The Case of Kosovo

You use the expression that [the administration] "failed to choose to choose." That's what's going on: an evasion, an inability to grapple with their problems and define goals. I hear in our policy two problems: an inability to distinguish primary goals from secondary goals, and an inability to distinguish means from ends, because, as we now move into Kosovo shortly after it became clear that the bombing wasn't going to succeed, I believe the goal of the bombing became not dealing with the situation but saving NATO.

I agree precisely with what you just said, and I'd add one thing. Whenever you're put in a position of laying down an ultimatum, you're giving the freedom of choice to the other side. Generally, if you're making an ultimatum, you've failed in what you've tried to achieve. And this is a great demonstration of that. The ultimatum itself became an imprisoning factor for NATO. The question of credibility that you've referred to -- that word credibility which everyone remembers from the Vietnam War (which everyone, frankly, should be questioning when they hear it) -- already came up when the ultimatum was delivered.

And let's remind our audience, the ultimatum was given to Milosevic by Albright and the Clinton administration.

That's right. At the conference at Rambouillet. The West, NATO -- the nineteen nations, now, of NATO -- put forward a plan whereby Milosevic was supposed to withdraw most of his troops from the area of Kosovo, allow an armed force of NATO troops to take their place, and then they would occupy the country for a three-year transition period before there would be a final decision made on the "character of autonomy." It's clear that Milosevic took this plan to be tending toward independence, some kind of independence. It's clear also that NATO put the plan together in a rather ramshackle fashion, because on the one hand they wanted stop the fighting in Kosovo, and on the other hand they did not want an independent Kosovo.

Of course, one of the other problems with the current policy -- the current fiasco, you could say -- is that it's almost impossible now to conceive of Kosovo in some way still being under Serbian power, which is still the policy of NATO. After Serbia has "ethnically cleansed" so much of the province, it's very hard to see how it remains within the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. So this is another problem that's created for U.S. foreign policy and for European foreign policy especially. An independent Kosovo was thought to be, before the bombing started, almost as dangerous as the continuing killing in Kosovo. The idea was that if this small province became independent, it would encourage an independent or greater Albania. It would encourage the splitting up of Macedonia, which has a large Albanian population. And in one way or another, the entire Balkan peninsula would be thrown into instability and conflict. It's almost as if in several ways the U.S. foreign policy has brought forward, created, what it was attempting to forestall.

In the Balkans, the U.S. and the world are confronting one of the great challenges of our time: How people will live together. The issue of self-determination as Yugoslavia breaks up, and so on. What is most telling is how surprised the administration was by Milosevic's response to the bombing. You visited the area. In a way it really wasn't surprising. His goals have been clear all along.

I would say so, although I guess one must be careful to read back into a long and complicated series of events knowledge that we maybe didn't have at the time. But I certainly agree with your point that what's happening now cannot be in any way separated from the war that began in 1991. Indeed, one of the problems, I think, with covering this war (and there's been, of course, blanket coverage) and one of the reasons it's so confusing for people is that it is an example of an event in which the present is the past. They are inseparable. We're not talking about history when we talk about [events] since 1991. We're talking about the same story. We look at the phenomenon of ethnic cleansing that's so vividly shown in Kosovo. This happened in 1991-92 in the Krajina part of Croatia, the largely Serb part of Croatia. It happened in Bosnia from '92-'95. It happened in '95 in the Krajina again, when the Croats threw out the Serbs. And certainly when the Serbs did it, in various places, we saw exactly the same phenomenon. That is, the Yugoslav army would encircle a town, the security ministry or the interior ministry forces would go into the town, kill a lot of people, create another circle around, and finally the paramilitary militias would go in and create terror. They would kill people, they would rape people, do anything that they could do to encourage a mass exodus. And this has been seen again and again and again. What has changed is not the behavior of Milosevic. What has changed has been the reaction of the United States, and the reaction of the West, and what Clinton has said about it, and other Western leaders have said about it. So, I think it's rather confusing for the American public and other Western publics to understand what's happening when their leaders have strikingly different comments on what's essentially the same phenomenon, depending on the time.

