit was a turning point. Rather than fragmenting over all the difficult issues that divided it, the alliance came out stronger and more united than ever. Central to what happened was a small dinner meeting that Clinton and Blair and a few of their top aides held the night before the conference began. At that moment, a month into the war, with almost none of the news good, the bombing campaign more than a little anorexic, and Milosevic appearing to have a chance to win his gamble, they were for the first time looking at the possibility of defeat. They had all been so careful about the rules, and about listening to political concerns, that they were not winning the war. In that sense, Mike Short and others who were complaining bitterly about the limits imposed on their air campaign had been right, and the senior politicians were now faced with the consequences of these decisions. The British were by then talking much more openly about the need for ground troops, and Blair himself, having visited Brussels and seized on this issue, was far more out-front and outspoken than the president and irritated with the Americans.
The Americans, for their part, were annoyed with the British for being so public about the use of ground troops, a bridge the Americans were not yet ready to cross politically. At the meeting Blair wanted to push the Americans ahead on the use of ground troops; Clinton wanted to hold the alliance together, fearing their use might tear it apart and wanting to lower the volume on discussing it. That night they reached a compromise. The British would say less about ground troops, and in return the Americans would give permission to go ahead with the planning for their use, an escalation that Belgrade, so wired into NATO through friendships and connections, would know about immediately.
It was only when they faced the prospect of defeat that Clinton and Blair decided they had to win. That was central to the presummit dinner, the sudden awareness that the alternative to winning was unacceptable. What it would do to NATO—effectively signal the end of it—and to their countries (and, it was known but never said, to their own careers and place in history) was also unacceptable, and they vowed in a kind of mutual two-man pact that they would win. There would be no turning back. They had begun it and they would finish it. If they had to pay a higher price, so be it. “A metaphorical blood oath,” Sandy Berger, one of the handful of witnesses, later called it. There would be no bombing halts. No half-a-loaf negotiations with Milosevic designed to let him off the hook. Instead they would ratchet up the pressure on him. It was, in terms of the war, a fateful decision. A month into the bombing, the most important guide to the conduct of the war, the need to hold the alliance together at all costs for political reasons, was changing. Now the primary goal was to win, and that was a military mandate. Clark was given permission to start the early, preliminary paperwork on the use of ground troops.
Clark thought that the differences in attitude on both sides of the Atlantic were the result of a combination of geography and history. The civilians in Washington had never been in a war before, this was not a commitment they had been eager to make, and their attitude had always been one of almost irritation, as if this was some annoying, distant problem that would not go away. For the Europeans, it was more immediate, it was physically closer to them, it was war, and especially among the British, there was a sense of urgency, a belief that the sooner they dealt with what were obvious problems, the better the outcome was going to be for everyone. Whatever else had happened during the NATO summit, Clark thought, the British had managed to convince the Americans of the gravity of the situation and that time was not necessarily on their side.
Because of the summit, the target list was expanded and restrictions on targets in downtown Belgrade were lifted. On May 7, the full force of NATO airpower was used for the first time on targets in the city, with formidable results. Finally, Mike Short told friends, after forty-five days, they were letting him do the things he had wanted to do at the start, and with the change in policy and the willingness to go after targets in downtown Belgrade, the B-2s became even more effective. They did things that no bomber or bombing program had ever done before. It had always been an air force belief that it was virtually impossible to take out and close down an enemy airbase from the air because with so many different possibilities for runways, somehow an auxiliary runway or two could quickly be reopened. But late in the war, a B-2, using all its weaponry, had hit a Serb airbase and had systematically knocked out every runway, closing it down for several days. In addition, the Novi Sad Bridge (the Rock and Roll Bridge from which Belgrade citizens had taunted the United States in the past by using it as a kind of open-air discotheque) had finally been taken out. But even with the new guidelines there were setbacks, and when the Chinese embassy was hit by mistake, strict limits were once again put on targets in downtown Belgrade.
