Transcript
R. Nessen: Good morning, and welcome to the Brookings Institution. My name is Ron Nessen. I'm the Vice President of Communications and I want to welcome you to our briefing on the Kosovo crisis and a briefing about the NATO strikes against Serbia.
We have three experts this morning who will talk to you briefly and then the rest of the time will be taken up with your questions.
Let me introduce the entire panel initially. First of all, Richard Haass, who is Director of the Foreign Policy Studies Program here at the Brookings Institution. During his extensive government career, he served in the Departments of State and Defense. From 1989 to 1993, he was Special Assistant to President Bush during the Persian Gulf War, and Senior Director of Near East and South Asian Affairs on the National Security Council.
The books that he has written that are pertinent to the topic today include the Reluctant Sheriff: The United States after the Cold War and Intervention: The Use of American Military Force in the Post-Cold War World. He was awarded the Presidential Citizens Medal for his contributions to the development and articulation of U.S. policy during Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm.
In the middle of the panel is Ivo Daalder, a visiting fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies Program here at Brookings. From 1995 to '96, he served as Director for European Affairs at the National Security Council, where he coordinated U.S. policy toward Bosnia under President Clinton
His forthcoming publications pertinent to this topic include NATO in the 21st Century, out later this year, and Getting to Dayton: The Making of America's Bosnia Policy in 1995.
And finally, Michael O'Hanlon down at the far end of the table. He's a fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies Program at Brookings and an adjunct professor at Columbia University and at Georgetown University.
He is the author of Saving Lives with Force: Military Criteria for Humanitarian Intervention, and a forthcoming book detailing the impact of advanced technology on military operations.
So we will begin, first of all, with Richard Haass.
R. Haass: Thank you, Ron.
Good morning and welcome to the Brookings Institution. The way we're going to work this briefing this morning is I'm just going to speak for about two minutes now, then I'm going to turn first to Ivo Daalder, who is going to essentially address two questions: First, how did we get to where we are and, second of all, where might we go from here.
Mike O'Hanlon will then speak next, and he will address the military questions, essentially look at our current military options but also what might be the consequences if NATO decides to embark on a different path.
Let me though just say one or two things now and then again I'll speak after they're done about some of the lessons that we ought to have learned over the last week or so.
We meet this morning, essentially at a time that we are approaching the end of the first week of this phase of the war, and I use the word "war" quite literally. The word "intervention" is sometimes a bit too antiseptic for what this is about.
We have completed phase one, which you might call a period of strategic bombing, aimed essentially to weaken or degrade air defense capabilities, command and control capabilities. This, however, will continue but at a lower level and we are on the eve of phase two which is an increasingly tactical air operation to bring NATO aircraft in closer against targets in and around Kosovo. And Mike O'Hanlon will detail the potential for such a phase and the problems.
Clearly though, the meeting this morning and more importantly all that is going on on the ground takes place against the backdrop about a fundamental question, is the current course of action that NATO is pursuing likely to be enough?
And what we essentially have are various time lines unfolding. On one hand, a NATO time line of various phases of an air war against a Serbian time line which is creating facts on the ground, and the real question for the United States, for the Clinton administration, and for the Congress, the real question for NATO is whether what is being done from the air will have an impact sufficiently soon and to a sufficient degree in order to stop the creation of facts on the ground or, to put it bluntly, will what is being done from the air happen soon enough so there is still a Kosovo and a Kosovo people left to save?
And I think as we meet here today, that is very much an open question. Again, we are on the eve of some awfully large decisions. The purpose this morning is to essentially illuminate the choices and give you our own sense of where the United States and NATO ought to consider going from here.
Let me again first turn to Ivo Daalder.
I. Daalder: Good morning. As Richard said, we're into a major war here and this is a real war as opposed to some of our previous interventions. It is in fact the biggest military conflict in Europe since the end of World War II, some 55 years ago, not an insignificant fact.
More importantly, I am pretty sure that very few people inside or outside the administration thought that, even a week ago, we would be where we are today. Let me plead guilty, I didn't. But here we are.
