General Cédras and his thugs had intensified their reign of terror, executing orphaned children, raping young girls, killing priests, mutilating people and leaving body parts in the open to terrify mothers, and slashing the faces of mothers with machetes while their children watched. … I was fed up. … I thought we had to go forward.
—BILL CLINTON
The Western mistake … had been to treat the Serbs as rational people with whom one could argue, negotiate, compromise, and agree. In fact they respected only force or an unambiguous and credible threat to use it.
—RICHARD HOLBROOKE
CLINTON’S PREDECESSOR, GEORGE H. W. Bush, being the first post–Cold War president, had no tradition of U.S. diplomacy to draw on when trying to determine the international responsibilities of the United States as the only superpower in a still largely anarchic world. In situations in which U.S. security and economic well-being were not at stake, did this country nevertheless have an obligation to defend and enforce basic world order and justice—that is, the norms of the international system itself: the sanctity of national borders; the rule of no military interventions into another country’s territory (unless the target country were violating these norms)?
In responding to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, President Bush had answered the question of U.S. responsibilities in the affirmative with respect to the world order norms. And in the Somalian humanitarian military intervention he veered into the more controversial realm of using force to shape the internal situation of other countries when doing so was not required by the security or economic condition of the United States. Ironically, it fell to Bush, Realist disciple of Henry Kissinger, to usher in a new foreign policy era of liberal interventionism—at least in the relatively easy cases of dealing with small powers.
President Clinton inherited the post–Cold War Wilsonian disposition that in the early 1990s was more prevalent among the Democratic party elite than among the Republican leadership (which was then split between the George Bush–Brent Scowcroft realists and the neoconservative disciples of Ronald Reagan). The Wilsonian disposition was elevated to doctrinal status in the “enlargement” speech of national security adviser Anthony Lake and the two National Security Council (NSC) national security strategy documents issued over Clinton’s signature, which included promoting democracy and halting gross human rights violations among the U.S. interests that could require the use of U.S. military power.1
WHAT TO DO WITH THE HAITIAN REFUGEES … AND WITH HAITI
As with so many other issues, the view from the Oval Office on the issue of how to deal with the boatloads of refugees from Haiti’s repressive regime looked different than it had from the campaign bus.
The Haitian refugees had started coming in great numbers following the October 1991 military coup in Haiti against the elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Amid persistent reports of brutal repression and abuse of Aristide’s supporters by the military regime, more than 30,000 Haitians headed for the United States in small boats between the coup and the end of the Bush administration. Approximately 20,000 of these were turned back by the U.S. Coast Guard while still outside U.S. territorial waters.
During the 1992 election campaign Clinton had excoriated as “inhumane” and “immoral” Bush’s policy toward the Haitians and Bush’s rationalization that most of the boat people were not really political refugees seeking asylum but people fleeing economic hardship, whom the United States was in no position to absorb. Bush claimed that the proper way to deal with the Haitian exodus was to have U.S. authorities in Haiti screen all potential emigrés to the United States to determine whether they were indeed proper candidates for political asylum.
Clinton had pledged to modify the Bush refugee policy if elected president and also to intensify efforts to restore democracy in Haiti. But shortly after his inauguration, evidently worried that a more welcoming attitude toward the refugees might unleash a veritable flood of them upon Florida’s shores, Clinton averred that he might have been “too harsh” in his criticism of the Bush policy and announced that he would continue the policy of interception “for the time being” but would make it “easier and safer” for Haitians seeking political asylum to apply through the U.S. embassy in Haiti. White House spokesperson George Stephanopoulous told reporters that administration lawyers had determined the Bush repatriation policy was not in violation of U.S. or international law and that the president had “reconsidered his position. … He believes that this is the right thing to do. It is the best way to save lives.”2
Meanwhile, the president said he was putting his administration to work to arrange for a restoration of Aristide to the presidency and of democracy on the island and also to help Haiti with its economic development. The first step was to throw U.S. support behind the diplomatic initiative of the United Nations in July 1993, which grew out of a meeting on Governor’s Island, New York, between UN envoy Dante Caputo and representatives from Haiti. The Governor’s Island agreement provided for a lifting of UN sanctions on Haiti as the reward for the appointment of a new Haitian prime minister, Haiti’s hosting of a U.S. and UN peacekeeping contingent of 1,300 troops, and finally, in October 1993, the return of Aristide to the island.
