On the afternoon of Jan. 15, with Washington paralyzed by an ice storm,
President Clinton's top foreign policy advisers straggled into the
Situation Room. Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright was pressing --
and losing, for the moment -- a campaign to scale up U.S. and NATO
intervention in Kosovo.
Everyone in
the White House basement that day agreed that Yugoslav President
Slobodan Milosevic was "shredding," as one participant put it, his
promises of restraint against rebellious ethnic Albanians. Albright said
muddling through was not working, and the time had come to tie the
threat of force to a comprehensive settlement between Serbia, the
dominant Yugoslav republic, and Kosovo, its secessionist province. Her
Cabinet peers in the so-called Principals Committee, no less frustrated
than Albright, were not yet ready to take that risk. They approved a
13-page classified "Kosovo Strategy" that policymakers referred to
informally as "Status Quo Plus."
"We're just
gerbils running on a wheel," Albright fumed outside the meeting,
convinced that no incremental effort would keep stop Kosovo's pent-up
civil war from exploding.
Even in the
satellite age, White House decisions can be obsolete at birth. What the
principals did not know as they met is that 4,700 miles away, in a
Kosovo village called Racak, nearly four dozen civilians lay freshly
dead in a Serb massacre that would change everything.
A
reconstruction of decisionmaking in Washington and Brussels, where NATO
is headquartered, suggests that Racak transformed the West's Balkan
policy as singular events seldom do. The atrocity, discovered the
following day, convinced the administration and then its NATO allies
that a six-year effort to bottle up the ethnic conflict in Kosovo was
doomed. In the next two weeks, they set aside the
emphasis on
containment that had grown over the years from a one- sentence threat
delivered Dec. 24, 1992. Instead they steered a more ambitious course:
to solve the Kosovo problem instead of keeping it safely confined.
By the time
national security adviser Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger called the principals
together again Jan. 19, Albright "was pushing on an open door," an
associate said. Within two more days Clinton aired the plan with British
Prime Minister Tony Blair, and by the end of January the die was cast
for NATO's first war and the most consequential conflict in Europe since
World War II.
"In dealing
with Kosovo, you were dealing with the crucible of the problem,"
Albright said in an interview Friday in a formal seventh- floor
reception room, referring to the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Milosevic's
nationalist politics were founded on the issue of Kosovo, and only by
going to its roots could the West stop him from "playing the very card
that was designed to create chaos," Albright said.
Still, in
its first three weeks, a military campaign whose central objective was
saving the lives and homes of Kosovo's ethnic Albanians has greatly
accelerated their slaughter and dispossession. Interviews and internal
documents describing the run-up to war suggest that a number of
calculations and choices by the Clinton administration over the course
of the last year contributed to these unintended effects:
Although
policymakers considered the possibility that bombing would spur Serb
forces to harsher violence on the ground -- Albright considered it among
other potential "surprises" gamed out in a classified memorandum last
month -- they misjudged Milosevic's ambition. Policymakers generally
assumed the Serb leader would try to eradicate the rebel Kosovo
Liberation Army, as he boasted he could do in five to seven days. They
did not foresee Serb efforts to depopulate Kosovo of its 1.6 million
ethnic Albanians, some two- thirds of whom are now homeless and many
thousands believed dead, and therefore made no military plans to halt
them.
While
recognizing that Milosevic regarded the loss of Kosovo as a threat to
his power in Belgrade, the administration made the crucial tactical
decision to seek accord with Kosovo's Albanians first and Milosevic
second. Only that way, policymakers believed, could they hold back the
guerrillas from a major offensive and persuade NATO partners to threaten
use of force against Belgrade.
At the same
time, the allies took several decisions that undercut the threat of
"sustained and decisive military power" that a November 1998 National
Intelligence Estimate, the last broad and formal assessment by the U.S.
government, described as the West's only lever to budge Milosevic. Later
spot intelligence assessments ranged widely in their predictions about
Milosevic's likely reaction to Western pressure.
