Re: kosovo

immanuel wallerstein wrote:
> 
> july 8, 1999
> 
> dear wsn network,
> 
> you may be interested in my latest commentary, which is on kosovo.
> 
> yours/immanuel wallerstein
> 
>----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> ------
>                    Comment No. 19, July 1, 1999
> 
>                "The Clinton-Milosevich Chess Match"
> 
>                                           by Immanuel Wallerstein
> 
>      The whole world has been watching the Clinton-Milosevich
> chess match since the beginning of 1999. In early June, most
> commentators seemed to believe that Clinton has won, and hand-
> somely. Clinton proclaimed victory. So did his NATO allies. So
> did a large percentage of the world left, which is highly im-
> pressed with the demonstration of U.S. military power. Milosevich
> said that he won, but most people, including most people in
> Serbia, seem to think this is simply silly.
>      I believe assessment should be far more prudent. For one
> thing, the game is not over until it is over, and we are still
> in the middle of it. In the second place, assessment of chess
> moves should always be made in terms of alternatives. So let us
> look at the alternatives, as of the time of the Rambouillet
> meetings. The Rambouillet meetings were convened by the NATO
> powers in order to impose a "settlement" on the Kosovo crisis.
> These days, there is endless reference to the Rambouillet agree-
> ments, even in United Nations resolutions, but in fact there were
> no such agreements. There were basically three participants at
> Rambouillet: the Yugoslav government, an Albanian delegation
> (comprising both the KLA and Rugova), and certain NATO governments
> (who behaved as a relatively cohesive group at the meeting).
>      What happened at the meeting was that the NATO powers
> drafted a set of terms and asked the Yugoslavs and the Kosovars
> to agree to them. What is now forgotten is that there was not one
> set of terms but two successive sets. The first set was accepted
> by the Yugoslavs and rejected by the Albanians. The second set
> (the set now referred to as the "Rambouillet agreements") was
> accepted by the Albanians and rejected by the Yugoslavs. Neither
> set was accepted by both parties. It is after the second failed
> agreement that the NATO powers gave their ultimatum to Belgrade,
> and then invaded.
>      Let us look in more detail at what these terms were. The
> first set provided for withdrawal of Yugoslav troops from Kosovo,
> and the entry of a NATO force into Kosovo. These terms Milosevich
> accepted, or at least swallowed. The Albanian delegation
> demurred. They told Mrs. Albright that the terms had to include
> a referendum on independence. She added this clause, providing
> for one in three years. The NATO powers then added as well a
> secret annex (secret to the rest of us, but of course not to the
> Yugoslavs) providing the NATO troops with the right to enter at
> will the rest of Yugoslavia other than Kosovo. This Milosevich
> was not prepared to swallow.
> 
>      So, we had a war. What happened in the war? Yugoslavia was
> badly bombed. We learn now after the event that the bombing did
> far less damage to Yugoslav military capacity than NATO had
> hoped. The bombing did damage severely Yugoslavia's economic
> infrastructure, and current expectations are that GDP will go
> down 40% in the coming year. During the war, the Serbs engaged
> in ethnic cleansing of Kosovo, and current estimates are that
> some 10,000 persons were killed, and the homes of many more
> destroyed. No doubt there had been contingency plans to do this,
> but the fact is that before the war started, the amount of
> killing and destruction of homes had been relatively minor. It
> was the war that permitted, even encouraged, implementing this
> program.
>      Now to the war itself. Clinton clearly did not want to
> engage ground troops. He knew that politically this would be a
> real loser at home. Nonetheless, Yugoslav resistance and the
> endless stream of Kosovo refugees was pushing him into a corner
> where he would have had to engage land troops, and suffer the
> political losses this would incur. So, somewhat desperately, he
> enrolled the Russians as mediators. The Russians were happy to
> agree.
>      NATO claims that they got unconditional surrender on the
> part of the Yugoslavs. Did they? Let us compare what NATO got
> with what the Yugoslavs were ready to give them at Rambouillet.
> They got the withdrawal of Serbian troops and the entry of NATO
