The seventy-eight-day bombing campaign against Serbia
in the spring and early summer of 1999 was the last major international
conflict in the bloodiest of all centuries. It was also
a first in several respects – the first time in fifty years of existence that
the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation went to War, the first time that a
coalition of countries attacked a regime to end its brutalisation of a national
minority, the first time airpower alone was enough to ensure victory, and the
first time that U.S. Armed Forces conducted a sustained military operation
without suffering a single combat facility.
These distinctions of Operation Allied Force gave us a
glimpse of a new feature of world Politics and a new form of Warfare. Slobodan
Milošević may be in the dock at the UN International Criminal Tribunal in the
Hague, but his species of predatory Tyrant is not extinct. War will continue to
be necessary from time to time as part of the larger effort to reverse
aggression, stop the depredations of Dictators, reimpose order on chaos, and
more generally, defend the interests and enforce the norms of an abstraction
that is trying to become a Reality – the international community.
To the extent that there is such a thing as an
international community, it owes much to NATO. The alliance was founded for the
sole purpose of deterring – and if necessary, defeating – the Soviet Union and
the Warsaw Pact if they ever attacked the West. Yet by 1999, that country and
that alliance no longer existed. Many commentators and some political leaders
were asking whether NATO, having served its original purpose, should go into
honourable retirement.
The conflict in the Balkans was a reminder that the
end of the Cold War did not mean the end of instability in Europe. Quite the
contrary: the collapse of communist States – giant ones like the USSR and
smaller ones like Yugoslavia – was accompanied by the increased danger of chaos
and violence. The post-Soviet States were fortunate in that the leader of
Russia, President Boris Yeltsin, was determined to resist the temptations of
Irredentism. He insisted on converting inter-republic boundaries into new
international ones, even though that meant leaving millions of ethnic Russians
in what were now independent States. The post-Yugoslav States were cursed in
that their leaders, particularly Milošević, saw an opportunity to redraw the
map in blood, along ethnic and religious lines.
NATO was slow in rising to the challenge but did so
in 1995 by using diplomacy backed by Force to impose Peace in Bosnia. The
United States and its allies had to bomb the Bosnian Serbs in order to get Milošević
and his henchmen to the negotiating table in Dayton – and they then deployed
thousands of NATO troops to enforce the settlement achieved there.
NATO would have launched the bombing campaign with
the blessing of the UN Security Council if the Russian Federation had not
threatened a veto. Yet even though the War began over the vigorous objections
of the Russians, it ended in large measure because President Yeltsin and his
special envoy, Victor Chernomyrdin, threw Russia’s weight behind what were
essentially American terms, endorsed by NATO, for stopping the bombing. In that
respect, the War was both the most severe crisis in the first decade of
post-Cold War U.S.-Russian relations and the most dramatic instance of
U.S.-Russian diplomatic collaboration in that period.
By going to War against Milošević, the West was reiterating a
principle that had been taking shape for several years: the sovereignty of
individual States is not absolute; a national Government that systematically
and massively abuses its own citizens loses its right to govern; it is subject
either to being put out of business altogether or having its authority
suspended in that area of the country where it is running amok.
The
U.S.-led invasion of Haiti in 1994 was an early assertion of this principle and
therefore a precedent for what NATO did in Kosovo five years later.
A military junta that had carried out a coup against Haiti’s first democratically elected
president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was using terror and murder as
instruments for controlling an increasingly desperate and restive population. Thousands
of Haitians sought asylum in the United States by taking to the seas in rickety
boats. In order to end a Human Rights outrage and a humanitarian crisis
occurring off its shores, the United States sponsored a resolution in the UN
Security Council that made the restoration of Democracy a goal justifying the
use of Force. With the support of the UN and the Organisation of American
States, the United States assembled a broad-based coalition, invaded Haiti,
threw out the junta and reinstated Aristide.
