On Fri, 30 Jul 1999, Seth Ackerman wrote:
> I still don't understand the idea that NATO "won the war with air
> power." When the war started, NATO's objective was to get Milosevic to sign
> the Rambouillet document. When "air power" failed to achieve this outcome
> after about three weeks, NATO started to cut a deal.
This is of course the true horror of it: NATO's "victory" was just the restoration of the status quo ante minus thousands of lives and billions of damage. They could have had the same deal without the war. The Albanians would not have had to have been returned because they wouldn't have been cleansed. And Serbia would not have been destroyed. And the moderate Kosovan opposition wouldn't have been decimated. And there would still be some vestigages of inter-ethnic cooperation that could conceivably be built on.
But this is our modus operadi. The same was true in the Gulf. After the military build-up, Saddam would have left Kuwait if we had agreed to let his legitimate claims against the Kuwaitees get heard by a tribunal, say six months later, denying linkage. And it was true in Bosnia. Slobo was willing to sign the Dayton agreements before the bombing. (The Bosnian Serbs weren't, and they still weren't afterwards. They were forced to, and they consider Slobo a traitor to this day.) In each case, we bombed when it wasn't necessary in order that it would seem like it was bombing that created the success. In each case, we succeeded in achieving that impression, and we succeeded in getting allies to agree to work more and more outside UN channels. And in each case, the actual situation on the ground was a disaster. In Iraq, we are committing genocide, and in Bosnia, we have ratified exactly the partition we said we wouldn't stand for when it was offered 100,000 deaths earlier by Vance and Owen. (A deal it now seems we only rejected because we didn't write it.) For the people who serve as our pawns, our policies have been a horrific failure. But for our long-term aim of squelching the post-1989 project of a real UN troop force and replacing that it with NATO -- i.e., replacing international law with real teeth with souped up hegemony that our close allies go along with -- we've gone from success to success.
Except -- and here I seem to be in the minority -- I think we over played our hand and the trendline has crested. I think this was the freest hand the US will ever have get in regard to NATO and the UN. And that next time both our allies and the sort-of superpowers will provide more drag.
Michael
__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com