America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History (32 page)

But those forces, numbering some forty thousand in all, were operating in small units that were difficult to locate and easy to hide. They mixed in with the very population that NATO was supposedly trying to protect. Attacking them was a mission far better suited to ground troops—of which Clark had none available—than to air forces.

Certainly, this described Short’s view. In his own encounters with Milo
š
evi
ć
, Short had concluded, “If you hit that man hard, slapped him up side the head, he’d pay attention.”
³⁰
Slapping him “up side the head” translated into going after ministries, infrastructure, airfields, barracks, communications sites, and refineries. As far as Short was concerned, the plight of suffering Kosovars was somebody else’s problem.

The air force three-star publicly aired his unhappiness with the priorities established by the army four-star charged with overall responsibility for running the war. “As an airman, I would have done this differently,” he complained to
The Washington Post.
“It would not be an incremental air campaign or a slow buildup, but we would go downtown from the first night,” bringing home to “the influential citizens of Belgrade” the consequences of defying NATO and the United States.

If you wake up in the morning and you have no power to your house and no gas to your stove and the bridge you take to work is down and will be lying in the Danube for the next 20 years, I think you begin to ask, “Hey, Slobo, what’s this all about? How much more of this do we have to withstand?” And at some point, you make the transition from applauding Serb machismo against the world to thinking what your country is going to look like if this continues.
³¹

Scornful of tank plinking, Short refused to do it Clark’s way—and ultimately he prevailed.
³²

The second cleavage marked a split between fellow four-stars, pitting the SACEUR against his peers on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. To shield Kosovars caught in the path of Operation Horseshoe, Clark placed an urgent request for AH-64 Apache attack helicopters, potent weapons well suited to plinking Yugoslav mechanized units pushing through Kosovo. Such a commitment entailed risk, however—the AH-64 is fragile as well as powerful. It also hinted at a slippery slope. Given Clark’s publicly stated intention to “degrade, devastate, and ultimately destroy” the enemy, committing attack helicopters might open the door to a subsequent commitment of ground troops.

The Joint Chiefs were having none of that. To keep Apaches out of the fight, they debated, delayed, and dragged their feet. “Clearly,” Clark later grumbled, “they didn’t understand that this was a war, that NATO’s future was at stake.”
³³
More accurately, the JCS had concluded that Clark’s priorities differed from their own. They felt a limited obligation to bail out a colleague for whom they felt little affection, especially when doing so meant charging more deeply into a conflict that from the outset they viewed as suspect. By the time the Apaches did finally reach the scene and were ready to launch, the fighting had ended. Like General Short, the Joint Chiefs had prevailed at the SACEUR’s expense.

The third cleavage was between Washington and Brussels, with Clark caught squarely in the middle. Nominally a partnership of coequals, NATO is actually a tiered organization, with the United States occupying the top tier in solitary splendor. The preeminent symbol of that arrangement is the identity of the SACEUR: An American has always filled the post. Who this officer actually works for, however, is a delicate matter requiring political finesse.

As Allied Force went awry, authorities in Washington expected Clark to put U.S. interests first and to heed their instructions. Clark himself either failed to comprehend or refused to accept that requirement. In televised press conferences convened to explain (implausibly) that all was going according to plan, the SACEUR offered assessments and described intentions that put him at odds with the Pentagon and the White House.
³⁴
Clark gave the impression of viewing himself either as an independent potentate or as an agent of the alliance, rather than as someone who took his marching orders from Washington.

These performances particularly incensed the U.S. secretary of defense, William Cohen, who eventually had had enough. Cohen ordered General Shelton to call Clark with instructions that the JCS chairman read to the SACEUR verbatim: “Get your fucking face off the TV. No more briefings, period.”
³⁵
This directive removed any doubts about the hierarchy of authority. But it also exposed the extent to which Clark had forfeited the confidence of those in Washington whose support he badly needed.

Most of this was occurring offstage. In front of the curtain, a war much like any other war was underway, fraught with uncertainty and error and random bloodletting. Yet NATO and U.S. authorities had marketed Allied Force as something other than an actual war. After all, its purpose was to protect the innocent, with violence employed with laserlike precision to minimize casualties and kill only people genuinely deserving to be killed.

So when things that typically happen in war duly occurred, they seemed shocking, as if NATO had suffered a catastrophic failure or was violating some solemn promise. On the night of March 27, for example, a Yugoslav missile downed a U.S. Air Force F-117A. (The pilot, Lieutenant Colonel Dale Zelko, successfully ejected and was recovered.) Given the stealth technology that ostensibly made that aircraft undetectable, the shootdown appeared inexplicable.

On March 31, Serbs captured three GIs on peacekeeping duty in neighboring Macedonia. Clark complained about what he called a “kidnapping.”
³⁶
More likely, the soldiers had accidentally wandered across the border and into Serb hands. Even so, published photographs of befuddled young American troops held captive caused widespread dismay. (Once more, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, never publicity-shy, stepped into the breach, traveling to Belgrade to secure the POWs’ release.)

Then on April 12, a U.S. Air Force F-15E attacking a railroad bridge struck a passenger train entering the target area at just the wrong time. More than a dozen civilians were killed, with others wounded. Two days later, several F-16s rolled in on what the American pilots thought was a convoy of military vehicles. The convoy actually consisted of tractors pulling farm wagons, packed with fleeing Kosovars. As many as seventy-three noncombatants died as a result.

Worse still was to come on May 7. With the weight of the NATO air effort now shifting to the “strategic” targets that Short preferred, B-2 bombers flying all the way from Whiteman AFB in Missouri put five satellite-guided bombs on a large Belgrade building that turned out to be the embassy of the People’s Republic of China. Apologies for what Washington insisted had been an accident did little to mollify the Chinese.

