Roots of Allied Farce
II, John B. Roberts
Roots of Allied Farce JOHN B. ROBERTS II 0 n the morning of March 29, 1999, the sixth day of NATO's bombing campaign against the Serbs, American diplomats throughout the Office of the High...
...The Serbs' attachment to Kosovo as a symbol of national independence is like a Texan's view of the Alamo...
...At his initiative, Hutson met separately with White House aide Leon Fuerth, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and presidential envoy Richard Holbrooke to urge U.S...
...Nobody heeded him...
...I was part of the White House team in Spain in 1985 when Reagan urged President Felipe Gonzalez to hold a referendum on NATO membership...
...Ironically, an institution dedicated to "International Peace" set the stage for Clinton's interventionist policies in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo, triggering the most widespread deployment of U.S...
...During his tenure he established blue-ribbon commissions of policy experts to create a new U.S...
...Across the former USSR and its Eastern European satellites, few issues are so explosive as that of national minorities...
...The report urged "a new principle of international relations: the destruction or displacement of groups of people within states can justify international intervention...
...36 June 1999 • The American Spectator Due to higher birthrates, they said they were now Kosovo's ethnic majority...
...Hutson's message was a bombshell...
...It said the U.S...
...Co-authored by Carnegie staffers David Scheffer (now U.S...
...He urged Albright to work with Prince Alexander, as a unifying force who might help move Yugoslavia past Milosevic...
...Fluent in Russian and Serbo-Croatian, over the course of a three-decade long foreign service career Hutson specialized in the Soviet Union and its Slavic satellite...
...Unlike Ambassador Abramowitz, who seems distraught that the strategies he advocated brought about Kosovo's obliteration instead of its salvation, Tom Hutson is just plain angry...
...ambassador for war crimes) and Morton Halperin, the book set criteria for officials to use in deciding when to support separatist ethnic groups seeking independence, and advocated military force for that purpose...
...As for its impact on Bosnia and Herzegovina," he warned, "I fear that it has driven a stake into the heart of the Dayton accords...
...Richard Perle and James Schlesinger resigned rather than endorse the report's conclusions...
...Ambassador Milton Abramowitz, former assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research, was president of the Carnegie Endowment between 1991 and 1997...
...I had taken Dmitro Markov, a Ukrainian friend who was press counselor for his newly independent country's embassy, with me to the Carnegie report unveiling at the National Press Club...
...From his office, Hutson could see a nearby square, the site of a May1995 artillery attack that killed 71 people...
...could then mediate a Kosovo truce...
...In 1994, the Council on Foreign Relations published Richard Haass's book Intervention: The Use of American Military Force in the Post-Cold War World, voicing similar themes...
...During a briefing on resettlement of Bosnian war refugees, Hutson alerted NATO Supreme Commander Wesley Clark to the difficulties of dealing with the Serbs...
...During the spring and summer of 1992, Madeleine Albright, Henry Cisneros, John Deutch, Richard Holbrooke, Alice Rivlin, David Gergen, Admiral William Crowe, and numerous lesser luminaries who would nonetheless get sub-cabinet appointments debated defense and foreign policy for hours...
...And so did he...
...38 June 1999 • The American Spectator...
...Mat, Hutson says, means irrational...
...Someone supplied weapons to the Kosovar separatists, who wanted all-Albanian schools and teachers...
...should "realign NATO and OSCE [Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe] to deal with new security problems in Europe" and urged military intervention under humanitarian guises...
...Although it is not yet in the center of the screen," he wrote me in reply from Sarajevo, "the dilemma over Kosovo (the U.S...
...My personal reasons for retiring now have only been strengthened by the ill-conceived decision of NATO to bomb the Serbs," Hutson wrote...
...Finally, Hutson is bothered that Clinton is holding out false hope to the Kosovar refugees...
...In a July25, 1992 speech he said Milosevic needed to be brought to justice for his "crimes against humanity" and criticized George Bush's lack of "real leadership...
...After six years as the Carnegie Endowment's president, Abramowitz in 1997 moved on to the Council on Foreign Relations...
...He believes diplomacy is infinitely preferable to a ground war in Yugoslavia...
...I didn't know it at the time, but these meetings were my introduction to Clinton's Cabinet-in-waiting...
...It was time, Abramowitz counseled, to support full independence for Kosovo...
...Would Spain have voted to join NATO knowing that their Basque minority, spread across four provinces in Spain and three in France, might someday use terrorism to provoke NATO intervention on their behalf...
