How a President, Distracted by Scandal, Entered Balkan War

April 18, 1999

THE ROAD TO WAR: A SPECIAL REPORT

How a President, Distracted by Scandal, Entered Balkan War

In This Article
The Politics: No Will For Troops on Eve of Elections
The Negotiations: Talks at a Castle Set Stage for War

By ELAINE SCIOLINO and ETHAN BRONNER

n Jan. 19, President Clinton's top aides met in the Situation Room in the White House basement to hear a fateful new plan for an autonomous Kosovo from Madeleine K. Albright, the Secretary of State. NATO, she urged, should use the threat of air strikes on Yugoslavia to force a peace agreement to be monitored by the alliance's ground troops.
The President, who had other matters on his mind, was not there. His lawyers were starting their arguments on the Senate floor against his removal from office. That night he was to deliver his State of the Union address.

U.S. Air Force

Newly arrived American airmen being processed earlier this week at the Aviano Air Force Base in Italy.

Nearly 5,000 miles away, in Belgrade, Gen. Wesley K. Clark, the NATO commander, and Gen. Klaus Naumann, chairman of the NATO military council, were sitting with President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia. They came brandishing a plastic portfolio of color photographs documenting a massacre of Albanians three days earlier by Serbian security forces in the Kosovo town of Racak.
They also came with threats of NATO air strikes.
This was far from their first encounter with the Serbian leader, but this time, they recalled, they found a newly hardened man with a bunker mentality.
"This was not a massacre," Milosevic shouted. "This was staged. These people are terrorists."
When General Clark warned him that NATO would "start telling me to move aircraft," Milosevic appeared infuriated by the prospect of bombings. He called the general a war criminal.
Jan. 19 is already seen as a pivotal day in the Clinton Presidency. But it may turn out to be so less for the Senate impeachment hearings and State of the Union address than for the moves toward war over Kosovo.
Kosovo would have presented a daunting foreign policy challenge even to a President whose powers of persuasion and moral authority had not been damaged by a year of sex scandal and impeachment.

Michael R. Gordon, John Broder, Craig R. Whitney, Jane Perlez and Philip Shenon contributed reporting to this article.

It is unclear whether the President's decisions on Kosovo would have been any different if he had not been distracted by his own political and legal problems. But it is clear that his troubles gave him less maneuvering room to make his decisions. Diplomacy that came to rely heavily on military threats reduced the wiggle room even further.
Over the previous year, sharp criticism and questioning of Clinton's motives arose each time he did take military action, as with the strikes in December against Iraq when the House was poised to vote on his impeachment.
Now, Clinton is facing mounting criticism for not having acted earlier or more decisively on Kosovo. His critics say that had he done so, Milosevic would not have been able to move troops and equipment into Kosovo and carry out the massive "ethnic cleansing" of the past four weeks.
As the President viewed the situation, there were only "a bunch of bad options" confronting him, he said earlier this month.
Throughout, the NATO allies hoped, even assumed, that they were dealing with the Milosevic who negotiated the Bosnian peace at Dayton, Ohio, the man who lied and manipulated and ranted in all-night, Scotch-laden negotiations and then cut a deal in the morning when he saw that it was in his interest. Instead they were dealing with the Milosevic of Belgrade, who was willing to employ mass murder to assure his continued dominance of Serbia.
George J. Tenet, the Director of Central Intelligence, predicted in Congressional testimony in February that there would be a major spring offensive by the Serbs in Kosovo and huge refugee flows. But intelligence assessments presented to Clinton about how Milosevic would respond to NATO threats of military force were vague.
These reports included speculation that the Yugoslav leader would back down in the face of air strikes.
One interagency intelligence report coordinated by the C.I.A. in January 1999, for example, concluded that "Milosevic doesn't want a war he can't win."
"After enough of a defense to sustain his honor and assuage his backers he will quickly sue for peace," the assessment went on. Another interagency report in February stated, "He doesn't believe NATO is going to bomb."
Prodded by such assessments and his advisers, the President pressed ahead with a strategy of threats coupled with negotiations, gambling that Milosevic would back down. These threats quickly became a test of NATO's credibility, with the added onus of the alliance's looming 50th anniversary, which is to be observed next weekend.
Last September, former Senator Bob Dole went to Kosovo to gather facts for an international refugee group of which he is chairman. On his return, he reported his findings to Clinton. Afterward Clinton sat with him alone in the Oval Office and asked for his help in lobbying his former Senate colleagues to vote against conviction in the impeachment trial.
In an interview, Dole said he thought "a lot of attention was diverted" from Yugoslavia and other foreign policy issues by the impeachment.
It was "all consuming," he added, and Kosovo "may have been one of the casualties."
Kosovo's Dangers: A Balkan Firestorm That Slowly Spread
rom the moment Yugoslavia fell apart in 1991, Kosovo -- with its 90 percent ethnic Albanian population, and a Serbian minority that held its land sacred -- was viewed as a place from which a wider war could erupt. The Bush Administration, which had adopted a hands-off policy on the killings in Croatia and Bosnia, warned Milosevic on Dec. 29, 1992, that the United States was prepared to take unilateral military action if the Serbs sparked a conflict in Kosovo.
The Clinton Administration reiterated the warning weeks after the inauguration. Three years later, when the Administration convened the conference in Dayton to end the Bosnia war, Kosovo was not on the agenda.

