The Nation April 19, 1999

The Case Against Intervention in Kosovo

by BENJAMIN SCHWARZ and CHRISTOPHER LAYNE

President Clinton's address attempting to justify-after the fact-the
US-led NATO bombing of Serbia should set off alarms. 

After all,the ideas and concerns Clinton invoked-the notion of 
instability spreading from country to country (much like falling 
dominoes), the perception that world politicsis a bipolar ideological 
confrontation between democracy anddictatorship,the obsession with 
reaffirming US leadership and resolve, the anxiety about
the vitality of alliance commitments and the conviction that US
security is tied to peace in an area of little inherent strategic 
importance-were all factors that led to the catastrophe of American 
involvement in Vietnam.

To be sure, presidential addresses are intended to persuade, but the
American people have a right to expect their chief executive-even one
with Bill Clinton's track record-to avoid distortions and half-truths.

Clinton's statement to the nation fell well short of the mark. It also 
failed the test of logic. In trying to rally public support, Clinton 
apparently hoped that, although taken in isolation his points were 
suspect, if he somehow packaged them using an 
everything-including-the-kitchen-sink approach,the factual and logical 
flaws would be lost in the crowd.

Clinton's explanation of the Kosovo conflict's background was, to put it
charitably, misleading. He glossed over the fact that the province of
Kosovo (the cradle of Serbia's cultural and national identity) is an
integral part of Serbia's sovereign territory. Far from being a case of
one state committing aggression against another, this conflict is, of
course, a civil war, the root of which is the province's ethnic Albanians' 
armed struggle to break free of Serbia and establish an independent state.

Thus,as in numerous ethnic conflicts in the Balkans and elsewhere, the
opposing sides' objectives cannot be reconciled.

Clinton was also misleading in placing sole blame for the breakdown of
the recent NATO-brokered Rambouillet peace talks on the Serbs. The ethnic
Albanians also refused at first to sign the NATO peace deal, because it
failed to guarantee their eventual independence from Serbia. The United
States finally induced them to sign by threatening to cut off the Kosovo
Liberation Army's access to arms and by reminding the KLA that without
its assent to the agreement, NATO could not conduct airstrikes against
Serbia.

When KLA intransigence initially stalled the talks, US officials-especially
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright-were palpably frustrated because
they feared that their plans to bomb Serbia would be derailed.

The President's description of the peace process also left out some
important details. Essentially, the Serbs, who were given the choice of
signing or being bombed, were "negotiating" with a gun at their heads.

They saw the Rambouillet deal as one-sided because, although the plan
provided that Kosovo would nominally remain a part of Serbia for three 
years, it also would have reduced the Serbian government's actual control 
over the province to a nullity. Of course, the plan ostensibly would have
disarmed the KLA in Kosovo, but because that group can operate out of 
neighboring Albania, it could have stockpiled weapons there. 

In fact, the KLA made its intentions quite clear: After the three-year 
transitional period, either Kosovo would become independent, or the KLA 
would resume the war.

Furthermore, Serbia resented the provisions of the peace plan that would
have required Belgrade to accept the presence of NATO forces in Kosovo.

An analogy to America's own bitter war of secession can illustrate what
NATO is trying to compel Serbia to do. It is as if the nineteenth-century
concert of Europe had forced President Lincoln to accept Southern
independence and European troops on American soil to police the
agreement, and had threatened to intervene militarily in support of the 
Confederate Army if Lincoln refused. 

After all, the unprecedentedly murderous AmericanCivil War appalled 
Europeans just as much as the Kosovo conflict does US leaders today. 
And just as Europeans believed that North American "stability" (and 
access to Southern cotton) was vital to their prosperity,so US 
policy-makers today are convinced that European stability is
essential to the United States' economic well-being. (Of course, the
social systems defended in Kosovo and the American South aren't parallel.)

Clinton justified the NATO action as a "moral imperative" to end the
killing of ethnic-Albanian civilians. Indeed, other US officials have
gone even further, describing the Serbian campaign in Kosovo as "genocide."

Although this characterization is demonstrably false (and trivializes
truly genocidal campaigns, like Hitler's attempt to exterminate European
Jewry),the President certainly is correct to observe that innocent civilians
are dying in Kosovo (before NATO's intervention, about 2,000 civilians,
mainly ethnic Albanians killed by the Serbs but also Kosovar Serbs killed by
theKLA, had perished there) and that the war is a humanitarian tragedy,
with hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing Kosovo and Serbian killings 
of civilians. But this is only part of the truth.

