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Date sent: Thu, 20 May 1999 11:51:24 -0700
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From: Sid Shniad <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: WORRIED ALLIES KEEP EYES ON THE CLOCK - The Guardian
The Guardian Sunday May 16, 1999
WORRIED ALLIES KEEP EYES ON THE CLOCK
Another weekend, another Nato disaster. On Friday, Korisa joined
the lamentable list of targets hit by Western missiles and bombs by
accident, with tragic results for innocent civilians - both Kosovan and
Serbian - and calamitous consequences for Nato's ideological offensive.
Once again Nato spent the weekend seeking to minimise the
political damage from its latest bombing disaster, the killing of almost
100 civilians in Korisa. Underlying their efforts is the issue with
which Western diplomats, politicians and military men alike are
now obsessed - time.
How much longer will Western public opinion tolerate these
deaths and how much longer will they support Nato's hidden sixth
war aim - the liberation of Kosovo without the death of a single
Nato soldier or airman?
The clock is now ticking fast not just on the diplomats, the
humanitarian agencies and the generals - all of whom face the task of
ensuring this conflict is resolved before the bitter Balkans winter.
Diplomacy grinds staggeringly slow, especially since the collapse
of the Russian government and the bombing of the Chinese embassy.
Trying to strike a note of optimism yesterday, Robin Cook, the
Foreign Secretary, reported that the G7 group of countries were well
on the way to providing the text of a draft UN Security Council
resolution setting out the terms of a peace settlement. But the Russians,
possibly set to lose their Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov, are in
unpredictable mood and may yet veto the resolution on the grounds that
Nato is continuing its bombing campaign.
In the meantime it is likely that the US Deputy Secretary of State
Strobe Talbott and the Russian peace envoy Victor Chernomyrdin will
go to Helsinki on Tuesday to confer with Finnish President Martti
Ahtisaari, who as leader of a non-Nato country has become the new
diplomatic link. They will try to persuade him to accompany
Chernomyrdin to Belgrade when the time is right to talk to Milosevic.
Ahtisaari's task will be to persuade Milosevic to accept Nato's plan
for an international security force, the withdrawal of Serbian forces
from Kosovo and its other conditions.
The signals from Belgrade remain gloomy. There are no signs that
Milosevic is yet willing to accept a large scale Nato presence in
Kosovo. The only glimmer of hope is that he seems willing to let more
refugee agencies work again inside Kosovo, especially the International
Committee of the Red Cross.
For, both the UN agencies and the military are now obsessed with
one thing - the possibility that this crisis could be going on next winter.
For the humanitarian agencies the task is to make sure tents are
warm enough to withstand the Balkan cold. For the military the task is
even more urgent.
All the signs from Western capitals and the military leaders in the
Balkans suggest the debate on ground troops has reopened. Lieutenant-
General Mike Jackson, the leader of the Nato troops on the
Macedonian border, has in public played down suggestions that final
decisions must be made in the next fortnight if a ground force capable
of invading Kosovo is to be assembled in time to defeat the Serbs by
October.
Cook yesterday acknowledged that time is now a factor. 'We all
understand that winter will come round with the change of the seasons,
and it also has a very clear military bearing. But it is wrong to say that
on 30 May some shutter will come down. That is far too precise and
does not do sufficient justice to the capability of the military to respond
to emergency situations. We have had our best ever week of the air
campaign against hard military assets in Kosovo.
'What is possible depends on what is happening in Kosovo, and in
terms of the military campaign inside Kosovo, that is quite successful.'
So for the moment, despite the civilian death toll, the air
commanders are still insisting they can make remorseless progress in
killing the Serb army on the border of Kosovo.
The current estimate that Nato has destroyed more than 25 per cent
of Yugoslav forces' heavy equipment marks a change from two weeks
ago, when officials said they believed 10 to 20 per cent of tanks were
destroyed.
Nato has also been increasingly relying on B-52 bombers,
carrying 51 bombs each containing 500 pounds of explosives, to
pound Serb defensive positions along borders that are potential
invasion routes for Nato troops.
But in the end the decision to send in ground troops, and the
environment in which they are deployed, will not be taken in Europe.
The decision lies in Washington.
Talking in private, a senior US military official told The
Observer that a point of no return is indeed near. Washington is
more fragmented and riven than ever with no leadership from the
presidency and no one believes the Pentagon will put its heart and
soul into a war for a President it dislikes.
