Chapter Thirty-six

KOSOVO

Clinton surely was entitled to a season of quiet in the wake of his impeachment victory and the tumultuous thirteen months that had come before. He did not get it. Instead, with frightening velocity, a new and quite different crisis was upon him. It was unfolding in a place called Kosovo.

Kosovo is a province of Serbia, still ruled then by the strongman of Belgrade, Slobodan Milosevic. The emergency that sprang upon the Clinton White House in March 1999 had been building in plain view for a year. But the latest problems of the Balkans had occupied a rather small space in the peripheral vision of a president whose gaze had been focused on political survival. Most Americans, whose news had been saturated with the Lewinsky opera, could be forgiven for wondering how it was that the United States was suddenly in a war. But war it was—for seventy-eight days that spring, an ordeal just as intense, and with human consequences that were vastly more far-reaching, than the scandal Clinton had just endured.

War came that spring when Clinton concluded this was the only way to enforce an obscure but long-standing U.S. commitment, dating to the closing days of the Bush administration, to protect Kosovo and its population of ethnic Albanians from aggression by the Serb majority just over the borders of this largely autonomous province. Serbs had deep historic hatreds of Kosovar Albanians, and Belgrade had long coveted direct control of the province, which was filled with religious and cultural landmarks with deep symbolic resonance in Serbian history. Hatred and territorial ambition flowed both ways. The Kosovar Albanians equally loathed ethnic Serbians. The violent and popularly supported Kosovo Liberation Army wanted nothing short of independence, something Washington did not support. The Kosovo problem was replete with parallels with the confrontation Clinton had faced at the beginning of his term in Bosnia. The question now was whether the administration could live up to its pledge to deter a Bosnia-style campaign of ethnic cleansing and slaughter in Kosovo.

The escalation of the Kosovo confrontation during 1998 was still another example of how the administration’s energy and attention had been sapped by the Lewinsky scandal. In early March of that year, Serb atrocities in a Kosovo village left dozens of Kosovar Albanians dead. The administration pronounced this unacceptable, and sought to deter Belgrade from further violence with a combination of economic sanctions and negotiations. Several diplomats with long experience in the Balkans, including Madeleine Albright and Richard Holbrooke, warned that this strategy alone was insufficient. Milosevic would respond only to a formal threat of military intervention. NATO ambassador Alexander Vershbow, a veteran foreign service officer who had been heavily involved in Bosnia policy, wrote a long memo in the summer of 1998 urging a push for a comprehensive Dayton-style solution to the Kosovo problem. This would mean putting another international peacekeeping force, with more U.S. troops, on the ground in the Balkans. He found no takers in the White House, where national security officials knew that Clinton had no room for any more problems on his plate. For now, containment of the Kosovo problem was his goal.

By January, however, it had become clear that Kosovo’s perils could be ignored no longer. On the fifteenth, while the Senate was busy with opening arguments in Clinton’s impeachment trial, Milosevic’s security forces broke a ceasefire agreement and killed fifty civilians, including women and children, in a village called Racak. Never again, Clinton had said after the horrors of Rwanda and Bosnia. Did he mean it?

He did. On January 27, Clinton agreed to a vigorous strategy to push toward resolution of the Kosovo problem before it became a full-fledged crisis of ethnic cleansing. Albright would launch negotiations at Rambouillet, France. These negotiations would be carried out with a powerful stick. If Serbia failed to pull back the ground forces it was currently massing around Kosovo and accept a negotiated settlement guaranteeing autonomy for the province, then NATO would forcibly intervene with air strikes against Serbia. (At the same time, the Kosovar Albanians were warned that unless they relinquished dreams of independence and also forswore violence, they would have no NATO protection and would be left to their own fate.) Albright crossed the Atlantic and negotiations began at a turreted fourteenth-century castle nestled in snow-covered woods around Rambouillet. The hope was that this magical environment would produce another breakthrough like the one four years earlier at Dayton. Instead, it produced a stalemate. By late March, Milosevic remained defiant, while his forces continued to build menacingly around Kosovo. The implication was inescapable: The dictator wanted a test of wills with Clinton.