The use of the B-2s showed that the introduction of high technology into warfare was taking place at an ever faster rate. The Gulf War, which less than a decade earlier had been the epitome of a modern high-tech war, now looked oddly old-fashioned. In it, roughly 9 percent of the weaponry had been precision-guided. In Kosovo, that figure went over 60 percent. If one plane could now hit sixteen targets, then the role of the B-2, given the rapid acceleration in technology, was bound to increase in the future. The day was fast approaching when the B-2s would carry perhaps as many as fifty bombs, which would mean that one plane could hit fifty targets. John Warden, who had played so pivotal a part in planning the air campaign against Iraq, and who had later decided that it would have taken some six weeks with the airpower available in 1999 to end Hitler’s war production and transportation, believed that, with the B-2s, that six-week period would have been shortened even more, now down to three days of bombing. Given the need for the B-2s to go back and forth to Missouri to rearm, this would have translated into six days of war in Kosovo. Later when it was all over and the American targeteers and intelligence people compared notes, they came to believe that they had been more successful even earlier in the war than they had realized. The pain they were inflicting, if not immediately affecting Milosevic and his inner circle back in Belgrade, had been very real for his forces in the field. As the NATO intelligence people came to understand how the Serbs used their forces in the field and moved them around when they were under constant air attack, and as the weather improved dramatically, the air campaign steadily and systematically increased in efficiency, well before it began to register in Belgrade.
Even though the target lists had been expanded, the American targeteers were immensely frustrated by the limitations that remained. In downtown Belgrade, for example, they longed to take out a major communications and telephone switching station, but it was only forty yards from a tenth-century church. The switching station was in the bowels of a building and would be easy enough to hit with two-thousand-pound bombs, but while no part of the church’s main structure was apt to be damaged, its beautiful, historic windows might be destroyed. So they let it pass. In addition, they held back on hitting the Yugo factories, even though they knew that Milosevic was using them to repair his mobile radar units and SAMs. But one day, they decided, if the war went on and it came down to something like this, they would be able to take them out, too.
The Serb forces in the field who had once been the hunters had become the hunted, a role they were ill-prepared for. The increased effectiveness of the air campaign was gradual; at no one dramatic moment did it all come together. At first the Serbs had used large formations to attack, as they had been taught by the Russians, but the A-10 Warthogs were brutal, especially on their armored units. “You would think they would have learned from the Iraqis about the Warthogs,” one senior air force officer later said, “but I think they were very macho—they thought they were a lot tougher and smarter than the Iraqis, and then they learned it wasn’t true.” Gradually, however, Serbs broke their forces down into much smaller units and began to park their tanks near houses, so that the NATO pilots, not knowing who lived in the houses, had to be careful.
By early May, Serb reserve units from specific towns that had been called up en masse began to turn against the war, some to mutiny as a group, while others had high desertion rates. Serb police were on a number of occasions forced to turn water hoses on civilians in the towns that the deserters and mutineers had come from. At the same time, the KLA forces were forming into larger units and the Serbs had to deal with them as well as the blistering air campaign. Soon it was an old, many-times-told story in guerrilla warfare: the day belonged to the Serbs, the night to the KLA.
NATO was also becoming more successful in taking out Serb SAMs and radar stations. One of the keys was to find them. The Serbs moved them constantly, but the targeteers began to become expert at looking at a spot where a SAM was and, knowing the limited distance it could be moved, being able to predict where the Serbs would relocate it. By one set of NATO statistics, in the beginning of the fighting the Serbs would move a mobile radar unit roughly every thirty-six hours and a SAM every twelve hours; by mid-May they were moving them every forty-five minutes.
Also by mid-May, for the first time, allied intelligence knew that the air war was having a considerable impact on the Serb political structure. Good sources in Yugoslavia, some of them with connections to the Milosevic regime, began to report the effect of the bombing. Milosevic, they said, was increasingly isolated from some of his closest allies, was becoming more erratic in his personal behavior, and was being seen less and less in public. The population, despite the attempts of Milosevic’s propaganda machinery to portray an exuberant, lionhearted Serb people who scoffed at NATO and became more unified with every bomb that fell, was turning surly, its anger focused not only on NATO, but on Milosevic as well. The rate of desertion kept going up especially among conscripts who believed in a Serbian Kosovo but did not want to die for it.