Civil wars are notoriously brutal, and guerrilla wars are particularly
hellish; the unconscionable acts that Clinton condemned are inherent to
these conflicts. In the kind of guerrilla campaign waged by the KLA,
civilians are inescapably targets of violence, because the insurgents
draw their manpower, material sustenance and political support from the
friendly population in whose name they fight. 

In a guerrilla war-any guerrilla war-the line differentiating fighters 
from noncombatants inevitablyevaporates. The Serbs should be castigated 
for their brutal tactics in Kosovo, but the United States has no moral 
ground to stand on in such matters. 

For example, the United States designated wide areas of South Vietnam 
thought to be under Vietcong control as "free-fire zones."
Rules of engagement were not restricted in those areas, because anyone found
there was considered a Vietcong fighter or supporter.

Even on its own terms, the argument that we must intervene in Kosovo to
stave off a humanitarian catastrophe is unconvincing. Although the Serbs
have obviously committed atrocities, in the Balkan wars of this decade
all the combatants have been guilty of acts of savagery. 

Indeed, several days before the NATO airstrikes began, the drama in Kosovo 
overshadowed the report by the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague 
of the atrocities-massive ethnic cleansing, summary executions, indiscriminate
shelling of civilian populations-the Croatian Army committed with the tacit
blessing of the United States during its summer 1995 offensive against
the Croatian Serbs. 

For its part, the KLA-whose goals include not only independence but the 
expulsion of Serbs from Kosovo-has kidnapped and executed Serb civilians and 
burned their villages.

And while Clinton has depicted Serbian actions in the most horrific
light possible, he remains silent about the human rights atrocities
perpetrated by America's NATO ally Turkey, which has been waging a 
decades-long military campaign of repression against its Kurdish ethnic 
minority.

Like Serbia, Turkey has questionable democratic credentials. Like the ethnic
Albanians in Kosovo, Kurds waging a guerrilla war demand independence.
Turkey has responded to the Kurdish insurgency with the same tactics
that Clinton has imputed to the Serbs: terror, "genocide" and suppression 
of human rights.

Yet the Clinton Administration does not propose bombing Ankara, which,
of course, provokes the obvious question: Why intervene in Kosovo and not
in Turkey-or Sudan, Rwanda, Congo or Sierra Leone, for that matter, where
humanitarian intervention is at least as justified? 

The moral argument for intervention in Kosovo is cast in terms of universally applicable
principles. But Washington picks and chooses its humanitarian
interventions, inserting itself in some conflicts and ignoring others in
which the reasons to act are at least as compelling. 

This leaves US policy-makers open to the charge that they are using 
humanitarian concerns as a pretext to mobilize public support for military 
interventions undertaken for other reasons.

The President asserted that America's vital interests are at stake in
Kosovo. As he put it, the United States and the alliance must "defuse a
powder keg at the heart of Europe that has exploded twice before in this
century with catastrophic results." 

Here, Clinton's understanding of European history is particularly misguided. In arguing for intervention
to prevent a wider war, he said that "Sarajevo, the capital of neighboring
Bosnia, is where World War I began." But comparisons to the First World
War actually point to a policy antithetical to the one he is pursuing. The
fuse of that war was lit in Sarajevo not because ethnic conflict existed in
the Balkans but because great powers meddled in those conflicts. (The
Balkans do not have even so tenuous a connection to the origins of World War
II.)

Clinton has also stressed the need to act to preserve NATO's
credibility.

The President argues that to let Serbian aggression go unpunished will
encourage leaders in other troubled areas to pursue dangerous policies.
But halting Serbian aggression is no more likely to deter future aggressors
than US action in the Persian Gulf-which, after all, was defended as
part of a new world order that would punish aggressors-deterred Serbia. 

In the world of statecraft, most crises are discrete, not tightly linked. 
The outcome of events in other potential hot spots will be decided by local
conditions, not by what the United States does or does not do in the
Balkans. 

Put another way, just as Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic
wasnot deterred by US action against Iraq; Saddam Hussein was not deterred
by US action in Panama; Manuel Antonio Noriega was not deterred by US
action in Grenada, Lebanon and Vietnam; Ho Chi Minh was not deterred by US
action against North Korea; and Kim Il Sung and Joseph Stalin were not
deterred byUS action against Adolf Hitler. America's misplaced obsession 
with credibility will doom the United States to a string of military
interventions in strategically peripheral regions.