In any real war, incidents such as these—with the possible exception of the embassy bombing—would have qualified as regrettable but insignificant. In Kosovo, they became defining moments, emblematic of an alliance unable to get its act together.

On the American home front, meanwhile, an epidemic of impatience erupted. Politicians and pundits alike expressed consternation over the administration’s apparent inability to deliver instantaneous victory. Within a week of the first bombs falling, Senator Richard Lugar, a well-regarded moderate Republican from Indiana, took to the op-ed pages of
The Washington Post
to declare, “We are losing the war in Kosovo.”
³⁷
Air power alone wasn’t going to suffice. The self-evident solution was to send in ground troops.

A chorus of militant voices rose up to endorse that proposal. Writing in
The Weekly Standard,
for example, Robert Kagan and William Kristol commended Lugar and other Republicans who were calling for escalation. At issue in Kosovo, they wrote, was “the single overriding question of our time: Will the United States and its allies have the will to shape the world in conformance with our interests and our principles…? Or will we allow much of the world to slip into chaos and brutality?” The key was to win a decisive military victory, which meant that the United States needed to “liberate Kosovo” and “drive Milo
š
evi
ć
from power.”
³⁸

Senator John McCain sounded a similar note. He denounced the Clinton administration for having “waged war on the cheap,” with saving Kosovars taking a backseat to avoiding U.S. casualties. McCain professed to find the president’s reluctance to invade Kosovo “mystifying.” Only a large-scale ground offensive could “rescue the nation’s security and honor from the calamity” that Clinton’s bungling had produced.
³⁹
In short, the clamor triggered by the absence of immediate military success imparted to Kosovo greatly elevated significance. The stakes at issue there assumed seemingly cosmic proportions.

When and how to mount an invasion, thereby redeeming an increasingly dire situation, became the overriding issue of the day. Observers noted with satisfaction the emergence of an interventionist consensus transcending the usual left-right divisions of American politics. Even peaceniks were coming to appreciate the potential benefits of war.
⁴⁰
Others assessed the merits of various invasion scenarios.
⁴¹
Hovering in the background to provide a simulacrum of historical context was World War II, with Milo
š
evi
ć
, the latest stand-in for Hitler, engaged in criminal actions akin to those associated with Auschwitz.

In the event, as is so often the case, the kibitzing of critics proved less important than the ongoing rush of events. Given the disparity between the opposing sides, the outcome of the Kosovo War was foreordained—assuming that NATO, which really meant the United States, persevered. Whatever the daily humiliations accruing as a result of a venture gone badly amiss, they paled in comparison to the mortification awaiting the Clinton administration if it admitted outright failure. So, in contrast to Reagan after Beirut or Clinton himself after Mogadishu, the administration refused to quit. Responding to critics, national security adviser Sandy Berger on June 2 identified “four irreducible facts” defining U.S. policy in Kosovo. “One, we will win. Period. Full stop. There is no alternative. Second, winning means what we said it means. Third, the air campaign is having a serious impact. Four, the president has said he has not ruled out any option. So go back to one. We will win.”
⁴²

Berger’s fourth point explicitly revoked the administration’s previous prohibition on the introduction of ground troops. If phase three of General Clark’s air campaign did not produce the desired result, there was indeed going to be a phase four: Invasion.

In fact, by the time Berger staged this demonstration of faux pugnacity, the endgame was already approaching. Phase three of the bombing campaign was now inflicting heavy damage. The forces under General Short’s command were doing what he had wanted done all along: closing down oil refineries, dropping bridges across the Danube, knocking out electrical distribution systems, and even blasting the main radio and television broadcast facilities in the center of Belgrade. The Serb people, noisily contemptuous of NATO at the campaign’s outset, were showing signs of war-weariness.

Of equal importance, the KLA had bounced back. Under the cover of allied air attacks, they reconstituted their forces and returned to the offensive. As had Operation Determined Force, Allied Force benefited from a proxy ground component.

For Milo
š
evi
ć
, the last straw came on May 27, when the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia indicted him for war crimes. With Serbia proper under intensifying assault from the air, the KLA on the move, and NATO inching toward invasion, Milo
š
evi
ć
’s interest in terminating hostilities now exceeded even Clinton’s. Soon enough, the American, European, and Russian negotiators who had been working unsuccessfully to arrange a ceasefire hammered out terms that Milo
š
evi
ć
found tolerable.

Once all parties accepted that agreement on June 3, fighting stopped. Military action did not, however. The ceasefire terms required Yugoslav forces to evacuate Kosovo. This they proceeded to do in remarkably good order, exhibiting few signs of defeat. In their place, a force of fifty thousand peacekeepers began arriving in Kosovo on June 12. This was KFOR, an organization primarily built around NATO, with the United States initially contributing seven thousand troops and General Clark in overall command.

Complicating matters was the fact that KFOR also included a Russian contingent. This was part of the price that the West had paid for Moscow’s assistance in brokering the ceasefire deal. Yet the Russians were going to play on their own terms. When they jumped the gun by dispatching an armored column from Bosnia to the Kosovo capital of Pri
š
tina, an angry Clark reacted with characteristic rashness. To prevent the arrival of further Russian reinforcements, he directed KFOR’s immediate commander, British Lieutenant General Sir Michael Jackson, to block the runway of Pri
š
tina’s main airport. This Jackson refused to do, provoking a heated exchange with Clark, important for our purposes because it illustrates the impact of the Kosovo war on allied solidarity.