On March 20, the Serbian forces swarmed into Kosovo. There was a final sprint by Holbrooke to Belgrade to warn Milosevic that he was guaranteeing a bloody confrontation. He professed indifference. So acting on Clinton’s ultimatum, on March 24, NATO war planes began dropping bombs on Serb military targets. It was the start of the first full-fledged war in NATO’s fifty-year history. That night Clinton spoke from the Oval Office, with a large map of Serbia on his desk as a visual aid to explain to a largely baffled public what Kosovo was and why it mattered. The Serbs, he explained, had launched “an attack by tanks and artillery on a largely defenseless people whose leaders already have agreed to peace.” Noting that genocide had plagued this region before, he implored, “Ending this tragedy is a moral imperative.”

In this speech, one could see the shape of a bolder and more purposeful leader. Clinton did not equivocate, as in Bosnia, or avert his gaze, as in Rwanda. This was a different man, tested by experience and more confident in his own judgments. At the same time, the new boldness was still interwoven with the old caution and sensitivity to political risk that was always in Clinton’s nature. He made clear that NATO would fight this war from the air only. As for U.S. ground forces, he announced, “I do not intend to put our troops in Kosovo to fight a war.”

An air war was most sensible for a variety of reasons. It was safer by far for NATO forces, which made it easier to sustain support for the Kosovo intervention with both a skeptical U.S. Congress and NATO allies, many of whom were deeply anxious about going to war against Serbia. What was unwise, however, was for Clinton to appear in his Oval Office address to be ruling out the possibility of ground troops. The effect was to telegraph to Milosevic that there were clear limits to what NATO would do in pursuit of a “moral imperative.” If the Serbs could simply wait out the air campaign and wait for NATO’s resolve to weaken, the dictator could fairly presume, he might be able to set his own terms for Kosovo.

Another misjudgment became glaringly evident in the opening days of the air war. One rationale for the bombing campaign, as Clinton explained it, was that it would “deter” the Serbs from waging an even more aggressive campaign against the Kosovars. The assumption was that Milosevic, like bullies in other settings, would back down quickly in the face of NATO’s show of force. This had been the best guess of the Central Intelligence Agency, and it had been Madeleine Albright’s argument in internal deliberations. This assumption proved dead wrong. Far from being deterred, the Serb forces dramatically accelerated their campaign of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. Within several days, several hundred thousand Kosovars were forcibly expelled from their homes and transported under gunpoint out of Kosovo. Refugee camps in neighboring Albania and Macedonia were quickly swamped. A humanitarian and military catastrophe was in the offing. NATO had laid down promises of protection to Kosovar Albanians and threats of reprisal to Serbs that it lacked the military might to deliver on.

But in these bleak opening days of the Kosovo war Clinton revealed he was a different and much stronger character than the man who took office six years before. In those early years, when events went badly, Clinton would stammer and second-guess his own judgment and others’. He would tell visiting lawmakers that his advisers had given him bad information. Now the old roles were reversed. It was Clinton’s foreign policy team—whose members were being pilloried daily in the press and beginning to cast accusing eyes at one another—who had lost confidence. And it was the president who was telling them to take a breath and realize that everything was going to work out in the end. There was no point of having high poll numbers if you were not prepared to spend capital on something like this, he said.

In the Oval Office one morning after a particularly brutal day of news from Kosovo, Clinton looked around the room and “could see fear in the whites of the eyes,” as one participant recalled.

“Guys, let’s not lose sight of why we did this,” the president urged. “Let’s not forget what prompted us to do this and who is responsible.”

The prospect of failure was very real. So was the poise with which Clinton confronted this prospect and resolved to avoid it.

That spring Time magazine put the Kosovo conflict on its cover with an arresting image. It was Albright, standing on a tarmac wearing a flight jacket and holding a cell phone to her ear. “Madeleine’s War,” read the headline.

More than Clinton even, the secretary of state had become the public face of the Kosovo intervention. She was the first woman to preside at Foggy Bottom, but her celebrity sprang from her great theatrical presence and charm, which allowed her to dominate a room. Most beguiling of all was her biography. She was not yet two when her family whisked her out of their native Czechoslovakia to escape the Nazi occupation. In America, she had married a newspaper heir, and, while raising her children, began a career in diplomacy. After a jarring divorce that left her well set financially, she turned her Georgetown home into a Democratic foreign policy salon. This history, a flight from fascism and a climb up America’s ladders of opportunity, helped inform a deeply idealistic view of America’s benevolent role in the world. It was an attitude that many foreign policy traditionalists, including some who now worked under her at the State Department, regarded as naÏve. Her admirers believed it gave her voice a deeper timbre. “History is watching us,” she told fellow foreign ministers at a conference in Kosovo in London.

