Kosovo, 1999: An Insider's View - by Christopher Deliso

Collision Course: NATO, Russia, and Kosovo
By John Norris
Praeger, 2005, 334 pp.

Collision Course: NATO, Russia, and Kosovo gives an unprecedented inside view of the planning and conduct of NATO's 1999 bombing campaign against Yugoslavia. Written by John Norris, the former communications director for Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, this recently released work traces the chronology of decisions and events made by all of the key political players involved. With his enviable access to the communications and meetings held among U.S., European, Serbian, and Russian diplomats, Norris is able to weave a riveting narrative that provides access to the minds and motives of those who crafted the war.

As such, the author helpfully expands the existing literature on Kosovo. For the first time, we get comprehensive explanations for decisions (mostly, those of Washington and Moscow) that have always been murkily known. However, unless one is a committed interventionist who unhesitatingly accepts the status quo on all of America's foreign policy, this book will also frequently prove hard to digest. I suspect that this dichotomy (exclusive inside sources and blatant state propaganda) will make reading Collision Course a necessary, if somewhat irritating, experience for most of our readers.

A Caveat

It's important to note from the outset that Collision Course is an establishment work, and its author and key sources were and are cheerleaders for an intervention and occupation that have led to humanitarian horrors, local mafia consolidation of power, and the imminent betrayal of UN Resolution 1244, which guaranteed that Kosovo would remain a part of Yugoslavia. Despite the analytical critiques Norris makes of poor decision-making and infighting among Clinton officials, the rationale for intervention itself is never seriously questioned, except when it is referred to in order to cast doubting allies (and especially Russia) in a bad light.

Further, the author is currently special adviser to the president of the International Crisis Group, an utterly loathsome think-tank and graveyard of retired, failed, and ambitiously aspiring Western diplomats. Nevertheless, the ICG retains considerable clout among the "international community," considering that it is funded by the same governments and institutions whose views it parrots with regularity. In short, it is the civilian version of private military contractors like MPRI that are staffed by retired military men. The difference is that the ICG concentrates on political murders rather than corporeal ones.

Now the ICG has always been especially aggressive when it comes to the Balkans. It is no accident that several of the participants on the winning side of the Kosovo conflict now sit on its board. In addition to author and advisor Norris, names like General Wesley Clark and former Finnish president (and special negotiator during the war) Martti Ahtisaari jump out. The ICG has been foremost in the lobbying war for Kosovo's independence – an eventual scenario that was obvious from the onset of NATO's bombing, yet one that Norris inexplicably excludes from the minds of those executing the war, as if they had never expected their actions would lead to logical conclusions at variance with the peace they dictated in the end.

A Manifesto, Not a Foreword

Before the book even starts, there is a foreword by former Deputy Secretary of State Talbott – not unreasonable, considering that he is one of the book's main protagonists. Talbott's brief text is dripping with a retrospective neoconservatism that remarkably manages to valorize the 1999 bombing while also taking jabs at the Bush administration's handling of Iraq. The goal is to slyly posit Kosovo – a Clintonian "achievement" – as an example for the current administration to follow elsewhere.

Among the other carved-in-stone truths we meet here include statements like, "to the extent that there is such a thing as an international community, it owes much to NATO" (p. ix), and "the sovereignty of states is not absolute" (p. x). He attempts to trace the lineage of the American humanitarian crusade as far back as the 1994 intervention meant to prop up Aristide in Haiti, stating the need to overthrow the military junta as "thousands of Haitians sought asylum in the United States by taking to the sea in rickety boats" (p. xi). Could the threat of such an unwanted intrusion of refugees, perhaps, actually have had more to do with the intervention than with safeguarding human rights and democracy?

Predictably enough, for Talbott, the Bush administration failed in Iraq and Afghanistan because of its "reluctance to cast its own policies in terms of continuity with its predecessors, especially its previous predecessor, the Clinton administration" (p. xi). Imagine that.

Nevertheless, all's well that ends well, because Bush has performed a total about-face on the nation-building angle, with the helpful result that "Kosovo looks more like a model for what they may end up putting in place in those other states that American-led armies liberated from heinous regimes" (p. xi). According to the former diplomat's checklist of criteria on war and peace, "[Kosovo] was far from perfect, but overall, it gets a passing grade" (p. xii). According to whom? As I've argued before, Kosovo should not be held up as a model for anything but disaster.

