[ALBSA-Info] Clinton's Massive Ground Invasion That Almost Was

[Iris Pilika]

Friday, June 9, 2000


Clinton's Massive Ground Invasion That Almost Was 
 Yugoslavia: After 71 days of air war, White House had in place a memo to
send in 175,000 NATO troops. 


By DOYLE MCMANUS, Times Washington Bureau Chief





     WASHINGTON--On the night of June 2, 1999, President Clinton's
national security advisor, Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger, sat glumly in his
corner office in the White House's West Wing. His task: drafting a memo
advising Clinton to prepare for a ground invasion of Yugoslavia. 
     NATO's air war against Serbia had been underway for 71 days, but
Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic hadn't buckled. Almost a million
refugees from Kosovo had fled into exile, and thousands more were homeless
inside the province. For weeks, Berger had argued that an air war would be
enough, that a land war was unnecessary. But now he was no longer sure,
and time was running out. If the United States and its allies wanted to
launch ground operations before the Balkan winter set in, they would have
to start preparing now. 
     "It was the longest night of my time in this job," Berger said later. 
     About 2 a.m., scribbling on a yellow pad, he finished his memo. To be
sure of winning in Kosovo, Berger wrote, the United States had only one
option left: a massive ground invasion using 175,000 North Atlantic Treaty
Organization troops, about 100,000 of them from the U.S. 
     The "go/no-go" memo, freshly typed by a secretary, went to the Oval
Office that same morning. Clinton was ready to approve it, Berger said.
But before he could, unexpected news arrived from Belgrade: Milosevic had
agreed to NATO's terms. 
     The American public didn't know it, but Clinton had been within days
of launching full preparations for an invasion. Berger's account, in an
interview with The Times, marks the first time a highly placed U.S.
official has publicly described how close the United States and its allies
came to deciding to fight their way into Kosovo, a province of Serbia, the
dominant Yugoslav republic. 
     In the end, of course, the invasion didn't happen. It might not have
occurred even if Clinton had ordered preparations to go forward. NATO
commanders wanted three months to assemble their invasion force; Clinton
aides planned at least one more "last-ditch" peace mission. 
     But the episode is a reminder of how uncertain the outcome of the
conflict appeared a year ago, even on the eve of victory; how fragile
NATO's consensus was as the alliance waged the first war of its 50-year
history; and how limited the choices were, even for the world's only
superpower. 

     NATO Enjoyed Huge Advantage in the Air 
     NATO's war against Yugoslavia wasn't supposed to be that hard. All
along, Berger said, "we believed that the air campaign would work." 
     Moreover, he argued, a ground invasion could have mired the alliance
in bloody, inconclusive and politically divisive combat. "In the air, we
had a thousand-to-one advantage. Once we got on the ground, we still would
have had an advantage, but what was it, three to one? . . . Milosevic
would have been happy to see a force come in on the ground, because it
would have allowed him to wage a war of attrition." 
     Betting on a low-casualty victory from the air, Clinton publicly
ruled out the riskier option of ground combat on the first day of the war. 
     Critics charged that Clinton was unwittingly encouraging Milosevic to
dig in and wait out the bombs. 
     But Berger insists that taking ground forces off the table was the
right thing to do at that point--because the alternative was a public
debate, within the United States and among NATO members, that would have
divided the alliance and potentially crippled the war effort. 
     Even with a thousand-to-one advantage, NATO's air campaign took
longer than most of the alliance's leaders anticipated when the war began
March 24, 1999. Some hoped that Milosevic would back down after only a few
days; he didn't. Bad weather made air operations difficult; dozens of
bombing runs were canceled. 
     At the same time, the allies argued about which targets to hit, with
French President Jacques Chirac insisting on caution in striking
politically sensitive facilities. 
     Some officials, including Defense Secretary William S. Cohen, have
contended that the allies' qualms hampered the air war, delayed victory
and endangered allied pilots. But in "Winning Ugly," a book about the war
released Thursday, foreign policy scholars Ivo H. Daalder and Michael E.
O'Hanlon conclude that poor preparation, not allied squabbling, was the
main reason for the slow progress. 
     Daalder and O'Hanlon quote Adm. James O. Ellis, NATO's commander for
southern Europe, as saying the alliance fell victim to "short-war
syndrome." NATO assumed the war wouldn't last long and failed to plan for
a long campaign. "We called this one absolutely wrong," Ellis said,
according to the book. 
     "NATO was clearly losing the war through late April . . . and could
have lost the war entirely," said Daalder, a scholar at the Brookings
Institution in Washington. 
     Instead, at a summit meeting in Washington at the end of April,
NATO's leaders, in Berger's words, agreed: "We will not lose. We will not
lose. Whatever it takes, we will not lose." 
     Two escalations followed. One was visible: more airplanes, more
airstrikes, and the first attacks against Belgrade's electrical power
system, which was a "dual-use" (civilian and military) target that had
been off limits. 
     The other was invisible: a stepped-up debate inside government
councils concerning preparations for a ground war. 