Clinton himself put it aptly that spring when he publicly thanked Albright “for being able to redeem the lessons of your life story by standing up for the freedom of the people in the Balkans.”

Clinton genuinely was drawn to Albright’s life story, and was proud that he had appointed her. Just as genuinely, he found her a difficult woman, and on occasion regretted that he had been pressured into her appointment. In Clinton’s view, in internal deliberations Albright was less likely to bring realistic analysis than sententious pronouncements about the morally right course. Clinton vastly preferred solutions over sermons from his own aides. In her public role, Clinton regarded Albright as a strong voice, but also a grandstander. Once she allowed herself to be the star at a ceremony at the Truman Library in Independence, Missouri, to celebrate NATO expansion. A presidential friend and foreign policy adviser told Clinton how curious this seemed—the president should be the one representing the United States at an occasion like this. With some real heat in his voice, Clinton replied, “Madeleine will screw me every time.”

Albright might have been the face of the Kosovo intervention, but by no means was she Clinton’s most important aide as he executed the policy. That role belonged to a man who enjoyed less publicity but vastly more influence. Sandy Berger was one of the Clinton White House’s long-haul players. Berger was himself a shrewdly political man who had known Clinton since the 1970s—long enough to understand the president’s idiosyncrasies. When Clinton barked, Berger was comfortable barking right back. When Clinton worried about the political implications of a foreign policy decision, Berger was a sympathetic ear. He had bided his time patiently, albeit with growing frustration, as Tony Lake’s loyal deputy in the first term. Now that he had achieved his goal of being national security adviser, managing difficult personalities was still part of his job.

One of those personalities was Albright. She and Berger had been friends for twenty years. In their public postures, they rarely betrayed signs of the traditional tensions between national security advisers and secretaries of state. But those tensions were there, and were often the theme of the half dozen or more phone conversations a day between Berger and Albright. Their relationship was based on mutual affection, but overlaid by bickering and sighs and eye-rolling resentment. She believed, with some cause, that the heavily male team at the White House privately condescended to her and sought to hoard influence at her expense. He believed, with some cause, that she worried as much about massaging her public image and getting on the Sunday talk shows as about the substance of policy.

Berger’s credentials in the priesthood of foreign policy intellectuals had themselves been challenged on occasion. He had been a deputy to Lake in the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff in the Carter years, but he was more of a speechwriter than a strategist. Most of Berger’s career had been as a successful Washington lawyer, with a practice specializing in international trade. This was a fine background for understanding the new world of foreign policy, with its emphasis on commercial markets, but it was not a résumé to impress the elitists. “I really like him,” said Henry Kissinger. “But you can’t blame a trade lawyer for not being a global strategist.”

Clinton and Berger both had reason to resent that remark. They did have a strategy. It was a worldview—different from the one Kissinger and national security traditionalists had espoused—that put a premium on updating and expanding alliances for a post–Cold War world, opening up commercial markets, curbing weapons proliferation, and trying to limit humanitarian catastrophes as long as this could be done at acceptable political and military cost. These spacious themes allowed a lot of room for improvisation. And it was here that Berger was superbly well equipped for his job. He worked inhuman hours, arriving at the White House by 7 a.m. and staying invariably to 9:30 or 10 p.m. and often much later. He was a worrywart, by temperament and legal training, and he immersed himself in virtually every problem, large and small alike, that moved through the sprawling National Security Council bureaucracy beneath him. He was an intelligent and good-hearted man, though sometimes a short-tempered one. All of this, combined with his intimate rapport with Clinton, had made him the most powerful national security adviser since Kissinger in the Nixon White House. The top foreign policy advisers called themselves the “ABC Club,” for Albright, Berger, and Cohen. No one inside the State Department or Pentagon or White House doubted that it was Berger who was the dominant member.

It was Berger who crafted the composite policy on Kosovo that emerged from the ABC Club’s deliberations. While Albright brought aggressive instincts, pushing always for the most robust intervention and wanting a revocation of the no-ground-troops pledge, Cohen reflected the Pentagon’s usual reluctance to commit its forces, particularly in humanitarian ventures. Berger shared Secretary of State Albright’s moralism and Defense Secretary Cohen’s caution. By April, several weeks into the air war, ground troops remained off the table, at Berger’s insistence, even as there was precious little evidence that the air campaign was achieving the war’s stated objectives. Clinton’s policy continued to reflect a paradoxical mix of lofty aims pursued with limited means.