However, contrary to the spirit of the Governor’s Island accord, when the peacekeepers arrived in Haiti in October 1933 on the ship Harlan County, they were blocked from coming ashore by Haitian paramilitary forces. Not wanting to have a test of arms at that point, the president ordered the Harlan County to turn around. It was a humiliating moment for the United States, and Clinton briefly considered military intervention but decided to rely on further diplomatic persuasion instead.
It took a year of futile diplomatic efforts to bring the Clinton administration to the realization that General Raoul Cédras would continue to block the restoration of democracy unless faced with a credible threat of intervention. Clinton was finally moved to act upon this premise by strong remonstrations from the Congressional Black Caucus and the hunger strike of Randall Robinson, the director of TransAfrica. In July 1994, UN ambassador Madeleine Albright mobilized other members of the Security Council to support Resolution 940 authorizing member states to use force if necessary “to facilitate the departure from Haiti of the military leadership, … the prompt return of the legitimately elected president, and the restoration of the legitimate authorities of the Government of Haiti.”3 This was an unorthodox UN action, but it was reflective of the new strength of the human rights movement and the evolving doctrines of conditional sovereignty and of the responsibility of the wider community to intervene to protect human rights when the country in which they are being violated lacks the capacity or will to provide such protection.
Under the authority of Resolution 940 and related Security Council resolutions, President Clinton ordered the U.S. military to prepare to invade Haiti in September to forcibly remove General Cédras and then, backed by a UN peacekeeping force, to establish the conditions for the restoration of democratic processes. On September 15, 1994, Clinton addressed the nation to prepare the public for the forthcoming military action. He maintained that all diplomatic efforts had been exhausted and issued a warning to the Haitian military leaders that they must relinquish power immediately, explaining that “Haiti’s dictators … control the most violent regime in our hemisphere. Cédras and his armed thugs have conducted a reign of terror, executing children, raping women, killing priests.”4 In this speech and statements during the next few days preceding the planned invasion, due to commence on September 18, the administration reiterated its case for military intervention: (1) It was intolerable that democratic governments in the Americas be overthrown by military coups; (2) terrible human rights violations were being committed by the Haitian military regime; and (3) continuing waves of immigrants from Haiti would destabilize the hemisphere.
On the day of the planned invasion, three Clinton emissaries—former president Jimmy Carter, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell, and Senator Sam Nunn, chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee—were in Haiti trying to convince General Cédras to relinquish power and not to oppose the restoration of President Aristide in time to allow a peaceful entry by the U.S. troops. Carter’s principal aide on this trip, Robert Pastor, describes the tense scene:
By 1 P.M. on Sunday (18 September), the Carter-Nunn-Powell team succeeded in gaining agreement to allow peaceful entry of the US forces into Haiti and restoration of President Aristide. However, with details still remaining to be negotiated, President Clinton’s deadline had now passed. Suddenly, Haitian General Philippe Biamby burst into the room with the news that the 82nd Airborne was being readied for attack. … Biamby accused the US negotiating team of deception and informed them he was taking Cédras to a secure area where they would prepare for the invasion. …
Because the Carter-Nunn-Powell team had conveyed the threat with credibility, but without brandishing it, Cédras had been ready to sign the agreement; once he learned the attack was already underway, however, he refused to sign or even negotiate further.
