Assessing the War in KOSOVO

...And the NATO bombing campaign had apparently won him the support of many who in the past opposed him...

...Yet looking at devastated Kosovo, it's hard to argue that all the self-determination has made this a better world...

...A Point of Privilege Rising to a point of personal privilege, as they say in the Senate, I wish to address a characterization of me—unfavorable, I think—in the Wall Street Journal...

...That has been the American experience...

...That consensus seems in danger of fraying as the war goes on, though, especially over the question of assembling a ground force...

...One could hear the grinding of gears as NATO policymakers began to address the question of a ground force...

...He asserted that NATO's purpose was the return of refugees protected by "some sort of international force...

...At9:00 a.m...

...Third, in February in Paris, when the Kosovars bought the arrangement and the U. S. still thought that under the threat of bombing Milosevic would too...

...History, however, does notprovide very many examples of successful mass repatriation...

...The perception of impotence feeds nationalist and anti-American sentiment in Russia...

...We thought "victory through air power" died on the Normandy beaches...

...ground troops originally unthinkable to President Clinton...

...But let me admit that as a journalist of 60 years in print, radio and television, I do have serious concerns about what has happened to the standards of my beloved profession...

...But it never occurred to us that this might be news...

...The Clinton Administration was not about to invite a lot of dithering and an inevitable veto by Russia and China...

...A war, if it is to have public support, requires that the enemy be personalized...

...The nature of the danger suggests the nature of the preventive strategy...

...Secessionist movements are still alive—Chechnya in Russia, the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan...

...Some partitions simply turned back the clock on imperial conquest...

...But, as in Iraq, there was no visible sign of a suitable successor...

...It had yet to be demonstrated that he had even an entry strategy...

...First, last October, when special envoy Richard C. Holbrooke, believing he could repeat his success in getting Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to accept the Dayton Accords on Bosnia, announced a peace plan calling for a pullback of Serbian forces from Kosovo and the restoration of political autonomy...

...C designates problems like Kosovo or Rwanda that do not directly threaten American interests...

...It is ironic that the April 23-25 North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit in Washington, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the most successful alliance in history, finds NATO engaged in military conflict, something it managed to avoid during a half-century of the Cold War...

...Fifty-seven per cent could not name Kosovo as the province where the war was under way...

...None of us had any stomach for a scandal involving the martyred President...

...Some of us one-time ground soldiers still bridle at the memory of the elite "fly boys" with crushed caps who flew off into the wild blue yonder and were back in time for dinner...

...Second, at Rambouillet in January, when the U.S...

...In 1971, working for CBS, I showed up in the office of Representative Wilbur D. Mills, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, for a scheduled filmed interview...

...Germany has now been reunified —the only recent example of one state where there were two before...

...Inarecent editorial-page article titled "In Defense of Tabloid Sleaze," Mark Steyn, a columnist of the London Daily Telegraph, cites me as one of the "deans of dignity, solons of solemnity and grampas of gravitas" who have given insufficient attention to the details of Presidential scandal...

...and its five Contact Group partners—Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Russia—believed that under the threat of bombing Milosevic could be pressured into accepting autonomy for Kosovo, with NATO troops deployed to protect it...

...Manuel Noriega of Panama was the man President George Bush loved to hate...

...he had liquor on his breath and spoke with exaggerated slowness...

...In Congress, meanwhile, critics were asking whether President Clinton had an exit strategy from Kosovo...

...By making Kosovo a NATO operation without even the gesture of seeking Security Council approval, the United States established the precedent of ignoring the world organization...

...Without much discussion, we just let it go by...

...Czechoslovakia has split into two states, but at least peacefully...

...The Yugoslav federation, created with Marshal Josip Broz Tito's iron fist, dissolved into five ethnically diverse republics, something that a far-sighted Bush Administration tried to prevent...

...Yes, in a different time with a different journalistic ethic, I passed up a few scandals...

