The Lessons of Kosovo
Hours
after Serb generals agreed to end the war in Kosovo, Democrats rose on the U.S.
Senate floor to gloat. Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., called it "a victory for
President Clinton and his administration," and Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., chided
conservatives who had called it "Clinton and Gore's war." More than a week
later, Republicans remain unrepentant. NATO's bombing was unnecessary and
caused the Serbs' ethnic cleansing, former Vice President Dan Quayle charged
yesterday on Meet the Press . "This is not a victory. I think that this
is going to continue to be a mess."
Throughout the 2000 election season and for decades to come, Democrats and
Republicans will go on debating who was right and who was wrong in Kosovo. They
still don't get it. The point isn't who was wrong. The point is to understand
what was wrong and to learn the corresponding lessons.
1. Aggressors don't control the rules. Cynics reasoned that
the war was futile because aggression is the way of the world, and indomitable
ferocity is the way of aggressors. They said Balkan enmities were too deeply
ingrained, Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic was too ruthless, and the Serbs were
too fiercely attached to Kosovo to back down. While assuming that President
Clinton was infallibly stupid and weak, they assumed that Milosevic was
infallibly clever and resolute. But just as Clinton proved capable of fighting
on, Milosevic proved capable of giving up.
2. We can make the rules. Within days of the war's outbreak,
politicians and talking heads pronounced it a failure. Throughout the bombing,
they said NATO, the United States, and Clinton lacked the ability or resolve to
prevail. Pundits assessed the war's prospects with detached skepticism, as
though forecasting the weather. But war is more than an objective event.
Subjective factors--resolve, confidence, and patience--can prove decisive.
NATO's leaders simply refused to lose. Rather than accept the law of the
jungle, they overrode it. Clinton wagered, as he put it a week ago, "that we
could raise the price to a point where it would no longer make any sense for
[Milosevic] to go on, and where he could no longer maintain his position if he
did." By ending the war, Milosevic accepted the new rules.
3. To impose limits on the enemy, you must know your own.
Critics of the war observed, rightly, that NATO was protecting itself rather
than the Kosovars by refusing to risk its pilots in low-flying missions or its
infantry in a ground invasion. According to George Will, NATO thereby exposed a
"huge limit on its will," i.e., "it believes the defense of [its] values is
important enough to kill for, but not important enough to be killed for." But
by depriving Serbia of the ability to kill allied soldiers, NATO leaders
demoralized Serb commanders who had counted on body bags to demoralize citizens
in the West. In essence, NATO held Serb forces at a safe distance with one arm
while pummeling them with the other. In such a hopeless situation, the Serbs
gave up. By taking into account the limits of its own will--the will to endure
pain--NATO broke Serbia's.
4. It's not about who wins. Hawks deride Clinton for having
let squeamish NATO partners such as Italy and Germany curtail the early stages
of the war. They're indignant that we allowed Russia, our old nemesis and new
deadbeat debtor, to water down our terms for ending the war and sneak its
troops into Kosovo ahead of us. They argue that the Kosovo Liberation Army, not
Clinton, won the war by drawing the Serbs out into the open, where NATO planes
could pound them. While complaining that the United States shoulders too much
responsibility in Europe and will end up paying billions for Balkan
reconstruction, they fret about the loss of American control of the
peacekeeping force. They don't understand that the point of the war was
international justice and peace, not American power.
5. It's not about who loses. Many conservatives who argued
throughout the war that we shouldn't have got into it now say we didn't really
win it because we didn't invade Serbia, seize Belgrade, depose or kill
Milosevic, and force the Serbs to agree explicitly to Kosovar independence.
"NATO leaders have left the Yugoslavian president in power," writes Bob Novak.
The peace agreement includes "no mention of a referendum on Kosovo's
sovereignty," frets Arianna Huffington. But the point of the war wasn't to
conquer or humiliate the Serbs. The point was to stop the Balkan cycle of
conquest and humiliation.
6. Just because we're doing something bad doesn't mean the alternatives
are better. By NATO's own estimates, we killed thousands of Serb
troops and civilians. We destroyed bridges, crippled power plants, accidentally
bombed hospitals, and wiped out Serbia's economy. While Serb forces prevented
foreign journalists from ascertaining the fate of ethnic Albanians inside
Kosovo, American leftists held up images of Serb civilian casualties as proof
that the bombing was wrong and must be stopped. Now that NATO has persisted and
has broken the Serbs' lock on Kosovo, journalists have gone in and are
beginning to confirm the scale of the atrocities halted by the bombing. As bad
as the bombing was, permitting the atrocities to go on would have been
worse.
7. Just because we didn't do the right thing before doesn't mean we
shouldn't do it now. Predictably, critics on the left denounced the
war, arguing that the U.S. government's motives were suspect because we have
often invaded small countries for selfish reasons and have failed to intervene
in conflicts when altruism required it. Unpredictably, critics on the right
adopted the same argument, pointing out that we had failed to act in Rwanda,
Chechnya, Eritrea, and the Sudan. While claiming to have judged the government
by its deeds, both camps judged the current war--wrongly--by who was waging
it.
8. It's better to build a law enforcement system than to punish one
outlaw. During the war, hawks who prized human rights and vigilance
accused Clinton of going easy on the Serbs. They faulted him for letting
European leaders veto bombing targets and rule out ground troops. Now that it's
over, they're criticizing him for letting Russia broker the peace agreement and
participate in the peacekeeping force, and they're still complaining that
NATO's generals "were impeded by civilian leadership from effectively fighting
the war." They don't understand that the allies compromised with each other and
with Russia because they sought long-term peace--not short-term
gratification--and that such peace requires a level of deterrence that can be
achieved only by an international consortium of civilian leaders.
9. Don't define yourself merely by your enemy. For decades,
the Republican Party preached military strength in the face of foreign
expansionism. But now that a Democratic president whom they despise has led the
nation into war, GOP leaders have adopted the arguments of the counterculture.
House Majority Leader Dick Armey, House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, Senate
Majority Leader Trent Lott, and Senate Majority Whip Don Nickles claim that
Milosevic was open to peace all along, that the war and its casualties were our
fault, that we needlessly offended Russia, and that our "victory" is false. By
forsaking their intellectual heritage just to spite Clinton, they have paid him
the ultimate homage. They have allowed him, through their agency, to redefine
the GOP.
10. History defies laws. Political analysts pretend to explain
the past and predict the future with the same certainty as natural scientists.
They trotted out numerous theories to establish the Kosovo mission's futility:
Air power alone had never won a war, the Serbs had proven their invincibility
against Hitler, and negotiation backed by gradual military escalation had
failed in Vietnam. (Thomas L. Friedman of the New York Times even had a
theory that no country with a McDonald's had ever gone to war against another
country with a McDonald's.) None of these theories panned out in Kosovo. That's
because theories apply only in certain circumstances, and circumstances change.
Surveillance and air power are vastly more sophisticated than in previous wars,
NATO has a far greater power monopoly in Europe than Hitler had, and in Kosovo,
unlike in Vietnam, the isolated party in the war was not the United States but
its enemy.
Who was wrong about
Kosovo? Those who were too cynical to challenge the ways of the world, too
preoccupied with the past to see the present, and too obsessed with who was
wrong to recognize what was right.
