Clinton Flunked National Strategy 101.

• Author: BRESLER, ROBERT J.

FOR AN ASSESSMENT of the Kosovo military action, let us look back at the key issues: The policy blunder. Pres. Clinton's initial decision to bomb Serbia was the most serious U.S. foreign policy blunder since Vietnam. Countless numbers of Kosovar Albanians were murdered and close to 1,000,000 driven from their homes and villages, perhaps never to return. According to news reports, the Clinton Administration and the NATO leadership had intelligence information as early as October, 1998, that Pres. Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia was planning his campaign of "ethnic cleansing" in Kosovo. Clinton and the NATO allies took no measures to deter such a horror or prepare for it. No NATO rapid deployment force was created, and no plans to deal with the refugees were formulated. They foolishly hoped that the mere threat of bombing or at least a token display of it would suffice to scare Milosevic away from his diabolical plans.

Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the two leaders of this ill-advised NATO policy, left the alliance and the American military with no attractive alternatives. Kosovo was simply a hostage crisis writ large. Without a rapid deployment force in place, NATO had no equivalent of a SWAT team to rescue the Kosovars. Bombing Serbia was tantamount to storming a bank when the robbers have innocent people under their control. In this case, the robber (Milosevic) murdered a large number of his hostages and remained at large to kill more.

The ground war realities. If the choice, after such a disastrous failure of judgment, were to launch a ground war, the brave talk of such an option failed to consider the consequences. First of all, while such an effort was being mounted, Milosevic would have attempted to remove or kill many of the remaining Kosovars. A NATO operation simply to expel Serbian forces from Kosovo could have had an initial success. However, an occupying force would spend years fighting Serb guerrillas and terrorists. Some speculate that a full-fledged effort to destroy all of Serbia's military forces and occupy the entire country could have involved 500,000 NATO troops, with at least one-half being Americans and the cost close to $50,000,000,000 in the first year. Completing the task would have demanded a massive open-ended commitment to occupy and reconstruct all of Yugoslavia and required the support of the neighboring Balkan states as well as Greece and Italy, ambivalent supporters of even the bombing...