So that leaves you to address at least two fundamental questions. How did we get into this situation? How do you get into a major war when you didn't think you were getting into one? And now, how do we get out that we are in a major war?
Getting in, let me start with that. We've basically gotten into the situation I think because we have consistently acted too late. We've done the right thing, but only after doing the right thing was no longer enough. Thus, in March 1998, when the crackdown started, we refused to threaten or launch the air strikes that both President Bush and President Clinton had promised would come upon a violent crackdown in Kosovo.
After a summer of bloodshed and a large scale humanitarian disaster in Kosovo, which included a quarter of a million people made homeless within Kosovo, we finally did threaten air strikes in order to get a cease fire and to force the removal of the Serb Army and security forces that have been deployed since the beginning of 1998.
That threat succeeded in getting Mr. Milosevic in October to sign on to an agreement that, in fact, would have imposed a cease fire and let to do a draw of Serb forces. But because the United States, though not its major allies, refused to contemplate the deployment of ground troops in order to oversee the implementation of that agreement, there was no way to ensure that Belgrade was going to live up to what it had said it would live up in October.
By last Christmas, Serbia escalated once again, and what Dick Holbrooke refers to as his civilian army, also known as the OSCE monitors, were able to monitor and witness the fact that the agreement was being broken but had no means to ensure that Belgrade would in fact comply.
So we were forced to consider ground troops, and we did this January, but then limited the ground troops to the circumstances of having a peace agreement to implement. And as negotiations went on in Rambouillet, France, and then failed, mid last month, Milosevic decided to call NATO's bluff. He rejected any option regarding peace and he opted for war. He deployed 40,000 troops and some 300 tanks in and around Kosovo, and the only question was, when would he pounce.
Last week, after Milosevic spurned a final and almost desperate U.S. attempt to get him onboard of a peace agreement, NATO had no choice but to launch the air war that it did. The air strikes, I believe, were launched with the hope, if not the full expectation, that having gone though this one night, perhaps two, Mr. Milosevic would decide that he had had enough and that Rambouillet, after all, sounded pretty good. We now know that that's not going to work.
Instead, what we have a strange situation in which NATO has limited military strategy that is divorced from any real political objectives. Its military strategy is to deter and if necessary to seriously or severely or whatever other adjective you want to use, damage Belgrade's ability to wage war against the Kosovar population.
But the political objective from which we set out here and got involved was to find a solution to the Kosovar problem and how the military strategy is going to do that is left uncertain. In fact, we have sought to calibrate our bombing campaign in such a way that we would bomb enough to get the Serbs out of Kosovo, but not just enough to get Kosovo out of Serbia. It's not working.
We have three options therefore. First, we can bomb a little longer. We can claim victory. We can, in fact, achieve the serious degradation of the military capability that Slobodan Milosevic has. Every tank we hit, after all, degrades his capability. I call this the Greco-Italian option. It is, let's try diplomacy one more time. I don't think that's going to work. It would fundamentally weaken NATO and, more importantly, would undermine U.S. credibility. After all, the president last Wednesday said there is a moral imperative to protect the Kosovar Albanians. Bombing a little longer while what's going on in Kosovo today continues is not likely to meet that moral imperative.
So we can go to option two which is to bomb for the duration. This seems to be the NATO strategy. We will bomb for weeks, for months, as Kosovo burns, in the hope, ultimately, that bombing will turn the Serb people and/or the Serb army against Mr. Milosevic. We see no sign of that happening yet. After all, the Serb people are enjoying their rock concerts in the summery, the near summery places of Belgrade, and the army is pounding away in Kosovo.
I have doubts about this option. One, because I don't believe a long duration bombing campaign is likely to be sustainable within NATO, although I may be proven wrong on that. But, more importantly, NATO may, in these circumstance, well win the war, but it's going to lose the one crucial battle of Kosovo. There will be nothing left by the time we have won the war.
So that leads, inevitably, and this week the big topic is going to be, to option three, which is putting ground forces on the ground. If there is a moral imperative to defend the Kosovar Albanian population, which I believe there is. After all, we did ask these people to put their fate in our hands. Then that moral imperative cannot just extend to air strikes but has to ultimately extend to ground troops.
