Victory Spoiled - Yugoslavia conflict

National Review, June 28, 1999 by Andrew J. Bacevich

Kosovo II

Nothing to savor in Yugoslavia.

Mr. Bacevich is professor of international relations at Boston University.

'Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won." So wrote the Duke of Wellington in his dispatch from Waterloo in June 1815.

As the war over Kosovo approaches its denouement, the United States and its allies may perhaps be forgiven for wishing to ignore the Iron Duke's dour observation. That the Clinton administration, and the Gore campaign, tormented for weeks by the great sucking sound of a Balkan quagmire, will breathe a sigh of relief is understandable. Americans of all political persuasions rightly rejoice that the conflict ends with no U.S. combat fatalities and that Serbia's vicious campaign of ethnic cleansing has at last run its course.

Yet NATO's success in Kosovo should occasion sober reflection rather than euphoria. The legacy of this ill-conceived war will not lack for melancholy.

As with Operation Desert Storm in 1991, Operation Allied Force has the appearance of a decisive victory won cheaply. And as with that earlier war, events will expose this as an illusion.

With the American economy rocketing along and the federal budget in surplus, the war's immediate costs- estimated at $1.7 to 2.6 billion for the United States-might seem little more than pocket change. But add to that an estimated $2 to 3.5 billion in peacekeeping expenses annually (a sum that excludes the cost of reconstructing either Kosovo or Serbia as a whole) and within a few years you're talking about real money.

For that investment, the United States can anticipate only modest returns. In part this stems from that most fundamental of blunders: misidentifying the objective. Because of that miscalculation, the victory just achieved is partial and incomplete.

Its war aims held hostage by the imperatives of consensus, NATO never faced up to the fact that a politically meaningful outcome would require a change of regime in Belgrade. Calling off the war because Yugoslav authorities have agreed to withdraw from Kosovo is the equivalent of FDR and Churchill's declaring victory once the Wehrmacht had evacuated Paris.

As it is, Slobodan Milosevic, perpetrator of atrocities, indicted war criminal, and Hitler of the '90s, survives in power. As long as that remains the case, predictions that a cessation of hostilities will give way (in the language of the so-called peace agreement) to "democracy, economic prosperity, stability and regional cooperation" are pure cant. As a practical matter, Kosovo now becomes a protectorate that the United States and its allies will occupy, defend, police, and subsidize. Yugoslavia joins the roster of "rogue states" to be isolated, contained, and discomfited. Officials in Washington and Brussels will make much of the prospects that the Serbian people will throw off their political shackles. But the examples of Cuba, Iraq, and Libya among others offer little cause for optimism on that score. Keeping the peace in Kosovo promises to be yet another arduous, wearisome, near-interminable military commitment.

Worse, the war establishes precedents and reinforces expectations that may well prove to be positively mischievous.

By inserting themselves smack into the middle of a Balkan civil war, the United States and its allies put paid to the longstanding principle that constrained states from interfering in one another's internal affairs. In its place, a new principle has emerged: Henceforth, governments that gratuitously abuse their own citizens are subject to externally administered discipline. The protection afforded by traditional assertions of sovereignty no longer pertains.

The argument now begins over precisely when and how to apply this new prerogative-or is it an obligation?-to intervene. If relevant to Europe, why not to other quarters where brutality occurs even more frequently and on a larger scale? If the principle applies to human- rights violations by puny countries like Yugoslavia, why not to more important ones? The process of sorting out these questions promises to be a bloody one. To some observers, this is an exciting prospect. Contemplating the implications of Kosovo, Todd Gitlin, reformed antiwar activist turned crusader, observes that "just wars are not only possible but legion." Certain that their intentions are righteous, Americans can look forward to one, two, many Kosovos.

And why not, when we can do so virtually without risk? After all, relying exclusively on air power, the United States prevailed in Kosovo without suffering a single casualty. At one wrenching moment during the war, it actually appeared that the cockpit of an American combat aircraft making bombing runs might be a safer place than an American high school.

In the skies over Serbia, strategic bombing seemingly came into its own, vindicating at long last the predictions of air enthusiasts going back to Billy Mitchell and Hap Arnold and apparently validating the prime military lesson of the 1990s. The decade that began with a massive air assault against Baghdad now concludes with another against Belgrade. Yet the importance of these two events can be understood only in relationship to a third: the disastrous firefight in the streets of Mogadishu in October 1993. That bloody failure and the firestorm it unleashed persuaded the Clinton administration that popular support for liberal internationalism, absent an overarching threat to U.S. security, stops short of a willingness actually to expend American lives. By contrast, the bombing of Iraq in 1991 had suggested that air power alone might permit the United States to accomplish its purposes while sustaining only minimal losses. In 1999, Operation Allied Force has provided a large-scale demonstration of this military doctrine. By exploiting its command of the air, the United States can, in the eyes of true believers, dominate the earth and shape its politics.