Because Carter could not persuade the generals to complete the agreement, he changed the venue of the negotiations … to the Presidential Palace, and he asked Cédras to accompany him. There, the de facto president, Emile Jonaissant, was willing to sign the agreement … With the US Air Force halfway to Haiti, President Clinton finally ordered their recall and asked Carter to sign the agreement on his behalf.5
As part of the last-minute deal for calling off the invasion, the Cédras group were to be granted amnesty and the United States would provide them with financial assistance (“golden parachutes”) for leaving the country and settling elsewhere. This feature angered human rights groups. Why not a trial to prosecute Cédras for brutal human rights crimes? But former president Jimmy Carter and Colin Powell defended the deal they negotiated on the grounds that if sacrificing full justice bought the avoidance of the bloodshed of a military invasion and also a restoration of democracy in Haiti, it was worth it.
WHETHER AND HOW TO INTERVENE IN THE BALKANS
The Balkan crises posed questions concerning the purposes and power of the United States in the emerging system of world politics for which the Clinton administration had no answers at the outset and for which it would need to evolve an appropriate conceptual apparatus along the way. It had problematic ramifications for developments in other regions. Any overt definition of the Serbs as the U.S. or Western enemy in Bosnia and Kosovo could play into the hands of the antireform nationalists in Russia for whom a pro-Serbian policy was a cultural, religious, and geopolitical given; accordingly, Yeltsin and the proreform elements would be reluctant to support UN or NATO actions that punished the Serbs. But opposed to this constraint on U.S. policy was the growing frustration throughout the Muslim world with the failure of the West to support their Bosnian religious brethren against blatant aggression at the hands of the Euro-Christian Orthodox Serbs—a potentially dangerous polarization of attitudes that could undermine U.S. interests throughout the Middle East.
TAKING SIDES IN BOSNIA
Having criticized President Bush during the election campaign for not doing enough to arrest the Serbian “ethnic cleansing” campaign in Bosnia and to compel the warring ethnic groups to peacefully settle their disputes over the structure of the Bosnian state, Clinton began his presidency under considerable pressure to come forward with an activist policy to end the civil war. Each week that went by, the better-armed Serbs (having inherited most of the heavy arms and equipment from the disintegrated Yugoslav federation) were getting their way. At the start of February 1993, they had already captured about 70 percent of Bosnia and were starving out enclaves of Muslims who refused to leave the Serb-dominated areas. As many as 150,000 Bosnians had already lost their lives, and 1.5 million had been driven from their homes during the past year of intercommunal strife.
Clinton thus inherited a set of interlinked dilemmas in that troubled area at least as painful as those that had paralyzed the Bush administration. At the political and diplomatic level, should the United States insist the Bosnian Serbs relinquish the bulk of the territory they had captured as a condition of a settlement? The Serbs were bound to reject this, making it necessary for outsiders (including the United States) to provide military assistance to the anti-Serb forces. Clinton was advised that such an equalization of fighting capability would likely prolong and intensify the civil war and that the only way to avoid this consequence would be to credibly threaten direct military intervention by the West with enough forces to decisively turn the tide of battle against the Serbs. Alternatively, should the United States give highest priority to an immediate cessation of hostilities—a cease-fire in place—and the negotiation of a compromise settlement (along the lines of a plan developed jointly by the UN mediator Cyrus Vance and the European Community mediator David Owen) that would carve up Bosnia into essentially autonomous provinces based on current concentrations of the different religious groups? The Vance-Owen plan would appear to reward the Serbs’ brutal aggression and to legitimize their holding on to much of the territory they had taken by force. Moreover, given the bitter grievances that such a partition of Bosnia would leave among minorities within each of the ethnic-majority provinces, the arrangement would require long-term enforcement by large and uniquely powerful international peacekeeping units.
