A Quagmire Is Not So Deadly as an Inferno, And Other Lessons From Kosovo

By Richard H. Curtiss

“This is a good outcome. It’s good for America. It’s very good for the world.”
—Presidential candidate Sen. John McCain, June 13, 1999.

With the arrival in Kosovo of NATO forces (not to mention some unexpected Russians) on June 12, the worst of what will probably go down in history as the Kosovo war is over. There were joyous scenes of crowds cheering the liberating forces reminiscent of the allied liberation of Paris in 1944. There will be heartbreaking scenes as the 800,000 displaced Kosovars return to destroyed neighborhoods, burned-out houses and, at this writing, no one knows how many fresh graves.

There may be ugly scenes, too, reminiscent of the aftermath of World War II when, after the retreat of defeated German forces from countries of Eastern Europe and the Balkans, embittered mobs and newly installed communist governments expelled German-speaking minorities who had lived among them for generations. Throughout Germany today are people whose grandparents and parents arrived with nothing more than a few battered suitcases and the clothes on their backs, and set out to rebuild their lives from the ground up.

It will be the responsibility of NATO troops to prevent acts of vengeance from either the Albanian Kosovar or Serb side. Hopefully lessons have been learned in this regard from Bosnia, where many Muslims, Serbs and Croats still fear to return to their homes. It would be too much to hope that a final settlement will be reached more easily in Kosovo.

Senator John McCain, quoted at the beginning of this article, bluntly predicts partition, presumably meaning the areas of religious and nationalist significance to the Serbs would stay with them, and the rest would go to Kosovar Albanians living either in an independent Kosovar state or one affiliated with Albania. Others consider the borders of Kosovo inviolate, and propose autonomy for Kosovo along the lines it enjoyed within the former Yugoslavia before Slobodan Milosevic personally abolished it in 1989. Perhaps sometime in the next century, when all of the peoples of former Yugoslavia and Albania join a united Europe, it no longer will matter.

It’s too early to know what lessons the Serbs themselves have learned from this fourth losing war into which Milosevic has led them in only eight years. His popularity seems to soar whenever his people are under siege, and then wane between his losing campaigns. Historians will trace it to a nationalism of martyrdom built upon the defeat of the Serbs by the Turks at Kosovo in the 14th century.

But now that the Serbs have suffered at home some of the kinds of personal losses their brethren have suffered in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and now Kosovo, perhaps defeat will lose its allurre. Or perhaps their hero will find yet another place, like Montenegro or the autonomous province of Vojvodina, to lose a war.

There are lessons to be learned from wars. The British, French and other European military officers did a miserable and in some cases deceitful job of “protecting” the Bosnian Muslims from the Serbs for three years under U.N. auspices, and then only somewhat better when it became a NATO operation. It seems the lessons of that bitter experience were absorbed, however, both at the military and political levels in the 19-member NATO alliance.

As he completed his ethnic cleansing of half the Kosovars, Serb President Milosevic, backed by Russia, because of cultural and ethnic ties, and China, perhaps partly out of concern for the parallel between Serb treatment of the Kosovars and Chinese treatment of the Tibetans and other minorities, unsuccessfully tried every trick in the book, including refusing to negotiate unless there was a bombing pause, to buy time to prevent those who had been driven over Kosovo’s borders from ever returning.

That this was his purpose became clear from the beginning when the very first refugees to reach Macedonia and Albania reported that Serb authorities were methodically confiscating their passports, identity cards, property deeds, and anything else they could use to prove residence in the province where their families had lived for generations. Almost to the end Milosevic insisted that some Serb police should remain in Kosovo and that no one would be admitted into Kosovo without proof of previous residence.

But the lessons about Milosevic had been learned in Bosnia, there was no bombing pause, and there will be no Serb officials in a position to prevent the return of the refugees.

It can also be argued that sometimes the lessons of the previous war do not apply to the next one and that different people can draw totally different lessons from the same event.

Both arguments may be applied in the inevitable debates over whatever lessons Kosovo holds for Americans. For example, I realized as I grew up that my mother had concluded from World War I that modern weapons had become so deadly that any future war must be avoided at all costs. She also felt that, weighted down by too much history, victorious European powers were incapable of granting vanquished powers a just peace, and that harsh terms imposed by the victors in World War I had led quickly to World War II.

Yet, despite such strong isolationist qualms, she was deathly afraid that without U.S. intervention Hitler’s Germany would conquer all of Europe, thus setting up an inevitable devastating confrontation between a democratic North America with a totalitarian Europe.