...Albania knew the Kosovars' ultimate goals...
...If the U.S...
...Education was the point of conflict...
...We have the responsibility for these two million people in perpetuity...
...So were the difficulties he encountered in trying to resettle people displaced by the war...
...He still trusts that a diplomatic resolution is possible, but that it will take a unilateral NATO cease-fire...
...foreign policy after the Cold War...
...The Serbs wanted students taught in Serbo-Croatian, Yugoslavia's primary language...
...Others in the foreign policy elite soon took up the issue...
...foreign policy framework...
...meddling in Yugoslavia's royal affairs...
...It was Foreign Service officer Thomas R. Hutson's last official e-mail to his associates...
...Would Gonzalez, whose government has since been accused of using death squads to exterminate Basque militants, have even allowed such a NATO referendum...
...Kosovo was not taken up at Dayton...
...It could also spill over into Macedonia, with inevitable consequences for Serbia and the rest of the Balkans...
...So at 10:28 in the morning of March 29, 1999, Hutson dispatched his e-mail dissent with a simple "send" command...
...The report also proposed the revolutionary idea that a U.S.-led military first strike was justified, not to defend the United The American Spectator • June 1999 States, but to impose highly subjective political settlements on other countries...
...Hutson's first digs in Tuzla were dismal...
...We don't do things like this...
...Once the Serbs began to beat up on the KLA in the villages," he says, "it was too late...
...ist Cavalry Division, villagers were extremely hesitant to go home...
...In setting out pre-conditions for the introduction of military force, the authors say that in addition to all peaceful avenues being foreclosed, "the use of military force to create a new state would require conduct by the parent government so egregious that it has forfeited any right to govern the minority claiming self-determination!' Before NATO 37 Would Spain have joined NATO knowing that its Basque minority might someday use terrorism to provoke NATO intervention on its behalf...
...Changing Our Ways" provided both the rationale for U.S...
...Shortly after the report's release, presidential candidate Bill Clinton took up the Carnegie Endowment's cudgel...
...The Carnegie Endowment's new foreign policy principles were front-and-center in the presidential debate...
...y mid-summer, the Carnegie Endowment's final report was B ready...
...In 1995, two years before the escalation of violence between the KLA and the Serbs, Hutson wanted the U.S...
...He is angry about NATO's new role as military aggressor...
...Reports signed by all three recommended a dramatic escalation of the use of military force to settle other countries' domestic conflicts...
...In fact, "self-determination" doesn't really apply to the Kosovar Albanians, where the ultimate goal is annexation of Kosovo into Albania...
...endorsed this new foreign policy principle the potential for international chaos was immense...
...Some of the Kosovars said there was no point negotiating with Serbs...
...By August so, Clinton advocated the use of military force against the Serbs...
...But the reckoning over Kosovo was merely postponed, not prevented...
...troops, and the 1994 GOP sweep of the House and Senate struck fear of a one-term presidency in the heart of the Clinton White House...
...Milosevic was left with the understanding that the U.S...
...Over time, he has lived a total of eight years in the region...
...Real or trumped up incidents of destruction or displacement would be grounds for Russian or American military intervention in dozens of countries where nothing like a melting pot has ever existed...
...It was a reminder of the stakes of war in the Balkans...
...They planned to secede from Yugoslavia and join Albania...
...The Balkans were less of an issue in the 1996 presidential election than they had been in 1992...
...began its late-March bombing campaign, Serbian repression in Kosovo did not meet this test...
...he says...
...Using a Turkish word, inat, to describe the Serb temperament, Hutson told Clark the Serbs could not be bombed into submission...
...NATO would not easily force the Serbs to allow Kosovo to secede from Yugoslavia and join with Albania, the goal of the Kosovar liberation movement since the early nineties...
...He is convinced a ground assault means we will fight Serbs behind every rock and tree, just as the British faced American colonists during the Revolution...
...Another 1992 Carnegie publication, "Self-Determination in the New World Order," brings the new military doctrine into sharp focus...
...He wondered how the new principle might apply to Ukraine's sizable Russian minority...
...I can understand why and I'm not blaming anybody," Abramowitz told me in late April, "but that was the time Milosevic was at the table and he wanted the war to end....That was the point of maximum leverage...
...But by then the glow of multilateral military interventionism had temporarily faded...
...They alone would control Kosovo's future...
...Leon Fuerth, then a Senate staffer for Al Gore, and Greg Craig, who would later be on Clinton's Senate impeachment trial defense team, were members of the group...