Milosevic’s bet that NATO would fragment and be unable to stay the course was illusory. His sources within NATO were reporting that, rather than backing off, NATO was upping the ante, not only bombing the very heart of his political and economic machinery, but moving ahead with preliminary paperwork on ground troops. He was effectively isolated from the rest of the world. The Russians might in theory be supporters of his, critics of NATO, and very unhappy with what it was doing, but because they were immensely dependent upon the West for economic assistance, they were in no position to act. The war so far was not so much showcasing pan-Slavic brotherhood as it was momentary Russian impotence. Milosevic stood alone.
There were other negative signs. The KLA had not been dormant during the bombing. It understood that it now had a wondrous new airshield and renewed its efforts, organizing in larger, if somewhat irregular, units, poorly trained perhaps, but ever more emboldened. By mid-May the weather, which had hampered NATO planes earlier in the bombing runs over Kosovo, had cleared, and NATO was hitting some of Milosevic’s armored units, keeping his forces in check, while their indigenous enemies, the KLA, with perhaps as many as ten thousand men under arms, were on the move. Because of that, Milosevic faced an additional dilemma. For the first time he was in danger of being defeated militarily in Kosovo, especially now that the allies were planning on ground forces.
The other issue he had to contend with was his personal control of the country. When he had first come to power, there had been several indigenous protests against his policies and authoritarian moves, but he had always quickly and violently repressed any dissenters and escalated control not merely of the political process but of the media as well. The key to sustaining power, however, as in communist societies past, had been the secret police. But the world around him had changed, and democratic stirrings had not entirely gone away. Now, even with a considerable Serb passion for Kosovo, many of the more democratically oriented Serb citizens, some of whom wanted closer ties to the West and some who did not, were becoming aware that, like it or not, they were at war because of his political excesses, his grandiose flaunting of NATO and his ethnic hatreds. That knowledge, or at least some of it, had always been there. But now it was costing them dearly.
For Yugoslavia or Serbia was, in political terms, something of a halfway house, neither entirely totalitarian nor yet very democratic. In the transition from a Cold War to a post–Cold War society, Milosevic had exploited the existing power vacuum and made a number of critical instruments of democratic life, such as the media, his own, and he had been brutal toward political opponents. But that was not the same thing as gaining popularity; and by May, many Yugoslavs were facing the cumulative effects of Western economic sanctions, isolation from the West, and the knowledge that elsewhere in Europe other once-communist countries were moving toward democracy, while they were still struggling with authoritarian rule. Added to that was the bombing, which was the direct result of Milosevic’s ambitions; these were his political moves, but they were the ones who had to pay for them. The Serb people might not like what NATO was doing, but intelligence sources saw signs that they now placed no small part of the blame on Milosevic.
When bombing as a singular instrument of policy had failed before in wartime, it had almost always been against a completely controlled, autocratic society. But Yugoslavia, for all of Milosevic’s consolidation of power, was rather different. The country, somewhat in conflict with itself, was a political hybrid, an autocracy with democratic forces momentarily stymied, but still there stirring just under the surface. The bombing underscored the fault line between the two, widening the gap that separated those more drawn to the hatreds of the past and those who hoped for a chance for freedoms, long denied and now delayed. During his rise, Milosevic had used instruments of power and the passions of an unusually cruel nationalism to block equally powerful instincts for democracy. It had worked at first. In the early days of his rule, there was the belief that fierce nationalism and embryonic democratic feelings could be combined. But now that a harsher reality was setting in, a profound separation was taking place between these two forces. Those stirrings for democracy had never gone away, and Milosevic’s foreign adventures had taught many Serbs how powerless they really were.