The Associated Press

Albanians outside a Dayton, Ohio, base in 1995 as peace talks proceeded without Albanian invlovement.

"Bosnia was then the emergency, and it had to be stopped," said Richard C. Holbrooke, the American envoy who negotiated the agreement at Dayton, in an interview. "Otherwise there would have been a real risk that Bosnia would merge with Kosovo into a huge firestorm that would destabilize the whole region." Over the next two years, younger, more confrontational ethnic Albanians began to build a ragtag army, supplied with weapons from neighboring Albania and financed largely by the Albanian diaspora in Europe and the United States.
They faced serious obstacles. Milosevic, who had risen to power on the cause of protecting Kosovo's minority Serbs, took away Kosovo's broad autonomy in 1989 and was unlikely to give it back without a fight.
The killing in Kosovo began in earnest in February 1998, when the Serbs retaliated for rebel attacks on policemen with brutal operations of their own in the Drenica area. Members of the Kosovo Liberation Army and their families were slain.
The Administration sent Robert S. Gelbard, its envoy to the region, to confront Milosevic with horrific photographs of death and mutilation. A veteran State Department official respected for his tenacity but known for his temper, Gelbard had experience in Bosnia and Croatia. But he did not have much of a personal relationship with the Serbian leader, whom he castigated in unusually blunt language.
The Drenica killings, Gelbard felt, were the kind of ruthless act that would further radicalize the restive Albanian population and lead to an explosion that could affect the entire region.
"You have done more than anyone to increase the membership of the K.L.A.," Gelbard told Milosevic. "You are acting as if you were their secret membership chairman."
The meeting ended badly, American officials said. Milosevic was infuriated and would eventually refuse to meet with Gelbard at all.
The Distractions: Foreign Policy Crisis Comes at a Bad Time
he eruption of violence in Kosovo in early 1998 could not have come at a more inopportune moment for the Clinton Administration.
The President and his aides were consumed by the Lewinsky affair. The Clinton foreign policy team was focused on Presidential visits to China and Africa and on Russia's economic implosion. Legislative electoral politics, especially with an incendiary sex scandal enveloping the White House, was never far from the President's concerns. And Kosovo did not register in any public opinion polls.

The Associated Press

Holbrooke at his first Kosovo meeting with Albanian hard-liners, in Junik near the Albanian border in 1998.

One of the President's political advisers said in an interview: "I hardly remember Kosovo in political discussions. It was all impeachment, impeachment, impeachment. There was nothing else."
Nonetheless, the spring of 1998 posed a question: Would the Administration, which had reaffirmed Bush's Christmas warning, take any action?
Weighing their options, officials said, they quickly ruled out unilateral military strikes, the very response Bush had promised. If anything was to be done, it would be in concert with the NATO allies, who along with America had troops on the ground as part of the international force in Bosnia. The United States could not start bombing while its allies were exposed in a neighboring country.
From then on, everything about Kosovo was subject to decisions by an alliance that worked by consensus and was soon to grow from 16 to 19 members.
Senior Administration officials who had lived through the years of delay and inaction in Bosnia believed they had learned a few things about how to deal with Milosevic. Diplomacy could work, but only if it was linked to the credible threat of force.
Ms. Albright began making the case for military action. At one key meeting in May, Gelbard argued that the time had come for air strikes.
Officials say Samuel R. Berger, the national security adviser, was opposed. The United States could not threaten without being prepared to follow up with a specific action.
Gelbard replied that he had already worked out some bombing targets with the NATO commander, General Clark. But Berger rejected the plan and no one else in the room supported Gelbard, who declined to discuss his role, saying only, "When I had the lead role on Kosovo issues I had complete support from the President and the Secretary of State."
The Administration then turned to Holbrooke. He pressed the Kosovo Albanians' main political leader, Ibrahim Rugova, who was becoming increasingly marginalized in his own camp, to meet with Milosevic. The payoff for Rugova was a meeting with Clinton in the Oval Office on May 27.
In a brief conversation with the President and Vice President Al Gore, Rugova warned that without direct American intervention, Kosovo was headed for all-out war. He pleaded for urgent American action and an increased American presence to halt the escalating violence.
"We will not allow another Bosnia to happen in Kosovo," a senior Administration official quoted Clinton as telling Rugova. The assurances were largely theoretical. Nothing concrete was promised.
After Rugova presented the President with a gift of a large piece of quartz mined from Kosovo, Clinton spent part of their time together telling him about similar minerals in his home state of Arkansas.
The two men posed for a photo. The meeting received little press coverage. The Options From Cruise Missiles To a Force of 200,000 There was plenty of other news in Washington that spring. Kenneth W. Starr's sex-and-lies inquiry was still preoccupying the White House. There were drawn-out court battles between the President's lawyers and Starr over whether senior Administration aides, a few of whom were involved in foreign policy issues, should be forced to testify before Starr's grand jury.
In June, with the six-nation Contact Group on the Balkans warning Milosevic that he could not count on the West's dithering on Kosovo as it had on Bosnia, NATO was ordered to draw up plans for military action. Milosevic promised concessions.
The Options: From Cruise Missiles To a Force of 200,000
he American strategy seemed to be working.
The situation on the ground, however, was far from stable. The Albanian guerrillas used the early summer to take control of some 40 percent of Kosovo, and Milosevic responded with a major offensive.