Paradoxically, unless Serbia quickly knuckles under to NATO bombing, the
effect of Kosovo intervention may be to rupture fatally the very
alliance the airstrikes were intended to solidify. If the Serbs refuse to
capitulate, the alliance's fragile unity will likely dissolve. Indeed, a
bare forty-eight hours after the bombing commenced, Greece and Italy
already were expressing unease with the air campaign.

The President's argument that, absent US intervention in Kosovo, the war
will engulf the entire Balkan region, pit Greece against Turkey and
"destabilize" all of Europe is nothing more than a recycled version of
the long-discredited domino theory. But, aside from the theory's general
flaws,Clinton's specific application of it to Kosovo is problematic.

After all, the Administration's grand strategy of "Engagement and
Enlargement" is based explicitly on the convictions that democracies do
not fight other democracies and that international institutions foster peace
among their members. 

Washington considers both Greece and Turkey democracies, and both are members of the same institution-NATO. So, in
essence, the Clinton Administration is waging war in Kosovo to forestall a
Greco-Turkish conflict that, according to the Administration's own core
foreign policy assumptions, cannot occur. 

Also, to the extent that the Kosovo conflict does "spill over" into 
neighboring Macedonia and Albania,NATO's attacks are likely to be the 
proximate cause. Rather than dampening Serbian military attacks against 
Kosovo's ethnic Albanians, NATO's airstrikes have intensified Serbian 
aggression, which in turn has caused more Albanians to flee Kosovo. 

Meanwhile, the likelihood of cross-border clashes has increased, because 
the KLA will undoubtedly use refugee camps in Albania as bases of operations. The violent anti-US/NATO
demonstrations in Macedonia in reaction to the bombing clearly illustrate 
how NATO intervention is contributing to regional destabilization, but even if
war spreads to neighboring Albania and Macedonia, instability in those
states poses no greater intrinsic threat to US interests than does the
conflict in Kosovo.

President Clinton says that if the United States allows a fire to burn
in the Balkans, "the flames will spread," but one way to fight forest
fires is let the fire burn itself out. Wars end when both sides are 
exhausted, or when one side realizes it has been defeated and abandons 
the struggle.

In the other Balkan conflict, in Bosnia, the war might have ended with
fewer dead if the Bosnian Muslims had tried to negotiate an accommodation 
with the Serbs much earlier in the conflict. One of the reasons they didn't
do so is that they believed NATO would eventually rescue them. 

But they did not simply rely on the natural course of events to bring NATO 
into the conflict. Rather, to create sympathy in the West for their cause, 
they manipulated the situation and engaged in clever propaganda. 

A decisive moment in the Bosnian conflict occurred in early 1994, when a 
mortar shell exploded in a crowded Sarajevo marketplace, killing and maiming scores
of civilians. The Serbs were immediately blamed for this atrocity, and
NATO's intervention followed shortly thereafter. The evidence that the 
Bosnian Serbs were responsible is, at best, highly inconclusive. In fact, as
former British foreign secretary David Owen reports in his account of his
tenure as the European Union's Balkan peace envoy, there is strong evidence
that the Bosnian Muslims fired the offending mortar shell themselves to
fabricate an incident that would spur NATO intervention to relieve the
siege of Sarajevo. 

In Kosovo, as US and NATO officials have acknowledged off the record, the 
United States has been subject to similar provocations, as the KLA has 
maneuvered to bring NATO into the war as its de facto air force.

Clinton has also been unable to think through the short- and medium-term
implications of NATO intervention. US and NATO officials say that air
power will compel Serbia to abide by the alliance's wishes. But as World War
II, Vietnam and the Persian Gulf War demonstrated, air power alone does not
win wars. To prevail over an opponent, one must prevail on the ground. 

The Clinton Administration, however, has created its own mythology about air
power's efficacy, contending that the NATO bombing of the Bosnian Serbs in
the summer of 1995 forced them to negotiate at Dayton. In fact, the
decisive event that ended the Bosnian war was the successful summer 1995
ground offensive against the Bosnian Serbs launched by the Croatian
Army.

So air power is highly unlikely to break Serbia's will. The US Strategic
Bombing Survey found that the Allied bombing of German cities during
World War II actually stiffened German civilians' will to resist. In the 
Vietnam War, the United States again tried unsuccessfully to use bombing to
crack the North's will to prosecute the war. The airstrikes against Serbia
are no more likely to succeed in their objective than did those in Southeast
Asia.

In World War II, of course, even the awesome military power of Nazi
Germany could not subdue the (mostly Serb) Yugoslav resistance. And 
throughout the cold war, the Serb-led Yugoslav Army prepared to resist a 
possible Soviet invasion with the same tactics, and tenacity, it had 
employed successfully against the Nazis.