...This lie...this pipe dream that these people are going to go back...
...He didn't realize the three wereleading advocates of a new and radical use of military intervention around the globe...
...As a measure of its influence, Scheffer and Halperin's prescription for U.S...
...This was an entirely new concept for NATO, which was born as a purely defensive alliance against the Soviets and the Warsaw Pact...
...Hutson tried first to shape policy from the inside...
...Hutson is angry that the U.S...
...Don't count on the Serbs doing anything other than fighting to hang on to it," he warned General Clark before the war began...
...Roots of Allied Farce JOHN B. ROBERTS II 0 n the morning of March 29, 1999, the sixth day of NATO's bombing campaign against the Serbs, American diplomats throughout the Office of the High Representative (OHR) in Bosnia-Herzegovina received an unusual message from their colleague in Tuzla...
...troops since WWII...
...The book endorsed U.N...
...He didn't wait around to read the replies...
...redefining the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of states...
...command of U.S...
...mandate or declaration of war from Congress to carry on fighting...
...I was invited to attend closed-door commission meetings, and later I met with Abramowitz, who made clear he wanted the commission's views to play a part in the upcoming presidential elections...
...Armed clashes broke out...
...In the early nineties, when Clinton was still governor of Arkansas, they formed part of a small foreign policy elite convened by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace to change U.S...
...Changing Our Ways: America's Role in the New World" was a dramatic departure from the bipartisan foreign policy consensus of the Cold War period...
...Actually, the Kosovo intervention appears only partially to meet Scheffer and Halperin's criteria...
...Holbrooke delivered Clinton a clean foreign policy slate for his re-election campaign...
...Sixty days later, the first violence in Kosovo began...
...aspirations of the 90 percent Kosovar Albanian majority for independence or union with Albania...
...commitment to its being part of Serbia vs...
...Secretary General Boutros BoutrosGhali's concept of "preventive deployment...
...in June of 1995, Albright listened intently...
...The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace was girding for war...
...military attache Louis J. Fortier plotted with General Simovic, head of Yugoslavia's air force, to depose a pro-Axis King and replace him with his pro-U.S...
...Shortly before I began attending the commission's meetings, Bosnians voted in a referendum for independence from Yugoslavia...
...It meant international military coalitions, preferably U.N.-led, could send armed force not as peacekeepers but peacemakers—to prevent conflict from breaking out and stay in place indefinitely...
...interventionism and a policy recommendation about the best means—NATO—for waging that war...
...I listened intently, offering opinions only when asked...
...When he met with Albright, Holbrooke, and Fuerth in 1995 Hutson may have thought they were simply uninterested in his political solution to preserve the Yugoslav Federation and prevent war...
...The ill-fated Somalian adventure in peacemaking and nation-building soured the public's appetite for U.N...
...So the Balkans were a hot topic of commission discussions...
...There's no way in hell they're going to go back," Hutson says...
...Serbs, victims of savage ethnic cleansing in Krajina, feared their Bosnian Muslim and Croat neighbors, who in turn feared one another and the Serbs...
...Abramowitz's tactic of having commission members hand-feed key Democrats even before the report's release was paying off...
...This decision has unified the Serbs as no other event I have witnessed in my observation of the area for nearly three decades...
...The 120page book resulted from a Carnegie study group created by Ambassador Abramowitz...
...The American Spectator • June 1999 macy should be judged by what it prevents, not only by what it initiates and creates...Much of it is a holding action designed to avoid explosion until the unifying forces of history take humanity into their embrace...
...All it needed was a president eager to do battle...
...In February 1992 I was asked to design a publicity campaign to gain public support for the commission's recommendations...
...In a series of New York Times interviews in 1992, Kosovar political leaders said they planned autonomy or independence as intermediate steps...
...Richard Perle and James Schlesinger were the token conservatives...
...In addition to Dayton, Abramowitz says the U.S...
...As the Kosovo Liberation Army's militancy increased between the months of November 1997 and February'1998, Abramowitz thinks diplomacy might have defused the crisis...
...His first Balkan posting was to Belgrade in the heyday of Marshall Tito's Yugoslavia...
...They also said military intervention was called for "when a self-determination claim triggers an armed conflict that becomes a humanitarian crisis...
...There was a precedent for U.S...
...Richard Holbrooke, who three years later became Clinton's architect of the Dayton peace accords, argued passionately for American military intervention there...