A Startling Revelation

Following this rather hackneyed attempt to justify intervention as a policy, author Norris begins the book with a contention so surprising that one suspects some retrospective contextualization has been performed here as well for political benefit. How else can one explain the following statement and its conclusion?

"[N]ATO's large membership and consensus style may cause endless headaches for military planners, but it is also why joining NATO is appealing to nations across Central and Eastern Europe. Nations from Albania to Ukraine want in the Western club. The gravitational pull of the community of Western democracies highlights why Milosevic's Yugoslavia had become such an anachronism. As nations throughout the region strove to reform their economies, mitigate ethnic tensions, and broaden civil society, Belgrade seemed to delight in continually moving in the opposite direction. It is small wonder that NATO and Yugoslavia ended up on a collision course.

"It was Yugoslavia's resistance to the broader trends of political and economic reform – not the plight of Kosovo Albanians – that best explains NATO's war." (pp. xxii-xxiii)

This astonishing paragraph clearly seeks to contextualize Clinton's war as a necessary predecessor to the Bush administration's multicolored revolutions in Georgia, Ukraine, and who knows where next. Sadly, it might even be true. The "liberals" of American politics are often contrasted with the belated liberals of the neocon camp, the ones most often identified with permanent revolution for the sake of spreading democracy, but it's clear that despite the occasional softball criticism of the Bush administration's interventions, it's more like a family squabble than some deeper alienation. The Democrats prefer allied lynch mobs, whereas the Republicans are more willing to intervene without outside help. The difference is basically the same.

At the end of the day, both Democrats and Republicans remain committed to the same "values" of forcing political change on foreign regimes. Norris' explanation seems to replace one deception (that of the humanitarian intervention) with another (the democracy-building intervention), somehow by rolling them into one. Considering that the ultimate justification for NATO's war has always been cited as being primarily the protection of the Kosovo Albanians, I would be feeling pretty insulted right now if I were one of the latter.

Room for Self-Criticism?

That said, the author at least notes several contemporary criticisms of the unfolding war. Starting from the second chapter, he recites a litany of abuses leveled at the Clinton administration from the press, former officials, and the Republican opposition. Perhaps because of his former position, Norris is most acutely aware of the antagonisms leveled at the State Department by the Pentagon, CIA, and others over the former's failure to foresee a refugee crisis once bombing got underway and over their naïve view that Milosevic would immediately capitulate. Henry Kissinger is cited as saying the administration wasn't hawkish enough, while the "fiercely conservative" Richard Perle charged that Clinton's was "the worst foreign policy team since the Second World War" (p. 26).

However, when Norris alleges that the Clinton administration "was caught off-balance by the refugee crisis," while at the same alleging that "few understood raw politics better than Bill Clinton," (p. 27) one has to question his sincerity. This contradiction cuts to the central dilemma of the book: whether we can take the testimony of the author at face value or we have to understand him as an apologist. After all, many less gifted and less privy to sensitive information than the president were arguing at the time that such a bombardment would in fact cause such a crisis; how then can the sagacious Clinton have failed to see it? Unless, of course, he had hoped for it to occur for his own propaganda purposes; but this possibility is preempted by Norris, who merely says that Milosevic's evil intent "helped" justify the president's decision.

Notably, he refers only to "images" of refugees as being pivotal in firming alliance support for war – images of refugees being the key weapon for developing the "human interest" angle of the story and taking attention away from the bombing's destructiveness. And though it is well known that the Albanian KLA at least in some cases forced people to become refugees to cynically generate world sympathy, and shot other Albanians believed to be Serb "collaborators," this scenario is dismissed by the author as nothing more than Russian-Yugoslav propaganda (pp. 13, 20).

Essentially, the question is one of believability: could the Western leadership really have been so naïve about so much? For instance, the American negotiating principle from the beginning was to secure the rights of Kosovo's Albanians with the introduction of peacekeepers, while still somehow keeping Kosovo a part of the Yugoslav state. Anyone with sense could have seen that this was not a possibility once the Serb forces were expelled. Should we believe, then, that the Americans were sincere in their "official" platform, and/or that the author is being sincere vouching for their sincerity in his retelling? This is one of the book's great mysteries.

