Thursday, April 30, 2015

StrobeTalbott. Foreword. Collision course. NATO, Russia, and Kosovo. Praeger. 2005.



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.
In 1998 Milošević turned his brutality against those citizens of Serbia who happened to be ethnic Albanians living in the southern province of Kosovo. Once again, the West, with some support from Russia, tried diplomacy backed by the threat of Force. This time it prouved inadequate, so in 1999 the formula was reversed: NATO applied Force backed by diplomacy.
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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