Then, over a secure speakerphone, came the scratchy voice of Christopher Hill, the ambassador to Macedonia. He had been the point man in dealing with Milosevic for a year. What were the chances of an accord now? Hill was asked. His answer was terse: “Zero point zero percent.” No chance. Milosevic had decided, for reasons no one quite understood, to face down NATO. “There was,” recalls one participant, “a stunned silence in the room.”
It may be true, as the administration argues, that there were never any good choices in Kosovo. Milosevic has started four Balkan wars in the past eight years, each more savage than the last. And it may well be, as Clintonites insist, that the Serb tyrant intended all along to ravage Kosovo. “There are literally no options that could have prevented this,” says a senior administration official.
Not quite. A NEWSWEEK reconstruction of the months leading up to the strikes suggests that, through diplomatic errors and missed opportunities, the administration may have trapped itself in what one senior U.S. official calls “an ever-tightening vice” of bad policy choices. First it failed to offer Milosevic a face-saving compromise. But the administration flinched from assembling a credible military option to enforce its hard-line diplomacy. Then, when it knew the military second-best–airstrikes–was all but inevitable, it neglected to plan fully for the humanitarian debacle of thousands of fleeing refugees, a disaster that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs had predicted.
The decision to go to war was the fruit of a foreign policy carefully nurtured largely by Albright: “diplomacy backed by the threat of force.” For months the secretary, the administration’s ranking hawk, had labored to unite all 19 NATO members behind Washington. By the time of the March 13 meeting, even Clinton, the baby-boomer president with a Vietnam-era aversion to war, was with her 100 percent. All the Serb dictator had to do was cave, just as he had last October and three years before, at Dayton.
Of course, he didn’t. It wasn’t the first time the Clintonites found themselves surprised by Milosevic, and it wouldn’t be the last. Two days later, at another top-secret White House confab, Shelton jolted the principals with a bleak assessment of the air campaign that everyone knew was now all but inevitable. “In the short term, military action would make things worse in Kosovo,” according to one knowledgeable source. Much worse: without ground troops, there would be massive refugee flows. The estimate was said to be so dire that even Albright was scared nearly dovish. The secretary had backed strikes earlier than anyone. But when the Paris talks ended on March 18–as predicted, with Milosevic’s defiance–she abruptly sent Richard Holbrooke to Belgrade for a final chance at diplomacy. In a phone call on March 19, Albright’s British counterpart, Robin Cook, was openly doubtful the effort would succeed–and NATO’s military commander, U.S. Army Gen. Wesley Clark, was fretting that each day without strikes saw the Serbs sending more troops into Kosovo. Albright insisted on the Holbrooke mission. It failed. There were no good options left.
Two weeks into the bombing, there still aren’t. The administration’s worst fears have come true: Milosevic has acted more ruthlessly than anyone had imagined. On the surface the administration presents a united front. But quietly the Pentagon and the CIA are distancing themselves from Clinton’s favored notion of “immaculate destruction,” a bloodless, easy air war. The military elite now insist, somberly, that they warned that airstrikes alone wouldn’t work. Indeed, when the bombing started, none of the Joint Chiefs even bothered to make the traditional trip to the “tank,” their Pentagon meeting room, to follow the opening salvos. “The knives are out all over Washington,” says one senior U.S. official.
Little wonder. The chief question is why diplomacy proved so futile–and Milosevic so intractable. It wasn’t always so: Clinton may compare the Serb dictator to Hitler now, but last fall Holbrooke found him a willing if reluctant bargainer. Milosevic agreed, under threat of what were then so-called pinprick strikes, to submit the province to international peacekeeping and withdraw his forces while talks over autonomy for the Kosovars continued.
October, in fact, may have been the first missed opportunity for a more enduring peace. European intelligence in Belgrade had strong suggestions then that Milosevic was not entirely averse to NATO troops monitoring a ceasefire–an idea proposed by the French, British and Germans. The real problem, diplomats say, was back in Washington. The U.S. administration was terrified of how the GOP-run Congress might react to the prospect of U.S. troops in Kosovo. The midterm elections were near; Clinton feared losing seats in the face of threatened impeachment. The Pentagon, too, was fretting over “mission creep.” The alternative was a short-term Holbrooke compromise: 2,000 unarmed peace “verifiers.” Clinton refused even to risk U.S. troops in an “extraction force” that the Europeans assembled in Macedonia in case those “verifiers” needed rescuing.
