-Caveat Lector-
>From NewRepublic
> How Tito's training destroyed Nato hopes of a clean war
>
>
> Foreign Affairs Editorial Opinion (Published) Keywords: KOSOVA TITO NATO
> Source: Electronic Telegraph
> Published: 6/27/99 Author: By John Simpson
> Posted on 06/26/1999 23:58:06 PDT by pCahill
>
>
>
>
>
> How Tito's training destroyed Nato hopes of a clean war
>
>
> By John Simpson
>
> SOMEHOW it was no great surprise to read in last week's newspapers that after 11
> weeks of bombing, 40,000 or so sorties and untold thousands of tons of bombs,
> Nato had managed to hit only 13 Serb tanks in Kosovo. It has claimed, of course,
> to have knocked out up to 40 per cent of the 280 or so tanks the Serbs were
> believed to have deployed in Kosovo, plus almost 60 per cent of their artillery
> and mortars.
>
> What Nato really hit were canvas and wood replicas. Colleagues of mine saw some
> of these in Kosovo, together with old armoured personnel carriers, broken-axled
> and rusting, which the Serbs had carefully left out for Nato's pilots to see.
> From the height they were flying it must have looked exactly like the real
> thing.
>
> This was precisely the kind of war the Yugoslav Army had been trained to fight;
> not the dirty wars of massacre and torture which Serb soldiers ended up fighting
> in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo. For more than 30 years Marshal Tito taught his
> people that the real danger would be an all-out attack from the Soviet Union,
> and they trained themselves in the unglamorous business of hiding and dispersing
> their forces, so the enemy would expend effort pointlessly. That is exactly what
> happened; only the enemy turned out to be us.
>
> Time and again when I was in Belgrade my colleagues back in London used to ask
> me about signs of casualties. The military death toll must be pretty high by
> now, they would say; what about the funerals, the death notices, the anecdotal
> evidence that lives were being lost?
>
> I always answered, quite truthfully, that the only casualties I heard anything
> about were civilians. Not surprisingly, as it turned out. Something like 400
> soldiers seem to have been killed, as compared with about 1,700 civilians. Night
> after night Nato would hit army barracks and government ministries, as though
> the Yugoslav army were obliging enough to hang around there. So we have the
> melancholy result that four times as many of the people Nato did not mean to hit
> were killed, compared with the ones it was trying to target. More schools and
> hospitals and old people's homes were hit than Serb tanks.
>
> Depressingly, this little war, genuinely fought for the best of motives, is a
> throwback to most of the other wars we have seen in this calamitous century.
> Victorian wars were mostly fought between armies; the Boer war ushered in an era
> of total warfare, where the unarmed, the innocent, the non-combatants were
> regarded as being just as useful a target as the military.
>
> In the Eighties and Nineties we have dared to believe that all this might
> change. Scarcely a single civilian died in the Falklands War; it was like a
> return to the neat, conclusive campaigns of the 19th century. In the Gulf war it
> looked as though the precision of the new weaponry meant that Western countries
> at least would be able, and obliged, to fight clean wars. Defence installations
> in Baghdad disappeared in a cloud of brick dust, while purely civilian
> installations were left alone. Even the terrible loss of life at the Al Amariyah
> shelter, when 340 women and children were killed, was a mistake: the structure
> was a military command centre of sorts.
>
> The fact that Western journalists were able to report wars like this from the
> enemy capital meant that civilian casualties would have to be kept down; public
> opinion would not support great loss of life among the innocent. Or so we
> thought. It did not turn out quite like that.
>
> Week after week in Yugoslavia Nato hit the wrong targets; names such as
> Aleksinac, Nis and Surdulica were thrown into public awareness by some terrible
> tragedy, and then (after some initial hesitation) explained away. It was enough
> for Nato to say it was sorry, that it had not meant to do it, for public opinion
> in the West to forgive and forget.
>
> Now we see the terrible evidence that made President Clinton and Tony Blair
> determined to carry on in spite of everything; and the torture chambers and mass
> graves of Kosovo will join the other dark horrors of the 20th century. But good
> intentions are not quite enough. In 1943 Albert Einstein contrasted the clarity
> of the Allies' ends with the confusion of their means in the war against Hitler.
> This contrast remains unfortunately as stark as ever.
>
> Maybe the evidence of Nato's failures in the face of a small and not
> particularly well-armed enemy will make us a little less hubristic now. Maybe we
> will try to get back to the way we made war against Saddam. Maybe civilian
> casualties will worry us more in future. Maybe.
>
> John Simpson is world affairs editor of the BBC.
A<>E<>R
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