Now, of course, there are huge obstacles to deploying ground troops. And my colleague, Mike O'Hanlon, will address some. There is the numbers of people we need. There is the near certainty of huge political upheaval on the Hill. There is a public that has not been prepared. There is a NATO alliance where most allies have not really signed up to this prospect.
But then, what if we don't? We will have launched the most major military conflict in Europe since 1945 and lost. We will have lost in the process, Kosovo. And we will have lost in the process the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. For, if NATO cannot do Kosovo, then what can NATO do. And as we move on April 23rd-25th, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of that alliance, that question will haunt the allied leaders who are to meet here.
So my prediction, if past is future, we'll send in ground troops, but we'll send them in too late.
M. O'Hanlon: Thank you, Ivo and Richard. And thank you all for being here.
I want to talk about two topics. One, what are the odds that an air campaign in this so-called phase two mode can now succeed in halting the Serb offensive in Kosovo?
And second, kind of giving you a sense of where my conclusions about the first issue will wind up, assuming that the air war cannot stop this kind of set of atrocities and offensives in Kosovo, what would a NATO ground offensive entail? What would it be likely to accomplish? What might its goals be?
I just want to tick off a couple of the military issues related to each one. Obviously we're discussing the broader political and strategic options throughout the morning and Richard will get into these as well.
On the issue of air power, I simply want to remind you that there are two main sets of targets that are now being discussed in this so-called phase two operation which would be concentrated largely in the area of Kosovo and Serb forces in Kosovo.
One set of targets which appears with increasing frequency in the administration's descriptions of what they want to do are the fixed targets. The major depots, the communication centers, the headquarters. I believe we can do a good job of hitting these targets quite efficiently and in a fairly timely fashion.
There's still the big question of what that will really accomplish vis-a-vis Serb forces in the field. We know that in Iraq, for example, we were not able to fully sever communications between Baghdad and Kuwait, even after many, many days of bombing. And even though Iraqi forces did suffer from a lack of supplies, they were certainly not starved out of their bunkers in the proper sense of the word, even after a month-and-a-half. So, I think we have to be a little bit nervous about this approach, although it is something that in narrow military terms I believe we can accomplish to a large extent.
Also picking up on a theme Ivo mentioned, as a footnote, the fact that Milosevic has now had several more months to prepare for a possible NATO air campaign in Kosovo may have given him the opportunity to bury supplies, to disperse them. We don't know to what extent he has taken advantage of these months of possible NATO air strikes to be able to support his forces from a number of smaller bases within Kosovo which may not be so easily targetable by air power.
The second set of targets is, I believe, a much more difficult set. It begins with heavy armor, such as the 300 tanks that Ivo mentioned a couple of minutes ago. To some extent we can do a fairly good job against these tanks if we can see them and if we can get our weapons to work under the weather conditions that prevail. Neither of those things is trivial, especially the second.
I would remind you that the kinds of weapons we used in Desert Storm against tanks were things such as laser-guided bombs, infrared-guided bombs. All of these things depend on being able to essentially see through the atmosphere, through whatever distance exists between either the targeting airplane or the airplane dropping the weapon and the target itself. So you probably need several miles worth of clear sky. In many cases in the Balkans, you're not going to have that.
To the extent that Milosevic could avoid offensive operation on clear days, he could actually continue even with his tanks over a fairly considerable time. But I do believe that over a number of weeks we can seriously hit his heavy armor. He'll be able to hide a fair amount of it. He will be able to avoid major losses but we will still be able to do some damage. We'll be able to do less damage against smaller weapons.
The administration has made it clear it doesn't really want to target Serb troops, or at least that's not its primary goal. But there's a whole intermediate category. The mortars, the recoilless rifles, the antitank guns, these weapons are extremely effective in ethnic cleansing and they cannot generally be attacked very well by air power because they can't be seen, even on clear days. They can be hidden immediately after being used in most cases.
So I think, in that area of the targets, that we have to be quite pessimistic about NATO's likely effectiveness over time.