Wade Goddard for The New York Times

Members of the Kosovo Liberation Army posing in a village early last year before the fighting heated up.

NATO's military planners began weighing their options. These ranged from an attack involving only the firing of cruise missiles to a phased air campaign to deployment of peacekeeping troops as part of a negotiated or imposed settlement. The planners also looked at what it would take to invade Yugoslavia. Western officials said the numbers were staggering: As many as 200,000 soldiers would be needed for a ground war.
In a few months in the spring and summer of 1992, Bosnian Serb forces expelled hundreds of thousands of non-Serbs from their homes in Bosnia. In 1995, the Croats in Croatia drove more than 100,000 Serbs from their homes in just a few days.
Seven years later, officials said, no one planned for the tactic of population expulsion that has been the currency of Balkan wars for more than a century and that Milosevic adopted in Kosovo: the expulsion, this time within weeks, of hundreds of thousands of people.
"There were a lot of Milosevic watchers who said a few bombs might do it," a senior NATO official said. "What was not assumed, and not postulated, was that he would try to empty the country of its ethnic majority."
NATO officials were wrestling with several legal and political hurdles, officials disclosed. Some NATO members were worried about imposing a peace without the approval of the United Nations Security Council.
Alexander Vershbow, the United States representative to NATO and a former National Security Council aide who had been deeply involved in Bosnia policy, suggested an answer in a classified cable titled "Kosovo: Time for Another Endgame Strategy."
Vershbow's plan, officials said, arrived with a heavy political price tag: The possible dispatch of NATO soldiers just before a midterm election and in the midst of the impeachment fight.
The cable spelled out a plan to impose a political settlement in Kosovo with the cooperation of the Russians, longtime allies of the Serbs. Moscow and Washington would then go together to the Security Council.
"Kosovo endgame initiative could become a model of NATO-Russian cooperation," Vershbow wrote. "No kidding."
The proposed deal called for creation of an international protectorate in Kosovo. The settlement would be policed by an international military presence, or ground force. If a peace settlement was negotiated in advance, as many as 30,000 troops might be required to enforce it. But Vershbow also left open the possibility that NATO might have to impose a settlement without Belgrade's consent, requiring 60,000 troops. To help sell the idea in Congress, Vershbow said, the American contribution could be limited.
"Sooner or later we are going to face the issue of deploying ground forces in Kosovo," he wrote in his cable. "We have too much at stake in the political stability of the south Balkans to permit the conflict to fester much longer."
Beyond concerns about the American ground troops in Bosnia, there were fears that a Kosovo war could spread, and even engulf Greece and Turkey, both NATO members.
The cable landed in Washington on Aug. 7, the day bombs exploded outside the American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. It was circulated as Clinton was preparing for his pivotal appearance before the grand jury investigating the Lewinsky affair and the White House was planning the cruise missile attack against Sudan and the Afghan bases of Osama bin Laden, the Saudi exile suspected of directing the attacks.
The plan generated some interest among midlevel officials in Washington. Senior officials agreed that it underscored the need to come up with a comprehensive strategy. In the end nothing came of it.
Clinton was under attack for his grand jury testimony and faced questions about whether his military decisions were motivated by domestic politics.
Jokes about the movie "Wag the Dog" became commonplace. Fittingly, the President in the movie seeking to distract attention from a sex scandal stages an ersatz conflict in, of all places, Albania.
Next: The Politics

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