A BOSTON GLOBE EDITORIAL
A self-defeating war

War is the mother of unintended consequences.
 
President Clinton has said that the Balkans will not get better until democracy comes to Serbia. The NATO attack, however, has drastically harmed the prospects for Serbian democracy. Political forces allied against Slobodan Milosevic have been routed as Serbs rally to the defense of the country.  

President Clinton said the air war is necessary to prevent the conflict from spreading. Yet the war has destabilized the surrounding countries by threatening the fragile peace in Bosnia, putting at risk the prodemocracy forces in Montenegro, dangerously altering the ethnic mix in Macedonia, and by emboldening the forces of teh Kosovo Liberation Army, whom the United States had only recently branded as terrorists. Albania is on its way to becoming a client state as NATO begins to use the refugee-swamped country as a base for its Kosovo operations. 

In a less obvious way, the war is destabilizing Russia, marginalizing pro-Western reformers and bolstering the hard-line nationalists who are sure to do better in the upcoming elections than they otherwise would have done. 

President Clinton said the war was necessary to prevent ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. Yet the ethnic cleansing has accelerated under cover of the NATO attack. 

So now, as the bombing enters its fourth week, the United States and NATO are throwing more planes and more bombs into the breach to pressure Milosevic, whom they badly underestimated in their fatally flawed attempt to bring him to heel at Rambouillet.  

When the reason for continuing a war shifts from its original goals and toward maintaining credibility, the policy is in trouble. In a subtle way, that is what is happening to NATO. The organization should not reject a chance to end the war just because the organization needs to save face. With each escalation there are new and often unforeseen consequences.  

What can easily be foreseen, however, is that sending NATO ground troops to fight a land war in the Balkans would even further destabilize Europe and perhaps the United States, too. The effect on Russia would be calamitous, and the cost in blood and treasure to this country would be considerable. At first there would be an attempt to limit the ground operation to Kosovo. But once troops are engaged, protecting the army becomes part of the war aim, and inexorably they would be drawn deeper into Serbia itself.  

TV pictures of refugees have pumped up public support in the United States for ground troops, but pictures of American soldiers in body bags would as quickly deflate it. The vaunted budget surplus would quickly dwindle, and the confidence that has buoyed the stock market in the teeth of financial woes elsewhere could be expected to erode as well. Preserving Social Security and Medicare would have to take a back seat to the all-devouring needs of war. The backlash would feed the forces of isolation in this country, harming America's ability to lead. 

Using just military logic, Senator John McCain is right when he says that there is no substitute for victory and the United States should take all measures necessary to win. But political and strategic logic at times has to trump military logic, as President Truman found when General Douglas MacArthur proposed using all necessary force to win the Korean War. The resulting truce was more frustrating and inconclusive but infinitely wiser than expanding the war. 

America's national interests are not directly engaged in Kosovo as they are in Iraq. For all his atrocities, Milosevic is not manufacturing nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons. If there are compromises that can be reached in Kosovo, the United States and NATO should take them, even if they find it morally repugnant to deal with Milosevic. After all, it was morally repugnant of Croatia's Franjo Tudjman to ethnically cleanse 200,000 Serbs from the Krajina region of Croatia, yet nobody suggested that NATO intervene then.  

Congress should be wary of committing the United States to the course of ground combat. Wars should not be entered into in the white heat of emotion. The consequences of committing troops to fight in the Balkans could haunt America for generations to come. 

This story ran on page A24 of the Boston Globe on 04/22/99.
© Copyright 1999 Globe Newspaper Company.