Intimate Portraits

Aside from its problematic intrinsic nature, however, Collision Course has plenty to offer on the informative level. The portrayals of interactions among the biggest world diplomats offer much insight into the negotiating process. Norris reveals how our leaders (and theirs) really think and presents the kind of seemingly minor details that contribute to their relationships. For example, to a senior NATO official is attributed the observation that because "winters are bad for Yeltsin," negotiations with the Russian president, as well as the intervention itself, were best held off: "he starts to pay attention and always gets better in March and April (p. 4)." Incredibly, Clinton and Yeltsin had only spoken twice about Kosovo in the six months between October 1998 and March 1999 – with the latter slamming the phone down on both occasions – a fact that serves Norris' thesis that the Russians were intransigent, bellicose, and slow to engage with the negotiating process.

Yet while there may indeed be some truth to stereotypes, it becomes tiresome after a while to hear the Russian negotiators constantly mocked for the great crimes of smoking and drinking, while the fresh-faced Western diplomats are described with generally positive adjectives ("lean," "affable," "good-natured," "scrappy," etc.) as they sanctimoniously interface with their laptops and policy papers. The subtle implication of Norris' opposing descriptions of the Russians and Westerners is that the former were unwilling to negotiate and an impediment to the peace process – even as the facts the author recounts lead to a precisely opposite interpretation.

In the end, the picture painted of American diplomacy is actually quite unflattering. It is the Russians who throughout proved most pragmatic and eager to engage all parties in negotiations, and the Americans (as well as Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac) who come off as obdurate, unyielding bullies – a position they could well afford, since they were the ones dropping the bombs. As Collision Course abundantly reveals, the entire tenor of American negotiation throughout the conflict was in the form of ultimatum, and the primary considerations of those involved were not empathy for refugees or democracy, but merely to further their own individual and collective reputations and prestige.

That said, it is important to note that all the parties involved acted according to their own political considerations first. Russian President Boris Yeltsin's frantic calls to stop the bombing were fueled by his own looming impeachment hearings, and the helpful effect that the war was having for his Communist opposition. For his part, U.S. Vice President Gore was weighing the consequences any high-profile diplomatic role might have for his upcoming presidential campaign. Finnish president and special negotiator Martti Ahtisaari worried about what shaking hands with the Hague-indicted Milosevic would mean for his image among EU leaders.

Ground War!

Collision Course gives extended coverage of the constant argument then going on within NATO and within the U.S. administration over the desirability of a ground war. In retrospect, it seems incredible that in spring 1999 some high officials feared that the war might drag on for another year. The reader is made to appreciate that given the immense logistical challenges of posing a ground invasion of Kosovo, plans had to be made well in advance (June 1 was the deadline given by Gen. Clark, but in the end it wasn't necessary).

The chief advocates for ground invasion were, Clark, Tony Blair, and Madeleine Albright, as well as more minor characters such as Undersecretary for Foreign Affairs Tom Pickering and Special Adviser on Balkan Affairs James Dobbins. The well-documented animosity between the Pentagon and Clark was fueled largely by this debate, with the trigger-happy Clark reasoning that a fast and massive invasion would end the war faster, and the Pentagon balking at the risks of either crossing the Albania-Kosovo mountains or sweeping down the Hungarian plain, and then being forced to take Belgrade itself. Again and again, political decision-making is held up against the fear of public reaction; the majority of NATO countries apparently had no stomach for a messy ground war. In the end, NATO got itself off the hook by bombing enough civilian targets and threatening to level Belgrade itself, thus forcing a capitulation from Milosevic. In this light, the whole furor over the necessity of a ground invasion in a certain sense seems to lack reality.

High Drama

Undoubtedly the most exciting chapters of Collision Course are the penultimate ones (9 and 10) that describe the high-stakes brinkmanship between NATO and Russia over troop deployment into Kosovo. This section describes in detail the secret planning that went into Russia's surprise entrance into Kosovo via Bosnia, and the diplomatic maelstrom this move caused. As the author notes, though tensions were deflated and the Russian occupation of Slatina Airfield quickly descended into farce, no one knew at the time how the situation would play out. Had Wesley Clark had his way, the situation could well have boiled over into a shoot-out – which memorably led British subordinate Gen. Michael Jackson to indignantly tell Clark, "I'm not starting World War III for you" (p. 278).