Three months later, predictably, the Holbrooke ceasefire began to fracture: Kosovars killed several Serb policemen, then the Serbs massacred Kosovars at Racak. This was a crucial moment. In January the White House was preoccupied with the Senate impeachment trial. And in Albright’s hands, U.S. policy toward the Serbs began to harden. By her own account, the Czech-born secretary has a bit of a Munich complex, a belief that appeasing dictators only encourages their worst impulses. And Milosevic was the worst dictator around.
The secretary began arguing hard for strikes in late January–mostly alone, at first. The Pentagon was warning that airstrikes alone couldn’t save Kosovo. But the military itself was wary of committing ground troops. And Clinton scotched another NATO plan for a troop-enforced peace agreement unless Milosevic welcomed it. So Albright, perhaps out of instinct, perhaps to sell bombing to the White House and Europeans, consistently made Milosevic the demon. She was soon quoted as saying he “understands only the language of force”–true, no doubt, but insulting to hear. “It’s not a useful device to personalize this,” says a senior administration official. “We gave him an ultimatum. It boxed us into a corner, and it boxed him, too.” Around this time Milosevic began massing some 40,000 troops on the Kosovo border.
The downward spiral to war quickened in mid-February, at Rambouillet, France, where the Kosovo peace talks were convened. The Europeans had insisted on one last round before bombing. But the two-week negotiations were so disorganized that one official calls the event an “anti-Dayton.” “The Serbs were drunk the whole time,” says a NATO official. The Kosovars, meanwhile, didn’t trust their French hosts. Albright flew in to save things by assuring the Albanians of U.S. support. She even allowed a deadline to pass to get them aboard, blaming Milosevic for the delay. “The price of saving Rambouillet,” concedes one U.S. official, “was to tie ourselves more and more closely to the Albanians.”
It may also have been the last fatal blow to peace. The administration had gotten into bed with an obscure guerrilla army with which it had, in truth, few sympathies. Albright’s defenders say she did only what was necessary to bring the Kosovars to the table. Far from kissing up to them, she nearly let Rambouillet break down by refusing to agree to their chief demand: a referendum on independence. And far from radicalizing Milosevic, they offered him total disarmament of the Kosovo Liberation Army. “It gave him a chance for a very good deal,” says a White House official.
But some Western diplomats and U.S. officials believe that Milosevic came to view the U.S. position as fatally biased. He suspected that independence for Kosovo–which has the same meaning to Serbs that Jerusalem does to Israelis–was America’s secret aim. It wasn’t, but such a perception threatened the dictator’s political survival. Ironically, Clinton by now was embracing the use of 4,000 U.S. troops as peacekeepers. Just before Rambouillet, “we had gotten intelligence reports that suggested the Serbs might be open to the possibility of NATO troops” again, says a senior U.S. official. “But those reports simply disappeared as Rambouillet became a shambles.” After the talks, Serb attacks in Kosovo accelerated.
As the diplomacy soured, the problem for Washington was that it had foreclosed troop contingency plans that might have averted part of the humanitarian disaster. When the Rambouillet talks were under way, the British, Germans and French had already begun shipping peacekeeping troops by rail into Macedonia. Had Washington sent an armored division to join them, NATO would have had on Kosovo’s border a force that might have been able to intervene. Yet the Clinton administration, even as it pushed for airstrikes, felt no need to put in place any backup forces.
Clinton officials seethe over the criticisms. “It’s obscene to say we caused this,” the president fumed to an aide the other day. His defenders argue that the Europeans never proposed a real NATO troop solution. Some say a final reckoning with a monster like Milosevic was inevitable; Clinton has come to believe that Balkan-style tribalism may be the worst threat to the golden 21st century he envisions. “This [war] is the sick reductio ad absurdum of the last seven years of Milosevic’s policies in the Balkans,” says a senior administration official. But it is, as well, the bleak sum of the administration’s own choices.
