Despite 'Lessons,' Clinton Still Seen Lacking Strategy
By John F. Harris
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 27, 1999; Page A15

The bombs falling for a third consecutive day over Yugoslavia yesterday
are the tangible consequences of what President Clinton on national
television Wednesday night called his "lessons in Bosnia."

It took nearly four years, and the loss of some 300,000 lives, before
Clinton led NATO to military intervention in Bosnia in 1995. In Kosovo,
the White House has acted on a series of lessons: that the United States
must move with dispatch; that it must actively lead NATO allies and if
necessary bypass the United Nations; and that it must lay the political
basis for military action with passes at diplomacy, however remote their
chances of success.

If the latest air offensive reflects the coalescence of a Clinton approach
to the crises of the post-Cold War world, however, an array of critics is
asserting that the intervention also has revealed Clinton as a foreign
policy recidivist. Once again, he is being accused -- including by some
former senior officials in his administration -- of improvising his way
through a crisis, deploying U.S. forces with tactical efficiency but
without a clear long-term strategy. And, once again, the administration
acted militarily in part to restore credibility weakened by a series of
rhetorical threats that were not followed through.

"I don't think he's learned a damn thing," said a former top national
security official who served Clinton in the first term. "What are the
objectives? What does he do if the bombing does not work? How do you get
out?"

Beyond the immediate crisis, this week's action in Kosovo has cast a light
on large questions that have haunted this administration from its opening
days six years ago, when it inherited a knotty pair of problems in Bosnia
and Somalia. Has Clinton found a footing in a world no longer steadied by
the grim-but-predictable power balances of the Cold War? Is the use of
American military power abroad guided by a larger strategy, or simply by a
grab bag of good intentions, haphazardly pursued?

A variety of current and former administration officials interviewed this
week said the execution of the Yugoslavia mission shows clear contrasts --
and vivid evidence of lessons learned -- compared to earlier episodes
involving American use of force abroad.

The public agonizing over whether to commit military force that marked
Clinton's 1994 intervention in Haiti was not seen in the months leading up
to this week's strikes against Serbia. Nor was there a repeat of the
administration's fumbling efforts in 1993 and 1994 to craft a European
consensus in Bosnia, in which Clinton several times floated suggestions
for military action and dropped them after allies balked.

In Kosovo, by contrast, Clinton over several months has crafted a NATO
consensus behind a U.S.-drafted peace plan, backed up by the threat of
airstrikes if Serbia failed to sign. "There's more unity on this issue in
NATO than I have seen in six years," said White House national security
adviser Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger, adding that until the strikes Serbian
leader Slobodan Milosevic apparently "did not believe that NATO was
serious."

Another senior administration official, speaking on background, was more
pointed in describing U.S. allies: "One of the lessons of Bosnia is not to
let the Europeans struggle alone without direction."

In addition, Clinton established from the beginning of the Kosovo showdown
that NATO would be the principal instrument for confronting the crisis,
brushing aside protests that the United Nations needed to give approval
for the strikes. In Bosnia, by contrast, allies were hindered for two
years by a system in which an ineffectual U.N. peacekeeping force had veto
rights over NATO air power.

Yet if the Clinton administration has grown more sure-footed in its
tactical execution of military force, it remains bedeviled by a familiar
criticism: that after six years he has yet to formulate a coherent a
strategy for when and how to use military force in the type of regional
conflicts that routinely confront U.S. policymakers in the post-Cold War
world.

"There is an absence of any grand design," said John Lewis Gaddis of Yale
University, one of foremost diplomatic historians. "The consistent pattern
I see is one of responding to crises. There's a kind of incrementalism and
ad-hocism to things."

While Clinton has plunged into regional conflicts in Haiti, Iraq, and the
Balkans, Gaddis said he suspects he has not thought through such questions
as, "How many of these can we sustain? What are the long-term vital
interests?"

This improvisational approach is reflected in arguments Clinton has
offered to defend the Kosovo intervention. Sometimes he has put the
emphasis on averting humanitarian disaster, although far bloodier
conflicts have taken place around the world in recent years with no talk
of a U.S. role. On other occasions, Clinton has put most emphasis on
averting a wider Balkans war and maintaining NATO credibility, although
some experts say it was his own previous threats that put this credibility
under question in the first place.

"What worries me is that we are issuing so many ultimatums," said Zbigniew
Brzezinski, who served as national security adviser in the Carter
administration.

After a U.S.-brokered truce in Kosovo last October, Clinton declared that
violations by Milosevic's Serbian forces against the Albanian majority
living in the Kosovo province would be met with force. But repeated
violations over the past several months -- including the organized killing
of 45 unarmed Kosovar civilians in Racak in January -- prompted renewed
diplomatic overtures to Milosevic by the United States rather than a
military strike.