"He may
assume he could absorb a limited attack and allies would not support a
long campaign," the CIA's National Intelligence Daily, distributed to
several dozen senior decision-makers, said Jan. 27. But one Feb. 6
scenario supposed Milosevic might "accept a major NATO ground force {to
implement peace}, but only if he is given a face- saving formula that
would allow him to portray this as keeping Kosovo within Serbia."
Another, the same month, said "Milosevic will seek to give just enough
to avoid NATO bombing."
The
constraints of alliance and domestic politics pressed simultaneously on
Clinton in opposite directions: to raise the stakes of intervention
while limiting the available means. Washington's four key European
partners -- Britain, France, Germany and Italy -- were unwilling to use
force over Kosovo without a plan for a comprehensive settlement, but
they ruled out what one U.S. official called "the only certain means of
reaching that objective, which was ground troops prepared to invade."
Convinced
that the United States had to offer ground troops to help implement any
peace accord, Albright felt obliged to limit the proposal in ways that
some policymakers saw as self-defeating. "Our assumption was that we had
to find ways to minimize the percentage of American troops and emphasize
a `permissive environment' if there was any hope of getting the Pentagon
and the president and Congress to buy it," said one adviser involved in
crafting Albright's plan. By similar logic, for fear of a divisive
congressional and allied debate, Clinton declared as bombing started
March 23 that "I do not intend to put our troops in Kosovo to fight a
war."
The
assurances on ground troops, and the conspicuous difficulty the alliance
had in authorizing more than a limited Phase I of a three-phased air
battle plan, convinced not only Milosevic but much of the U.S.
intelligence community that NATO would not hold together even as long as
it has. A policymaker added: "Our own intelligence community may have
assumed, as Milosevic seems to have, that we would bomb as we had just
done in Iraq -- hit them for three days and then stop, whether we
accomplished the mission or not."
Clinton and
his senior advisers describe themselves as more convinced than ever that
they are doing the right thing. Asked how he will be able to find
success in a war that brought the refugee catastrophe it tried to avert,
Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott replied in an interview: "Very
simple. They're going home. They're going back to a Kosovo that is safe
and secure and self- governing. That's our answer."
A POLICY FOUNDED ON A THREAT
The image of
Kosovo as Europe's tinderbox, where war could bring not only
humanitarian but strategic consequences, preceded the Clinton
administration. President George Bush, whose Secretary of State James A.
Baker III had famously said of Bosnia, "We don't have a dog in that
fight," felt otherwise about Kosovo. Fighting there would certainly
complete the violent breakup of Yugoslavia that began in 1991, he
believed, and could easily draw in neighbors from Bulgaria to Turkey to
Greece.
In Bush's
final days, Baker's successor, Lawrence S. Eagleburger, sent a
classified cable to Belgrade with instructions that the acting U.S.
ambassador read it to Milosevic -- verbatim, without elaboration, and
face to face. The Dec. 24, 1992, text, which has been widely described
but not quoted before, read in its entirety: "In the event of conflict
in Kosovo caused by Serbian action, the U.S. will be prepared to employ
military force against Serbians in Kosovo and in Serbia proper."
That single
sentence became the basis for six years of U.S. policy: an unspecified
threat, of unspecified certainty, to prevent unspecified acts of
escalation by Serbia. Asked what might have triggered U.S. punishment,
and how far Bush might have been prepared to go with force, the
undersecretary of state for political affairs at the time, Arnold Kanter,
replied in an interview recently: "To tell you the truth, that's a very
hard question. I really don't know."
Twice in
Clinton's first year in office -- in February and July 1993 -- Secretary
of State Warren Christopher ordered the reiteration of that warning to
Milosevic.
But the
warning was permitted to dissipate. By the time Milosevic launched his
first serious offensive in Kosovo -- beginning near Drenica on Feb. 26,
1998 -- two things had changed. The first was the rise of a guerrilla
force, the Kosovo Liberation Army, that not only fought Serb army and
Interior Ministry Police but gunned down civilians, killing Serb mail
carriers and others associated with Belgrade. "We weren't in a situation
where there was a Serb crackdown on an unarmed, peaceful Albanian
populace," one policymaker said. More important, the intervening years
had brought an accord in Bosnia and a largely European ground force to
implement it.