> forces into Kosovo. They did not get version two of the agreements:
> the referendum on Kosovo independence, or the right for
> NATO troops to enter freely the rest of Yugoslavia. Furthermore,
> they got two things they had tried hard to avoid at Rambouillet.
> The final agreement required a U.N. resolution, and hence the
> right of the U.N. to have a say in the future. And they got the
> entry of Russian troops into Kosovo.
>      So let us add this up. Had Clinton stuck to the original
> terms of Rambouillet, the U.S. would have gotten a better deal
> in Kosovo from its own point of view than what they got after a
> war. In addition, they got ethnic cleansing. To be sure, the
> ethnic cleansers were Serbs. But the fact is that these Serbs,
> however malignant, would not have been able to engage in the
> ethnic cleansing had Clinton stuck to his own original terms at
> Rambouillet. In the world of moral responsibility, Clinton has
> to share the blame. And in the world of practical politics, it
> does not add up to a stunning victory.
>      The entry of the Russians into Kosovo is not to be under-
> estimated. They have reasserted, and this for the next fifty
> years at least, their inescapable role as a power in the Balkans,
> exactly what the U.S. had wished to avoid. Incidentally, it is
> a piquant detail that the key Russian move, the occupation of the
> Pristina airport, was made possible by Mrs. Albright. Gen. Sir
> Michael Jackson had wanted to send British and French troops into
> Kosovo on June 11. Mrs. Albright flew to Macedonia to persuade
> him to put off entry one day, so that the U.S. Marines, who
> weren't yet "ready" (I thought the Marines were always ready)
> could go in at the same time. This delay of one day was exactly
> 
> what made it possible for the Russians to occupy the Pristina
> airport, and therefore obtain a de facto Russian zone (even if
> we don't call it that). In the annals of diplomacy, Mrs. Albright
> will surely occupy a special place for this brilliant tactical
> move.
>      Where then are we now in the chess game? Milosevich seems
> to have survived at home. Yugoslav politics are infinitely more
> open than Iraqi politics, and there is real opposition to him in
> both Serbia and Montenegro. But I would give him odds on
> remaining in power until the end of his term, which is 2002.
> Clinton has avoided the worst (sending in ground troops). At
> home, he comes out neither ahead nor behind. But, if conditions
> deteriorate in Kosovo, if (in particular) the Kosovo Liberation
> Army decides in the month or two to come that it doesn't really
> intend to disarm and starts shooting not at the absent Serbs but
> at the present NATO troops, Clinton (and Gore) could pay a heavy
> political price at home. In chess terms, the end game promises
> to be very tricky.
>      So, why did Clinton throw away a good Rambouillet deal
> (which he himself proposed) in favor of one that he was unable
> to enforce? I come back to what I argued in a previous comment
> (No. 13, April 1, 1999, see <http://fbc.binghamton.edu/commentr.htm>),
> that the real objective of Clinton had, nothing to do with ethnic
> cleansing, or the strategic importance of U.S. troops in the Balkans,
> or any of the other ostensible reasons. The real objective was
> to lock the Europeans into a renewed NATO and prevent the
> emergence of a European army outside of NATO. Has he
> succeeded at least in this objective? For the
> moment, he seems slightly stronger on this front than he was in
> 1998. But the rumblings are there all over Europe, even on the
> European right, about the importance of rethinking their military
> preparations. It is by no means sure that the U.S. has won in
> this regard more than a momentary respite.
> 
> [These bimonthly commentaries are copyright, but may be reproduced
> at will by electronic means.]
> 

Although you mention moral responsibility only briefly, your decision to
mention it at all without also telling the role of atrocities by the
Serb government and now, to a lesser degree, by various Kosovars
detracts from your overall message.

Regarding your hypothesis about Clinton's "real objective," how do you
think Clinton could gain by locking "the Europeans into a renewed NATO
and [preventing] the
emergence of a European army outside of NATO"? Or do you think that
Clinton is driven by some other motive besides personal gain?

-- 
Pat Gunning
Web pages on Subjectivism, Democracy, Taiwan, Ludwig von Mises, and
Austrian Economics
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