     Laying Groundwork for Possible Invasion 
     Gen. Wesley K. Clark, then NATO's supreme commander, had drawn up
contingency plans for invading Yugoslavia a year earlier. Prodded by
British Prime Minister Tony Blair, NATO's leading hawk, the alliance
authorized Clark to update the plans, but Cohen and the U.S. Joint Chiefs
of Staff were skeptical. 
     In May, Clinton decided to put the option of ground troops back on
the table--if only to threaten Milosevic and build public support in case
an invasion was necessary. The issue would have divided NATO in March, but
after almost two months of an indecisive air war, it could no longer be
ducked. 
     On May 20, 1999, Clark briefed Clinton and his advisors. The general
presented several options, officials said. The largest was for a force of
about 175,000 troops to take all of Kosovo by land, mostly from Albania.
Other options required smaller forces: the allies could take only part of
Kosovo, establish "safe areas" for refugees and open land corridors for
fleeing civilians. But Clark recommended the "heavy option." 
     Clinton agreed to Clark's request to increase the NATO ground force
on Kosovo's borders from about 25,000 troops to almost 50,000. In public,
the troops were described as advance units of a possible peacekeeping
force, which was technically true. But the troops also were intended to
start preparing for combat--and to let Milosevic see that an invasion
force was building. As part of the psychological warfare, one official
said, Britain leaked word that it was sending a heavy tank unit to the
region. 
     Then, on May 31, NATO authorized Clark to begin strengthening
Albania's roads to support heavy tanks. Among other problems, Berger
recalled, "the tunnels in the mountains were smaller than the tanks that
had to go through them." In public, NATO spokesmen claimed that the road
improvements were to help get supplies to Kosovo refugees, but in fact
they were an essential part of Clark's war plan. 
     At about the same time, Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott
warned Russia's special envoy, former Prime Minister Viktor S.
Chernomyrdin, that Clinton was seriously considering ground
troops--deliberately prompting Chernomyrdin to carry the warning to
Milosevic. 
     The warnings were "very explicit," a senior U.S. official said. The
State Department even arranged for two U.S. generals to brief
Chernomyrdin. 
     Chernomyrdin wasn't just alarmed. He was "apocalyptic," the U.S.
official recalled. He warned that an invasion would cause a terrible
crisis between NATO and Russia, and predicted that the Serbs would prove
tough fighters in the defense of their homeland. 
     "Chernomyrdin kept using one phrase over and over," the official
recalled. "He said if there were a ground invasion, it would lead to a
wave of blood--a sea of blood. . . . And you know what? That was fine. We
wanted him to think it was (a) likely to happen and (b) going to be awful,
because he worked all the harder in getting it fixed." 
     As Chernomyrdin and Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari flew to
Belgrade bearing NATO's threats, Berger was wrestling with what the
alliance would need to do to carry them out--and how much time it had. To
launch an invasion across Albania's mountains before the onset of winter
in October, Clark had asked for a decision by mid-June. 
     Berger listed three options in his June 2 memorandum to Clinton. 
     The first, he said, was to "arm the Kosovars; but that would cause a
chain of events that would produce a war that would last for years." 
     The second option was to wait until spring--but that would require
NATO to supply and protect thousands of refugees inside Kosovo through the
winter. 
     The third option was a major ground invasion. 