"The idea of
us using force over the objection of allies who have troops on the
ground, subject to retaliation, is fantasy-land," one policymaker said.
"Allies do not do that to each other."
When defense
planners met a year ago in the Joint Staff and the office of Defense
Secretary William S. Cohen, one of them said: "The first question we had
to ask was whether the Christmas warning was still on the table. And the
fact is the Christmas warning was not on the table. We were not prepared
for unilateral action."
LEADING THROUGH RHETORIC
Albright,
who used her seat at the Cabinet table as U.N. ambassador to press
unsuccessfully during Clinton's first term for earlier intervention in
Bosnia, saw Kosovo as a chance to right historical wrongs.
"I felt that
there still was time to do something about this, and that we should not
wait as long as we did on Bosnia to have dreadful things happen; that we
could get it ahead of the curve," Albright said in Friday's interview.
By the first
days of March 1998, the secretary of state had begun a conscious effort,
as one aide put it, "to lead through rhetoric." Her targets were
European allies, U.S. public opinion and her own government.
On a
stopover in Rome March 7, 1998, en route to a meeting of the six outside
powers known as the Contact Group on the Balkans, she declared alongside
a discomfited Italian Prime Minister Lamberto Dini: "We are not going to
stand by and watch the Serbian authorities do in Kosovo what they can no
longer get away with doing in Bosnia."
That
"engagement of American prestige," as another adviser put it, went
somewhat beyond the consensus of her Cabinet peers, as did her statement
that "we have a broad range of options available to us."
In the
London conference room in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office where the
six nations' foreign ministers had wrung their hands so often over
Bosnia's dismemberment in 1992 and 1993, Albright asked them whether
they wanted the same legacy for themselves. "History is watching us, and
we have an opportunity to make up for the mistakes that had been made
four or five years ago," she said, according to a government account.
Her aim, one U.S. official said, was to "put these ministers back on
their heels, to put them under pressure to show some spine."
In
Washington, a defense policy official said Albright's remarks
reverberated with some anxiety in the Pentagon. "Let's not get too far
ahead of ourselves in terms of making threats," he said of the
atmosphere. Berger, at the White House, was described by colleagues as
worried about damaging U.S. credibility by appearing to promise more in
Kosovo than the president was prepared to deliver.
United
Nations Security Council Resolution 1160 laid economic sanctions on
Belgrade on March 31, and Clinton froze Yugoslavia's assets in the
United States. But the spring and summer brought greater carnage, and a
quarter-million Albanians were left at least temporarily homeless.
At NATO's
June gathering, Cohen urged his fellow ministers to authorize the
military committee to begin conceptual planning for intervention in
Kosovo. When the defense ministers gathered again in Portugal three
months later, NATO Secretary General Javier Solana told the closed-door
gathering that Serbs were mocking the alliance with a slow-motion
offensive aimed at keeping NATO in its torpor. Solana said one Serb
diplomat, whom he did not name, went so far as to joke that "a village a
day keeps NATO away" -- a phrase that Solana repeated often in months to
come.
Washington,
throughout this period, spent the bulk of its political-military capital
on the ongoing confrontation with Iraq. But the period between the two
NATO gatherings saw a furious internal debate on whether the alliance
could act militarily without explicit authority from the Security
Council. On Sept. 24, a day after a carefully ambiguous Security Council
resolution, Washington finally persuaded its allies to issue an
ultimatum to Milosevic to pull back.
Oct. 13
brought the first "activation order" in NATO's history, a formal
agreement to authorize the bombing of Yugoslavia. But unbeknown at the
time, the governing North Atlantic Council approved only Phase I of the
three-phase air campaign, amounting to about 50 air defense targets. The
real punishment of Belgrade would come in Phase II, with "scores of
targets," and Phase III, with "hundreds and hundreds of targets,"
according to a senior White House official.
