America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History (31 page)

The grandly named Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), created in 1993, offered the best hope of deliverance. As armies go, the KLA left much to be desired, however. As late as 1996, it consisted of no more than 150 fighters and commanded little popular following. Yet by early 1998, it had mustered sufficient capacity to launch a series of harassing attacks against Serbs in Kosovo. These included assassinations, kidnappings, and bombings. U.S. officials denounced the KLA as a terrorist organization, giving Slobodan Milo
š
evi
ć
reason to believe that he had tacit American permission to crush the group. In the summer of 1998, he set out to do just that. A heavy-handed campaign of repression dealt the KLA a severe setback but also created a huge refugee crisis that attracted widespread media attention. For Milo
š
evi
ć
, the two hundred thousand Kosovar refugees were a public relations disaster. For the KLA, they represented a bonanza.
¹²

Milo
š
evi
ć
was playing right into his opponents’ hands. The cycle of KLA incitements and Serb reprisals was ineluctably drawing the United States and its allies into Kosovo’s fight for independence.
¹³
By October 1998, with the bellicose Madeleine Albright having now replaced the bland Warren Christopher as secretary of state, Washington was issuing ultimatums. Milo
š
evi
ć
had “not complied fully with the demands of the international community,” Albright charged. Either that was now going to stop or Serbia was going to face punitive military action. “We have made it clear to Milosevic and Kosovars,” Albright emphasized, “that we do not support independence for Kosovo—that we want Serbia out of Kosovo, not Kosovo out of Serbia.”
¹⁴
As a practical matter, Albright’s stated objectives were inherently at odds with one another. To evict the Serbs was necessarily to hand independence-minded KLA terrorists a victory.

After posting the eviction notice, the United States and its allies paused before enforcing its dictates. Another high-profile mission by Holbrooke extracted concessions from Milo
š
evi
ć
, which the Serb leader honored just long enough to gain a bit of breathing space. Faced with the prospect of a NATO air attack, Yugoslav forces did withdraw from Kosovo as Washington had demanded. The KLA wasted no time in filling the vacuum. By December, fighting—and the dispossession of civilians in Kosovo—had resumed.

In truth, not everyone in Washington shared Albright’s eagerness to force a showdown. Buffeted by multiple crises, the Clinton administration had reached its nadir. For the president himself, the Monica Lewinsky affair was in full swing, with the House Judiciary Committee approving articles of impeachment on December 11. A week later, the latest in a string of confrontations with Saddam Hussein culminated in the four-day bombing campaign known as Operation Desert Fox. Critics called it a wag-the-dog stunt concocted to distract public attention from the troubles assailing the presidency.
¹⁵
The charge was not easy to refute.

Secretary Albright anticipated that initiating a war over Kosovo was likely to invite a similar charge. Putting the onus for war on the unsavory Milo
š
evi
ć
was therefore vital. As State Department spokesman Jamie Rubin put it, “In order to move towards military action, it has to be clear that the Serbs were responsible.”
¹⁶
This describes the purpose of a putative peace conference convened under allied auspices at Rambouillet, France, in February 1999. Nominally, the conference represented one last good-faith effort to avert armed intervention by NATO. In fact, its purpose was to remove any remaining barriers to intervention.

Acting under acute American pressure, the Kosovars acquiesced in playing their assigned part. Without even the slightest show of enthusiasm, their delegates agreed to disarm the KLA in return for a promise of self-government
without
independence. A large NATO occupation force allowed access throughout the remnants of Yugoslavia was to guarantee this arrangement.
¹⁷
On March 18, Milo
š
evi
ć
’s representatives predictably and obligingly rejected this deal. In doing so, they handed Albright her casus belli.

From his headquarters in Mons, Belgium, General Clark had closely monitored these developments. While presiding over the ongoing occupation of Bosnia, Clark was actively promoting the use of bombing threats to bring Milo
š
evi
ć
to heel. During trips back to Washington, he collared just about anyone who would listen, whether in the Pentagon, the State Department, or the White House. His efforts at evangelizing did not find favor with Secretary of Defense William Cohen, his immediate boss in the U.S. chain of command, or with JCS chairman General Hugh Shelton, not in Clark’s chain of command but someone he could ill afford to alienate. Both began to question not only Clark’s propensity for freelancing but also his judgment.
¹⁸

Clark gave them ample reason to do so. On a Pentagon visit in June 1998, he had pressed his views on General Joseph Ralston, a politically savvy officer then serving as vice chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The exchange, recounted in Clark’s own memoirs, testifies to his singleminded, not to say tone-deaf self-confidence. Clark had made his standard pitch about getting Milo
š
evi
ć
to lay off the Kosovars by confronting him with the prospect of a NATO air offensive.

Ralston:
“Wes, what are we going to do if the air threat doesn’t deter him?”

Clark:
“Well, it will work. I know him as well as anyone. And it will give the diplomats the leverage they need.”

Ralston:
“OK, but let’s just say it doesn’t work. What will we do?”

Clark:
“Well, then we’ll bomb. We’ll have to follow through.”

Yet this qualified at best as a theoretical possibility, Clark insisted. Things were not going to come to actual violence. “I know Milosevic; he doesn’t want to get bombed.”
¹⁹

Ralston remained skeptical. Clark wrote off his fellow four-star’s inability to grasp the obvious as evidence of “the military’s innate conservatism.”
²⁰
Yet far more striking is Clark’s attribution of the problem in Kosovo to the machinations of one particularly nasty individual. Bosnia had taught Clark that “quarrels in the region were not really about age old religious differences but rather the result of many unscrupulous and manipulative leaders seeking their own power and wealth at the expense of ordinary people.”
²¹
By implication, removing or at least intimidating unscrupulous leaders offered the most direct path to giving ordinary people the justice they deserved.