One additional vulnerability that the architects of the bombing played on was that, if Yugoslavia was not exactly like Kenya, an out-and-out kleptocracy, then at the highest levels the Belgrade government was run by a part-capitalist, part-communist mafia, composed of Milosevic, his family, and their closest friends. They were cutting themselves in on all kinds of deals, running state-favored enterprises without any real competition, and gaining immense profits. During the ten years that Milosevic and his family ran the country, a small number of privileged people had eaten handsomely at the public-private trough. There was no greed, some of the Milosevic regime’s critics thought, quite like that of former dedicated Marxists when they finally had a chance to bend a partially capitalist system to their wants. The NATO targeteers took great pleasure in singling out those companies that belonged to the Milosevic mafia and destroying their buildings, knowing that this would turn up the pressure on Milosevic. Which it did. Soon reports were emanating from Belgrade about trusted advisers, ministers, and cronies who wanted to leave the country and move their money out as well. Many were trying to get Milosevic to do something to end the war.
For the first time in late May, Washington was somewhat optimistic the bombing was finally working. In Brussels, planning was going ahead for ground forces, as many as 225,000 to 250,000 troops, and the NATO planners were quite open in letting those people suspected of having close Milosevic ties know some of the details—if not exactly the battle plan. The White House was also more confident now. The president gave two good speeches on the war, one at the National Defense University in Washington, then another at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. Equally important, on May 18, Clinton pulled back from his original March 24 statement about ground troops. This time he said, “All options are on the table.”
Everything was gradually coming to a head. On May 27, the defense ministers of France, Germany, Britain, Italy, and the United States met in Bonn to discuss the use of ground troops. Though Washington was generally moving toward the use of ground troops, Bill Cohen was still something of a holdout. He wanted to continue the air war. The British were quite aggressive and ready to commit fifty thousand of their own men. The French thought it might be too late to get a force there before the winter. The Italians and the Germans were obviously uneasy but did not reject the idea. Right after that meeting, Tony Blair called up thirty thousand British Territorials.
If the White House was slowly moving toward accepting the necessity of ground troops, the JCS remained unconvinced. Clark, coming back to the Pentagon in late May, felt that Reimer was slow-walking him, wanting more time to study his plans. With Joe Ralston, Clark found equal resistance—questions about what would happen if they went ahead with ground troops and hostilities broke out elsewhere, say Korea, and after that the Persian Gulf as well. We were in a shooting war, still needing to win, Clark thought with some irritation, and they are talking to me about a double hypothetical.
At the same time, the Western leaders were also playing the Russian card as boldly as they could. From the start Milosevic had counted on Russian protection. But the new Russia was economically vulnerable, dependent on Western financing and barely able to fend for itself, let alone defend a fellow Slav (whom Boris Yeltsin did not even like). Strobe Talbott, the deputy secretary, had strong Russian connections and had been the contact man with them from the start. Even before the bombing had begun, when Milosevic had looked to Moscow for access to the modern Russian missiles, Talbott had made it abundantly clear to the Russians that we would not tolerate it, that any such lend-lease arrangement would undermine Russia’s economic lifeline to the West. From that moment on, a critical part of Milosevic’s strategy had failed, and he was isolated in terms of great-power politics, a man without a big brother.
At the time of the NATO anniversary summit, the Western powers had originally hoped to get a senior Russian representative to attend as a symbol that NATO was no longer an anti-Russian instrument but instead part of a larger democratic partnership that could work with the Russians. But the tensions caused by the bombing ended that hope. Yeltsin had originally expected NATO to split apart over the bombing, with the French leading the way, but Jacques Chirac had gone to Moscow and taken a hard line about the war, thus letting Yeltsin know that NATO would probably hold together. During the NATO summit, Yeltsin had called Clinton and they had had a long, detailed conversation, Yeltsin obviously in considerable political pain because the West was bombing someone he was supposed to help and he had been rendered powerless. That call resulted in Yeltsin’s appointing Viktor Chernomyrdin, a former prime minister and a close political ally, as his special envoy to the West on this issue. Chernomyrdin’s orders from Yeltsin, he later told others, were “I don’t care what you have to do, just end it. It’s ruining everything.”1
Chernomyrdin soon met with Talbott and Vice President Gore, and they came up with a kind of good-cop/bad-cop routine (though Chernomyrdin called it the hammer and the anvil). He would be paired with a neutral figure, who would have to do a good deal of the heavy lifting when they argued with Milosevic, because for a Russian to pound away at a fellow Slav was improper. Madeleine Albright suggested Martti Ahtisaari, the president of Finland. Both the Americans and the Russians quickly agreed he was the ideal choice. For the first time, without anyone realizing it, there was now a serious peace track. Ahtisaari represented a country that was in the European Union but not NATO and was viewed favorably by the Russians as a neutral player. He was also admired by the Americans, as most senior people in the UN were not.