In the third week of April, Washington played host to an event that was originally conceived of as a celebration: the fiftieth anniversary of NATO. Instead of a party, heads of state from across Europe arrived for a war council. Allied confidence was justifiably shaken by the poor course of the Kosovo intervention so far. But there were serious splits between nations about what to do.

Tony Blair, who approached the crisis with the same crusading instincts as Albright, was agitating with rising impatience for NATO to prove its will to win. That meant preparing for a possible ground invasion of Serbia. On the other hand, Germany’s newly elected chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, was warning that his government would likely fall if NATO pursued a ground option. His public was already deeply ambivalent about NATO waging an air war, even for laudable purposes. It was more than domestic politics that caused Clinton to avoid committing U.S. ground troops; he was caught in the crosscurrents of deeply contradictory views within the alliance.

Remarkably, Clinton was enjoying these crosscurrents. He was again liberated by his central insight into foreign policy: It was just like domestic politics, but in a different forum. As leaders descended on Washington, Clinton was working them as if he was trying to pass an education bill in the Arkansas legislature.

Blair, who had been having almost daily phone conversations with Clinton, was the first to arrive in Washington. Their meeting at the White House was unusually tense. Two years before, at their first Downing Street meeting in 1997, it was the similarities of the two men that had been so striking: two young leaders, both tugging progressive parties into a more modern era. Now, the crisis had put their differences in sharp relief. Blair valued action and clarity of purpose; Clinton, flexibility and consensus. As the stakes rose in the Kosovo crisis, the two men viewed each other with mounting frustration. While still close to the president, after two years in office Blair was no longer willing to play the subordinate to Clinton. Nor was the prime minister so flush with admiration. As he watched the American equivocate on whether he would commit the political and military resources to guarantee victory, he began to understand why some people regarded Clinton as an unreliable leader. For his part, Clinton was irked by Blair’s impatience. It should have been obvious to Blair, Clinton thought, how delicate relationships in the alliance were. In their White House meeting, Clinton implored the prime minister to give it time. Air strikes might yet make a ground intervention unnecessary, he reasoned, and in the meantime the paramount goal had to be allied unity. We can’t let Milosevic wait us out and divide NATO, Clinton said.

Later, Clinton met with the prime minister of Spain, José María Aznar López, in the White House residence. The conversation offered a vivid glimpse into how Clinton had come to excel at massaging his relationships on the world stage. In this case, Clinton’s goal was to prevent French president Jacques Chirac from disrupting the NATO summit, as was his wont, with a grandstanding French proposal for resolving the Kosovo conflict. Clinton knew that Chirac had been enlisting other European leaders. Gleefully, the president suggested lines for Aznar that could show sympathy for Chirac but keep him at bay. “You tell him, ‘These damn Americans! They won’t give me any room to breathe. I’m sorry, Jacques, I can’t be with you.’ ”

Clinton’s energetic maneuvering at the NATO summit—insisting that hawks like Blair agree to keep faith with the bombing campaign, while also keeping dovish nations like Germany from losing nerve and seeking a premature compromise with Milosevic—was a masterpiece of diplomacy. The week ended with the alliance intact, if precariously united in strategy for Kosovo. All nineteen nations agreed to a resolution in support of the air war, and declaring to Serbia that no action short of withdrawal from Kosovo was acceptable. Artful diplomacy, however, could not make up for the failure, so far, of the military campaign. Serb forces remained inside Kosovo; a million Kosovar Albanians remained outside, in refugee camps. The allied bombing had grown more aggressive. It was no longer aimed principally at Serb military forces in Kosovo; instead, the target list steadily expanded to include bridges, power plants, military headquarters, and other strategic locations across Serbia, especially in the capital, Belgrade. A more robust campaign had its perils. On May 7, NATO accidentally bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, killing three Chinese citizens. The bombers had hit the building they intended, but outdated CIA maps did not show that the building was no longer a Serbian military office. Clinton was appalled that such an egregious error could be committed by the world’s most technologically advanced military. He tried to call Chinese premier Jiang Zemin to apologize, but for several days Jiang would not even accept his call. For the moment, it looked as if Clinton’s carefully plotted march to a more cooperative relationship with China would be a victim of Kosovo. Meanwhile, Milosevic remained defiant. He did indeed believe he could wait out NATO—and Clinton, too.