There's another parallel I think we should bring up. I think the bombing came about partly because of assumptions about Milosevic that Secretary of State Albright and other high officials made, because of his behavior in 1995 when the United States bombed Serbia. There was an assumption that "Ah! Milosevic responds to force. If we use force here or even threaten it, he will respond." But the political situations were entirely different. At that time he wanted to deal. He was starting to lose the war.

On the ground.

Exactly. And also, he was desperate to get a deal, to get détente. Secondly, NATO war planes served as the air force of the Croatian armor, the tanks and other armor, the Croat army, and the Bosnian infantry. So, it wasn't actually just an air war, it was a complete attack on the ground.

And we had supplied arms.

Exactly. To Croatians and, in a rather roundabout fashion, to the Bosnians. So this is utterly different. And Kosovo is a much more difficult matter for him. The idea that he could give it up without fighting is absolutely crazy. I mean, he couldn't. It has a political importance for the Serbs which we've heard again and again. It goes back seven hundred years.

You just said that the Clinton administration mistakenly believed that the two situations were the same. That is, "If we bomb today we would get the same results as we got before." Which leads one, in that context and in the context of other things going on, to the conclusion that this administration is not serious about foreign policy. That they lack a professionalism. That it's almost an "amateur hour." Which is different than saying, as Clinton does, that the American people are isolationist.

It is very different. I don't have a high regard for this administration's foreign policy.

To judge a foreign policy there's first of all a permanent bureaucracy, and there are people in the U.S. government, always, who are extremely talented, extremely dedicated. There are then political appointees, who, in the case of this administration, have been very unimpressive. They have not appointed people with great experience to the key jobs in foreign policy. And I think that's true of the very senior positions, frankly.

Finally, though, the president has to be personally involved and has to care about foreign policy. That's just the way the system works. Otherwise, in the case of Haiti, for example, for a year the security bureaucracies, the Pentagon, the CIA, notably, were at war with the State Department over what policy should be, what the U.S. should be doing in Haiti, whether it really should put Aristide back or not. Until the president took an active role in that, U.S. policy there was just completely trolled along, without any real direction. Similarly with Bosnia: until the president took a very strong role in the summer of 1995, U.S. policy was paralyzed. And partly because of domestic political concerns (the election was coming up) and the realization, the very late realization on the part of President Clinton, that if the Europeans withdrew their humanitarian troops delivering food, because the U.S. had vowed to help them out, the U.S. troops would have to go and help them. So that, U.S. troops would be there in any event. The late realization of this vow that Clinton himself had made led to the U.S. taking a strong role there in 1995. But everything was done to avoid this kind of strong role.

To be fair, in 1990-91, when it was very clear that Yugoslavia was breaking up -- and the CIA had given a very full report of what would happen -- the Bush administration also avoided any role there. Their diplomacy, aside from a one-day visit by James Baker, was inert. They handed the whole problem to the Europeans who, apart from NATO, have no combined army. [Without an army, and] partly because of the matter we were discussing before (NATO enlargement and the attitude the United States was taking), European diplomacy, when it comes to something like Yugoslavia, is absolutely impotent. And it was shown very clearly in 1991 that they were not able to prevent this [ethnic cleansing]. And it could have been prevented by the Americans, I believe very strongly.

Let's look at this period, ten years or so, from Baker saying "We have no dogs in this fight" until the present war in Kosovo. By deciding in the beginning not to do the very little we could to possibly stop the deterioration there, we wound up doing a lot more and accomplishing much less in terms of whatever goals we should have had.

That's a good summary. The only thing I would add is that we have no idea, now, how little we have accomplished. As we speak, bombs are falling. It's unclear what sort of solution will be arrived at, or what the implications of that solution might be. The one thing we know is that tens of thousands of people have died, or even, depending on the estimates, hundreds of thousands. It's very hard to know how many have died. But certainly in Bosnia, up near a hundred thousand people died. We don't have any idea now how many died in Kosovo. We do know that nearly a million of them were displaced. These are all extreme effects of doing nothing.