What about direct U.S. military engagement? President Clinton’s military advisers attempted to disabuse their new commander in chief of his notion, expressed during the election campaign, that limited and selected air strikes against Serbian artillery or counter–air enforcement of “no-fly” zones against Serbian aircraft would be sufficient to break the Serbian siege of Bosnian Muslim enclaves. The French commander of UN peacekeeping and humanitarian relief forces also opposed these moves as likely to subject his lightly armed units to retaliatory attacks; and UN military authorities objected to lifting the arms embargo on supplies to the Bosnian Muslims on grounds that this would only encourage them to reopen hostilities against the Serbs in areas where the cease-fire was currently holding. The consensus among the military—national and international—was that any enforcement objectives had to be precisely defined and then provisioned with unambiguously sufficient forces to accomplish their missions. But whether the objective was the imposition of withdrawal demands upon the Serbs or the enforcement of a negotiated settlement, the military requirements would be large—at least 50,000 and as many as 200,000 ground troops, in addition to substantial air cover. Would the United States be willing to participate in this effort, contributing not just air support but also troops to a UN or NATO command?
The administration could not escape the realization that while it was agonizing over what to do, the civil war in Bosnia was intensifying. Press reports that Clinton found the Vance-Owen plan unfair to the Muslims and the announcement that he was appointing his own mediator, Ambassador Reginald Bartholomew, to join the UN mediation effort had the unintended effect of delaying Muslim acceptance of a negotiated compromise, which in turn allowed the Serbs to intensify their military efforts to grab even more of Bosnia before the imposition of a firm cease-fire.6
Clinton became increasingly frustrated with the vicious pattern the situation was exhibiting: lightly armed UN peacekeepers with the mission of enforcing cease-fires but with a mandate not to take sides, and thus standing by virtually paralyzed as one side or the other violated a cease-fire; persistent and spiraling brutality by whichever side was dominant in a locality against the other religious community (“ethnic cleansing” being practiced by the militaries and paramilitaries of each of the three religious communities against one another); and when cease-fires were broken, because of the US and other outside powers’ respect for the UN Security Council mandate of an embargo on weapons deliveries into all of the former Yugoslavia, the Bosnian Serbs, well and continuously supplied with arms from Serbia, a Russian client state, reaped a large asymmetrical benefit. The Croats got some help in circumventing the ban. Meanwhile, the Muslim Bosnians were the most disadvantaged by the embargo.
United Nations’ ambassador Madeleine Albright got the White House to let her introduce a Security Council resolution lifting the arms embargo; however, even the United Kingdom and France joined Russia in abstaining, thus defeating the effort. Unwilling to let it go at that, Albright, joined by Vice President Albert Gore and the national security adviser Anthony Lake, on the strength of the Republicans having captured control of both houses of Congress in the November 1994 elections (Senator Dole had been a leading critic of the embargo and was now sure to get his way), was able to convince the president to unilaterally suspend the embargo despite objections of the European allies and some holdouts in the administration for strict “neutrality.”
Things came to a head in the spring and summer of 1995. In May, in response to a severe shelling of the Bosnian capital Sarajevo by the Serbs, UN authorities acquiesced in the U.S. initiative to have NATO planes bomb ammunition dumps in Pale, a Serb stronghold. The Serbs retaliated by shelling what were supposed to be Muslim safe havens and, most provocatively, by taking hostage nearly 400 UN peacekeeping personnel. To deter further NATO bombing raids, the Serbs chained their captive UN peacekeepers to potential targets—air defense sites, bridges, other obvious military facilities—and demanded as a condition for their release that the UN guarantee there would be no more NATO air strikes. An agreement to that effect was negotiated between the UN peace force commander and the commander of the Bosnian Serb forces, ending the immediate hostage crisis; but it was apparently never formally accepted at UN headquarters.7