Armed with
the NATO threat, U.S. special envoy Richard C. Holbrooke persuaded
Milosevic to accept a cease-fire in Kosovo and to withdraw the troops
and special police who had not been there before 1998. "So you're the
one who will bomb us," Milosevic said in a can't-scare-me voice to Air
Force Lt. Gen. Michael Short, who accompanied Holbrooke. "I have U-2s
{observation aircraft} in one hand and B-52s in the other, and it's up
to you which one I'll use," Short replied.
With winter
already arriving, the cease-fire came just in time to avert the death by
exposure of many thousands of Albanian villagers in the hills.
The National
Intelligence Estimate issued in November concluded that "the October
agreement indicates that Milosevic is susceptible to outside pressure.
He will eventually accept a number of outcomes, from autonomy to
provisional status with final resolution to be determined, as long as he
remains the undisputed leader in Belgrade."
Still, the
estimate said, Milosevic would accept a new status for Kosovo "only when
he believes his power is endangered" by "insurgents driving up the
economic and military costs of holding onto the province, or the West
threatening to use sustained and decisive military power against his
forces."
STATUS QUO PLUS
U.S.
intelligence reported almost immediately that the KLA intended to draw
NATO into its fight for independence by provoking Serb forces into
further atrocities. Warnings to the rebel leaders from Washington
restrained them somewhat, but they assassinated a small-town Serb mayor
near Pristina and were believed responsible for the slaying of six Serb
youths at the Panda Cafe in Pec on Dec. 14. That served, one U.S.
official said, as "the sort of antipode" to Serb violence: "Pec was `bad
Albanians.' And one of our difficulties, particularly with the Europeans
. . . was getting them to accept the proposition that the root of the
problem is Belgrade."
Yugoslav and
irregular Serb forces, meanwhile, began violating their numerical limits
almost immediately. But Clinton's advisers saw no benefit, one said at
the time, "in making a big fuss about their presence. . . . You're not
going to get people to bomb over the specific number of troops."
Unarmed
European peace monitors reporting to U.S. Ambassador William Walker,
meanwhile, were getting the worst of encounters with the Serbs. "We were
having our people pulled out of cars and in certain instances being
beaten, with a certain brazenness," Walker said in a mobile telephone
interview from Macedonia. The Yugoslav army and Interior Ministry Police
no longer bothered to invent "a lame excuse" when observers came upon a
smoldering village or dead Albanian, he said.
Throughout
the late fall and winter, as Clinton moved to the brink and back of
bombing Iraq, mid-level policymakers were debating how to save
Holbrooke's October deal.
U.S.
Ambassador to Macedonia Christopher Hill, who served as special
negotiator for Kosovo, proposed to beef up Walker's observers with
helicopters and bodyguards, and to begin training Albanian police and
planning an election to which Milosevic had not yet agreed. But "a lot
of these required tacit consent from Belgrade," said a NATO diplomat in
Brussels at the time.
These
proposals culminated in the Status Quo Plus proposal that remained the
highest common denominator among Berger, Cohen, Albright and their
colleagues. "Our fundamental strategic objectives remain unchanged:
promote regional stability and protect our investment in Bosnia; prevent
resumption of hostilities in Kosovo and renewed humanitarian crisis;
preserve U.S. and NATO credibility," the classified strategy paper said,
summarizing the state of play on Jan. 15.
MASSACRE AT RACAK
Late
afternoon reports of fighting that day brought a team from Walker's
Kosovo Verification Mission to Racak. By nightfall, when it became too
dangerous to remain, they had found only one dead villager and several
wounded. But the next day Walker accompanied a second team up a snowy
ravine cut through hill overlooking the town.
The first
corpse they ran across, beneath a bloody blanket, was headless. More
bodies lay scattered singly up the hill, "almost all old men, obviously
in their work clothes, bullet holes in the eye, bullet holes in the
cranium," Walker said. Then came "a pile of bodies," all in a heap.
