The Lesson of Kosovo

As with most wars, the history of NATO's air campaign in the Balkans will be written in fits and starts. A final verdict on the war's wisdom and success will depend on many uncertainties, including Western success in rebuilding Kosovo, the fate of Slobodan Milosevic, and the future of U.S.-Russian ties. Yet even at this early moment, with so much still unknown, one thing seems clear: The war's many vocal naysayers in the United States got it wrong. Rarely have so many experts disgorged so much nonsense into print and over the airwaves. Day after day, at times nearly gleeful in their predictions of gloom and doom, critics condemned the war as a bungled operation predicated on a naive faith in airpower. President Clinton, they claimed, had solidified his place as an incompetent and pusillanimous commander in chief.

Years from now, or even months from now, a very different view on Kosovo is likely to prevail. Assuming the West undertakes the right diplomatic repair work with Russia and follows through on pledges to rebuild Kosovo, NATO's first real military campaign will be seen as a just and successful war, albeit one that was poorly planned and imperfectly executed. A brutal autocrat was faced down, saving the Albanians of Kosovo from a future of Serbian repression. While the human, economic, and diplomatic costs of NATO's air campaign have been considerable, this negative fallout will seem less significant as time passes, especially if the Kosovars--who believe the war was well worth it--help to shape the future image of this conflict.

Beyond agreeing that the war was justified, tomorrow's commentators are likely to agree on a few key points.

Clinton Shows a Spine

Every president, especially one who has studied history as diligently as Bill Clinton, knows that war is a highly unpredictable game. Whenever bombs start falling, the risks begin to rise. Kosovo was no exception, and Clinton deserves credit for gambling big on a war that always had the potential to go bad.

From the beginning of the Clinton presidency, U.S. policy in the Balkans has been an ongoing case of no good options. The ever circumspect Secretary of State Warren Christopher once went so far as to call Bosnia "a problem from hell." Through late 1998 and early 1999, Clinton again faced an agonizing dilemma in a part of the world devoid of vital U.S. interests: If the Serbs refused to accept a negotiated agreement in Kosovo, NATO could either do nothing in the face of Serb barbarism or it could use military power with no guarantee of success. Clinton was also fully aware that Milosevic might respond to the bombing with ethnic cleansing. (CIA Director George Tenet had publicly predicted as much in February.) And, of course, he knew that NATO's air campaign would infuriate Russia. For all these reasons, intervening in Kosovo may have been the biggest gamble in U.S. foreign policy since Jimmy Carter tried to rescue the hostages in Iran.

Sweeping Kosovo under the rug, as the administration had done with Bosnia for two years, would have been easy. Clinton might have drawn strong domestic criticism for allowing the Serbs to finish off the Kosovo Liberation Army this spring and reneging on past U.S. promises to stop the bloodshed in Kosovo. But the long-term political consequences of inaction would have been nil for the president.

Clinton took an alternate course for many reasons. Clearly, there were traditional realist concerns at work regarding the stability of Europe and the credibility of NATO. But Clinton was also motivated by a desire to do the right thing and defend human rights. This is a president who will likely go to his grave haunted by U.S. inaction in Rwanda and Bosnia. In those two crises, nearly a million people perished at the hands of ethnic extremists while the United States stood by and did nothing. The endgame in Bosnia in 1995 showed that America might have been able to stop that war much earlier, while Clinton himself has apologized to the Rwandan people for failing to take actions that could have stopped the genocide there. In Kosovo, Clinton showed that he had learned something from these deplorable episodes in U.S. foreign policy-lessons invoked often, if obliquely, in his defense of NATO's air campaign.

Air Power

In acting on hard-learned lessons from Rwanda and Bosnia, President Clinton disregarded a more cautious approach to American intervention abroad, preached most fervently by former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Colin Powell. In the view of Powell and many like-minded national security specialists, America should avoid the incremental use of force, only risk its soldiers when vital interests are at stake, and intervene only when there is a near certainty of victory. Kosovo met none of the criteria of the so-called Powell Doctrine. This was a limited war in defense of limited U.S. interests with no guarantee of success.