...He returned to the Balkans after the Dayton peace accords were signed by the Western powers and leaders of former Yugoslavia in December 1995...
...Hutson was encouraged when he left her office...
...His e-mail closed with a quote from Abba Eban: "DiploJOHN B. ROBERTS II is a writer and television producer...
...brother...
...We're America...
...The final language of the Dayton accords supports the Yugoslav Federation's territorial integrity, which binds Kosovo as a province of Yugoslavia...
...Nor did the Kosovo Liberation Army meet the requirements set by the authors for adherence to international norms...
...has broken its commitment to Milosevic...
...missed a second turning point to prevent war...
...The Dayton accords were born from this new political reality...
...Scheffer and Halperin endorsed Clinton's call for military intervention in Bosnia...
...Hutson was in the Balkans when Bosnia and Croatia, with dominant ethnic minority populations, exploded into a savage war of secession from predominantly-Serbian Yugoslavia...
...In the haste to declare peace, Holbrooke made a fatal misstep...
...In 1941, U.S...
...He outlined options including bombing Serbia, ousting Milosevic, arming and training the KLA, and turning Kosovo into a NATO protectorate through the use of ground forces...
...He says Richard Holbrooke committed the U.S...
...This palace coup set the stage for the Yugoslays' fierce resistance to German troops...
...Insiders say Holbrooke missed his chance to resolve the Kosovo dilemma without a bloody war...
...When he briefed her at the U.N...
...An institution dedicated to "International Peace" fostered the principle that hLJ inspired the largest deployment of U.S...
...Yet under his energetic leadership the OHR mission grew to almost thirty people...
...Although protected by military forces from 42 countries, including the Russians and the U.S...
...Hutson foretold the current conflict in the fall of 1997, when I asked him to identify unresolved Balkan hot spots...
...Some commissioners had been appointed to brief Democratic presidential candidates...
...Hutson's advice, drawn from years of field experience, was brushed aside...
...On April 28, 1992, Albanian president Sali Berisha welcomed visiting Kosovar leader Bujar Bukoshi to Tirana with fateful words...
...he and his staff of three were housed in an old salt factory...
...on Kosovo at Dayton, and now has broken his word...
...military intervention became the third-best selling publication in the history of the Carnegie Endowment's publishing program...
...Yet like so many others, Abramowitz se-ms not to have anticipated the refugee exodus resulting from the war...
...In January of this year he published a column in the Wall Street Journal urging a drastic shift in U.S policy toward Kosovo...
...respected Yugoslavia's sovereignty over its errant province...
...It discarded national sovereignty in favor of international intervention...
...Bosnia was then the most critical trouble spot in the region, but hardly the only one...
...They moved into a building renovated by a local soccer 35 The Kosovo debacle is the logical result of an interventionist doctrine that rose alongside Bill Clinton...
...Ambassador Abramowitz's blue-ribbon commission had planted the policy seedlings for the Kosovo war...
...support for reinstating exiled Crown Prince Alexander Karadjordjevic as a creative solution to the search for a successor to Milosevic...
...It is a bitter irony that NATO's intervention in Kosovo compounded the very evil it was intended to prevent...
...I began to regret my efforts to build publicity for the report...
...star who had prospered in Turkey (according to rumor, as a gun-running war profiteer...
...We must demand," he said, "the right for self-determination of the Albanians in ex-Yugoslavia...
...Hutson thinks we need a U.N...
...But afterwards her staff spread the word that Albright was unenthusiastic and Hutson's proposal was not to be taken seriously...
...The release of the final report was to coincide with the Democratic National Convention...
...Hutson thinks the Russians and the U.N...
...Kosovo has ceased to exist," he said, clearly distraught, three weeks into the war...
...Hutson is a Balkan expert...
...He was openly attacking Clinton's Kosovo policy...
...Instead of helping the ethnic Albanians establish their own independent political entity, the Clinton administration accelerated their purge...
...troops since the Second World War...
...The Russians had already announced their ground rules—any maltreatment of ethnic Russians in the "near abroad" or new republics was grounds for military intervention...
...The Carnegie report justified a U.S.-led first strike to impose subjective political settlements on sovereign nations...
...All-out war erupted in Sarajevo one week later...
...We wanted to end the war...
...Clinton dispatched Richard Holbrooke to end the Balkan hostilities before the presidential re-election campaign began...
...to take the lead by organizing an international body to work out a peaceful resolution for Kosovo...
Vol. 32 • June 1999 • No. 6