There were more and more signs that Washington had acquired the requisite resolve. The White House had its view of a settlement down to a simple phrase for Kosovo: “Serbs out, NATO in, Albanians back.” Sandy Berger, who had been dubious of any kind of air campaign, began to sound more hawkish. On June 2, he met with a number of people from the national security world who were activists on Bosnia and Kosovo, and who had sensed his doubts in the past. “We will win. Period. Full stop. There is no alternative,” he told them. “Second, winning means what we said it means. Third, the air campaign is having a serious impact. Fourth, the president has said he has not ruled out any options. So go back to one. We will win.”2 Berger then sat down to write what he thought was a fateful memo for the president, outlining their choices. Even though things were going well, or at least going better, the outcome was still in doubt, and Milosevic’s reaction would be unpredictable when he was cornered by NATO with the Russians acting in semiconcert with the alliance. Those who had dealt with him at close range always thought he was the most volatile of personalities, capable of great mood swings. Would he concede relatively quickly or would he force an invasion and watch NATO inflict the full power of its technology on the people of Belgrade before seeking terms? With someone as sociopathic as Milosevic, which was how most senior Western leaders viewed him, there was no telling how he would act in the final, desperate hours of his failed gamble.
Berger’s was not the most optimistic of memos. We could invade, he said, but it might not be easy. There was nothing attractive about the ground troop option. We might be sending as many as 250,000 men to Kosovo in the middle of what could be a harsh winter. American tanks would have a hard time going through Kosovo’s tunnels. It was, he thought, a hellish choice, sure to be unpopular, especially if the Serbs broke down their units and nibbled at the NATO forces guerrilla-style. Or we could continue the air war, delay the ground war, try to maximize airdrops to the vulnerable Kosovars during the winter, then strike with ground troops in the spring. Or we could arm the KLA and use NATO airpower in conjunction with its forces, although there were long-range dangers in becoming partners with a group like that. At one-thirty in the morning, he finished the memo, laid it out for the president, and went home.
The Talbott-Chernomyrdin-Ahtisaari team made considerable progress almost as soon as it was put in place. Russia signed up along with the G-7, the seven leading industrial democracies, in backing a proposal that called for the removal of Serb troops, police, and paramilitary forces from Kosovo, and their replacement by genuine peacekeeping forces. The first real American-Russian disagreement was, Talbott noted later, over the word all. To the Americans and NATO, all Serb troops and police and paramilitaries had to go, otherwise it would be far too dangerous for any peacekeeping force, which might be caught in an Albanian-Serb cross fire. The Serbs had responded that they wanted to keep some Serb troops inside Kosovo, the Russians had taken their side, and for a time that slowed things down. The other disagreement with the Russians was whether part of the peacekeeping role would be played by NATO. That was what the West demanded. It did not trust the United Nations, not in this venue, and not after what had happened in Bosnia. That also delayed any agreement.
The Russians, it would turn out, also wanted to play a peacekeeping role with troops of their own in Kosovo. In late May the Russian and American positions seemed frozen, the Americans feeling that the principal resistance came from the Russian military, which had not entirely thawed out in the post–Cold War era. But on the morning of June 3, after a prolonged, thirteen-hour negotiating session, the Russians, apparently under direct orders from Yeltsin, finally agreed that all the Serb forces should leave Kosovo. That was it. In the Russian draft to be taken by Ahtisaari and Chernomyrdin to Belgrade, the phrase “all Serb forces out” was used. The Russian military was furious. There would also be a substantial NATO role in the peacekeeping process.
