If the failure of Madeleine Albrights plan to impose Rambouillet on Serbia with a quick bombing campaign comes to be rejected more publically, the article below shows the shape of things to come.
A Panorama programme tonight reports that Clinton, occupied by personal business, did not attend the crucial meeting on January 19th in which Albright's strategy prevailed despite intelligence reports of a build up of Serbian troops in Kosovo and signals of their decisive action. The Germans had evidence of Operation Horseshoe from last year.
On March 13th Clinton met with senior advisers and backed the idea of a purely air-campaign although warned that in the short term it would make conditions worse for the Kosovo Albanians. Worried, he delayed for one more effort for a negotiated settlement, which failed. Instinctively he was against a ground war. He approved the air strikes without any fall back plan if it did not force Milosevic to sue for peace.
In the first week there was no plan to attack Serb forces in Kosovo at all. It started with restrained attacks against communication centres and anti-aircraft placements. Only after 10 days when there was no sign of negotiations was it widened into attacks on the infrastructure.
Clarke was quoted as saying the NATO campaign at its outset was "not designed to block Serb ethnic cleansing in anyway but to weaken Milosevic militarily and to force him to negotiate."
On 24th March Albright went on record saying "I do not see this as a long term action". Blair however relatively early said the campaign would be a long one.
Sidney Blumenthal was quoted stressing how very close is the relationship between Clinton and Blair. They are in telephone contact everyday about Kosovo. "To say their relationship is close is a euphemism."
Blumenthal noted that in the early 90's Washington and London did not hold the same view on Bosnia and nothing could be done. Now they do on Kosovo. How it evolves will be critical.
The continued tardiness in arrival of the small number of Apache gunships fits the limited strategy. There may, it seems to me, be no strategy to deal with a Serb attack on Albania. However Blair has just sent his liberal democrat friend, Paddy Ashdown, who is known to be an advocate of ground troops, to Albania for some photo-opportunities.
If Europe comes to regret its reliance on overwhelming US air supremacy, it will do so by accentuating the tendencies described in the article below from the Guardian.
Doug will be delighted to note that it describes a Marshall plan for the Balkans. Clearly Schroeder has not read Marx on Proudhon!
BTW strange journalistic interest in prurient imagery.
Chris Burford
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Hand in hand on the western front
In the discreet Belgian suburbs, two powerful men are bonding
By Martin Walker Monday April 19, 1999
As if he were conducting a secret love affair, the calendar of the late and unlamented European Commission President, Jacques Santer, has for the past year listed regular, early morning meetings with someone identified only as "S''.
This discreet monthly rendezvous was a breakfast with Javier Solana, secretary-general of Nato. The two men did not have far to travel. The Nato HQ is on the main road to Brussels airport, in the suburb of Evere, about seven minutes by car from the Commission building at the Schumann roundabout. But if Nato and the EU Commission have inhabited the same city for 33 years, they live officially on different planets.
This has been deliberate. Nato only came to Brussels in 1966, when President de Gaulle evicted the HQ from France, and French animosity towards the US-dominated alliance ensured that it stayed at arm's length from the institutions of Europe. Hence the discretion of those monthly breakfasts.
But the catalysing effect of the long Balkan wars of the 1990s has been making this as untenable as it is ridiculous. Nato and the EU have stumbled and drifted into a roughly rational form of division of labour for the Balkans.
Nato does the hard political-military stuff and the EU does the soft foreign policy of humanitarian aid and reconstruction. At its most absurd, this means Nato airstrikes knock down Serbian telecommunications towers and the EU helps finance their reconstruction, so the warplanes can knock them down again.
Kosovo means that the two institutions are now joined at the hip. Germany's latest proposal of a Marshall Plan to reconstruct the Balkans and bring them into the EU and Nato has now become simultaneously Nato's war aim and the EU's long-term peace plan.
This cosy new relationship was to have been formalised later this week at a grand jamboree for Nato's 50th birthday at which Barbra Streisand was to sing and President Bill Clinton was to put his seal on America's gracious acceptance of a separate European defence identity within Nato.
Previous US administrations had sent stiff diplomatic notes, warning that Nato's future was at risk, whenever Europeans hesitantly suggested such a heresy. The Clinton team, recognising the value of lending their intelligence and logistics assets while Europe provided cannon-fodder for operations of marginal US interest, has been more relaxed.
It is a bit like the Indian Army of the British Raj. The Americans provide the staff officers, gunners and engineers; Europeans are the sepoys. The problem is that, except for our unusable nuclear weapons, we Europeans are barely up to sepoy status yet. We have 2 million men under arms (compared to 1.2 million for the US) but spend about two thirds of the US defence budget, and are thus an entire technological generation behind them.
It was when Tony Blair and President Chirac were glumly informed by their general staffs last year that the combined French and British air forces could not seize command of the air over puny Serbia that the European revolution began. Britain gave up its long insistence that Europe's security depended on Nato and only Nato. The French finally accepted that Nato need not be merely a ploy to guarantee American hegemony. And at the St Malo summit last December, we jointly agreed to promote a European defence system.
Last month at Reinhartshausen, the Germans came up with a plan for the bureaucracy to achieve this. It called for an EU military committee, of equivalent status to the EU's shadowy and powerful monetary committee, which was the crucial institution in the launch of the single currency. The Germans also proposed regular meetings of European general staffs, which should be fun for the Luxembourg colonel (commanding 800 troops) when he sits alongside the French and British nuclear-armed grandees. "I felt I was at the birth of an event as historic as the launch of the euro,' commented Spain's foreign minister, Abel Matutes.
He may well be right, because of yet another revolution which has taken place to join the American, French and British rethinks. The Germans are finally shaking off the long, post-war habits of deference, thanks to the peace and love and radical politics generation of 1969.
Just as it took Richard Nixon to open US diplomatic relations with Red China, it took that former Young Socialist revolutionary Gerhard Schroeder and the erstwhile Green pacifist Joschka Fischer to get the Luftwaffe bombing Belgrade again.
So America's great postwar genetic achievement, of transforming belligerent Germans and Japanese into plump bourgeois pussycats, is ending. And that agreeable feature of the EU, as an economic superpower which deliberately chose not to match its wealth with military ambition, is withering fast. Those discreet EU-Nato breakfasts are set to become formal planning sessions, towards a European military vocation which we have yet to define.