The New York Times - OP-ED

Tuesday, May 11, 1999

The Misaimed War Machine

By JOHN WESTON

LONDON -- One can only sympathize with Westerners in Beijing who are being harassed or pelted with paving stones by Chinese mobs. My wife and I were among those in the British Embassy there in 1967 when Red Guards were incited to burn it to the ground. Other embassies and their staffs were assaulted. The Chinese record on respect for diplomatic immunity is itself far from unblemished.

But the bombing in Belgrade was not, despite NATO's apologies, just a statistical deviation from an accurate norm. It was an act of major and culpable incompetence. This incident and the other misaimed bombings are symptomatic of underlying malaise in the NATO campaign.

"The worst policy is to attack cities," Sun Tzu said in 500 B.C. on the art of war. The costs for NATO and Europe of ignoring this insight will not be neutralized merely by parroting that it is all the fault of Slobodan Milosevic.

Air strikes have been going on for 50 days. They are shutting off Yugoslavia's economy and daily life, blocking trade on the Danube and radicalizing Serb anti-Western sentiment. Relations with Russia and China have been set back. None of this has stanched the forced exodus from Kosovo.

Only a faulty calculus could have concluded that the Kosovars would be made safe without a forceful military presence on the ground. In "To End a War" Richard Holbrooke recalls the point in mid-1995 when "the situation in Bosnia had reached a dead end, and the Western powers either had to strengthen their forces or else withdraw." The British/French/ Dutch Rapid Reaction force was created, and the Americans reluctantly committed to send troops to Bosnia under NATO if the United Nations decided to withdraw. The logic applied to Kosovo is even stronger.

It is high time to switch the emphasis in Yugoslavia toward making good in Kosovo itself. We have told our citizens for years that the new NATO is about things like "combined joint task forces," flexible and rapid deployment and force projection, especially from sea to land. We have even practiced such concepts expensively in far-flung spots. It therefore will not do to say that we are suddenly in a too-difficult box.

Further action will this time need to have explicit Security Council endorsement and must involve Russia. I do not think this is beyond grasp. The United Nations ran a de facto trusteeship successfully for two years in East Slavonia after the Dayton agreement, while Croat and Serb passions cooled there and the confidence of local citizens was restored.

This transitional authority called for a civil-military administration (under a retired American general); an effective international ground force; clear authority, consistent backing and monitoring from the Security Council; NATO reinforcements close by, and the active support of the Russians. With some shuffling of the cards, this model could be used in Kosovo.

Meanwhile we have to persevere. But as Sun Tzu also said, "While we have heard of blundering swiftness in war, we have not yet seen a clever operation that was prolonged."

John Weston was the British Ambassador to the United Nations from 1995 to 1998.