If Clinton was going to prove Milosevic wrong, it was increasingly obvious that he needed to acknowledge that Blair had been right. The insertion of ground troops into Kosovo, once unthinkable, would have to be put on the table. After weeks of agonizing internal debate, Clinton announced a dramatic policy shift almost as an aside during a brief exchange with reporters. “I and everyone else has always said that we intend to see our objectives achieved and that we have not and will not take any option off the table.” Characteristically, the White House insisted that this important reversal actually represented no change at all. At the same time, Clinton was of no mind to give any nod to Blair for his prescience on this key question. Instead, a few hours later, the two leaders had their most difficult conversation ever. Clinton was furious that the British had been openly advertising their position in favor of the ground troop option in the American papers, and not so subtly underscoring the weakness of the U.S. position. Clinton had reason to be sensitive. Both public polls and Mark Penn’s surveys showed that the American public was losing confidence in Clinton’s handling of the war. A majority, however, did not want escalation—they preferred an immediate negotiated settlement. Clinton was losing the war, and his public; the last thing he needed was his closest ally shooting spitballs at him from across the Atlantic. After clearing the air over the media question, the two settled into a tense discussion of strategy that lasted hours. While ground troops were on the table, Clinton said, they still were not the right option. Blair reminded him that a ground operation might take several months to be successful. If they did not move soon, then the first autumn snows would be falling in the mountainous Balkans before a NATO victory was at hand—inviting a serious humanitarian crisis for refugees living in open-air tents, and making an already dangerous military venture much more complicated. Preparations for ground troops needed to begin immediately. Only at the end of the conversation was a sense of common cause regained. In a tone that conveyed both defiance and reassurance, Clinton told Blair, “Let’s be clear about one thing. We’re not going to lose.”

The president needed to send this message not only to Blair, but down through his own administration, which remained sharply divided on the question of ground troops. Albright continued to press hard for any means to victory. She was joined in this by the nation’s top military commander in Europe, General Wesley Clark, the supreme allied commander at NATO headquarters outside Brussels. Clark was an Arkansas native who had known Clinton casually for years. Brilliant and highly ambitious, Clark had a legion of critics within the army who regarded him as vainglorious and opportunistic—a latter-day Douglas MacArthur. But Clark was a favorite at the White House, where he kept in touch regularly with senior officials throughout the Kosovo war. These back-channel communications only increased the commander’s friction with his superiors at the Pentagon. Defense Secretary William Cohen, reflecting the institutional skepticism of most of the military, was deeply wary of expanding the Kosovo commitment. It fell as usual to Berger to resolve this bureaucratic tussle, all the while trying to discern Clinton’s calculus of risks: What costs was he really prepared to bear?

Berger well knew the hazards. The military planning had made clear the ground troop option was going to be costly and dangerous, far beyond anything the American public had been prepared to expect. For instance, it turned out NATO tanks were too wide to fit in the maze of mountain road tunnels in Kosovo. American forces would be fighting a Serb army on its own territory. Casualties would be in the thousands, far exceeding what the armed forces had incurred in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Yet if Clinton meant what he said—anything short of victory was unacceptable—this was the path before him. In early June, Clinton resolved to start down it. Berger, at the president’s instruction, recommended an immediate deployment of 100,000 American troops to the Balkans, in preparation for invasion.

Here, as if by some mysterious cycle in Clinton’s life, was when fortune broke his way. After weeks of defiant resolve, Milosevic buckled in early June. To the surprise of the administration and its allies, the Serbian dictator yielded to NATO’s demands for a withdrawal from Kosovo and the arrival of an international peacekeeping force in the province. The war was over. The previous three months had been harrowing, and hardly a textbook exercise in military strategy. “Winning ugly” is how military scholars Ivo Daalder and Michael O’Hanlon described the Kosovo episode. But if Clinton’s victory was not a thing of beauty, neither was it simply a stroke of good luck. For most of the bombing campaign, Milosevic had enjoyed the sympathies of Russia, historically an ally of Serbia. Boris Yeltsin had been so appalled by what he regarded as NATO’s illegitimate war that for weeks he refused even to take Clinton’s calls. But the careful bridge-building that the Clinton administration had pursued over two terms with Yeltsin’s Russia paid dividends. In the end, the Russian leader made clear his nascent relationship with the West was more important than his grievances over Kosovo. He appointed his prime minister, Viktor Chernomyrdin, to negotiate the details of an ultimatum that NATO and Russia jointly presented to Serbia. Milosevic folded only after realizing the full extent of his isolation. Clinton’s victory, no matter how ugly, reflected his own seasoning as a leader and the fruition of a strategy for cooperatively engaging the world that he had begun seven years earlier.