Such a perspective, dismissing political or historical complexities that might impede the use of American power, was by no means peculiar to Clark alone. In hawkish circles, such thinking exerted considerable appeal. In September 1998, for example, a group of foreign policy notables—the sort that convened for luncheons at SAIS—published a full-page letter to President Clinton in
The New York Times,
urging more forceful action in Kosovo
.
The title of the letter summarized its message: “Mr. President, Milosevic Is the Problem.”
²²

Although nobody dared to propose openly that the United States should simply bump off the Serb leader, here we glimpse yet again the logic destined in time to find expression in a full-fledged policy of targeted assassination. Bad leaders were preventing good outcomes. Solution? Get rid of them. During the years to come, the United States would repeatedly test this proposition, without evident success. Decapitation was to prove a poor substitute for strategy. Whatever problems the United States was facing in the Greater Middle East, they went much deeper than the actions of a few evildoers.

When the Rambouillet conference adjourned without reaching an agreement, Milo
š
evi
ć
, in effect, was calling NATO’s bluff: The mere threat of bombing had not produced the desired results. Indeed, beginning on March 20, Serb reinforcements, both military and paramilitary police forces, started pouring into Kosovo. This marked the beginning of Operation Horseshoe, a Yugoslav offensive aimed at eradicating the KLA and expelling the Muslim interlopers once and for all.

Clark himself was unperturbed. With NATO having authorized itself to use force, the SACEUR had at hand a carefully refined campaign plan ready for implementation. Late on the afternoon of March 23, Shelton called from Washington with the order to execute. From that moment, what the press took to calling “Madeleine’s War” became in equal measure “Wes’s War.”
²³

Operation Allied Force, as it was called, purported to be a humanitarian intervention. But as with its Bosnia predecessor Determined Force, this was a cover story. Its actual purpose was to shore up NATO’s credibility by putting a stop to Serb efforts to expel the Muslim inhabitants of Kosovo.
²⁴
In effect, the alliance was going to war to prove that with the passing of the Cold War it still retained the will and capacity to fight. As Clark put it, giving his best imitation of Colin Powell at the outset of Desert Storm, NATO was “going to systematically attack, disrupt, degrade, devastate, and ultimately destroy” Yugoslav forces in and around Kosovo.
²⁵
And with President Clinton having declared that he “did not intend to put our troops in Kosovo to fight a war,” Clark was going to accomplish that mission while relying exclusively on air power.
²⁶
Unfortunately, rather than demonstrating that NATO remained alive and well, the ensuing campaign, punctuated by one misstep after another, had the opposite effect.

Shortly after 8:00
P.M.
on March 24, Allied Force commenced. Salvos of cruise missiles, along with satellite-guided weapons launched from B-2 and F-117A stealth bombers, targeted Serb air defenses and strategic communications.
²⁷
Although aircraft from six NATO nations participated in some capacity, the United States flew two-thirds of the combat sorties.

Operationally, the purpose of this “phase one” was to gain complete control of Serb airspace. In that regard, it did not fully measure up. Whether fearful or shrewd, the Yugoslavs kept their radars turned off, which made them difficult to locate. An air defense threat therefore persisted. NATO responded by keeping its aircraft above fifteen thousand feet. Doing so reduced the hazards they faced but also complicated targeting and adversely affected bombing accuracy.

Politically, the aim of phase one was to make a statement expressing NATO’s seriousness in causing Yugoslavia to fold without further ado. Certain that they had Milo
š
evi
ć
pegged, Albright, the war’s principal architect, and Clark, its chief engineer, both expected hostilities to end within two or three days. NATO officials in Brussels and most U.S. authorities back in Washington entertained similar views. All miscalculated badly.

In fact, once begun, Allied Force continued for two and a half months, outlasting Desert Storm by several weeks. Crucially, Operation Horseshoe accelerated and expanded. In the face of this onslaught, Kosovars fled en masse, confronting Clark with a crisis that his planners had failed to anticipate. One week into Allied Force, over half a million displaced Kosovars were on the move, with one hundred thousand seeking refuge in Albania and another fifty thousand crossing into Macedonia. The numbers continued to swell.
²⁸

As phase one gave way to phase two, NATO committed more aircraft to engage a wider array of targets. Phase three waited on tap. Yet the use of such terms belies the confusion that was enveloping Allied Force. By the end of March, according to Clark, “pushing to escalate and intensify was the strategy.”
²⁹
In fact, strategy had collapsed, its place taken by a haphazard, at times almost desperate effort to find some way of ending what NATO, egged on by the likes of Albright and Clark, had fecklessly begun.

Almost from the outset—as soon as it became apparent that Milo
š
evi
ć
intended to put up serious resistance—unity of purpose within NATO gave way to disharmony. A more accurate name for Allied Force would have been Abundant Discord or Abiding Dissonance.

Three cleavages crippled the conduct of the campaign. On each of the three, Clark ended up on the wrong side. Fancying that he exercised authority on a par with that enjoyed by Dwight D. Eisenhower, NATO’s first Supreme Commander, Clark was about to learn otherwise. At it turned out, his status was more like that of a university president. Provided with a large house, a fancy office, and some handsome perks, he wielded limited clout even as he was beholden to multiple constituencies, each with its own distinctive agenda.

The first cleavage related to operational priorities. It pitted Clark against his nominal subordinate Lieutenant General Michael Short, charged with orchestrating the air campaign from his headquarters in Vicenza, Italy. That campaign’s moral justification rested on the claim that NATO was preventing Milo
š
evi
ć
from ethnically cleansing Kosovo. That, in turn, implied that taking on the Yugoslav forces actually brutalizing the Kosovars should be a priority.