On June 3, Chernomyrdin and Ahtisaari flew to Belgrade to meet with Milosevic. Ahtisaari went through the terms of the agreement with him while Chernomyrdin watched. Ahtisaari then warned that if Milosevic did not accept its terms, they would become harsher and the bombing more intensive. NATO would destroy the nation’s telephone system and other facets of Belgrade’s daily life. As Ahtisaari spoke to him, Milosevic turned to Chernomyrdin for help, received none, and realized that the Russians were now, in effect, on the other side, and the game was over. It was the best deal he could get, Chernomyrdin told him; he had better take it because anything else was going to be worse. Milosevic invited both men to dinner with him. They turned him down. The social game was over, too.3 The next day he accepted the terms.
Though it had been decided to send in ground troops if necessary, and though Milosevic knew that and it affected his final decision, it was a singular victory for the use of modern airpower, which had just begun to germinate in the Gulf War and had in military terms come to fruition in the Kosovo campaign, however slowly and belatedly. Or as John Keegan, widely regarded as among the most able of military historians, wrote a few days after Milosevic gave up, “There are certain dates in the history of warfare that mark real turning points. November 20, 1917, is one, when at Cambrai the tank showed that the traditional dominance of infantry, cavalry, and artillery on the battlefield had been overthrown. November 11, 1940, is another, when the sinking of the Italian fleet at Taranta demonstrated that the aircraft carrier and its aircraft had abolished the age-old supremacy of the battleship. Now there is a new turning point to fix on the calendar: June 3, 1999, when the capitulation of President Milosevic proved that a war can be won by airpower alone.”
One of the early victims of that victory was Wes Clark. Rarely had the commanding general in a victorious cause been treated so harshly. It was all quite deftly done. The other chiefs told the White House that unless they found the right four-star billet for Joe Ralston, he would be forced to retire. The White House was indebted to Ralston, and Bill Cohen was even more so. Ralston had been Cohen’s right-hand man, had handled his earlier personal humiliation with grace, had been a valuable team player, and had kept everyone aboard during a tense and edgy time. In the eyes of some, he had been the de facto chairman while serving under Shelton, and there had been talk—never a clear promise—that he might replace him as chairman once Shelton’s tour was up in the middle of 1999. The personal problems would be more in the past and the Kelly Flinn case more a part of history, but because of the war, no change was desired and Shelton had gotten a second two-year term.
If they needed a billet, they knew where to look. It would be Wes Clark’s. That SACEUR was traditionally an army man’s slot no longer seemed to matter. What the other chiefs did not make clear to Berger and Clinton (or at least Berger and Clinton later claimed they did not make clear) was that by signing on to Ralston’s new assignment as SACEUR, they were approving a de facto squeezing out of Clark, ending his career, forcing his retirement. Given the nature of the war just over and all the tensions that had been created, it was nothing less than a firing. Clinton signed on, apparently not realizing that he had been snookered. No one on his staff had caught on to the Pentagon move, and it was sold to the White House as a routine assignment, a normal rotation, just one good guy they liked replacing another guy whose tour was up.
Clark had served the usual term, they said, which of course was not true in general. Lauris Norstad had served six and a half years, Al Haig had served five, and in this particular case, Clark, as a triumphant commander who in the most difficult of circumstances had managed to bring them victory, would normally have expected to serve two or three years more. Indeed a critical part of his job would have been to oversee the implementation of the peace he had helped win. Later Clinton was said to have been quite angry about what had happened. So within seven weeks of his victory, Clark had effectively been relieved of his command and replaced by Ralston, who was a much more popular figure on the Pentagon side of the river. It was payback time, and the people at the Pentagon felt there was a lot to pay Clark back for.
