By William D. Hartung
As week three of the NATO bombing campaign in Kosovo begins, it is painfully clear that using air strikes to force Slobodan Milosevic to accept autonomy for the Kosovar Albanians has been a dismal failure. The bombings may or may not be "degrading" Milosevic's forces, but they have certainly degraded the standing of the United States as a world leader.
So far, the main achievement of the NATO air attacks has been to provide Milosevic's forces with an open field upon which to drive the Albanian population out of Kosovo at gunpoint. Since human rights monitors and humanitarian organizations evacuated the area prior to the bombing, there has been no one in Kosovo to document the crimes of the Serbian forces, much less try to stop them.
The current bombing campaign underscores the weakness of the "Clinton Doctrine," which involves calling in the cruise missiles to deal with any and every security threat -- from weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to terrorist bombings in Africa to ethnic cleansing in the Balkans.
During this decade, the United States has degenerated from the world's sole superpower to its designated bomber. U.S. policy makers need to develop some other options besides ignoring deadly conflicts, as we did in Rwanda, or sending in the B-52s, as we are now doing in Kosovo.
The first step toward a more effective policy is to abandon the notion that the U.S. and its top NATO allies can "go it alone." Last December's U.S./U.K. air raids on Iraq and this month's NATO strikes in Kosovo were both based on this dangerous delusion. In Kosovo, the use of NATO forces to intervene in an internal conflict without UN approval has raised anxieties not only in Russia, but in other major powers such as India and China which face their own internal ethnic and territorial disputes.
If the United States wants Russian cooperation on pressing issues like the control of that country's decaying nuclear arsenal, our government must do a better job of consulting Russia on major security operations like the air strikes in Kosovo.
To repair the damage that has already been done to U.S.-Russian relations and to increase its chances of bringing the killing in Kosovo to an end, the Clinton Administration should move forward aggressively on its recent overtures towards restoring Moscow to its role as a full partner in crafting a peace agreement. U.S. policy makers should also take up the suggestion of Jonathan Dean, a former U.S. ambassador to Germany, that any peacekeeping forces introduced into Kosovo be under United Nations auspices, rather than a NATO-only contingent.
In the long-term, the best option for dealing with ethnic tensions is to strengthen the United Nations' peacekeeping capabilities, and to come up with clearer ground rules for delegating peace keeping and conflict prevention duties to broad-based regional organizations such as the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
But without a substantial increase in its paltry administrative budget of $52 million per year -- roughly the price of a few days of bombing raids on Belgrade -- OSCE will have limited capabilities to monitor and deter conflicts.
And until it sheds its role as a UN deadbeat, the United States will have little political or moral standing to promote a comprehensive plan for sharing the burdens of peacekeeping with key allies and regional organizations. The United States could pay its $2 billion in outstanding UN dues for less than the price of just one of the costly B-2 bombers that have been put on display in the Kosovo crisis.
Looking to the future, U.S. policy should emphasize measures that can prevent violence, such as a strong international criminal tribunal; a global Code of Conduct on arms transfers that would restrict arms sales to despots and dictators; and a step-by-step plan for abolishing nuclear weapons modeled on the "Middle Powers Initiative" that has been tabled at the United Nations.
So far, the Clinton Administration has opposed all of these measures, relying instead on its preferred policy of episodic air strikes and unenforceable threats.
If nothing else, the current fiasco in Kosovo may provide an incentive to at least consider initiating a more cooperative approach to stemming the tide of global violence. It's long past time for the Clinton administration to acknowledge that our current strategy just isn't working.
*William D. Hartung is the President's Fellow at the World Policy Institute at the New School and the author of The Military Industrial Complex Revisited.