NATO's victory in Kosovo has dealt a serious blow to the Powell Doctrine, and that is a good thing. Threats to limited U.S. interests merit a range of limited responses. Military force has to be on this menu. While Powell was right to oppose the large-scale use of ground forces when no vital interests are at stake, he was never persuasive in arguing against the use of any military force in defense of limited interests. America's successful intervention in Bosnia in 1995 made this clear. Even Somalia, arguably, showed the merits of a limited interests/limited response model: Only 26 Americans died in an operation that saved over a million people from starvation.

The excessive rigidity of the Powell Doctrine was predicated on a deep skepticism about air power. Some of this scepticism is warranted. For example, bombing could have done little to stop the genocide in Rwanda, and there will always be military situations that require ground troops.

But on the question of whether the bombing would work in Kosovo, critics of NATO's air campaign showed an extraordinary narrowness. Combining poor history with an ignorance of current military technology, they repeated the mantra that airpower had never won a war and especially could not win this war. They were wrong. Even while taking excessive precautions against casualties, and even in the face of terrible weather and a shortage of aircraft early on, NATO warplanes slowly and methodically weakened Serbian ground forces in Kosovo. Through the use of pilotless drones, satellite reconnaissance, infrared imaging, and radar tracking systems, NATO was able to locate and destroy such elusive targets as mobile Serb artillery, camouflaged armored vehicles, and combat units on the move. Meanwhile, dug-in Serbian forces were pounded ceaselessly by high-intensity bombs and the supply lines from Serbia needed to sustain 40,000 troops in the field were systematically cut. Once NATO's aerial strike force became fully operational during the war's second month, often working in concert with KLA forces on the ground, Milosevic's capitulation became only a matter of time.

Humanitarianism Comes of Age

The Clinton Administration's talk of a crusade for human rights in Kosovo elicited much snickering on both the left and the right. The left, and most notably the Nation editorial page, found these claims absurd, observing tartly that the United States arms Turkish military forces repressing the Kurds and Indonesian forces repressing the East Timorese. The war in Kosovo, the left argued, was about reasserting American dominance in Europe through an expanded NATO. Meanwhile, right-wing critics such as Pat Buchanan criticized Kosovo as the latest example of U.S. foreign policy devolving into social work.

Both sets of critics were off base. The neo-isolationist right ignores the strong idealist tradition in U.S. foreign policy, which propels American presidents to intervene in situations like Somalia and Kosovo, a tradition that has great support among influential segments of the American public. The left is even more detached from current reality. Wedded to dated notions of American imperialist malevolence, the left has failed to grasp the growing centrality of human rights in U.S. foreign policy. Seeing little change on traditional human rights concerns--such as barring arms sales to dictators or cutting off trade with repressive regimes--the left sees business as usual in America's acquiescence to tyranny abroad. The transformation they miss, or play down, is the way in which humanitarian goals have been slowly defined as core national security concerns during the 1990s.

Beginning with the huge U.S. relief operation in Kurdistan in 1991, the United States has spearheaded several major humanitarian interventions throughout the world, including those in Somalia, Haiti, and Bosnia. NATO's air campaign can be seen as the culmination of this shift in official thinking. The intervention in Kosovo has been a war like no other in U.S. history, a war in which America's humanitarian motives carried easily as much weight as strategic motives. A pure realpolitik approach would have counseled ignoring the south Balkans backwater and concentrating on improving relations with Russia and China. That Clinton did the opposite shows just how deeply humanitarianism has penetrated to the core of U.S. foreign policy calculations.

