Edward Luttwak

This interesting piece came from Michael Brannigan of the lakota list:
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The author is a senior Pentagon analyst writing for today's Sunday
Telegraph. The analysis is not as dumb as if first seems and he's
probably
right about the prospective outcome. There has been much speculation
about
invasion and ground troops. There aren't going to be any ground troops.
The
bombing is all there is.

"The best guess at the moment is that we will carry on spinning and
dropping
bombs and the Kosovars and the Serbs will carry on shedding blood until
either the rump of Yugoslavia is a wasteland or the Russians come to the
aid
of Yugoslavia's leaders (and ours) and cut a nasty, messy deal".
(Nick Cohen, Observer, 25th April 1999).


Nato started bombing to help Milosevic
by Edward Luttwak

 'WE will keep bombing until Milosevic steps down", insisted your Prime
Minister last week. He was instantly corrected by Jamie Shea, Nato's
spokesman: "We will keep bombing," he stressed, "until Milosevic backs
down". The tumble over terminology identifies a fundamental fissure in
Nato
- a fissure running through not just the means to be employed in the
war,
but what the point of it is.

When the war began, Nato's aims were clear and limited. The aim of the
war
was not an independent Kosovo, or the overthrow of President Milosevic,
the
man now routinely referred to as the Butcher of the Balkans, the new
Hitler,
and a genocidal war criminal. It was, in fact, to reinforce Milosevic's
position within Serbia.

The United States, led by Madeleine Albright, US Secretary of State,
persuasively argued that only Milosevic could deliver an agreement on
Kosovo. The Serbian opposition was and is much more determined to hold
onto
Kosovo, at whatever cost, than he is. If Milosevic was to be able to
sign
the Rambouillet agreement, which the Kosovar Albanians had ratified, he
would have to have the excuse that he had no alternative. Nato bombing
would, it was thought, be enough to show the Serbs that their President
had
"no alternative".

The limited aim of an autonomous, but not independent, Kosovo - a Kosovo

with its own law-courts, but without its own army or Foreign Ministry -
had
a series of very clear and specific implications for the means by which
Nato
was to fight the war. First, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) was not to
be
armed or trained. Second, the force used against Serbia should be
deployed
in a very measured way. Its point was not to destroy Milosevic, but to
persuade him back to the negotiating table. Far from being regarded as
an
enemy of humanity, he was believed, when the war started, to be an
indispensible figure to Nato: for he was the only Serb politician
capable of
resolving the Kosovo question on Nato's lines.

There was, therefore, no question of attacking Milosevic's apparatus of
power or his political infrastructure, still less his person. So Nato's
plan
of attack was extremely gentle. There were less than 50 targets on the
original first phase bombing offensive. Most of them were minor, remote
air
defence targets. If you wondered why, in the first two weeks, all those
bombing missions were cancelled because of a few clouds, here's the
reason:
the aim was not to hurt Milosevic, but to give him an excuse for
capitulating to Nato on Kosovo. That aim suited Western politicians
perfectly for another reason: none of them wanted to see any of their
pilots
get hurt. A campaign which did no real damage to Serbia would also be
one
which did not risk the lives of any Nato pilots.

"War lite" was therefore to everyone's taste. Unfortunately, Milosevic
refused to walk down the path Nato made out for him. Instead of rushing
into
Nato's open arms, he sent his police units into Kosovo and proceeded to
evict as many Kosova Albanians as possible, as quickly as he could.
Milosevic's failure to behave according to plan has caused a rapid
re-appraisal of Nato's war aims. It has also dramatically altered the
means
which must be used to achieve them.

What is the aim of the war now the original justification for it, and
the
strategy behind it, have both been shredded? Nato has started bombing
Milosevic's power base. It has targeted his home, his TV station, and
his
party's headquarters. But let us be clear: the change of tactics has not

come about because politicians like Clinton and Blair have suddenly
"discovered" that Milosevic is guilty of genocide. Everyone with any
involvement in policy towards the Balkans has known for years that
Milosevic
was guilty of mass murder. His behaviour in Kosovo, though hideous, is
so
far relatively mild compared to the genocide he perpetrated in Bosnia.
There
is some evidence that he over-ruled some of the real ultras who
recommended
the "Bosnian solution" to the Kosovo problem: massacring all Kosova
Albanians, rather than just expelling them, which has been Milosevic's
policy.

No, the targetting of Milosevic is simply a reflection of frustration at
his
failure to act as he was supposed to. It is a familiar pattern: a
dictator
is demonised as a monster only when Western foreign policy fails, and he

ceases to respond in a predictable way to threats and offers. It
happened
with Saddam, with whom the US and Britain were happy to "do business"
when
he behaved as predicted - despite his hideous cruelty and use of
chemical
weapons against his own people. Only when statecraft failed, and he did
something quite unpredicted - invaded Kuwait - was he turned into "the
new
Hitler".

The motives behind targetting Milosevic are no more "moral" than they
were
in the case of Saddam. Nato's aims are in disarray as a consequence.
Everyone recognises that Milosevic remains the least horrible Serbian
leader
amongst a very horrible bunch. Removing him would make the situation
worse,
by ensuring he was replaced by a harder line nationalist. So what is the
aim
of the war?

There are two competing answers to that question. One is the creation of
an
independent Kosovo. This could not be done without a full scale invasion
by
Nato. It does not seem very likely. A Nato which is unwilling to fly
planes
below 15,000 ft because of the risk to its pilots' lives is not going to

risk the deaths of thousands of ground troops. That aim is opposed by
some
Nato members, and does not yet have US backing. Without the US, it will
remain a gleam in Tony Blair's eye.

The other alternative is much more likely. It is to persuade Milosevic
to
agree to some compromise. The hope is that the bombing, if it is intense

enough, will force Milosevic to turn to the Russians, empowering them to

negotiate a settlement with Nato. Any deal would inevitably involve the
partition of Kosovo, with the Serbians hanging on to the resource-rich
north, whilst the south would be an international "protectorate" run by
a
mixed force of Nato, Russians, and "non aligned" countries.

That would, of course, be a victory for Milosevic. But that does not
stop
many Nato leaders from fervently praying for it. It would allow Nato to
exit
the war with some dignity intact: it could be "spun" to suggest that
Nato
had achieved a homeland for the Kosovars and peace in the Balkans.

A great power congress to solve Kosovo would be like the great 19th
century
congress of Berlin, which re-drew the map of Europe. It would not have
much
to do with ethics. But then no foreign policy ever does. It is the
greatest
of your present Government's illusions, or its most chilling cynicism,
to
pretend that its foreign policy is, or could be, any different.


* Edward Luttwak is a member of the National Security Study Group of the
US
Department of Defence.