What Are We Fighting For in Serbia?

(Washington, D.C.): Suddenly, in the wake of President Clinton’s fiasco in Kosovo, a
bipartisan
chorus has emerged calling for the United States to embrace this tar baby even more tightly. The
question is: Why on earth would we want to do that?

The Choristers

The most insistent and influential voice in this chorus is that of Senator John
McCain,
Republican of Arizona. The former Vietnam-era naval aviator and prisoner of war’s status as one
of the few veterans currently serving in Congress has deterred many from questioning his
jingoistic, but unprescriptive, mantra that “Now that we’re in, we must win.” (It will be recalled
that Mr. McCain played an equally decisive role a few years back in implicating the GOP in what
would predictably become an open-ended U.S. deployment in Bosnia.)

Sen. McCain’s call to begin preparing for ground combat in Kosovo has just been endorsed by
House and Senate members of a congressional delegation that joined him in accompanying
Secretary of Defense William Cohen to NATO headquarters last week. And
we are told that
the American people — understandably appalled by images of the horrific war crimes being
inflicted on women, children, the aged and the rest of the Albanian population of Kosovo — are
now strongly supportive of invading Kosovo with U.S. and allied ground troops.

The Risks of an Ill-Considered Ground Campaign

Still, the down-sides of acting on these urgings should be obvious: No one knows for sure
how
much the Kosovo venture has already cost the U.S. Treasury — and, more to the point, the
Pentagon (especially in terms of the uncompensated wear-and-tear on its warplanes and support
aircraft). The tab so far appears conservatively to be measured at about two billion
dollars. On
top of that must be added the untold price of the emergency humanitarian operation now being
substantially mounted by the U.S. military. Those costs will increase exponentially, however, if a
forcible invasion of Kosovo (and perhaps other parts of Serbia) must now be undertaken.

Then there are the costs of what will surely evolve into a permanent presence in
Kosovo to
protect the ethnic Albanians. It is estimated that more than $10 billion has
been expended so far
in Bosnia for a far less difficult mission. Will new money be found to bear those expenses or will,
as in the past, much of it simply be extracted from the Clinton Administration’s favorite slush fund
— the Pentagon’s budgetary hide? Worse, will the commitment to Kosovo, a place of limited
strategic interest to the United States, render us unable to deal with far more momentous
problems emerging on the Korean peninsula, the Taiwan Strait, the Persian Gulf, etc.?

There will surely be a price to pay as well in the most precious currency of all — the
lives of
American military personnel. Here, too, the ultimate cost is unknowable at this point.
If,
however, NATO (read, the U.S.) is obliged to fight its way into and hold onto Yugoslav territory
that has proven in the past to favor guerrilla insurgencies rather than the superior conventional
forces trying to suppress them, the human price tag will be, as they say in the Pentagon,
“non-trivial.”

Why Would We Go in on the Ground?

Such losses — and the other costs — should not necessarily preclude military action on the
ground
in Kosovo. They demand, however, that the purposes for which this seriously
problematic
action might be taken are very clearly understood and that the projected benefits fully
justify them.

Unfortunately, at this writing, the purposes a NATO invasion of Kosovo would be
intended
to serve remain very unclear and the anticipated benefits exceedingly nebulous. Worse yet,
the three leading rationales for such an undertaking suggest that it cannot be justified.

• “NATO ought to invade Serbia to support ‘international humanitarian
  law.'”

This is an argument that has lately been advanced by assorted legal experts,
non-governmental organizations and academics — many of whom might otherwise have been
expected
to argue that the Atlantic alliance has no right to intervene in a civil war underway inside a
sovereign nation. In the face of Milosevic’s appalling crimes against humanity in Kosovo,
however, they aver that national sovereignty is being superceded by a new, higher international
responsibility.

This proposition will likely prove not only to be a troubling precedent (perhaps, notably, in
NATO-relevant places like Turkey, Spain and Northern Ireland). What is more, if the U.S. and its
allies embark upon a ground war in Serbia on such a basis, they will also be taking a large,
portentous step toward the multilateralists’ vision of world government. It is possible to be in
favor of stopping Slobodan Milosevic’s genocidal behavior while rejecting a new,
sovereignty-eroding principle of “international humanitarian law,” but it will surely be more
difficult to thread
this needle if NATO’s actions come to be predicated upon that principle.

• “NATO must invade Serbia to create an international protectorate in
  Kosovo.”

The glib way this idea is being promoted here in Washington belies both the difficulty and
what will be required to implement it. Even if, against all odds, the Serbs decided not to resist
NATO offensive operations aimed at making Kosovo a Serb-free zone (or at least one free of
Serbian security forces, paramilitaries and army troops), the West will face a prodigious task: It
will be obliged to assume responsibility for reconstructing the hundreds of Kosovar cities, towns
and villages destroyed over the past few weeks, resettling nearly a million refugees in them and
ensuring that they will never again be subjected to atrocities at Serb hands.

A variation on this theme that will probably prove, if anything, to be even more
vexing for the
United States is the idea of bringing Russian diplomats — and, presumably, Russian troops
— into the mix. The theory goes that the Serb government will be more likely to agree
to
surrender Kosovo to the Western allies if fellow Slavs in Russia are allowed to play a substantial
role in shaping and implementing a settlement.

In practice, such an arrangement would mean that NATO would have to admit the Serbs’
most
important ally into its councils. The Atlantic alliance has already served notice that it is
uncomfortable allowing humanitarian organizations to be put into positions that might
compromise NATO’s military operations against Serbia. One can only imagine the damage that
career KGB operative and current Russian premier Yevgeny Primakov could do if he succeeds in
placing Russian commanders and units in such positions!

• “NATO must invade Serbia in order to preserve the Milosevic regime in power.”
  

Of course, none of the prominent proponents of ground action in Kosovo are actually
coming
out and saying this. Indeed, most declare that they do not see how we can deal with Milosevic
ever again. Yet, the message is clear: The Clinton Administration, which continues to
claim
that it does not want to fight its way into Kosovo on the ground, and those among its critics
who believe we have no choice but to do so, see another deal with Milosevic as the only way
out of this morass.

The Bottom Line

If we are serious about achieving more than another temporary cease-fire in the Balkans,
however, we must not make any more deals with Slobodan Milosevic. If we
are to have any
hope of enlisting the Serb people — the vast majority of whom bear no responsibility for the
atrocities done in their name — they must be persuaded that the West will no longer pursue the
policy of legitimating and perpetuating Milosevic’s regime so that he might make more deals, an
odious policy personified by President Clinton’s special envoy for the Balkans, Amb. Richard
Holbrooke.

Finally, if we want “victory” to have any meaning, let alone any durability, the end of
Slobodan Milosevic’s reign of terror must become NATO’s declared objective and its
military, intelligence, economic, diplomatic and information activities tailored to bringing
about that worthy war aim. As former Secretary of Defense, Caspar Weinberger,
argues in an opinion piece which appeared in today’s New York
Times:

“Victory in this war must mean getting and keeping the Serbian army out of Kosovo —
permitting
the Kosovars to return to their homes (most of which will have to be rebuilt) — and the
elimination of Mr. Milosevic. If that humiliates him or Serbia, so much the better.”