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You can't negotiate with a war criminal
But a circus tent of NATO opponents, from Tom Hayden to Arianna Huffington, won't face reality.
By Ian Williams
[05/27/99]

Shays calls the GOP's bluff
By trying to force a floor vote on campaign finance reform, Rep. Chris Shays puts his money where his mouth is -- and his career in jeopardy.
By Jake Tapper
[05/27/99]

A visit to "no-man's land"
An endless stream of refugees waits in desperate limbo between Kosovo terror and crowded camps.
By Rob Mank
[05/26/99]

Is sodomy with a stick worse than death?
The outcry over Justin Volpe's abuse of Abner Louima -- compared with comparative silence about decades of police killings -- suggests assaulting someone's manhood is worse than killing him.
By Jill Nelson
[05/26/99]

Friend or foe?
The appropriate U.S. reaction to new allegations of Chinese espionage depends on whether China is an adversary or an ally.
By Joshua Micah Marshall
[05/26/99]

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The mistake that Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright can't admit is their original belief that the war in Kosovo would be a short war, one that could be wrapped up in time to celebrate NATO's 50th birthday party. It would be "a military euro," boasted a German strategist -- an invigorating, unifying parallel to the achievement of a single European currency.

You can't negotiate with a war criminal By Ian Williams

Now, instead of admitting the initial mistake, the president is escalating the war with intensified bombing raids and preparing for a ground war under the guise of sending "peacekeepers." We have returned to the familiar terrain of the credibility gap, postmarked Kosovo instead of Vietnam.

Putting the egos of politicians aside, there are ample reasons for reevaluating the Balkans war. It already is a strategic defeat, and it will take all the James Carvilles of the Western world to spin it as a victory.

The United States and NATO have failed to win a short war, but instead are being frustrated by a relatively small nation of Serbs. After the United States and NATO dropped 14,000 bombs and missiles by May 24, an eyewitness account in the Los Angeles Times described Belgraders as "stoic" and "learning to cope." The strategy of policing the new world order with high-tech, big-stick missiles has failed. Instead of intimidating would-be revolutionaries with our invincible image, the lesson is that the West couldn't defeat Slobodan Milosevic in 60 days and is highly unlikely to try extended military action elsewhere for a very long time.

Though the prewar population was 90 percent ethnic Albanian, Kosovo is the sacred place and spiritual home of Serbian identity going back to 1389. But the Albanian population of Kosovo is overwhelmingly anti-Orthodox, and the Kosovars have participated in recent "ethnic cleansing" as well. According to Foreign Affairs magazine, between 1986 and 1989, 130,000 Serbs were forced out of Kosovo because of "harassment and discrimination by the Kosovar majority." New York Times correspondent David Binder reported throughout the 1980s on Kosovar atrocities that included trying to set fire to young boys, raping Serbian girls, attacking Serbian Orthodox churches and poisoning Serbian wells, "thereby helping to fulfill a nationalist demand for an ethnically 'pure' Albanian Kosovo."

At that point Milosevic exploited the nationalism card, suspended Kosovo's autonomous status and set in motion the oppression that has spiraled to the present. As early as 1991, an Albanian-language poll showed that more than half of Kosovars favored annexation by Albania, 31 percent believed in armed struggle against the Serbs and only 7 percent "saw any point in attempting to enter into dialogue with the Serbs." Far from the Holocaust analogy, this data indicates an underlying civil war between ethnic Albanians and Serbs, rooted in irreconcilable nationalist hatreds.

The Balkan war was supposed to be about helping the Kosovars, but their suffering has been aggravated and deepened since the bombings began. When Clinton began the bombing on March 24, there were 124,000 Kosovars expelled from Kosovo. Now there are 900,000, a sevenfold increase in the number who have been uprooted. The United States is spending $13 billion on the military side of this adventure, 75 times more than the $200 million so far for humanitarian assistance. According to United Nations and CIA data, our country is next to last among 27 nations -- just above Romania -- in sheltering Kosovo refugees as a percentage of population. Tony Blair's United Kingdom is 22nd, far behind Norway, Sweden, Ireland, Canada and Australia.

The Kosovo failure undermines the U.S. strategy of shaping the post-Cold War order around NATO rather than the United Nations. As a consequence of a system intended to marginalize the Soviet Union as an international power, the United States now finds itself dependent on the Russians as mediators with Milosevic.

Far worse for humanity, the Balkans war has seriously damaged nuclear arms control talks between the United States and Russia. Analysts say START II -- the treaty slashing nuclear arsenals -- is "all but dead." In addition, the Balkans conflict has stimulated a virulent anti-U.S. sentiment in China, undermining a fragile coexistence. It is also a diversion from the domestic agenda that Democrats in particular care about. For instance, spending by the White House on Kosovo already equals three times what California receives in assistance for public schools ($3.9 billion), and more than 10 times the amount Clinton is proposing for new schoolteachers nationwide ($1 billion). The redirection of domestic dollars to defense will escalate as the war drones on.

And now the contradictory U.S. policy is to bomb Serbia into allowing 1 million traumatized Kosovars to return to their destroyed villages to live under NATO occupation as refugees inside a Yugoslavia from which they seek liberation. Are we planning to disarm the Kosovo Liberation Army and thwart their aspirations, or is the quagmire pulling us into a continuing civil war?

Ironically, NATO now finds itself on the same side as the KLA, a group that the U.S. envoy to the Balkans only last year dismissed as "terrorists." Whether by coincidence or design, the U.S.-NATO cooperation with the KLA grows by the day. "NATO's air strikes have helped the rebel effort to keep those vital [supply] lines working," the New York Times reported. In addition, the KLA guerrillas provide NATO with information on Serbian military positions.

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