A brief period during which NATO air strikes were suspended and various peace options were floated, including Serb cessation of hostilities in return for a withdrawal of the UN peacekeepers, ended on July 6, 1995, with the massive Serb attack on Srebrenica, one of the remaining Muslim enclaves in Bosnia. After shelling the town for five days, General Ratko Mladić’s legions swarmed into the town, taking the Dutch UN peacekeeping contingent hostage while forcing the women and children to leave. The Dutch, upon agreeing to withdraw their UN soldiers, thought they had obtained a promise from General Mladić not to harm the men of the town. But following the peacekeeper’s withdrawal, the men of Srebrenica—more than 7,000 of them—were slaughtered and dumped into mass graves. The extent of the “ethnic cleansing” massacre was not immediately known. But as intelligence investigators pieced together the story over the next few weeks, anger at the horror of Srebrenica—which behind closed doors in the White House Vice President Gore called “genocide”—resulted in a NATO-UN commitment to respond forcefully to further Serb assaults on any of the other Muslim safe areas in Bosnia.8
The president ordered an intensification of diplomatic efforts to convince the Serbs to agree to an independent Bosnia in a constitutional arrangement reflecting the demographic fact of its being a predominantly Muslim province of the former Yugoslavia. The contemplated structure could allow a degree of autonomy for the areas of Bosnia heavily populated by Serbs, but it should be a real federation. “We must commit to a unified Bosnia,” Clinton insisted to the involved members of his administration. “And if we can’t get that at the bargaining table, we have to help the Bosnians on the battlefield.”9 Indeed, a successful Croatian military surge in late summer 1995 against the Serbian forces in the Krajina region showed the world that the Serbs did not yet own the battlefield.
A major escalation of the conflict came in response to the August 28 shelling by the Bosnian Serbs of the Markale market in Sarajevo killing scores of people and injuring nearly 100. The largest military action in NATO’s history up to then, Operation Deliberate Force commenced at 2:00 A.M. on August 30 with more than 60 aircraft flying off the deck of the USS Theodore Roosevelt and from bases in Italy to destroy Bosnian surface-to-air missiles and positions around Sarajevo that were the source of the mortar attacks on the market. French and British artillery units joined in, attacking Serb military barracks in the vicinity.10 A temporary pause was ordered to allow a UN negotiating team to arrange a cessation of hostilities with the Bosnian Serbs. The violence broke out again on September 5 over the incompatibility of each side’s demands. But now the pace and intensity of negotiations also increased.
The first breakthrough agreement was reached on September 8 by the foreign ministers of Bosnia, Croatia, and Yugoslavia, producing an agreement on September 8 vaguely defining the structure of the new Bosnia as two entities (one Bosnian-Croat and the other Serb) within a single state. Then on September 13, the U.S. negotiating team, led by Richard Holbrooke, landed in Belgrade for a series of marathon meetings with the Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević and the notorious Bosnian Serb perpetrators of the ethnic cleansing campaigns President Radovan Karadžić and General Ratko Mladić to hammer out a cease-fire for the Sarajevo area that was announced on September 14. It took another twenty days to negotiate a countrywide cease-fire (which did not hold) and for Holbrooke to get the contending parties to come to Dayton, Ohio, to negotiate the final settlement.11 The Dayton accords, initialed on November 21, 1995, and signed on December 14, established an independent Bosnian state essentially along the lines of the September 8 agreement, with supreme international supervisory authority over its implementation, civilian and military, to be exercised by NATO, with the United States contributing a large share of the troops.
KOSOVO: MADELEINE’S WAR … AND THE DIPLOMATIC DANCE
Four years after Dayton, the unrepentant sponsor of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, Slobodan Milošević, was at it again in Kosovo—this time against the Albanians, the mostly Muslim, linguistically distinct people who make up 90 percent of the population of the province. The demands of the Kosovar Albanians for independence from the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia had been festering for decades. Even the communist dictator Josip Broz Tito had decided to accommodate to that reality by responding to Albanian violent self-determination agitations in 1968 with a grant of substantial autonomy for the province. But in reaction to renewed rebelliousness by the Kosovar Albanians in the 1980s, President Milošević abolished Kosovo’s autonomy and instituted direct rule from Belgrade. Milošević’s harsh attempts to suppress further nationalistic agitation by the Albanians included measures to make sure that all governmental and government-sponsored functions in Kosovo were defined and conducted as Serbian.