...Personalizing the Enemy The NATO campaign in the skies over Serbia, while massacre and forced expulsions raged in Kosovo, also revived an ancient controversy about the limits of air power...

...Under pressure of West European governments, which expressed willingness to accept refugees, but only temporarily, President Bill Clinton offered assurances that they would be enabled to return to their homeland...

...The "Press" has, in large part, metamorphosed into "the News Media" and, ultimately, "the Media," where journalism occupies a very small corner of a vast entertainment stage...

...Fifth, on March 24, when NATO initiated its air campaign against Yugoslavia, believing it could cripple Yugoslav forces before they were able to expel the Kosovars from their homes...

...All three of the stories I passed up eventually became public knowledge...

...In a Pew Research Center poll, only 38 per cent saw Kosovo as a serious problem for the U.S...

...Yet, if the worst indictment I must face is being a "dean of dignity," I guess I can somehow live with that...

...Then a sense of improvisation entered American and NATO planning...

...is for major regional contingencies like the Persian Gulf and North Korea, that do threaten American interests, but not our survival...

...The A category is empty right now, and keeping it that way is what this book is about...

...Looking toward the 21 st century, the authors outline A, B and C lists of trouble...

...The United States succeeded in getting the backing of all the other 18 members, 12 of them with military contributions, for the air campaign against Yugoslavia...

...India was partitioned to form Pakistan, and they are still trying to find ways to live with each other in peace...

...Slobodan Milosevic seems likely to be President Clinton's nominee for this Hall of Villains...

...In the Capitol newspaper called the Hill, that famous pollster and political pragmatist, Dick Morris, had a message for his old client: "If the bombing doesn't work, go home and give it up...

...A is for the likes of the former Soviet Union, which could have endangered America's survival...

...Dutch friends induced me to kill the article in fear that it might undo the Queen, and perhaps the monarchy...

...Although successful in hitting the Serbian infrastructure, the air strategy manifestly failed to save the ethnic Albanians...

...Milosevic had effectively eliminated or co-opted most opposition leaders...

...In 1975, while covering the Senate's CIA investigation, I noticed in a report on assassination conspiracies an obscure reference to "a close friend" of President John F. Kennedy who also had a relationship with Mafia figures, who in turn were involved with the CIA in trying to kill Fidel Castro...

...With all the states splitting into smaller and smaller entities, the United Nations, which started in business in 1945 with 50 states, now has 185...

...The vast forced exodus of Kosovars was clearly not anticipated...

...In the case of China, it means continuing the military exchanges that Perry promoted, and working to make China a security partner rather than an adversary...

...Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright denounced Milosevic as a modern-day Hitler and said the Administration was focusing on the question of whether dealing with him was "possible any longer...

...Ireland was partitioned and plunged into decades of violence...

...The idea of partition has been in the air...

...The vast country, which has not been able to find its footing in the 10 years since the fall of Communism, is intensely sensitive to not being taken seriously when it tries to speak out for its Slavic cousins in Yugoslavia...

...Palestine was partitioned into Israel and an immediately rejected Arab state, leading to a series of wars since 1948...

...Before World War II, General Billy Mitchell of the Army Air Corps attracted considerable attention with his doctrine of "victory through air power"— the thesis that the next war would be won largely from the air...

...In a world conflict class at the University of Miami, reported the Washington Post, students opposed the use of violence in any form...

...The Soviet Union, created with Stalin's iron fist, melted into 15 republics...

...In the case of Russia, this means continuing the program of destroying nuclear weapons, taking a deep breath before enlarging NATO any further, and keeping the Russian military engaged...

...In Russia, the potential danger is chaos, isolation and aggression—a replay of Weimar Germany after World War I. Russia also presents a danger of nuclear weapons falling into the wrong hands...

...Changed Relations THREE FUNDAMENTAL American relationships are affected by the Kosovo war...

...Discerning the Next Threat Awful as the Kosovo tragedy is, it does not resonate as a clear and present danger to America the way the Berlin blockade of 1948 did, or the Cuban missile crisis of 1962...