The cooperation of 18 other nations in wresting Kosovo from Milosevic's grip also underscores the breadth of support for the new humanitarianism. Considered in a larger context, it is clear that longstanding principles regarding national sovereignty are being rethought among those western elites who have traditionally structured the rules and norms of the international order. This trend is not new, but it has noticeably accelerated in recent years with the creation of an International Criminal Court and attempts to strengthen a variety of collective security institutions.

Of course, such humanitarian interventions are likely to proceed very selectively in the future. The plights of the Kurds in Turkey or the Chechens in Russia or the Tibetans are not likely to elicit Western crusades any time soon. Inconsistency, indeed outright hypocrisy, will remain the rule rather than the exception in the new crusade. Nevertheless, one thing is clear: In the wake of Kosovo, nationalist dictators have more reason to think twice before embarking on genocidal behavior.

Multilateralism Gets a Boost

Another frequent and foolish criticism of the Kosovo campaign heard this spring was that the war exemplified U.S. unilateralism. Again, the charge came from both the far left and right. The left saw the United States as leading NATO by the nose in its usual arrogant and hegemonic way, while blithely ignoring the legitimate authority of the United Nations. Isolationists on the right, such as the Cato Institute, complained that the United States shouldn't be solving Europe's problems. In truth, however, NATO's campaign in Kosovo represents one of the most important steps toward multilateralism in the post-Cold War era.

It has often been noted that the war in Kosovo was NATO's first major military undertaking in its 50-year history. Less commonly heard was the point that Kosovo was the first war fought by any formal alliance of democracies since World War II. More so than the Gulf War, this war was fought by committee, with 19 nations agreeing on all major decisions. The United States was the dominant member of this committee, but it still needed to achieve and maintain consensus through essentially democratic processes during weeks and weeks of war. Never has NATO multilateralism been put through a more demanding test.

And, far from being an occasion for Washington to reassert its hegemony over Europe, Kosovo appears to have boosted Europe's independence. Encouraged by European assertiveness on Kosovo, the European Union recently announced that it would create a military arm to bolster Europe's ability to respond to future security challenges. This initiative represents Europe's most ambitious effort to end its dependency on American leadership since the end of the Cold War.

And what of the United Nations? Kosovo presented a terrible dilemma for those who embrace both the new humanitarianism and a stronger U.N. But given that Russia would surely have vetoed any use of force against its fellow Slavs in Serbia, the choice in Kosovo was clear: use NATO to stop Milosevic's repression of the Kosovars, or do nothing. NATO's actions in Kosovo clearly violated the letter of international law, but they upheld the spirit.

A global security order predicated on true multilateralism must have a powerful United Nations at its core. That dream will not be in reach until all the permanent members of the Security Council are democratic states. In the meantime, relying on NATO--the largest alliance of democracies in history--may not be such a terrible thing.

So was it all worth it? Was it worth a million Kosovars expelled from their homes, thousands executed en masse, several thousand civilian deaths in Serbia, the destruction of critical Serbian infrastructure, and the opening of a major rift with Russia?

The answer, of course, depends on whom you ask. It's too early to say how the war will affect European stability, future military strategy, or diplomacy between NATO countries and the rest of the world. In the meantime, perhaps the opinion that should matter most is that of the Kosovars. They are the ones who bore the brunt of NATO's decision to finally stand up to Milosevic, who were driven from their homes and, in many cases, raped or murdered. Much of the criticism of the war has focused on how NATO simply worsened the plight of the Kosovars, triggering the humanitarian catastrophe it sought to prevent. In this analysis, the war ranks among the greatest follies of recent history.

Yet nearly every Kosovar interviewed by a print or broadcast reporter from the beginning of the war cheered NATO's actions. The Kosovars believe the war was worth it, and for reasons familiar to any historian of the modern era. Like so many other national groups in recent centuries, the Kosovars have been willing to pay a high price for freedom. Taking the long view, they believe it is far better to live in refugee camps for a year or two and return to a ravaged homeland than to live forever under Serbia's iron fist.