Outraged, the Albanians only intensified their activities, forming a province-wide dissident society, the Democratic League of Kosovo. Although their leader at the time, Ibrahim Rugova, was a devotee of nonviolent resistance, increasing frustration with peaceful protests (and even these being suppressed by the Serb authorities) plus envy of the independence the Bosnians had achieved, turned many in the movement toward more radical means and ends. The vehicle for this was the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) with its harassment attacks against Serbs in Kosovo and its call for full independence, not just the restoration of Kosovo’s autonomy within the Serbian state.
Hearing reports in January 1998 that Milošević was preparing a military crackdown on the Kosovo dissidents, Madeleine Albright, now secretary of state, swung into action. As UN ambassador during the first Clinton administration, she had become the point person for organizing the U.S. response in the Bosnian crisis, not because the United Nations was that heavily involved but because of her own knowledge of the area and its peoples (her father having been posted there when she was a girl), her energetic and emotionally driven opposition to the unconscionable human rights abuses that were coming to light, and the fact that, more than anyone else in the administration, she had made it her cause. And as the Bosnian crisis unfolded, she emerged as the most hawkish of Clinton’s advisers on the issue of using force.
Now, building on her success in the Bosnian crisis, she immediately, firmly, and apparently with the president’s full blessing became the first among equals in the administration for directing U.S. strategy against Milošević’s new aggressiveness. She made sure that the Serb president was reminded of the so-called “Christmas warning” President Bush had delivered at the time of similar rumblings in December 1992, informing Milošević that the United States would be prepared to respond militarily if the Serbs initiated an armed conflict in Kosovo, a warning also reiterated by Secretary of State Christopher in early 1993. And she publicly affirmed, “We are not going to stand by and watch the Serbian authorities do in Kosovo what they can no longer get away with in Bosnia.”12
The NSC, under Sandy Berger, and the Defense Department, under William Cohen, were not particularly comfortable with these statements of resolve. The Pentagon, having reluctantly acceded at the end of the Bosnian crisis to the deployment of U.S. peacekeeping troops in Bosnia, was not eager for another mission in the Balkans. But Albright kept arguing in the NSC discussions that the danger of a major confrontation was rapidly increasing and Milošević would not be amenable to a deal unless the threat of NATO or U.S. military force was kept prominently on the table. Albright quotes the exasperated national security adviser as saying, “The way you people at the State Department talk about bombing, you sound like lunatics.”13
But the secretary of state kept at it, also with her counterparts in NATO, with whom she formulated the essential features of the settlement that both the Serbs and the Kosovars had to be persuaded to accept: a negotiated agreement between Milošević and the Albanians that would grant a substantial measure of self-rule to the province of Kosovo. Autonomy, not independence. In her memoir, Albright explains that
Our reluctance to endorse independence was shaped less by principle than by a pragmatic assessment of attitudes in the region. Macedonia and Greece strongly opposed independence for Kosovo because they feared it might inflame separatist ambitions within their own ethnic Albanian populations. Other countries also had minorities with aspirations for independence, including Russia’s Chechens, Georgia’s Abkhaz, Turkey’s Kurds, and Spain’s Basques. More generally, some Europeans feared that an independent Kosovo would become a hotbed of Islamic extremism and organized crime. We couldn’t achieve our goals in Kosovo without support from Europe, and we wouldn’t have Europe’s support if we backed independence for Kosovo.14
The problem with the autonomy-not-independence formula for peace was that neither Milošević nor the militant KLA—that is, both belligerent parties—found it acceptable. Both now, particularly the increasingly confident KLA, thought they could achieve their aims without a negotiated settlement.
The rebel group was also indiscriminate in its attacks and apparently eager to provoke a massive Serb response that would generate international outrage and a willingness by the United States and NATO to enter the fray as they had in Bosnia. Its go-for-broke “summer offensive” in July 1998 did provoke an overwhelming Serb counterattack, driving the KLA plus hundreds of thousands of Kosovars out of their homes and into the woods. But the international response was neither that vigorous nor that swift. Would the displaced people, come winter and afraid to return to their homes, present the world with a spectacle of thousands starving and freezing to death and finally activate a counter-Serb or at least a humanitarian intervention?