To me as a child of 12, unburdened by all that history, when World War II began in September 1939, it seemed an easy choice. Go for the lesser evil, which meant joining the European allies to stop Hitler before he conquered them all and harnessed their resources to his war machine. But Americans were bitterly polarized between isolationism and interventionism and U.S. legislation to establish a military draft was passed by a slim margin in the fall of 1940, and barely renewed in the fall of 1941.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941 finally made the decision for conflicted Americans. As a result, there were conscientious objectors, but few war protestors for the only time in U.S. history.

Americans emerged from World War II largely united on its lessons: No more vengeance or unjust peace agreements that would plant the seeds of future wars, no more lengthy dithering when your neighbor is being mugged, and that “never again” means just that.

But already we were making exceptions, because while we made our pious resolutions, the Soviet Union, our erstwhile ally, was making forcible political changes that had nothing to do with democracy and border changes that had nothing to do with justice. The resulting Korean War was America’s first “limited war” and “limited victory” (meaning a draw) and its lesson was that with restraint by both sides, a local war could be prevented from becoming a continent-wide conflagration.

The Vietnam War, which President Lyndon Johnson fought with the lesson of the “limited” Korean War very much in mind, and over which the American people became increasingly divided, turned out to be the first clear battlefield defeat in America’s short history. Unfortunately, Americans remain divided over its lessons.

What might be called the “Vietnam generation” (a term which has as much to do with political outlook as with chronological age) concluded that wars fought on distant battlefields with no clear American interest at stake were not worth the price to the nation. Other Americans, who, with the same caveats, might be called “the World War II and Korean War generations” reached the conclusion that if the U.S. concluded that a war was worth fighting, then it should become a total war with the country deploying whatever force was necessary to win. There is overlap among these conclusions. The distinction is in which conclusion dominates.

The Gulf war was directed by a member of the World War II generation who went all out to apply force quickly, overwhelmingly and decisively. The Bosnian action, and now the Kosovo War, have been led by a member of the Vietnam generation who was determined to keep them limited, and was deeply conflicted about employing military means at all.

He won in Kosovo but only after belatedly making it clear that he was prepared to join British Prime Minister Tony Blair and French leaders in arguing to all of the 19 NATO member nations that ground troops should be introduced if air power alone did not prevail.

History will write the final “lessons of Kosovo,” but here are some suggestions:

At last Bill Clinton has a foreign policy success to help fill in an appalling void in his “legacy.” He may have landed the U.S. in a Balkan quagmire, but in doing so he helped quench an inferno of runaway nationalism of the kind that devastated Europe twice before in the 20th century.
The first and only war that the NATO alliance has fought, it won. This has enormous significance for stability in and around Europe, and endurance of the North American-European tie.
For the second time the U.S. has intervened decisively to halt “ethnic cleansing” by so-called Christians against Muslims (just as the U.S. refused to intervene on the side of the “Christians” in Lebanon’s civil war). This means that in any Muslim vs. Christian “clash of civilizations” of the kind so ardently desired by partisans of Israel, any U.S. role will not be determined by religion. It also means that “never again” has universal, not particular, applicability.
The Arab states, traditionally so maddeningly slow to act or even react, weren’t so slow this time. They sent huge amounts of aid and large numbers of their own (not contracted) medical and relief workers to the Kosovars. The Kosovars and Albanians were extremely grateful to the people from nations all over the world who came to their aid. But they could proudly say that none were more effective than many of their own Muslim co-religionists.
Israeli Foreign Minister Ariel Sharon warned his government and its powerful overseas lobbies that if they supported NATO bombing of Serbia on behalf of the Muslim Kosovars, “Israel could be next.” Sharon is dead right. The parallels between Palestine 1948 and Kosovo 1999 are astonishing: Some 800,000 refugees forced out of their homes by terror, more than 400 villages and neighborhoods burned and leveled, and the advancing of an exclusive claim by descendents of one of the many tribes who have lived there over the ages over claims of the indigenous majority, whose ancestors also have lived there for centuries. But this time, in Kosovo, the land grab was thwarted.

Perhaps out of the Kosovo war Americans, Europeans, and the Arabs and their Muslim co-religionists everywhere will derive the lessons needed to undo the injustices of that startlingly similar case of ethnic cleansing in Palestine just 51 years earlier.

Richard H. Curtiss is the executive editor of the Washington Report.