Washington Post

Sunday, June 27

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Kosovos To Come

BY Jim Hoagland

The lessons President Clinton has drawn from the Kosovo war pose a noble

and ambitious challenge not only for the American people but also for

Clinton and for his unchosen successor. National will and inspired

leadership must come together if the promises Clinton has fashioned out of

the Kosovo experience are to be fulfilled.

The president promises a future in which Americans stand ready to intervene

militarily if they can stop wholesale racial or ethnic slaughter "within or

beyond" other nations' borders. He sees a future in which the United States

actively works with the United Nations and other international bodies to

thwart and punish political mass murderers.

He promises a new world order -- although he shuns that specific phrase,

briefly popularized and then quickly abandoned by President Bush during the

Gulf War.

Traveling through the Balkans on June 22 Clinton committed the United

States not to walk away from the consequences of waging low-risk high-tech

warfare on a devastated Third World nation, as he and Bush did in Iraq and

elsewhere.

"We must win the peace," Clinton told NATO troops in Macedonia. "If we can

do this here . . . we can then say to the people of the world, 'Whether you

live in Africa or Central Europe or any other place, if somebody comes

after innocent civilians and tries to kill them en masse because of their

race, their ethnic background or their religion and it is within our power

to stop it, we will stop it.' "

A Clinton Doctrine of humanitarian warfare is taking shape. Its elaboration

by Clinton at Aviano air base, to Kosovo refugees in Macedonia and in a CNN

interview on the same European trip cannot be dismissed as mere rhetoric.

Words like these will have effect whatever Clinton's own ultimate use and

view of them.

Clinton has been serious on Kosovo. He did not treat the air campaign as a

casual matter, as he repeatedly did with missile strikes in Iraq. His

performance in Kosovo does not automatically erase his reputation for

employing words as if they have no tomorrow. But it should earn sober

consideration of his view of the consequences of a war he led.

This time the president has acted boldly as well as spoken ambitiously. He

dispatched 56 FBI forensic experts to Kosovo last week to gather evidence

for The Hague-based U.N. tribunal considering war crimes in ex-Yugoslavia.

And the United States announced a $ 5 million bounty for the delivery of

Slobodan Milosevic to the tribunal.

This active U.S. support for the tribunal's redoubtable chief prosecutor,

Louise Arbour, contrasts significantly with President Bush's quick turning

away from consideration of pursuing Saddam as a war criminal in 1991. It

contrasts even with Clinton's own record on international justice. A year

ago his administration helped block the establishment of a U.N.

International Criminal Court with strong prosecutorial teeth.

Clinton's intention to keep the United States intimately involved in

European-led and -financed peacekeeping and reconstruction in the Balkans

merits support by Congress and the public. He understands that NATO's

11-week bombing campaign, carried out largely by U.S. planes, can have no

long-lasting positive impact -- or ultimate justification -- without seeing

through postwar efforts to achieve justice and democracy in the Balkans.

The viability of a strategic doctrine built on the duty to intervene will

now be tested on the ground. Europe's economic power and the threat posed

by the Balkans to the continent's stability give NATO both the ability and

the clear need to help redeem Clinton's promises to the people of the

region. Success is possible, although far from guaranteed.

Less clear is how the president intends to engage America in reforming an

international system that has routinely allowed the horrors of Iraq,

Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo and elsewhere to fester, explode and then fester

toward new explosion.

That these horrors occurred inside national frontiers provided major powers

with a handy excuse not to get involved in the past. The Kosovo campaign,

as interpreted by Clinton, has dismantled borders as a barrier to military

action. Leaders must now decide at what point intervening to stop and

punish mass murder becomes their responsibility -- wherever it occurs.

NATO bombing on its southern fringe but still inside Europe without a

specific U.N. mandate -- i.e., the Kosovo campaign -- met the test in my

view. But for NATO to take on that duty on its own in Africa or the Middle

East, as Clinton seems to suggest could now happen, would be dangerous

overreaching for the alliance and the United States.

Clinton has presented the nation with a block of marble that has to be

carved into a statue by words and actions from him and from those who would

succeed him.

Reasonable political leaders can disagree on where America's duty to

intervene abroad begins and ends, and reasonable voters can then choose

among them. This is a question neither candidates nor voters can turn away

from in the U.S. election campaigns now rushing over the horizon toward us.