     Not All NATO Members on Board 
     "It was a pretty depressing memo," Berger said. "I said we basically
should go ahead with what Clark had proposed if this [the Chernomyrdin
mission] failed." 
     Berger also recommended that the president go public with his
decision; dispatching 100,000 or more troops to Albania could not be done
without open debate. "We had about a week to do some very heavy lifting
with [Capitol Hill] and the American people and the allies," he said. 
     Would Clinton have agreed? "Yes. The president, I think, had made
clear to me in principle that we could not lose." 
     Would NATO have gone along? "We would not have had a consensus,"
Berger said, meaning some of the alliance's 19 countries would have
refused to participate. Officials said they were confident that Britain,
France and Germany would have joined, but Greece was almost sure to refuse
and Italy was a question mark. The United States would have pressed
forward nonetheless, they said--a decision that could have meant ending
NATO's formal sponsorship of the war and forming a new coalition on the
spot. 
     In Belgrade, the Yugoslav and Serbian capital, Chernomyrdin and
Ahtisaari presented NATO's terms to Milosevic: a full withdrawal from
Kosovo, deployment of a NATO-led peacekeeping force, the return of all
refugees. Milosevic agreed. 
     "I was positively surprised," Ahtisaari said. "I was prepared to have
negotiations that would have lasted longer." 
     U.S. officials were amazed as well. They had expected Milosevic to
turn down the mediators. Clinton aides already were planning to send one
more diplomatic mission to Belgrade, direct from the United States, to
give Milosevic his final chance. 
     Officials initially were skeptical that Milosevic had really agreed.
Not until June 10, after Yugoslav military officers signed a detailed
agreement to allow NATO troops to enter Kosovo, did the U.N. Security
Council officially declare the war over and NATO halt its bombing. 

     U.S. Still Unsure Why Milosevic Gave In 
     Why did Milosevic give in? U.S. officials still don't know for sure,
and offer a mix of possible answers. 
     Perhaps it was the damage inflicted by the air war, although the
actual impact of the bombing has been debated even within the Pentagon. Or
perhaps it was the growing threat of a ground invasion. 
     Diplomacy helped; most officials believe Milosevic's recognition that
he had failed to divide NATO enough to stop the air war and that Russia
wouldn't stop the air war for him were key factors. And in the
Chernomyrdin-Ahtisaari talks, NATO offered Milosevic enough leeway to
allow him to tell his countrymen that he was not capitulating. The
peacekeeping force in Kosovo was formally placed under the United Nations'
authority, not NATO's, and the force was confined to Kosovo as opposed to
Serbia proper. 
     There was another factor, U.S. officials contend: The CIA and other
allied intelligence services were tracking down the bank accounts and
business interests of Milosevic and his closest supporters, seeking to
freeze their assets and disrupt their financial dealings. 
     Berger refused to comment about those reports, but acknowledged: "His
own cronies were beginning to pressure him. We saw the noose tightening." 
     "Milosevic, in the final analysis, is a survivor," one senior
official said. "He made a very hardheaded calculation about his chances of
survival physically and politically and concluded that he could turn this
into a Pyrrhic victory for NATO--that he could survive the loss of Kosovo
for a period of time, then whittle away at allied resolve, whittle away at
the situation on the ground, whittle away at his own opposition, and come
back and fight another day. 
     "And guess what?" the official said, smiling, for that is largely
what Milosevic has done. 


* * *
     Times staff writer Tyler Marshall contributed to this report. 
     Saturday: Without a solution near on Kosovo's final status, U.S. and
allied troops are likely to remain for years.