The New York Times

April 1, 1999

WHITE HOUSE MEMO

How to Lay Doubt Aside and Put the Best Face on a Bad Week in the Balkans

By JOHN M. BRODER

WASHINGTON -- The Clinton Administration's top foreign policy officials gathered in the Oval Office on Monday morning after the Balkans went through a wrenching weekend.

Serbian forces had accelerated their campaign of ethnic murder and expulsions in Kosovo and an American F-117 stealth fighter had gone down just west of Belgrade.

NATO war planners decided the day before to expand their list of targets to include Serbian military and police units, who were conducting an offensive against Kosovo civilians that was unexpected in its speed and savagery.

President Clinton surveyed the dispirited faces of his senior advisers -- including the Secretaries of State and Defense, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Director of Central Intelligence -- and decided they needed a pep talk, according to an official who attended the meeting.

"He said, 'Guys, let's not lose sight of why we did this,' " the official said. " 'Let's not forget what prompted us to do this and who is responsible.' "

It is telling that only four days into a long-planned bombardment of the forces of Slobodan Milosevic, the President of Yugoslavia, Clinton needed to buck up the senior officials who advised him to pursue the military option.

And to do so, he had to conceal his own doubts about the course he had chosen, according to advisers. While Clinton is confident he was justified in ordering the air and missile attacks, one adviser said, the decision has gnawed at him and cost him sleep.

Administration officials have repeatedly said that no one should be surprised by the campaign of terror visited on Kosovo by Milosevic's troops in the days following the start of allied bombing a week ago today.

The President today cast the mission as one that would take some time and that had been hampered by bad weather, and he asked Americans for their patience.

"It takes a while to get up and going," Clinton said in an interview with Dan Rather on CBS. "The American people and the people of the NATO nations should not be surprised that what has happened on the ground has happened. It was always obvious it was going to happen, if there was no opposition to Milosevic. And this thing hasn't had enough time to work. So I would ask the American people to be patient, and to be resolved, and to be firm."

Clinton was warned that Milosevic was intent on ruthlessly driving ethnic Albanians out of Kosovo. But the President and his advisers seem taken aback by the sheer ferocity of Milosevic's onslaught and the scale of the humanitarian disaster it spawned.

"It's one thing to say we expected this, but living it is not the same as thinking about it," one adviser said.

As reports of atrocities and heartbreaking pictures of columns of refugees pour in from the Balkans, Clinton and the White House have endeavored to present a picture of confidence. Directly after the Monday foreign policy meeting, for example, Clinton drove to suburban Virginia for a round of golf, a display of nonchalance that recalled, at least to some critics, President Bush's golf outings and speedboat rides during the 1990 buildup to the war in the Persian Gulf.

Clinton has kept a more-or-less normal schedule this week, handling routine ceremonial duties and keeping an engagement to speak at an electronics industry dinner on Tuesday night.

In another effort to avoid the appearance of being seized by crisis, officials in Washington, who themselves have dribbled out scraps of information about the war in vague daily briefings, have allowed the briefers at NATO headquarters to be the leading voices on the conflict. This is part of a deliberate strategy to portray Kosovo as chiefly a European, not an American concern, according to Joe Lockhart, the White House press secretary.

"I think we have consciously tried to have the allies be the main spokespeople for this. And this was a decision not just by the United States, but by all 19 members of NATO," Lockhart said.

By making NATO the voice of the operation, the United States, which is the dominant force in the alliance, may manage to bear less of the blame if it goes sour -- and less of the credit if it succeeds.

The understated American role also stands in contrast to Bush's leadership in the gulf war. He organized a coalition under United Nations auspices but never left any doubt that he was commanding it.

While striving to maintain a businesslike demeanor in public, in private President Clinton is preoccupied with the Balkan crisis, aides said. "There's a heaviness to this decision that affects him," one adviser said. "No matter how long you've been at this job, you never get used to these tough calls."

Kosovo is the first thing Clinton deals with in the morning and the last matter on his mind at night, this adviser said. He has also been plagued by a cold and seasonal allergies, lending to his haggard appearance in recent days.

He admitted in his interview with Rather today that he had "pent-up feelings" about Kosovo, but added: "I think the President's supposed to keep a lot of those feelings pent up."

The Balkans have troubled him since his first days in office. He was determined not to repeat the hesitation and indecision that marked his and NATO's handling of the Bosnia crisis from 1992 to 1995. And in fact the West acted more quickly when Milosevic moved on Kosovo than when he undertook his offensive in Bosnia seven years ago.

Nonetheless, there is evident improvisation in the Administration's and NATO's decision-making on Kosovo. Milosevic did not capitulate after the first few days of bombing, as the allies had hoped, so NATO decided to raise the stakes last weekend to attack his forces in the field.

When two days of that effort failed to deter him, the allies quickly moved on to a restricted version of what eventually will be "Phase 3," adding Government ministries in downtown Belgrade and other command-and-control facilities to the target list.

The cumulative picture is of a war being planned on the fly, with hurried escalation following each new provocation.

A senior national security official said that in fact the allies were "learning by doing how you conduct a NATO operation, both at a political and a military level."

How, then, do NATO and the United States plan to pursue the war in Yugoslavia if Phases 1, 2 and 3 fail to persuade Milosevic to withdraw his forces?

What is Phase 4?

Said one exasperated senior official, "There is no Phase 4."