Bombing
Serbia is Dangerously Counterproductive
By JONATHAN
POWER
March 24, 1999
LONDON- The only rational reason for western air attacks
on Yugoslavia is that Washington and London have to maintain
their credibility. Young men's lives will be sacrificed for
older men's face. They said they would do it. So they do it.
This is both irresponsible and stupid.
At the most basic it will be done at a most severe
military cost. This is not going to be a repeat of the
recent bombings of Iraq. The Serbs do have the capacity to
hit back and NATO's targets are many. Not just the off-shore
flotilla of warships but NATO troops in Bosnia and
Macedonia.
Second, the West is justifying the operation as necessary
to avoid a humanitarian disaster. We are now going to
witness the paradox of aerial bombing. While it consolidates
the support of the nation being bombed behind their leader,
(the lesson of its short history), it will also create a new
humanitarian disaster, of far bigger proportions than the
one it is supposed to stop. Not only is it likely to cause
social chaos in Serbia, it will create waves of refugees
streaming out of Kosovo in far greater numbers than we
presently see. This is simply because once Serbia is under
attack its army will ratchet up as fast as possible its
campaign to vanquish Kosovo.
Which explains why bombing without the intervening,
directing hand of ground troops is militarily inadequate.
The only way to stop the Serbian blitzkreig of Kosovo now
under way is to put tanks and troops in their way. "If you
carry out an act of war you have to be prepared to go the
whole distance," said General Michael Rose, former commander
of UN forces in Bosnia, yesterday. There are at present
12,000 NATO troops in neighbouring Macedonia waiting to
enter Kosovo to enforce the peace deal if it were
successfully negociated. Most are European troops; there are
only a handful of Americans. This is less than one seventh
the number of soldiers NATO estimates as necessary for a
fighting mission and, numbers apart, they are not
sufficiently armed for it.
There is a powerful political myth that airstrikes in
Bosnia in the summer of 1995 were a great success and that
little bit of history can be repeated. There is no
comparison. Five years ago the Serbs had already lost to the
Croats on the battlefield. Today's situation is the reverse
of that. The Kosovo liberation forces are in the process of
being routed.
NATO is taking an almighty gamble. President Bill Clinton
and Prime Minister Tony Blair have persuaded themselves that
a quick sharp bombing will be enough to persuade Serbia's
President Slobodan Milosevic to accept the peace deal. But
that it will be not enough to encourage the ethnic Albanians
in Kosovo to seek complete independence.
This is to play roulette. There is a school of thought,
which Clinton and Blair appear party to--which says that
Milosevic is just looking for an excuse to make a deal. He
needs to be able to say to his Serbian nationalist
supporters that he pushed it as far as he reasonably could.
If this is right, all well and good. But it is an enormous
gamble.
But if it's wrong then NATO will have no choice but to
introduce ground forces, for which it is inadequately
prepared. Where will that lead?
If the military arguments for bombing are weak, the
political ones are non-existent. The U.S. and Britain are
acting in the name of NATO. But NATO, even if it were united
on this decision, which it is not, has no legal footing to
take such action. Article 53 of the UN Charter, which the
West wrote says, "No enforcement action shall be taken by
regional agencies without the authorization of the Security
Council".
The trouble with flying in the face of the Charter is
that when the West bends it out of shape it does not, like a
rubber band, simply spring back to where it was, ready for
use the next time. It is damaged, perhaps unuseable. Why
should other countries pay it heed? Why should China not use
force to win back Taiwan or finesse the Law of the Sea?
Clinton talks about Kosovo being part of Europe as if it
were analogous to Czechoslovakia and Poland in Hitler's
time. It is not. It is not the heart of Europe. It is a part
of the world--especially the Albanian part--that has been
ruled since the Second World War by leaders who wanted to be
apart from democratic Europe.
The West is not defending essential Europe under
attack--in which case it could justify its case under
Article 51 of the UN Charter. It is intervening in a
peripheral war, of which there are many around the world. Is
it as important as, say Rwanda, five years ago, when half a
million people were massacred?
Why didn't the West intervene then? Why did Clinton then
choose to undermine the UN peacekeeping operation? If he
hadn't then--and in Somalia before--the UN might be prepared
and organized to do some useful intervening in Kosovo today.
In "Saving Kosovo" Clinton and Blair are destroying a
lot.
Copyright © 1999 By JONATHAN POWER
I can be reached by phone +44 385 351172 and e-mail:
JonatPower@aol.com
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