In the years that followed, Aristide abused his mandate,
misruled and alienated his people. When he was driven into exile by a popular
uprising in the spring of 2004, American troops and those from other countries
returned to patrol the streets of Port-au-Prince and disperse around the
country. Their presence, while a sobering epilogue to the U.S.-led invasion a
decade earlier, did not negate its validity or change a grim but inescapable
fact of international life: since there will continue to be States that are
either a menace to their own People or to their neighbours, other States must,
in concert, be prepared to step in and change the regime. In Haiti in 1994, that meant throwing out the junta and
and bringing back Aristide; in Kosovo in 1999, it meant ending Belgrade’s rule
in the province; in Afghanistan in 2001, it meant driving the Taliban from
kabul into the mountains; in Iraq in 2003, it meant toppling Saddam Hussein and
replacing him with an American proconsul.
The case of Afghanistan and
Iraq were complicated by the Bush administration’s reluctance to cast its own
policies in terms of continuity with its predecessors, especially its immediate
predecessor, the Clinton administration. President Bush and his principal
colleagues do not talk much about the ongoing obligation of the United States
in Bosnia and Kosovo, since they campaigned against both in 2000 as examples of
what they disparaged as the foolish business of nation-building. However, now
that they are engaged in precisely that activity in Afghanistan and Iraq, Kosovo looks more like a model for what they may end up
putting in place in those other States that American-led Armies liberated from
heinous regimes.
Afghanistan came into the cross hairs of American
military might because it was the base of operations for terrorists who attacked
the U.S. homeland on September 11, while Iraq became a target because the Bush
administration accused Saddam of possessing large, illicit, and usable stores
of weapons of mass destruction. As that pretext for the invasion has come under
sharp questioning and as the United States seeks more help from the UN and NATO
in providing Security and reconstruction in Afghanistan and Iraq, President Bush increasingly invokes the same rationale that
President Clinton used for regime-change in Haiti and Kosovo: the defence of
Freedom, Democracy, and decent Governance.
All the more reason, therefore, to study Kosovo for
the lessons it offers for future such exertions of Force.
Among the standards that should be applied are:
whether peaceful means of ending violence have been exhausted and therefore
Politics by other, violent means is justified; whether military action makes
maximum use of regional and global institutions and derives maximum legitimacy
from treaties and International Law; whether it enlists as much participation
in the War as possible from allies and ad hoc partners in order to ensure their
participation in the reconstruction that will follow; whether it makes the best
use of Technology, not just for killing enemy leaders and soldiers but for not
killing civilians; whether it is conducted in a fashion designed to reduce the
danger of conflict spreading; whether the prosecution of the War is
synchronised with diplomatic efforts to end the fighting; whether the terms of
the surrender imposed on the defeated Power are conducive to a stable and
sustainable Peace; and finally, whether the warmakers-turned-peacekeepers are
prepared to remain on the ground, in the region, and on the case for what will,
almost always, be a very long time.
By that checklist, the Kosovo War was far from
perfect, but overall, it gets a passing grade (although by the last criterion –
staying Power – it gets an incomplete, since five years does not qualify as a
long time.)
Kosovo, today, is a virtual trusteeship, a ward of
the UN and NATO. It’s a mess, but a manageable one, and nothing like the
cauldron of ethnic cleansing and blood-feuding that it became in the nineties.
Serbia, too, is far from a mature modern State, but it is staggering and lurching in the right direction – toward a
functioning Democracy and toward Europe.
For all these reasons, the War in Kosovo deserves
careful and continuing scrutiny, not just by military historians but by
students of current events and anyone thinking about the future of War and
Peace. They will wonder how events looked and felt at the time to those of us
who were involved. Thanks to John Norris, they will know. The account he offers
has an immediacy that can be provided only by someone who was an eyewitness to
much of the action, who interviewed at length and in depth many of the
participants while their memories were still fresh, and who has had access to
much of the diplomatic record.
All of us who had some role in the story told here
have some reason for satisfaction as we look back, hope as we look forward, and
gratitude to John Norris for being part of the team and for writing this book.
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