Albright continued to insist that it was essential to back diplomacy with force. She had a measure of success in getting the UN Security Council on September 23 to declare that the situation in Kosovo was a threat to the peace and security and to demand that Milošević cease his attacks on civilians. And on September 24 the NATO Council warned that it would authorize air strikes if the Serbs continued with their offensive.
Finally the Serbs did overplay their hand in the dead of winter with a brutal massacre in the town of Račak on January 16, 1999, shelling the town, herding women and children into a mosque, rounding up the adult males, whom they shot or mutilated and threw into a frozen ravine. Now the threat of air strikes assumed a credibility that had been lacking. And Milošević, likely fearing a repeat of something like Operation Deliberate Force, agreed to participate in talks with the Albanians convening on February 6 in Rambouillet, France. Albright mobilized her diplomatic counterparts in the so-called Contact Group consisting of the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Italy to coalesce behind a plan that would grant autonomy to Albanian Kosovo implemented by a NATO peacekeeping force.
Again, however, the sticking point for the Albanians was the status of mere autonomy, and for the Serbs it was having their sovereignty compromised by an outside military force deployed indefinitely on their soil. By deft maneuvering Albright was able to get the Albanians to agree to the draft agreement by persuading some of their delegation that autonomy, although the starting status for Kosovo, could evolve, perhaps through some kind of referendum after three years, into something more closely approaching independence. But the Serbs dug in their heels on the issue of a NATO force presence.
Just weeks after the collapse of the Rambouillet negotiations, the Serbs began their spring offensive, flouting repeated warnings from Albright and others. And on March 23, NATO Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar, consistent with the now-standing NATO Council directive, ordered NATO Commander General Wesley Clark to initiate the preplanned air attack on Serbian military assets. The next day, with the attack already underway, President Clinton informed the nation what had been happening:
My fellow Americans, today our Armed Forces joined our NATO allies in air strikes against Serbian forces responsible for the brutality in Kosovo. We have acted with resolve for several reasons.
We act to protect thousands of innocent people in Kosovo from a mounting military offensive. We act to prevent a wider war; to diffuse a powder keg at the heart of Europe that has exploded twice before in this century with catastrophic results.
The president recited the history of the conflict and related how in the round of negotiations the previous month the Kosovar leaders were willing to sign a peace agreement to end the fighting, but the Serbian leaders refused even to discuss key elements, while stationing 40,000 troops in and around Kosovo in preparation for a major offensive.
Now, they started moving from village to village, shelling civilians and torching their houses. We’ve seen innocent people taken from their homes, forced to kneel in the dirt and sprayed with bullets; Kosovar men dragged from their families, fathers and sons together, lined up and shot in cold blood. This is not war in the traditional sense. It is an attack by tanks and artillery on a largely defenseless people, whose leaders already agreed to peace. …
Today, we and our 18 NATO allies agreed to do what we said we would do. … In short, if President Milošević will not make peace, we will limit his ability to make war. …
If he decides to accept the peace agreement and demilitarize Kosovo, NATO has agreed to help implement it with a peacekeeping force. If NATO is invited to do so, our troops should take part in that mission to keep the peace. But I do not intend to put our troops in Kosovo to fight a war.15
I have italicized the last sentence because the administration suffered criticism for taking off the table the possibility of deploying U.S. ground forces to Kosovo as a part of the military action against Serbia. Many strategists and political analysts have argued that this made it easier for Milošević to continue to prolong his fight.16
In response to the NATO bombing, the Serbs went on a rampage in Kosovo. Albright and her fellow advocates of the coercive diplomacy strategy, she later admitted,