Helena Ranta, a Finnish forensic doctor, later reported that there were
22 bodies in that pile, 45 dead in all. "There were no indications," she
wrote, "of the people being other than unarmed civilians."
U.S. Army
Lt. Col. Michael Phillips, Walker's chief of staff, dialed the State
Department's Operations Center from the scene and began dictating a
grisly report. From there the report moved to the White House Situation
Room, which passed it before dawn to Berger. Albright recalled in the
interview that she first got word of the massacre around 4:30 a.m.
Saturday when her bedside clock radio snapped on with the headlines on
WTOP radio news.
Austrian
intelligence had recently passed NATO its discovery that Belgrade
planned a major spring offensive, code-named Operation Horseshoe.
Subsequent intelligence alerts gave various estimates, from mid-March to
early April. When Albright learned of the Racak massacre, she called
Berger. "Spring," she said sourly, "has come early to Kosovo."
"I wished we
had moved faster, all of us," she said in the interview Friday. "I
thought, `These were the kinds of things we were trying to avoid.' "
James
Steinberg, Berger's deputy at the White House, got his wake- up call
directly from Racak at 6 a.m. on Jan. 16, Washington time. Walker
"called me at home and gave me his firsthand account, just a very kind
of graphic, `You need to know about this.' My first reaction is this is
precisely what we feared. My second was, that's why we wanted the KVM
{observer force} in there, because it was going to be harder for them to
cover this up."
Albright had
other conclusions. According to confidants, she realized that the
galvanizing force of the atrocity would not last long. "Whatever threat
of force you don't get in the next two weeks you're never getting," one
adviser told her, "at least until the next Racak."
When the
Principals Committee met again on the evening of Jan. 19, shortly before
Clinton gave his State of the Union address, Albright said it was time
to discuss the elements of an ultimatum with the allies. And it was also
time, she said, for the United States to stop equivocating on whether it
would participate in an implementing ground force if a Kosovo peace deal
were reached.
Cohen,
according to a participant, said talk of ground troops -- even those
invited by Belgrade -- was premature. But neither he nor Gen. Henry H.
Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, held that view much
longer.
Clinton's
team swiftly coalesced around several elements of a plan, according to
one of those who took part: "One was to make a credible threat of
military force. The other was to demand the attendance of the parties at
a meeting at which the principal demands would be decided in advance by
the Contact Group, including Russia. The basic principles were
nonnegotiable, including a NATO implementing force."
Berger
brought the new consensus to Clinton. On Jan. 21, the president outlined
it to Britain's Blair in a call from the Oval Office. "If we do military
action without a political plan, we will have a problem," Clinton told
his friend in London, according to an official government account.
Clinton knew
that his NATO allies believed the Albanian guerrillas of the KLA were
driving the violence as much as Belgrade. He told Blair: "One thing is
to go to {the KLA} and say, `Look, if you want us to do any more, you
have to help too.' They probably have as many violations of cease-fires
as Milosevic, though his are more egregious."
Blair
agreed: "One of the dangers is if we go smack Milosevic and find the KLA
moving on people who don't agree with them."
Albright
spent the last week of January orchestrating the trigger for NATO's
threat. In the red velvet anteroom of the president's box at Moscow's
Bolshoi Theater, over champagne and caviar between acts of Verdi's "La
Traviata," Albright looked for some common ground with Russian Foreign
Minister Igor Ivanov. Would he not agree, she asked, that an ultimatum
to Belgrade might help lead Milosevic to a deal?
Ivanov
expressed understanding, though not agreement. Then Albright called the
foreign ministers of Britain, France, Germany and Italy -- the remaining
members of the Contact Group -- and said she would not agree to another
meeting unless they were prepared to commit ahead of time to the
ultimatum.
THE DIE IS CAST
On Jan. 30,
NATO ministers approved its second "activation order" to prepare for
war. This one, unlike the one Oct. 13, called for no pause between the
roughly 50 targets in Phase I and those to come.
