April 9 1999 OPINION The London Times By Simon Jenkins
Nato's leaders are treading the path that led to
insanity in Vietnam
Will they never learn?
Another middle way has not worked. The Great
Bombing Pretence is collapsing in Kosovo, as it
was bound to collapse. Foreign policy is
revealed not as focus-grouped, glamorous
kid-machismo but as something that kills people.
Nato's bombing adventure in Kosovo looked
good for a day or two. But it was always cynical
and ill thought-out. Now, with generals on both
sides of the Atlantic screaming no, the
"immaculate coercion" of the cruise missile war
must be followed by the real thing.
In the United States this week I have heard
almost no support for Nato's belief that
"bombing alone" would win security for
Kosovo's Albanians. I hear only Lyndon
Johnson's notorious Vietnam quote, "I never felt
that this war would be won from the air".
Yesterday's New York Times/CBS poll was
clear. Will airstrikes stop President Milosevic?
Sixty per cent say no. Will America send ground
troops? Seventy-five per cent say yes. The 24
American ground attack helicopters being sent to
Albania are the first swallows of an awesome
summer. Last October Western diplomats told
Mr Milosevic to give autonomy to Kosovo "or
else". He was threatening no state, and
perpetrating no greater evil than those being
ignored by the West in the Caucasus or
condoned as a fait accompli in Bosnia. But
great men had said "or else", and the networks
were watching. So now it is "or else".
Europe thinks it goes to war when diplomacy
has failed. America thinks it goes to war when
Europe has failed. It is grimly intriguing that the
American pro-war lobby is made up of mostly
younger people who do not remember (or have
forgotten) the Vietnam escalation. The issue,
once again, is not the plausibility of the
operation but the esteem of Uncle Sam and
confidence in America's military omnipotence.
As for whether a Kosovan war will be anything
but an American one, you can hear, read and
talk about this subject from dawn to dusk and
not hear a word about British involvement -
beyond the complaint that "America is having to
rescue Europe from another of its messes".
The collapse of "bombing alone" this past
fortnight has been spectacular. The misreading
of Mr Milosevic by Nato deserves to rank with
Gallipoli and Pearl Harbor in the annals of
military incompetence. Bill Clinton and Tony
Blair could not have been more clear in the
objective. It was to "stop the killing and ethnic
cleansing in Kosovo and force Milosevic to
grant the region partial autonomy". The
bombing has achieved the opposite. By targeting
cities, factories and bridges, and hitting enough
houses to kill civilians (including, of all
obscenities, native Kosovans in Pristina), the
bombs have increased support for the regime
and made compromise less likely.
Why leaders pursue strategies that so regularly
fail (as this approach failed in Iraq) is for
psychologists to answer. Mr Milosevic's
response was exactly as predicted. Faced with
demands that he accept Nato troops on his soil
and a promise that they would not be imposed,
he had to judge whether that promise was
believable. He sensibly concluded that it was
not. He urgently moved his formidable army
into Kosovo, where until this week not a single
bomber had been able to find it. In two weeks
the Yugoslav leader cleared half the province of
its Albanian population and, in grim Balkan
fashion, treated perhaps hundreds of Albanian
men as putative KLA fighters and shot them
dead. Mr Milosevic is now in a position to offer
a "monitored ceasefire" but with the Kosovo
Liberation Army truly crushed. It defies belief
that anyone in London or Washington thought
bombing alone would achieve any other
outcome.
Nato spin-doctors are frantically trying to
express "surprise" that Mr Milosevic moved so
fast and acted so ruthlessly, and argue that
bombing alone was always a long-term strategy,
whatever that means. The American press hoots
derision at such excuses. The Pentagon and the
Ministry of Defence are known to have been
sceptics about bombing from the start. In the
nearest Washington comes to an official
statement, "sources" this week admitted that
there never was any coherence to bombing
alone. As a State Department official admitted:
"We have accomplished nothing." The policy is
dead.
Whether Mr Milosevic would have behaved
with the ruthlessness of the past two weeks
without the bombing is, of course, horribly
moot. What is certain is that before the arrival
of Madeleine Albright, Robin Cook, Richard
Holbrooke and the world's most powerful
bombs, Mr Milosevic was conducting a guerrilla
war with the equally ruthless KLA, a group that
had scant local support until its cause was
"adopted" by Britain and others. The United
Nations last week put the Albanian-Serb balance
of atrocities at roughly even. After the arrival of
the grandees, Mr Milosevic changed tack and
did what he did in Bosnia. He has killed
thousands and displaced half a million people,
while conceding not one inch to Nato. He has
enforced an Albanian diaspora, tweaked Uncle
Sam's nose and won the grudging support of
Russia and China, important if there is to be a
land war. In other words, he has done precisely
what President Clinton and Mr Blair said they
would never let happen.
This week Nato's leaders, having learnt nothing,
came up with a new pledge. It was that the
displaced people of Kosovo would soon march
home under the banner of a Nato protection
force. If I were a Kosovan, I would give no
more weight to such promises than to an offer
of autonomy from Belgrade. The West gave
similar pledges under Dayton to displaced
Muslims in Bosnia. They have not been
honoured.
We now have "the ground option". The
Pentagon is reported to have considered the
invasion of Kosovo so crazy that it refused to
draw up contingency plans. That has had to
change under presidential order. Schemes of
Vietnamese fantasticality are now being woven.
They involve the air cavalry "cleaning" corridors
into Kosovo for an infantry advance through the
mountains. Behind them will come returning
Albanian villagers, to be resettled in safe havens
along the border, secured by modern technology
from marauding Serbs. What the RAF has left
standing of Pristina may have to be flattened.
But as they said in Vietnam, you sometimes
have to destroy the village to save the village.
In the heat of war, a fine line divides practicality
from insanity. An idea later dismissed as risible,
like bombing Cambodia or defoliating North
Vietnam, may have seemed serviceable at the
time. Desperate leaders need desperate ways out
of corners. Today's armies, designed to confront
communism, are being marched into battle by
fidgety leaders to get nasty pictures off the
television screen. A wild compulsion appears to
have seized Western liberalism as it gazes
ogle-eyed at whatever atrocity the networks
have selected for the nightly "grief pornography"
slot. It is as if, with the Cold War over, liberals
now want their turn at playing war games. They
want to feel the surge of power, the roar of the
chopper blade, the thrill of "bombs away".
If I thought for one minute that the appalling
destruction America and Britain are now raining
down on Yugoslavia could conceivably achieve
its declared objectives, I might ponder the
justice of such action. There is such a thing as a
world order and it does merit imposition, as in
the Falklands and Kuwait. Though the integrity
of states should be respected, it is not absolute.
But in Kosovo no virtue appears achievable. A
European state, already afflicted by a
communist past and a brutalist present, is being
plunged into further misery. Those we purport
to help are being killed and exiled. The best we
can hope is that Mr Milosevic declares his
cleansing at an end and invites the "monitors"
back, as he did last October. That will be a Nato
defeat. But it will be a lesser defeat than the
madness now on offer from the hawks of
Washington and London.