Now, you could argue very thoroughly that it was not the United States' business, and, indeed, James Baker did say that. But the years since 1991, when he made his statement, have proved the contrary: we did have a dog in this fight. And in my view, if we had taken action then -- and I don't think it would have necessarily needed to be military action ... it's almost as if there's a formula: the earlier you do something the less you have to do. And of course, the United States had, at the time, the greatest military prestige and power in its history -- the Soviet Union was collapsing, so its opponent during the Cold War was gone. Eastern Europe had thrown off the Soviet yoke and, finally the United States had just defeated, in this extraordinary fashion that no one expected, the armies of Saddam Hussein. So, in that spring of 1991, it had enormous military prestige and therefore power. To think of that as something that's not power and to say, "Well, we can take no steps unless we are willing to put 300,000 troops in there, and since we're not willing to do that we can do absolutely nothing," was, I think, a profound mistake. I thought that at the time, and so did Richard Holbrook and various other people.

You call your article on Kosovo in the current issue of The New York Review of Books "Endgame." What do you think that endgame would be, and what are the lessons of this experience for the problem of coming up with a foreign policy for the United States?

Well, one of the reasons I was emphasizing the notion of an endgame was the idea that all of the contradictions, all of the hesitations, all of the failures to decide were finally coming home to roost. They couldn't be avoided. And in this vast exodus, in this horrible scene that was on Americans' television sets every night, people were finally seeing the results not of what happened a month and a half ago, but what happened in 1991. So, "endgame" is an attempt to emphasize the fact that you can't escape decisions that you avoid. And that the United States above all is not in a position to avoid those effects.

I've always tried to avoid putting myself in the position of being a prophet. Certainly in this particular story, if you know it with any degree of intimacy, you're foolish to try to make predictions. As we sit here, there is a small degree of diplomatic intercourse going on between Russia, Belgrade, and Washington. It's clear that the United States government has recognized that Russia is going to be crucial to any sort of solution. It's also clear that the Clinton administration is frightened. I think it's very clear that they didn't think it would work this way. They thought that either Milosevic would fold, or bombing would go on for a couple days and then he would fold. No one anticipated it would continue this long, or that that he would be so successful in clearing out Kosovo so rapidly. Although, frankly, certainly with the ethnic cleansing, one could point to all sorts of examples, as I've said. They've had a lot of practice at it.

I think the United States and NATO will try for a diplomatic solution. They will hope to overthrow him, but it will be very difficult to do, as it has been. And they will try for some sort of diplomatic solution which will obviate the need to use ground troops. Although, I have to say, the debate, as it's happening in the United States -- which is ground troops or not -- is a false debate. The debate should really be about what other means can be used in Kosovo to protect Kosovars. It should be about something other than air power. And there are other things that are not even in the discussion. But I don't want to make a prediction about what exactly will happen there.

The one thing I would say is that the hope that the administration might learn lessons from what happened there is rather futile now. I think there's a sense in Washington that, "Oh my gosh! We avoided this horrible impeachment thing for a year only to find ourselves with a real problem." And they're very frightened of it, particularly as the election comes along. The problem is that, from the point of view of the American public, a chance for the president to talk to the public, to try to explain obligations that he believes Americans have there, has passed. He won't do that. And, you know, the more the government emphasizes that if you shoot down one pilot the mission is over (and you know, I don't like more than anyone else the idea of an American being shot out of the sky or killed or captured) the less position the United States is in to be a real world power. It can be an economic power but it'll be what President Nixon predicted years ago, after the incursion into Cambodia: "a pitiful helpless giant."

Mark, thank you very much for being here to share with us your ideas about foreign policy and the present situation in the Balkans. Thank you very much.

My pleasure.

And thank you very much for joining us for this Conversation with History.

See also: Conversation with Danner on Writing and the Mark Danner page, with links to articles by Danner.

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