American policy-makers notoriously misread the psychology, the history
and the nationalism of other nations. For all Clinton's talk about vital
interests, the struggle in Kosovo is only of the remotest geopolitical
consequence to the United States. For Serbia, however, it involves the
highest stakes for which a nation can fight: the defense of its
sovereign territory. 

In conflicts like those in Vietnam or Kosovo, the interests of
US adversaries clearly outweigh US interests-which means that an
opponent's resolve is likely to outlast America's. Indeed, far from turning 
against the popularly elected Serbian president, Serbs of all political stripes
have united against NATO. And should US troops ever be deployed in
Kosovo as peacekeepers, they would almost certainly be targets of
revenge-seeking Serb terrorists (US troops in neighboring Bosnia will similarly 
be at risk).

Clinton's policy is likely to have other, even more important and
unfortunate, strategic consequences. Intended or not, USactions-including NATO 
expansion, and now the intervention in Kosovo-have 
gravely offended and alarmed Russia. American policy-makers suggest that 
NATO's military intervention troubles only "extremist" Russians. 

But Washington should have no illusions: Opposition to NATO's attacks and its 
expansion is probably the one major foreign policy issue on which virtually
the entire Russian political class is united. NATO, after all, was supposedly 
designed as a defensive alliance to repel a military attack on its member states, 
but in Kosovo it has radically extended its writ by intervening in a state
unconnected to it. Furthermore, from Moscow's perspective, the United
States, by bringing its powerful military alliance to Russia's borders,
has reneged on a bargain it struck with Russia at the end of the cold war.

At that time Moscow agreed to quit Eastern Europe and to allow German
unification. Moreover, Russia acceded to the continued existence of an
alliance that had been hostile to it and even agreed to the inclusion of
newly unified Germany in that alliance. In return, Moscow received
assurances from the United States and its allies that they would not
take advantage of this situation to tip the geopolitical balance in a way
that would potentially threaten Russia's security.

Russians have good reasons to worry about NATO expansion, which, as
Clinton has acknowledged, is a means to consolidate and extend America's
military and political leadership in Europe. Great powers have always been more
concerned about competitors' capabilities than about theirintentions-because 
intentions can change quickly. 

In the post-cold war era, NATO remains the most powerful military alliance the 
world has ever seen. Even those Russians who are not closet aggressors are anxious about
having such an impressive military association poised on their frontier. NATO's
expansion, coupled with its intervention in cases in which the
alliance's security is not threatened, could lead to a nationalist backlash.

Russia may be down now, but because its history as a great power is
cyclical, there is every reason to assume that it will recover. American
actions make it more likely that a resurgent Russia will harbor deep and
justifiable resentment toward the United States. A hostile Russia not
only could create trouble in Europe but could also undermine the US strategic
position globally by aligning with China. 

At a time when many American strategists are concerned about a future 
great-power threat from China, a wise long-term US strategy would aim to 
insure Russian partnership with Washington. It is the height of folly 
to follow a policy in the Balkans that can only have the effect of pushing 
Russia more closely into Beijing's embrace.

In his address to the nation Clinton also briefly invoked another,
particularly disturbing argument for intervention. In a speech the
previous day, he had discussed this rationale at greater length, declaring that
"if we're going to have a strong economic relationship that includes our
ability to sell around the world, Europe has got to be a key.... That's
what this Kosovo thing is all about." He thus seems to argue that the
United States is fighting a war in Kosovo to make the world safe for
capitalism. 

In fact, the President and other policy-makers have long
been making similar arguments. In explaining its global strategy, for
instance, the Pentagon declared in 1993 that "a prosperous, largely democratic,
market-oriented zone of peace and prosperity that encompasses more than
two-thirds of the world's economy" requires the "stability" that only
American "leadership" can provide. In the debate over US intervention in
Bosnia, leading foreign policy figures, including the former head of the
National Security Agency and Senator Richard Lugar, asserted that, left
unchecked, the war there could lead to "national parochialism" in
Europe, threatening global economic interdependence and US prosperity.

The air war against Serbia is just the latest installment in what
appears to be Washington's quest to make the world safe for America's investors
and exporters. Last year, speaking to the Boston Chamber of Commerce,
Defense Secretary William Cohen justified NATO expansion as a way of "spreading
the kind of security and stability that Western Europe has enjoyed since
after World War II to Central and Eastern Europe." And, in an observation
certain to resonate with his audience, he noted: "And with that spread of
stability, there is a prospect to attract investment." 