had underestimated the speed, scale, and ferocity of the Serbs’ terror campaign. Homes in hundreds of villages were burned. Scholars, journalists, and political leaders who had advocated independence were tracked down and killed. Tens of thousands of people were made to board trains which were sealed from the outside and sent to the Albanian border. Thousands of others were herded along the same route by car or on foot. Serb security forces stripped the departing Kosovars of birth certificates, driver’s licenses, car registrations, and other proof of identification.17
NATO replied with its own escalation, hitting an expanded target list in Serbia itself, and the authors of the strategy as well as its critics began wondering where the spiraling paroxysm of violence would go next. Time magazine ran a feature article titled “Madeleine’s War,” with a caricature of Albright on the cover wearing an air force leather jacket and talking into a cell phone. She and the president considered strategies of de-escalation, like a bombing pause with an invitation to the Serbs to reciprocate, but they rejected it as likely to be seen by Milošević as a sign of weakness. “Instead we concluded that the air campaign would succeed if we continued to make it faster, harder, and smarter. Along with the British [Prime Minister Tony Blair had been a staunch supporter of the coercive strategy from the start], we pushed the Alliance to intensify bombing and further expand the circle of targets.”18 In addition to the standard military targets, including factories producing defense equipment and ammunition, Operation Allied Force attacked Serbia’s electricity infrastructure and disrupted water supplies in several cities.19
Ominously, the Russians, who had been largely cooperative in the earlier phase of the crisis in trying to find diplomatic formulas for resolving the crisis, were now warning that some of their military commanders were lobbying President Yeltsin to allow them to intervene on Serbia’s behalf. And Yeltsin himself was accusing the West of dangerously repolarizing the world, which might compel him to retarget Russia’s missiles toward NATO. Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov complained to Secretary Albright that Russia could not “sit around and watch NATO destroy a sovereign nation.”20
To compound the growing international political difficulties, an error in targeting intelligence by the CIA caused an embarrassing accidental strike on China’s embassy in Belgrade, killing three Chinese and injuring twenty. The CIA targeters mistook the embassy for a building holding Serb military communications facilities. To sooth Beijing’s anger and to deflect Russian attempts to exploit it, Secretary Albright acceded to the request of the Chinese ambassador in Washington that she make a formal apology on Chinese television.
On the ground in Kosovo, however, the bombing was taking its toll on the Serb ability to bring its heavy equipment into play against the KLA resourcefulness in devising asymmetric guerilla tactics. And there were reports of increasing numbers of Serb soldiers deserting. Antiwar demonstrations in Belgrade were also occurring.
The Russians were getting back into the act of trying to broker a cessation of hostilities, hoping to get NATO to allow them to have their own peacekeepers in parts of in postwar Kosovo, which they were probably telling Milošević could protect the Serb minority there from Albanian revengeful retaliation. Meanwhile, there were leaks in Washington, probably deliberate and unchallenged by the White House, that the Pentagon was preparing ground troop options.
Madeleine Albright’s memoir relates the diplomatic endgame to the war: Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott was dispatched to Bonn to meet with Russian diplomats to see if a common position on a war-ending deal could be worked out with the Russians. With a deft reconstruction by Talbott of the Russian formula for having its own peacekeeping role—the Russians were told this was an issue to be hammered out between NATO and Russia and did not have to involve Milošević at this stage—a common position was worked out to present to the Serb leader stipulating the conditions he would have to meet for the bombing to end.21 “Now we had to choreograph the next steps,” Albright recalls.
Once the fighting stopped, a NATO-led force would maintain order in Kosovo as the Serbs withdrew. The UN would authorize the peacekeeping mission and take charge of civilian administration. The EU would coordinate reconstruction. The OSCE … would help organize elections and train civilian police.
To put all these elements in motion, and in the proper order, requires a complicated diplomatic dance.22
And she proudly concludes her story of the Kosovo crisis with the compliment she received from the German foreign minister: “Well, if it was Madeleine’s war, it is now Madeleine’s victory.”23