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Introduction
OVER THE LAST YEAR, NIGHTLY NEWS REPORTS FILLED OUR TV SCREENS WITH cruise missiles surgically targeted on the Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yugoslavia. Zero casualties, "war lite," "immaculate coercion," punish and get out. But NATO's "humanitarian bombing" of Kosovo, a province of Serbia (the dominant republic in Yugoslavia), introduced a new geometry of terror, complete with a resurrected Hitler, Holocaust-like images of a people uprooted, papers stripped and sent to camps, charges of genocide and atrocities - in short, a world Europeans and all people of conscience had hoped to consign to the past. Human rights organizations called for immediate action to prevent ethnic cleansing. And the U.S.NATO alliance outlined the moral imperative to intervene militarily in a civil war taking place in a sovereign state outside the territory of the alliance to prevent crimes against humanity. Never mind that juridically, the bombing is an act of aggression and unjustifiable under international law. The world should never again stand by and "do nothing" in the face of evil.
Such logic soon began to strain under closer inspection. Slobodan Milosevic's regime has engaged in despicable thuggary, but what sense does it make to destroy a country in order to defend the ethnic rights of one of its minorities, especially since U.S. policy opposed independence for Kosovo? CIA Director George Tenet had warned that the Serbs might respond with a campaign of ethnic cleansing, and sure enough, the NATO bombings of Serbian army and police units accelerated the suffering of the ethnic Albanians (Lippman, 1999). The knowledge that Serbia's Milosevic might unleash a flood of refugees on already teetering neighboring states should have been reason enough to oppose the bombings. Was this misjudgment, incompetence, or the intended effect? Edward Luttwak (1999), a member of the National Security Study Group of the U.S. Department of Defense, argues that NATO started its incremental bombing to help Milosevic in the face of a recalcitrant Serbian opposition prepared to hold onto Kosovo at any cost: the aim was not to hurt Milosevic, but to give him an excuse for capitulating to NATO on Kosovo. (Not mentioned was that it has severely undermined a promising democratic movement in Belgrade, which was the best hope of getting rid of Milosevic.)1 The endgame...