On Feb. 1,
Clinton met his foreign policy team and the die was cast. According to
notes taken at the meeting, described as a paraphrase of Clinton's
remarks, the president said he understood from the CIA that Kosovo was
more central to Milosevic than Bosnia had been and "he may be sorely
tempted to take the first round of airstrikes. I hope we don't have to
bomb, but we may need to."
No one spoke
of what would happen if the bombing didn't work. "Governments make the
decisions that are necessary to make and they leave for another day
decisions that are very hard, for eventualities that everybody hopes
will never occur," said one official.
Blair's use
of the word "smack" and Clinton's "first round" suggested an atmosphere
in which the decision-makers anticipated nothing so serious as today's
ongoing war. In the final run-up, Albright asked policy planning
director Morton Halperin and others to look for unpleasant scenarios
that had not been fully considered. They came back with a five-page memo
titled, "Surprises." Among the fears: that the Albanians would renege on
the agreement; that they would launch military operations; that
Milosevic would combine a false peace offensive with continued low-level
fighting; that NATO would balk in the end at launching the air campaign;
that Russia would mount much more vigorous opposition, perhaps including
military aid to Belgrade.
The "hardest
one," said one official involved, "was what happened, which was a
massive offensive by the Serbs" touched off by the start of NATO
bombing. That would leave the administration "vulnerable to the
criticism" that it had caused the suffering it sought to prevent. The
only answer, the official said, was "to try to get the military
resources" to win the war -- "as quickly as we could."
By March 16,
the CIA sent an alert to senior decision-makers: "Kosovo -- Serb
Offensive At Hand." Two days later, Kosovo's Albanians finally signed
the proposed accord. The same day, by intelligence reckoning, marked the
start of Operation Horseshoe.
Holbrooke
made a last fruitless trip to Belgrade on March 22. Brig. Gen. George
Casey, of the Pentagon's Joint Staff, showed Yugoslav Chief of Staff
Gen. Dragoljub Ojdanic the next morning that NATO knew the names and
locations of all his major units. "If we begin to bomb," Casey said,
"you'll be known as the guy who let 50 years of Yugoslav military
independence be destroyed."
After 23
days of bombing, Albright looked confident and serene in nearly an
hour-long interview Friday, convinced, as one confidant put it, that
this is "simply the most important thing we have done in the world."
"I think we
have shown that this kind of thing cannot stand, that you cannot in 1999
have this kind of barbaric ethnic cleansing," Albright said, face
hardening and slashing the air with a hand. "It is ultimately better
that the democracies stand up against this kind of evil."
Staff
researcher Robert Thomason contributed to this report.
WAR IN THE BALKANS
March 1998
"We are not
going to stand by and watch the Serbian authorities do in Kosovo what
they can no longer get away with doing in Bosnia," Secretary of State
Madeleine K. Albright said on the way to an international meeting on the
Kosovo crisis.
June
Defense
Secretary William S. Cohen attended a NATO ministerial meeting in
Brussels in which military authorities called for air exercises in
Albania and Macedonia to increase pressure on Yugoslav President
Slobodan Milosevic.
September
A NATO
official quoted a bitter Secretary General Javier Solana on how Serbs
were mocking NATO's inaction, while village after village was being
burned in Kosovo: "A village a day keeps NATO away."
October
U.S. envoy
Richard C. Holbrooke, backed by a threat of NATO airstrikes, won
Milosevic's approval of a cease-fire and removal of troops from Kosovo.
Jan. 15, 1999
Forty-five
ethnic Albanians were massacred by Serbs in the Kosovo village of Racak.
The atrocity convinced the White House and its allies that a six-year
effort to bottle up the ethnic conflict was doomed.
Feb. 6-17
Kosovo
Albanians and Serbs met in Rambouillet, France, for their first,
inconclusive, round of talks. The Albanians agreed to a settlement
during the next round of talks in Paris. The Serbs refused and peace
talks were suspended.