Norris details how the mutual mistrust over Russia's role in the future peacekeeping force – it had asked for, but was denied, a sector of its own – led Yeltsin to force the situation by sending in his peacekeepers stationed in Bosnia. NATO feared that a new Cold War scenario might play out, in which Kosovo would be more or less partitioned, with Russia occupying the Serb-inhabited north of the province and NATO the rest. However, as the author explains, these worries were premature because the Russians had not planned through to the end and did not send a large enough force to stake out anything more than a symbolic presence. This was ultimately the result of Moscow's failure to win overflight clearance from Hungary, Romania, Ukraine, and Bulgaria, thus preventing them from being able to drop thousands of paratroopers into Kosovo. The author portrays this result triumphantly as an indicator of Eastern Europe's turn to the West.

Drawbacks: Unconnected Events and the Media's Role

However, the author's bad faith is shown in two ways: one, the complete avoidance of government-media organized deception; and two, the almost surreal lack of proper context for events. We are thus expected to believe that Milosevic's mid-war indictment by the Hague – a political move that effectively removed him from the negotiating process and made any Western politician associated with him stigmatized – caught the Clinton administration by surprise. The "irony" of the fact that CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour (who "broke" the story) was married to State Department Spokesman James Rubin is attributed to unnamed U.S. diplomats almost as an afterthought, and with no consideration of the fact that the news network and U.S. government were officially, if clandestinely, cooperating to spin the war. At many points, the reader is left to imagine that events happened by themselves, detached from one another, as if by accident.

A major shortcoming, considering that the author was tasked with dealing with the media, is the total omission of how the U.S. and NATO worked hand-in-glove with a complicit, self-serving Western press to spin a web of deception in newspapers and TV screens back home, casting the war in an honorable light while demonizing the Serbs. The effect of the media as an echo chamber for NATO propaganda was tremendous, and to not even mention it shows that, at the end of the day, Norris' apparent intent to provide a comprehensive account falls short. In fact, the media is only mentioned when unfavorable stories or reporter swarms catch Western diplomats off-guard or otherwise irritate them – the implication being that the media is a hostile and alien force out to attack rather than serve the government. Since the author obviously knows better, the failure to at least allude to some of the bigger lies (like "100,000 Albanians dead") is further evidence of an attempted whitewash.

Conclusions

Since Collision Course tends to glorify the West for its diplomatic acumen, martial prowess, and (apparently) more glowing health than the Russians, it is no surprise that the book's conclusions also tend to sugarcoat the war. There are no mentions of depleted uranium, and not too many of civilian casualties. There is no mention of the fact that the Russians proved correct in most of their predictions regarding "reverse" ethnic cleansing of Serbs and destruction of Serbian cultural monuments once NATO swept into Kosovo. The author has little sympathy in this regard, yet constantly points out the humanitarian valor displayed by NATO in defense of the Albanians as being a prime justification for the war – failing to delve very deeply into the real campaign of terror and intimidation that Albanian extremists had been waging for years against Serbian civilians. Milosevic may have indeed been guilty of many evils, but nothing happens in a vacuum, after all.

Other conclusions seem to have been jury-rigged for contemporary requirements. Thus the constant portrayals of "reckless" Russian diplomacy (as if they were the ones bombing people!) also dovetail quite nicely into the author's current criticism of Vladimir Putin, something that is decidedly in vogue in the West today. And while not directly calling for the immediate independence of Kosovo (as his very own ICG is loudly doing), the author closes the book by stating that "hard choices still need to be made, and they need to be made sooner rather than later" (p. 322). So at some level Collision Course can be said to be a well-timed manifesto aiming to both justify NATO's bombing and whitewash its leaders' crimes, while also stigmatizing Russia. In this way, the book attempts to set a precedent, or at least a preferred context, for today's apparently irreversible trend toward Kosovo independence. The victors are still keen to write the history.

However, none of these things make up the most compelling aspect of Collision Course. For what seems most striking in a book written about "how diplomacy is really practiced," as one reviewer put it, is the utter barrenness of American diplomacy today. The narration of events paints the same unflattering picture of American diplomacy as nothing more than the unyielding projection of ultimatums backed up by military force. That America rarely compromises is not, of course, the author's fault. Yet when the deck is stacked to the extent that it is in today's unipolar world, not even the most compelling storyline can sustain real excitement and suspense when the end result is so often a foregone conclusion.