So Cohen and the Chiefs had played very hard ball. If anyone was supposed to call Clark and break the news, it was Cohen, who was technically his superior in the chain of command, but the call came from Hugh Shelton, who told Clark he was going to be replaced. The call caught Clark completely by surprise, and because his peers did not trust him and did not want to give him any wiggle room (they feared he might use his Clinton connections to reverse their decision), they had leaked the story to the Washington Post that very night. Thus, the next phone call Clark received was from a Post reporter asking for confirmation. That meant that even as he was dealing with the stunning news that he would be leaving Brussels, he was being asked by a Post reporter what he felt about this unexpected turn of events. Clark immediately got on the phone himself, trying to reach different high officials in the Pentagon to find out what had happened, but they were all quite deliberately unavailable. No, he was told, General Shelton was busy, in a meeting. And Secretary Cohen? Preparing for morning meetings in Japan and couldn’t take his call. The more important the figure, the less available he was. The only person he could reach was Ken Bacon, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman. There was nothing more Clark could do. It was all over. “I never saw myself as a fifty-five-year-old retired general,” he said a few weeks later.4
Clark was devastated by the news, a world-class slap in the face, a public rebuke of almost unparalleled proportions. His superiors and peers did not merely dislike him, they hated him and what he had done. Later, Sandy Berger told him that, in effect, the Pentagon had fooled the White House on the changeover, claiming that his tour had been the normal one. But Clark knew he had been had, and he had at his fingertips a list of his predecessors who had stayed on for much longer tours. Because other people had been sacrificed by the White House before, Clark was never entirely sure whether or not to believe Berger’s story.
At Clark’s retirement ceremonies, the senior military people were notable for their absence. The new army chief of staff, Eric Shinseki, was there, but some of the other Joint Chiefs were missing, most notably Henry Shelton, an army man and the chairman of the JCS, who happened to be on vacation. Some of the members of the Joint Staff, who were in effect Clark’s peers, were also missing. That of itself was like a rebuke within a rebuke, as if the Chiefs were rejecting not just the man who had run the war, but the war itself. The civilians did show: Cohen, who presided, Berger, Talbott, Jim Steinberg. Albright was away, but she had let others know she was furious about Clark’s treatment.
A year later, as if in atonement, Clinton included Clark on one of the lists for the Presidential Medal of Freedom, but some of Clark’s friends remained irate. The Clinton administration, they thought, owed Wes Clark, big time. He had taken on the most difficult of commands, one that the Clinton people had sent him to undertake, and pulled it off, even though he had had to struggle constantly against the undertow of his own people. He had accomplished what he had set out to do against great odds, and if the Clinton people had been tricked by the Pentagon as they later claimed, then the least they owed Clark was to reverse the process they had inadvertently agreed to. But that was not the kind of thing they liked to do, because it would put them in a sharp and unwanted conflict with the uniformed chiefs. Ironically, what happened to Clark created even more doubts about Clinton among many senior military men. They may have had their serious philosophical differences with Clark, but, they felt, Clinton was deeply in debt to him for the way he had run the war. Now when he had been sliced up, Clinton had somehow stood on the sidelines and done nothing. Again it was about codes and loyalty.
• • •
More than six years after he had first taken office and begun to struggle with the issue of the Balkans, Clinton had finally and quite reluctantly unleashed American airpower in Kosovo and Serbia. He had won that gamble—at least won it for the time being, because winning in the Balkans was always so problematical. But in the end Milosevic had folded his hand. When he had backed down, Clinton had taken a phone call from Senator Joe Biden of Delaware, the ranking Democratic member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Biden had been almost without equal in urging the administration to act militarily in the Balkans. “Congratulations—you’ve got your sea legs,” he told the president. “Joe, you’ve been pretty rough on me,” the president said. Then he paused and added, as if in apology, something revealing: “Remember I came in as a governor and I didn’t have any experience in foreign policy?” It was a nice, friendly call, and it took place in the seventh year of Clinton’s presidency.5