State Department spokesman Jamie Rubin, barely restraining
his exuberance over apparent Serbian capitulation last Thursday, declared
that the notorious unreliability of Slobodan Milosevic made it too early to
pop the champagne corks. The real question is whether the bubbly ever should
flow in celebration.
Former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, a career diplomat who is
neither an isolationist nor a Serb sympathizer, immediately labeled
President Clinton's triumph "a Pyrrhic victory." Quite apart from doubts
about Yugoslav President Milosevic's compliance, disarming the Kosovo
Liberation Army (KLA) and returning ethnic Albanians to the ruined province
are daunting tasks.
But the truly Pyrrhic nature of NATO's victory lies in longer-term
implications. Serious students of foreign policy I talked to late last week,
far from eager to join in Rubin's prospective champagne bash, were
melancholy. U.S. relations with China have been undermined. The most
dangerous elements in the Russian military have been emboldened. Most
worrisome, the world now sees America with very different eyes.
Eight years ago, when the U.S.-led coalition won the Gulf War, my partner
Rowland Evans and I wrote a column "on being wrong." We had greatly
overestimated Iraqi resistance and the alienation of the Muslim world. But
in 1991, we expressed concern about the easy victory in a war declared by
presidential decree without real congressional deliberation, concluding: "It
is hard to imagine any bar on any president against waging any war in the
future that he says is required to correct gross injustice." This prediction
proved all too accurate.
I feel no need to eat crow this time about saying that Milosevic would not
yield quickly and that Clinton never would invade Kosovo. These factors
resulted in relentless bombing to bring the Serbs to heel. The fearsome
display of American force has deeply disturbed responsible critics who
shared Clinton's view that Serb persecution of Albanians in Kosovo was a
valid U.S. concern.
"We are in danger of losing prestige and goodwill around the world," Sen.
Kay Bailey Hutchison, a Republican who supported the bombing once it began,
told me. Agreeing, Eagleburger said: "We look like the big bully to a lot of
people around the world."
Former Sen. Sam Nunn, a rare Democrat critical of both the Gulf and Kosovo
wars, saw a systemic difficulty: "I think we have to be more mature in
handling these civil wars around the globe. We've got to develop other tools
beyond military force to deal with what are non-vital interests, and I
consider this a non-vital interest." The other tools? Perhaps waging a war
of words and somehow disabling the targeted communications system before the
bombing begins -- but no such planning has been done at the Pentagon.
Revulsion at American use of force takes on a more sinister tone in Russia.
Nunn returned from a recent trip to Moscow fearful that NATO's attack on
Yugoslavia had immeasurably strengthened hawks in the Russian military and
political establishments. The NATO assault has encouraged those in the
Kremlin who argue that their country's reduced means requires reliance on
nuclear arms and their early first use -- a hair-trigger doctrine that Nunn,
while a Senate Armed Services Committee member, fought as American policy
for two decades.
But this frightening fallout from intervention in the Balkan wars has
little impact on the international decision-making process to which the
United States now seems committed. On the day Milosevic appeared to hoist
the white flag, Jack Kemp addressed a Rome conference to mark the 10th
anniversary of the Berlin Wall's fall and sounded like Pat Buchanan:
"Here we have an international entity (NATO) threatening literally to
destroy a sovereign nation-state (Serbia) so that it can constitute a new
protectorate (an independent Kosovo) under its auspices, after which one of
the international courts will apportion blame and the international
financial institutions will be sent in to reconstruct the societies and
their economies."
The seemingly cost-free nature of the Kosovo war could breed new
interventions. NATO last week estimated that 5,000 Serbian troops died in
the bombing, while not a single killed-in-action was suffered by the
alliance. Clinton pitched not only a no-hitter but a perfect game. Wise
heads in Washington ponder the ultimate cost of that victory.
