Clinton's war: what Kosovo can teach us now.

• Author: Blumenthal, Sidney

In the spring of 1999, President Bill Clinton launched a war to reverse Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic's "ethnic cleansing" of Albanians from the province of Kosovo.

There are some striking similarities between Clinton's Kosovo campaign and George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq four years later. Both were wars of choice, waged against tyrannical regimes that did not immediately threaten the United States. Both wars provoked strong public opposition in Europe and elsewhere and criticism that insufficient ground forces were being brought to bear against the enemy. Both wars ended with sudden U.S. victories. And both defined the national security visions of their respective administrations.

Yet it is the differences between those wars and how the diplomacy surrounding them was conducted that is most striking. In the case of Iraq, the Bush administration ignored NATO; belatedly demanded, briefly gained, and ultimately lost the support of the United Nations; and went to war over the expressed opposition of much of the world. Bush's war has divided the United States from Europe, split Europe itself, and left the future of the United Nations and NATO in doubt. In Kosovo, by contrast, the Clinton administration worked through NATO, keeping its shaky coalition together in the Western alliance's first war. Clinton's war brought Europe and America closer together and invested NATO and trans-Atlantic relations with a renewed sense of purpose. That unity of purpose proved invaluable in post-war Kosovo, where U.S. and European troops secured the peace and U.N. administrators sponsored a difficult, but so far reasonably successful, transition to democracy. How helpful--or welcome--our allies will be in rebuilding post-war Iraq remains to be seen.

Sidney Blumenthal, who served as assistant and senior adviser to President Clinton in his secured term, was a participant in the Kosovo War events in the White House and a liaison to several European leaders, including British Prime Minister Tony Blair. In his forthcoming memoir, The Clinton Wars, Blumenthal recounts the 78 days of the Kosovo campaign, adding important new details to the story of that victory: how Clinton combined the use of force with diplomacy in a delicate balancing act; his true view on the deployment of ground troops; how Germany became part of the "coalition of the willing"; and Clinton's strategic commitment to the U.S.-European alliance.--The Editors

IN MID-FEBRUARY 1999, ONE DAY AFTER his trial in the United States Senate ended, President Bill Clinton delivered his weekly Saturday radio address. The subject was Kosovo, and his attention on this particular Saturday to an obscure corner of Europe, a rebellious province of Serbia, seemed almost like a return to tranquility after the tumult of the impeachment drama.

But the latest turn in the Balkan wars that had plagued the West for a decade was about to confront Clinton with the gravest foreign policy crisis of his presidency and the first war fought by NATO forces in its 50-year history. Like Joseph Stalin, Slobodan Milosevic--the president of Serbia--was a mediocrity with the soul of a mass murderer: the man without qualities as tyrant. Like Stalin, he manipulated nationalism to promote his atavistic power. He was ruthless in his corruption, which was a family enterprise, in his brutality, and in pitting his enemies against each other. In 1989, as communist regimes began to crumble across Eastern Europe, Milosevic, a former party apparatchik, had harnessed the power of ethnic grievance to launch his new career as a Serbian nationalist leader. During the early 1990s, Milosevic and his military had waged a bloody irredentist war across the former Yugoslavia, one aimed at the "ethnic cleansing" of Bosnian territory that the Serbs deemed their own. It ended only during the summer of 1995, when NATO bombs forced Serbia to the negotiating table at Dayton, Ohio, ending the war in Bosnia.

By the late 1990s, however, Milosevic had launched a new campaign in Kosovo, considered by Serbs to be the cradle of their civilization and culture. In 1998, Milosevic promulgated a virtual law of apartheid against Kosovo's overwhelmingly Albanian population, denying them employment, health care, and rights--the first step in a plan to drive them from their land and occupy it solely with Serbs. That January, the Serb army staged a massacre, precipitating U.S. involvement in trying to work out a peace agreement. While the negotiations proceeded, Milosevic massed 40,000 troops, 300 tanks, and 1,000 pieces of artillery at the Kosovo border. His campaign had already created 250,000 refugees.

The Kosovo crisis, as dismal and obscure as it must have seemed to many Americans, threatened to discredit the leadership of every government in Western Europe, set Russia against the United States, and undermine Clinton just as he was freed from the constitutional crisis at home. The Kosovo war would require all of the president's deft political skills to sustain a strained international coalition. His entire foreign policy rested on his ability to carry out a campaign that faced intense opposition from both right and left, from his familiar enemies in the Republican Congress and a rising chorus of discontent about his strategy and motives. When Clinton sat down to deliver his radio address that cold February day, he knew he was about to face the next great challenge of his second term. "Bosnia taught us a lesson: In this volatile region, violence we fail to oppose leads to even greater violence we will have to oppose later at greater cost," he told the audience. "We must heed that lesson in Kosovo."

Using or Losing NATO

The Clinton of 1999 was a more toughened, more experienced, and shrewder president than the Clinton who had taken office in 1993. He had entered the office naively believing that the world could be held at bay, or that he could subcontract international affairs to his foreign policy team while he himself dealt with domestic policy. Now he knew that he could not repeat that mistake and that his own persistent leadership was needed. He had learned the harsh lesson of Bosnia: Diplomacy without the threat and use of force would not work in the Balkans.

In the earlier phase of dealing with the crisis in the Balkans, Clinton had been captivated by the idea that eternal, unyielding ethnic antagonisms, about which the West could do very little, had driven the conflicts there. But in his instinctive search for practical answers, Clinton's political sense reasserted itself, and he eventually grasped that it was politics above all that was behind the Balkan conflagration. Clinton peered into Milosevic's heart and saw a politician--an evil one, but a politician nonetheless. For Clinton, on the Balkans, this was the beginning of wisdom and recovery.

Clinton realized that passivity and fatalism in foreign policy were self-defeating. In both Bosnia and Rwanda, the United States, with its preponderance of power, had made a statement to the rest of the...