But the Pentagon is caught between its instincts and its pride:
the war, as any senior officer will now admit, is in danger of
becoming a farce. But it still wants to win it.
It has become clear over the past week that neither the White
House nor the State Department nor the US mission to the United
Nations has the slightest idea how heavy or light the coming night's
bombing will be - and certainly had no warning of the suddenly
ferocious night of bombing that led to the Chinese embassy fiasco, let
alone the latest tragic slaughter of the very people the war is trying to
protect.
'It came as a complete surprise,' a senior White House official told
The Observer soon after the Chinese embassy incident. 'The
parameters of the action are Clinton's decision, but the nature of the
action is being decided elsewhere. By the military I guess.'
A senior Pentagon official gave the following reasons for this
increasingly independent spirit among the military: exasperation
with Clinton's caprice; the lack of clarity over the aim of the
mission; and the quagmires through which the diplomatic efforts
are wading.
The signals sent out by the President are blinding in their
confusion. On the eve of the bombing of the Chinese embassy,
Clinton was ready to deal with the man he had compared to
Hitler. Last Thursday, he was 'back to square one', as a staffer in
the office of the leading Republican hawk Senator John McCain
put it - comparing Milosevic's pogrom to the Nazi Holocaust.
The response of the military has been, in no small part, to 'forget
what the Chinese and Boris Yeltsin thinks after a drink or three and
intensify the attacks on an increasing rage of targets,' said a senior US
army official.
And yet, he added, 'this is a war being fought on overdrive, on
automatic'. There is indeed something dutiful, rather than heartfelt, in
the way the Pentagon talks about Kosovo.
Almost alone in the detailed decision-making now are General
Wesley Clark himself, and his closest strategic aide, Lt-Col Douglas
McGregor, whose proposals for a radical restructuring of the US
military to make it more quickly responsive to crises such as Kosovo
was debated but rejected.
Their authority in the air war comes from the fact that Washington
is riven. The dividing lines are now clearly identifiable, astride party
allegiance, but without clear direction.
The interventionist hawks are led by Defence Secretary
William Cohen, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Senator
McCain and just over half the Pentagon.
Cohen laid out his strategy at a recent meeting in the offices of
USA Today, where he said: 'I ask each of the allies - "once we begin
this, you have to be in from the beginning; and you've got to be in at the
conclusion. This could be a long, hard campaign".'
The leading doves are the Republican leadership on Capitol
Hill, with National Security Advisor Sandy Berger as their ally in
the White House and the other, timid, half of the Pentagon. Atop
these manoeuvring factions are the President and the even more
non-committal Vice President Al Gore, who has remained either
clueless or viewless throughout.
During the lead-up to the Nato summit last month, however,
according to an official on Albright's team, Clinton made it clear
to his security staff that he 'did not intend to see this through to
the bitter end at any cost'. This he did at a time when Tony Blair
was convinced that he and Clinton were together on the aggressive
ticket. In the event, Blair was left exposed as leader of the hawkish
wing of Nato.
'I don't think it's pushing it too far to say that Clinton hung
Blair out to dry,' said a disgruntled former White House staffer.
While the divide on the use of ground troops widens, there is
across-the-board support for an increasingly fierce air war, almost by
default.
The Pentagon has drawn up detailed plans to extend the bases from
which air strikes could be launched, bringing in airfields in the territory
of two Nato allies - Turkey and the nervous newcomer, Hungary.
The plan obviously echoes that which the Pentagon has drawn up
for a ground campaign, the strategic core of which is to 'secure'
Yugoslavia by surrounding the country with between 60,000 and
80,000 troops, divisions of whom would be on hand to invade from
Hungary in the north if necessary.
There is no underestimating the degree to which Clinton's
international agenda is dictated by domestic considerations. A senior
British diplomat - who is enthusiastic about the current presidency -
acknowledged that: 'With the White House, whatever you suggest, they
always have to go into a huddle and work out "how is this going to play
in the polls?"'
However, the Republican agenda turned out to be even more
myopic than the President's. Whatever their views on Kosovo - and
there was a genuine debate between the interventionists and the new
isolationists - the party decided to oppose Clinton at all costs. Sources
across the board say that this was what really motivated the at-best
reticent support for what one Republican pollster described as
'Clinton's war - it has to be, so we're against it'.
[PEN-L:7093] (Fwd) WORRIED ALLIES KEEP EYES ON THE CLOCK - The Guardian
ts99u-1.cc.umanitoba.ca [130.179.154.224] Thu, 20 May 1999 19:11:45 -0500