No doubt the Administration is moved by the human tragedy of Kosovo. Clearly,
however, its perception that US economic interests are indirectly at stake is at
least as important. As Cohen has said, the Administration's strategy
seeks to "discourage violence and instability-instability which destroys lives
and markets." 

Clinton recently exhorted Americans to accept the "inevitable
logic" of globalism and free trade. But the Administration's Balkan
policy shows that globalization is not inevitable-it depends on America's
overseas military commitments and its willingness to wage war if necessary.

What is most frightening about this economic rationale (which amounts
to an imperialist argument) is its open-endedness. According to US
policy-makers, the logic of global economic interdependence leads inevitably to a
proliferation of US security commitments: Instability and aggression,
virtually wherever they occur, are regarded as a threat to America,
because they would disrupt the global stability upon which the United States
purportedly depends for its prosperity. 

This thinking is, again, similar to the domino theory: Instability in even 
economically unimportant areas (like Kosovo) could "spill over" and infect 
other areas regarded as essential to global economic interdependence.

The US action in Kosovo should give Americans considerable pause as they
contemplate their nation's role in international politics. It is one
thing to oppose, as the United States did in the Persian Gulf, an aggressive
attack by one state against another.  

It is something else entirely to proclaim, as Washington has, that the United 
States now reserves the right to use military force to alter another state's 
internal political arrangements when Washington finds that these offend its 
ever-shifting political sensibilities. It indeed is quite fantastic to find 
the United States taking military action against a sovereign state in Europe that
poses no threat to America's security or to its interests. If the United
States is not the aggressor that Russia says it is, at the least it is
displaying the arrogance of power common to imperial states.

We should know, of course, the trouble in which this arrogance of power
can mire us. It is too early to tell if the Clinton Administration's policy
will ultimately lead to the use of US ground troops in the Kosovo
conflict. But there is ample reason to fear that this could happen.

Vietnam showed that once the decision to use military force has been
made, policy-makers are under almost irresistible pressure to escalate to
win-or to avoid failure. Anyone familiar with the history of the Kennedy and
Johnson administrations' step-by-step descent into the Vietnam quagmire
must have been chilled in recent days by the statements of many members
of Congress and foreign policy analysts. Even many of those, like Senator
John McCain and Henry Kissinger, who were initially skeptical of intervention
now contend that, once committed, the United States has no choice but
to do whatever is necessary-including using ground forces-to prevail.

If any clear lesson emerges from Vietnam, it is that it makes no sense
to compound a mistake by digging oneself more deeply into a strategic
morass.

The questions that policy-makers must ask now are: What does "victory"
in Kosovo mean, and can victory be attained without incurring costs
disproportionate to the US interests at stake? Astonishingly, an
Administration led and staffed by opponents of the Vietnam War is now
compelled by the same concerns that drove, and blind to the same
obstacles that confounded, the architects of that conflict.

Representing one foreign policy tradition, John Quincy Adams admonished
America to "go not abroad in search of monsters to destroy." The US
intervention in Kosovo should prompt Americans to heed his warning.

During the 1992 election campaign, Clinton said the United States should 
play lofty global role; it would be "intolerable" for the United States to
actas if it were "simply...another great power." But rather than have the
United States pursue grandiose visions pleasing to its self-image,
followers of Adams's tradition-like Charles Beard and William Appleman
Williams on the left, as well as such thoughtful conservatives as George
Kennan and Walter Lippmann-accept that there are not and need not be US
solutions to the world's myriad problems. They understand that balancing
costs and benefits, resources and commitments, is a moral as well as
strategic imperative. States that fail to do so run the risk of
political and economic ruin.

Instead of crediting Clinton's notions of the intolerable, post-cold war
America should attend to Lippmann's sobering injunction: "A mature great
power...will eschew the theory of a global and universal duty which not
only commits it to unending wars of intervention but intoxicates its
thinking with the illusion that it is a crusader for righteousness....

I am in favor of learning to behave like a great power, of getting rid of the
globalism which would not only entangle us everywhere but is based on
the totally vain notion that if we do not set the world in order, no matter
what the price, we cannot live in the world safely.... We shall have to
learn to live as a great power which defends itself and makes its way
amongother great powers.

Benjamin Schwarz is a correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly and former
executive editor of The World Policy Journal. Christopher Layne is a
MacArthur Fellow in Peace and International Security Studies. For more
information, go to www.thenation.com.