New York Times - April 23, 1999
FOREIGN AFFAIRS / By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Stop the Music
It is said that a camel is a horse designed by a committee. It may not be pretty but it gets the job done, especially in the desert.
By that standard, NATO's air war over Yugoslavia is a military strategy designed by a 19-member alliance. It's also not pretty, but its very weakness could be a strength.
Bombing the Serbs from 15,000 feet is the only military strategy that all 19 NATO members, the U.S. Congress and the Russians can agree upon as tolerable in Yugoslavia today. While there are many obvious downsides to war-from-15,000-feet, it does have one great strength -- its sustainability. NATO can carry on this sort of air war for a long, long time. The Serbs need to remember that.
While it is true that NATO will never liberate Kosovo from the air, there is still a chance that this sort of sustained bombardment can achieve our basic objectives -- which are to compel Slobodan Milosevic, either tacitly or by negotiation, to enable the return of the Kosovo Albanians to their homes, with self-rule, protected by an international peacekeeping force that would patrol a fence between Albanians and Serbs.
But if NATO's only strength is that it can bomb forever, then it has to get every ounce out of that. Let's at least have a real air war. The idea that people are still holding rock concerts in Belgrade, or going out for Sunday merry-go-round rides, while their fellow Serbs are "cleansing" Kosovo, is outrageous. It should be lights out in Belgrade: every power grid, water pipe, bridge, road and war-related factory has to be targeted.
Like it or not, we are at war with the Serbian nation (the Serbs certainly think so), and the stakes have to be very clear: Every week you ravage Kosovo is another decade we will set your country back by pulverizing you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1389? We can do 1389 too. If we can frame the issue that way, Mr. Milosevic will blink, and we may have seen his first flutter yesterday.
Will this strategy halt the barbarism still going on in Kosovo? No. The war to prevent the refugees from being thrown out of Kosovo, or abducted, was lost the first week -- when NATO and the Clinton team bombed the Serbs without having either adequate ground or air power in place to deter them, and without understanding Mr. Milosevic's capabilities or his intentions. That was a strategic blunder for which the Kosovars have paid dearly.
The question now is how best to reverse that, without the U.S. and NATO becoming so enmeshed in the Balkans that it will weaken their ability to operate anywhere else, and strain their cohesion as never before. The only way is a merciless air war.
What about ground troops? NATO should continue planning for a ground war, as the British and French are urging, both because it might influence Mr. Milosevic to blink sooner rather than later, and because it would inject some realism into the debate about this subject. The U.S. public and Congress need to understand just what would be involved in a ground war. Invading Kosovo means owning Kosovo. A ground war would likely require going all the way to Belgrade and end up making both Albania and Macedonia, from which any invasion of Kosovo would be staged, U.S. protectorates.
Be advised, these are weak, tribalized states that can fall apart in our hands. Albania is non-country country. It is a country where police estimate that more than half the cars on the road were stolen from somewhere else in Europe, where everyone has a gun at home and where just two years ago the whole banking system was based on pyramid schemes and three-card monte. The Wall Street Journal recently quoted an unemployed worker in Tirana as saying, "It would be better if Milosevic bombed here, and we could all go as refugees to Italy and Germany."
That is just one reason that, for now, we must stick to a strategy that at least holds out the hope of achieving our objectives without NATO ending up owning the Balkans. Because nothing would do more to sap public support for American internationalism than America's taking over history's oldest hornet's nests.
Give war a chance. Let's see what months of bombing does before we opt for weeks of invasion, where, if we win, we get to occupy the Balkans for years. Let's make Kosovo Mr. Milosevic's Vietnam, not ours.