The devaluation of administration rhetoric, Brzezinski believes, may have
meant "Milosevic was less convinced that we really mean it. It takes much
more [force] now to prove that we are really serious."

"We have given too many red lines and deadlines, and not backed them up,"
said retired Gen. George Joulwan, who worked closely on Bosnia in
Clinton's first term as NATO's supreme commander.

Bristling under such criticism, administration officials counter that
people do not appreciate the intricate balance involved in applying
military pressure on Milosevic, while also assembling and keeping intact
the necessary domestic and international coalitions.

Senior administration officials said yesterday that they had been
convinced last winter -- and in particular after the Racak massacre --
that airstrikes against Serbia were a virtual certainty. But hurling bombs
immediately was rejected.

The reason, officials said, was that European allies insisted and critical
policymakers such as Berger agreed, that any use of force be linked
directly to a new diplomatic overture. It was out of this linkage that the
United States crafted a peace plan for presentation at talks in France
last month and earlier this month between the Serbs and the Kosovar
Albanians who are trying to break free of Belgrade's grip.

There was scant expectation these talks would result in Serb acquiescence
to a settlement and the NATO peacekeeping force needed to enforce it.
During a White House meeting on the crisis, officials recalled, U.S.
negotiator Christopher Hill chimed in via speaker phone from Macedonia to
offer his appraisal of prospects for success. "Approximately
zero-point-zero percent," he said.

But Clinton has concluded over time that going through the rituals of
diplomatic effort and failure is important. After deciding last August
that force was needed in Iraq, the administration set a series of
well-publicized tests that the Iraqi regime failed before allied forces
struck in December. In Kosovo, a White House official said yesterday, "We
wanted to shape it in a way that Milosevic had to make a choice. It's
important to sustaining public support."

It was for this reason, officials said, that Clinton accepted Secretary of
State Madeleine K. Albright's recommendation to send Balkans envoy Richard
C. Holbrooke to Belgrade last weekend even though a White House meeting
Saturday morning concluded, one official recalled, the assessment was "90
percent to 10" chance it would end in failure.

But there are downsides to such a strategy, administration and European
officials have acknowledged in recent days. One is that going the extra
mile for diplomacy can be perceived as timidity. Another is that dictators
like Milosevic, knowing Clinton's sensitivity to public opinion, act
accordingly.

Earlier this month, one administration official recalled, NATO Secretary
General Javier Solana came to Washington and complained that Milosevic was
pursuing a strategy of "a village a day keeps NATO away." That is, he was
carrying out ethnic cleansing in Kosovo slowly, to stay "just below the
outrage threshold," as Berger described it this week, in which
international opinion would demand a response.

A European diplomat involved in Balkans policy with Washington said this
week that the United States could have saved lives if it had forced a
military showdown over Kosovo last October, instead of accepting an
interim agreement that the Serbs soon violated. Rather than a reluctance
of Europeans to act, this diplomat said, "the delay was much more about
internal U.S. politics," in particular Clinton's fear that public opinion
and Congress would recoil at a Kosovo intervention.

He waited until the end to make his public case. On Thursday of last week,
as it became clear airstrikes were imminent, a White House official
recalled, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and Senate Minority
Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) warned Clinton that Congress was hardly
prepared for the action and urged Clinton to immediately start selling his
argument.

Participants in his congressional briefings said Clinton made his case
with more confidence, and candor, than he has in the past. In Bosnia,
Clinton told Congress that U.S. troops would be out in a year, even though
most experts called this unrealistic, and Clinton quickly reneged after
the 1996 elections. In his Kosovo briefings, Clinton did not shade the
considerable risks of casualties for pilots, or evade the fact that he was
choosing from bad alternatives.

"He tried to be candid and tried to be forthright," said Sen. John W.
Warner (R-Va.), adding that he wished Clinton had begun making the public
case "much earlier."

Just as Clinton has grown more confident in ordering force, so too are the
Pentagon officials who take the orders. Several officials said the
Pentagon has grown more comfortable with using power in ambiguous
situations. The military, said one senior White House official, "has drawn
the same lesson we have: Just because you can't do everything does not
mean you can't do anything. . . . The military is very comfortable now
that they can define achievable goals that are short of all-out surrender
that are still worth doing."

This week has shown the administration's policy and military officials
alike responding with greater poise in the face of a modern regional
conflict, a European diplomat said: "There are people who say that there's
been a lot of dithering over Kosovo, but if you look at the speed with
which this crisis being dealt with compared to Bosnia, the difference is
dramatic."


Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company; fair use reprint for
nonprofit educational use only


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