Only a few weeks after NATO ended its Kosovo bombing campaign Michael Mandelbaum, a distinguished Fellow of the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations, had already reached the conclusion that politically, the whole operation had been ‘a perfect failure’. Serb treatment of Albanians in Kosovo, he writes, was hardly exemplary before the bombing but, measured by the worst of all human right violations – murder – neither was it exceptionally bad.
Given its source, his essay which appeared in the September/October, 1999 issue of the Council’s journal, Foreign Affairs, is a surprisingly scathing critique of U.S. foreign policy. Mandelbaum’s acute insights, so close in time to the events they describe, confirm much of our subsequent research. The following brief extracts capture the tone of this remarkable and highly recommended essay which can be viewed in full (behind a paywall) at: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/1999-09-01/perfect-failure
“Every war has unanticipated consequences, but in this case, virtually all the major political effects were unplanned, unanticipated and unwelcome. Having begun it, Western political leaders declared they were fighting for the sake of the people of the Balkans, who nevertheless emerged from the war considerably worse off than they had been before. The alliance also fought to establish a new principle governing the use of force in the post-Cold War world. But the war set precedents that it would be neither feasible nor desirable to follow. Finally, like all wars this one affected the national countries that waged it. The effects were negative: relationships with two large, important, and troublesome formerly communist countries, Russia and China were set back by the operations in the Balkans…”
“When the war ended the political question at its heart remained unsettled. That question concerned the proper principle for determining sovereignty.The Albanians had fought for independence based on the right to national self-determination. The Serbs fought to keep Kosovo part of Yugoslavia in the name of inviolability of existing borders. While insisting that Kosovo be granted autonomy, Nato asserted that it must remain part of Yugoslavia. The alliance had therefore intervened in a civil war and defeated one side, but embraced the position of the party it had defeated the issue over which the war had been fought.”
“In Serbia proper the NATO air campaign destroyed much of the infrastructure on which economic life depended….besides harming those whom NATO’s political leaders had proclaimed innocent of the crimes committed in Kosovo- for which they blamed Milosevic not the Serb people – these strikes violated Article 14 of the 1997 Protocol to the 1949 Geneva Convention which bars attacks on “objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population…”
“…The bombing of Serbia, moreover, continued an ugly pattern that the Clinton administration had followed in Haiti and Iraq, a pattern born of a combination of objection to particular leaders and a reluctance to risk American casualties…if there is a Clinton Doctrine-an innovation by the present administration in the conduct of foreign policy – it is this: punishing the innocent in order to express indignation at the guilty.”
