The Lesson of Kosovo - Illustration - Brief Article

Washington Monthly, July, 1999 by David Callahan

When intervention is a risk worth taking

As with most wars, the history of NATO's air campaign in the Balkans will be written in fits and starts. A final verdict on the war's wisdom and success will depend on many uncertainties, including Western success in rebuilding Kosovo, the fate of Slobodan Milosevic, and the future of U.S.-Russian ties. Yet even at this early moment, with so much still unknown, one thing seems clear: The war's many vocal naysayers in the United States got it wrong. Rarely have so many experts disgorged so much nonsense into print and over the airwaves. Day after day, at times nearly gleeful in their predictions of gloom and doom, critics condemned the war as a bungled operation predicated on a naive faith in airpower. President Clinton, they claimed, had solidified his place as an incompetent and pusillanimous commander in chief.

Years from now, or even months from now, a very different view on Kosovo is likely to prevail. Assuming the West undertakes the right diplomatic repair work with Russia and follows through on pledges to rebuild Kosovo, NATO's first real military campaign will be seen as a just and successful war, albeit one that was poorly planned and imperfectly executed. A brutal autocrat was faced down, saving the Albanians of Kosovo from a future of Serbian repression. While the human, economic, and diplomatic costs of NATO's air campaign have been considerable, this negative fallout will seem less significant as time passes, especially if the Kosovars--who believe the war was well worth it--help to shape the future image of this conflict.

Beyond agreeing that the war was justified, tomorrow's commentators are likely to agree on a few key points.

Clinton Shows a Spine

Every president, especially one who has studied history as diligently as Bill Clinton, knows that war is a highly unpredictable game. Whenever bombs start falling, the risks begin to rise. Kosovo was no exception, and Clinton deserves credit for gambling big on a war that always had the potential to go bad.

From the beginning of the Clinton presidency, U.S. policy in the Balkans has been an ongoing case of no good options. The ever circumspect Secretary of State Warren Christopher once went so far as to call Bosnia "a problem from hell." Through late 1998 and early 1999, Clinton again faced an agonizing dilemma in a part of the world devoid of vital U.S. interests: If the Serbs refused to accept a negotiated agreement in Kosovo, NATO could either do nothing in the face of Serb barbarism or it could use military power with no guarantee of success. Clinton was also fully aware that Milosevic might respond to the bombing with ethnic cleansing. (CIA Director George Tenet had publicly predicted as much in February.) And, of course, he knew that NATO's air campaign would infuriate Russia. For all these reasons, intervening in Kosovo may have been the biggest gamble in U.S. foreign policy since Jimmy Carter tried to rescue the hostages in Iran.

Sweeping Kosovo under the rug, as the administration had done with Bosnia for two years, would have been easy. Clinton might have drawn strong domestic criticism for allowing the Serbs to finish off the Kosovo Liberation Army this spring and reneging on past U.S. promises to stop the bloodshed in Kosovo. But the long-term political consequences of inaction would have been nil for the president.

Clinton took an alternate course for many reasons. Clearly, there were traditional realist concerns at work regarding the stability of Europe and the credibility of NATO. But Clinton was also motivated by a desire to do the right thing and defend human rights. This is a president who will likely go to his grave haunted by U.S. inaction in Rwanda and Bosnia. In those two crises, nearly a million people perished at the hands of ethnic extremists while the United States stood by and did nothing. The endgame in Bosnia in 1995 showed that America might have been able to stop that war much earlier, while Clinton himself has apologized to the Rwandan people for failing to take actions that could have stopped the genocide there. In Kosovo, Clinton showed that he had learned something from these deplorable episodes in U.S. foreign policy-lessons invoked often, if obliquely, in his defense of NATO's air campaign.

Air Power

In acting on hard-learned lessons from Rwanda and Bosnia, President Clinton disregarded a more cautious approach to American intervention abroad, preached most fervently by former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Colin Powell. In the view of Powell and many like-minded national security specialists, America should avoid the incremental use of force, only risk its soldiers when vital interests are at stake, and intervene only when there is a near certainty of victory. Kosovo met none of the criteria of the so-called Powell Doctrine. This was a limited war in defense of limited U.S. interests with no guarantee of success.

NATO's victory in Kosovo has dealt a serious blow to the Powell Doctrine, and that is a good thing. Threats to limited U.S. interests merit a range of limited responses. Military force has to be on this menu. While Powell was right to oppose the large-scale use of ground forces when no vital interests are at stake, he was never persuasive in arguing against the use of any military force in defense of limited interests. America's successful intervention in Bosnia in 1995 made this clear. Even Somalia, arguably, showed the merits of a limited interests/limited response model: Only 26 Americans died in an operation that saved over a million people from starvation.