It does not draw the conclusion from an article in its sister paper, the Guardian, yesterday, that it was the combination of KLA ground troops plus tactical bombing that broke the Yugoslav army at the village of Planeja.
It does not answer what would have happened if tactical NATO troops had established armed enclaves within Kosov, which had then been flooded with refugees which they could not cope with.
It does imply that the fatal feature of the intervention was its compromised political legitimacy.
It does not address the differing interests of the US and the Europeans.
Chris Burford
London
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Next time, Nato must not delay
Sunday July 18, 1999 The Observer
The murders in Racak by the Specialna Antiterroristicka Jedinica in mid-January were a decisive moment: it was when the countdown to the war in Kosovo began.
Public opinion throughout the West suddenly hardened and when the Americans in particular realised that a military intervention could no longer be excluded. Ethnic cleansing on this mounting scale had to be opposed.
It was only after Rambouillet failed, however, and the aerial bombardment was under way in April, that, as the Observer reports exclusively today, the reluctant sanction was given to planning a full-scale invasion of Kosovo, code-named Bravo-minus.
Britain was to contribute 50,000 men - in effect, the entire operational British Army - to a force of 170,000 set to invade Kosovo in September. Milosevic's sudden buckling was in part because, with the preparations starting in June, he began to believe that the West was deadly serious.
Leftwing critics have argued that the war was another case of bloodthirsty Nato, in thrall to the American military-industrial complex, finding any pretext to curb a small nation's sovereignty. Others claimed that the war produced what it purported to avoid - a humanitarian disaster - because the West was not prepared to use ground troops from the outset and consequently should never have been begun. Both views were alarmingly at odds with real opinions and options.
The Nato countries are democracies, keen to avoid war at almost any price, and the US aversion to the use of force fundamentally disabled the diplomacy before and during Rambouillet, paradoxically making the war more, rather than less, likely. Nor was there ever the remotest chance of assembling ground troops from the beginning.
The greater risk was that Germany would veto their use completely, as we reveal today. The choice, as the Observer and others argued throughout, was between doing nothing or an imperfect something - bombing - in the expectation that if that did not work, then the logic of events would lead to ground troops, or at least a credible threat that they would be used.
That is what happened. For too long, though, the democracies believed that Milosevic would respond rationally to Western threats and was a man with whom they could do business. They underestimated the different political context in which a dictator operates, and the way that their own attachment to a peaceful solution undermined their negotiating position.
The lesson is clear. Next time round there must be much more speed and determination, together with a more light-footed system of policing within a new international authority. Such action is anathema to democracies, but the paradox is that without it the world becomes a more dangerous place.
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