LONDON- What an anniversary that was! The first birthday marking Nato’s bombing of Yugoslavia brought forth a torrent of articles both pro and against. Yet not one came close to matching for lucidity and perceptiveness, delivered in an icily ironic style, the essay penned at the time of the war by the former Swedish prime minister, Carl Bildt, in the cerebral British monthly, Prospect. Bildt, who is presently the UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for the Balkans, is a man of political leanings, if elections are anything to go by, too far to the right for most of his countrymen. His instinct is to support Nato, to be close to America, to wind back the welfare state and to argue the case for the use of force and intervention. But something happened to him on the road to Belgrade.
“The Baby Bombers”, as the editor headlined the piece, was a wake-up call for the baby-boomers, now in the higher reaches of western political power, “who have never learnt about war and power the hard way” and who, with their “smart wars- high rhetoric, high altitude and high technology; smart bombs for smart politicians”, believe there is a “third way in war”. Bildt wrote of meeting Gerd Schmueckle, a retired German general who was wounded six times on the Russian front during the Second World war, but then served in the highest positions inside Nato. Perhaps, said the general, it is a question of generations. While the war veterans are losing their hair and teeth, the new generation suddenly has a different attitude towards war.
“For Schmueckle, war was associated with horror beyond imagination, leaving deep psychological scars on individuals and nations. Bombs, he said, do not create peace; instead they breed hatred for years, perhaps for generations.”
A year on we can see the truth of this in Yugoslavia. The bombing did not forestall ethnic cleansing, it appeared to precipitate it. And it has bequeathed a cauldron of mutual hatred and a political potage that no amount of Nato and UN policing and Western economic aid can clear up, even if it were forthcoming in something like the quantities promised- another example of the war time rhetoric that misled the public. Reading the public statements of Bernard Kouchner, the UN man responsible for the reconstruction of Kosovo and General Klaus Reinhardt, the local Nato commander, is to sense that they are often close to despair.
Aficionados of Carl Bildt now have the chance to pursue his thinking, one year after the bombing, in the new issue of Survival, the quarterly journal of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. This is a much more lengthy discourse on the limits of force, and looks not just at Kosovo but at Bosnia before. It’s essense is to challenge what has now achieved the status of conventional wisdom- the idea of the supremacy of air-power.
Bildt argues that the Dayton agreement that brought an end to the fighting in Bosnia was “far more a victory for diplomacy than a victory for force”. He certainly doesn’t exclude that the Nato air operation, initiated on September 30th, 1995, “had a significant psychological impact during its first few days”, but the political momentum that led to the accord came about primarily because of a new diplomatic approach. “The essential diplomatic innovation was the willingness of the U.S. to accept some of the core demands of the Bosnian Serbs; demands that the U.S. previously had refused even to contemplate. In particular the Bosnian Serbs had consistently demanded a separate Republika Srpska inside a weak Bosnian framework”.
After Dayton there was an unforgivable lull in Western diplomatic activity. Neither the European Union nor the U.S. were willing to launch any serious diplomatic initiatives to head off the brewing crisis in Kosovo. Albanian opinion inside Kosovo, once more fluid and open to diplomatic options, was allowed to harden, leading to the birth of an armed insurrection and driving the population into the embrace of the Kosovo Liberation Army.
The West, misreading the lesson of Bosnia, tried to head off Serbian repression with the threat of air power. Thus when diplomacy failed- and the Rambouillet agreement demanded much more from Slobodan Milosevic than the “peace agreement” which ended the war- the West had little choice but to make good on its threats.
The air operation, however, could not prevent a major humanitarian disaster. Whether it triggered it, Bildt more cautious than I, just says “will remain a subject of debate”. But he adds scathingly, “despite all the talk about a revolution in military affairs, Kosovo brutally demonstrated that the axe remains the superior short-range-precision-guided weapon when it comes to one man killing another; there is very little that increasingly long-range and high tech weaponry can do about it.”
A year on we have to live with the now seemingly insoluble Kosovo problem handed over to the UN, to the world. Poor old rest of the world. (That was its reward for kicking up a fuss about the UN Charter being abused by the West’s unilateral decision to bomb.) The UN is supposed to find the peace that Western bombs could not deliver, even though, in Bildt’s view, “there is no agreed framework for either the internal or external order of Kosovo.”
What the West needs if it is to progress, never mind Kosovo, and grow out of its baby-bomber lifestyle, is a little less Bill Clinton and Tony Blair and rather more Carl Bildt. His two essays should be their compulsory reading before, once again in some new imbroglio, they are tempted by the quick but elusive fix of air power.