...In 1952, writing from the Netherlands, I learned of Queen Juliana's fixation on a faith healer who inducted her into mysticism and neutralism...

...But the authority of the United Nations, once flouted, is not likely to be restored soon...

...It doesn't help that Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin, who is dependent on American and international aid, can hardly afford to make good on his veiled threats of intervention in Kosovo...

...Slowly Americans became aware of the war...

...I never expected to be charged with excessive dignity...

...World War II left us with a North and South Korea and an East and West Germany...

...In the People's Republic of China, the potential danger is that the enormous country could turn hostile to the West...

...Supreme Commander General Wesley K. Clark was frank to say that air power alone could not save Kosovo...

...Another concerns NATO...

...and only 47 per cent believed America had a responsibility to stop the fighting...

...Milosevics Miscalculation During the early stage of the war, America remained largely insulated...

...In Latin America, Fidel Castro has been the bête noire, and sometime assassination target, of Presidents back to Eisenhower...

...Back at the office, I observed that Mills seemed to have a drinking problem...

...Since that time, the U.S...

...And counting...

...But it returned, in large part because Clinton, feeling morally committed to opposing genocide in Kosovo, sought to limit himself to what he considered politically feasible...

...Milosevic might have thought that parading titrée prisoners before the cameras would have the same effect on Americans as seeing the body of an American airman being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, Somalia...

...The devastating pictures of expellees stranded on the borders of Kosovo, the shooting down of an American Stealth fighter and the capture of three American soldiers all contributed to rising public anger and support for stringent action against Yugoslavia...

...Scrambling Boundaries Albanians fighting for independence from Serbia was probably not what President Woodrow Wilson imagined when he promoted ethnic self-determination and the scrambling of boundaries after World War I. One has to wonder where partition, often with massive population transfers and "ethnic cleansing," has gotten the world...

...That was about as valuable as some of Morris' other counsel...

...Giving up on Milosevic as a negotiating partner, the United States considered a policy of "regime change" (a phrase borrowed from the Iraq conflict...

...The summit is supposed to define NATO's future mission, and that new mission statement may now have to cover a war against a country that has not threatened any NATO member, an intervention within the territory of a sovereign state...

...At the Brookings Institution here, Ivo Daalder, a former National Security Council officer, predicted a decision to send in ground troops, but too late to accomplish its objective...

...President Ronald Reagan's favorite monster was Libya's Muammar el-Qaddafi, whom he called "the mad dog of the Middle East...

...Suspecting that the "close friend" might be a woman, I asked my CBS superiors whetherto pursue the lead...

...has had difficulty discerning the source of the next big threat as opposed to the momentary flash point...

...The problem is addressed by former Defense Secretary William J. Perry and former Assistant Secretary Ashton B. Carter in a thoughtful new book, Preventive Defense: A New Security Strategy for America...

...If so, the Serbian dictator miscalculated, and so did the cynical Dick Morris...

...I confess that I do not know how I would have acted had they occurred in the current journalistic climate...

...One concerns the United Nations...

...It was clearly fear of an adverse public reaction that made the use of U.S...

...This would have northern Kosovo become a part of Serbia, and make the rest an independent state under NATO protection...

...Ten years ago, as the Berlin Wall came down and Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev began to withdraw from the Cold War, one of his advisers, Georgi Arbatov, told me sardonically, "We will deprive you of an enemy and then what will you do...

...President Bush fought a war against Saddam Hussein of Iraq, whom he likened to Hitler...

...Fourth, on March 22, when Holbrooke flew to Belgrade with a "final" ultimatum to Milosevic...

...By early April it looked as though we might shortly witness a fait accompli—a devastated and largely depopulated Kosovo...

...Finally, there is the bilateral relationship with Russia...

...Indeed, NATO's next challenge may be the liberation of Kosovo, or a large part of it...

...At briefings in Brussels, spokesmen talked of the no-groundtroops policy as the policy "at the moment" or "for the time being...