Can we, by taking away the Serb armor, essentially allow the KLA, the Kosovar armed forces, to equalize the battlefield? That's a big question. My guess is that no is the answer, that over time we can make the balance a little more equal but it will take a month to do that. In the meantime, there may not be a Kosovo to save, as has been mentioned this morning. And even after that month, my guess is that the Serb forces which start with 40,000 people in Kosovo and 60,000 or 70,000 more in the rest of Serbia will probably still be strong enough to defeat the KLA, even if we act as the KLA's air force.
That's a more open question but my guess is that even if that's your more limited goal, you may not succeed with an air campaign alone. So it will certainly not be fast, and even after a month, it still may not have a fundamental difference in the military balance. Those are my main conclusions about the air war.
Let me just give you one kind of anecdote before moving onto a couple of issues with a possible ground campaign. People talk about Desert Storm and the degree to which the 40-day air campaign really prepared the battlefield, and that's certainly true. But I would remind you that the forces, Iraqi forces that were dug in near the Kuwait/Saudi border were hit quite hard.
Many of the forces which were further north in Kuwait, many of the Republican Guard forces, were only weakened by about 25 percent on average according to the Air Force's own Gulf War Air Power Survey Summary Report, which means that 25 percent attrition after a 40-day air campaign, those forces were losing less than 1 percent of their heavy equipment per day. And here I am focusing just on things like tanks, the relatively easy things to hit, as I've been discussing.
So I think it's realistic to assume that in this situation, maybe we'll do about the same. Our weapons are a little better. Our reconnaissance is a little better than in Desert Storm, but the terrain is a little worse, actually a lot worse, and we will probably be doing quite well if we can manage to attrit just 1 percent of the armor, the Serb armor in Kosovo, per day.
So that's a very slow pace of improvement of the military balance, even to the extent that we can focus on tanks on things like that and make a difference. So, enough about the air campaign.
Let me just kind of tick off four issues with the ground war. I don't want to get into a lot of detail. We can do more in the discussion.
First of all, how big would a force have to be? There's been some casual discussion in the newspaper about broad orders of magnitude. It's very hard to come up with a specific number, but I would say a bare minimum is 75,000 to 100,000 total NATO forces. In other words, the numerical equivalent, more or less, of the Serbian military. And, a more realistic number might even push into the 150,000 total force vicinity.
One way to think about why I come up with that number is that the U.S.-led coalition in Desert Storm had approximately numerical equality with the Iraqi forces in Kuwait. Actually, when you add in everything, when you add in the Syrian forces and the Saudi forces and others who were essentially backing up the operation, the U.S.-led coalition had numerical superiority. But, in rough terms, it's certainly realistic to think we would at least aspire to equality with the overall Serb military, because there's no guarantee that the Serbs are not going to reinforce in Kosovo if we decide to deploy. So I think you're looking at a force of probably 100,000 and maybe more.
Second point, and perhaps even more to the real immediate issue, how long would it take to get the force there and how would we do it? These are extremely difficult questions, perhaps the single most difficult to wrestle with. It's not at all obvious which country in the region would allow us to use bases or would even be able to have enough bases to operate quickly, because clearly speed would be of the essence.
I think we would probably have to use a lot of airlift because sea lift operations from the United States take roughly a month and there may not be enough armor in West Germany. We could, to some extent, use rail lines to bring down U.S. armor from West Germany, but that may not be quite enough in the end, and even that is going to take several weeks. So we're going to need to focus on air power.
That means several things right away. First of all, it means U.S. forces probably need to be the dominant player in this NATO-led operation. No one else has the strategic lift. Even though it's in Europe, most European countries are not even that good at feeder lift. They're certainly not particularly well prepared to operate in a hostile environment, away from their home territory for an extended period of time. So, any discussion of the U.S. planning a supporting role in a ground operation as envisioned under the Rambouillet accords would have to be immediately discarded. This would be a U.S. dominated ground operation in my estimation, with at least half of the forces, and probably even more than that of the transport and logistics capabilities being American.
Even having presupposed that level of U.S. commitment, and even having presupposed an all out air armada essentially, to bring in supplies, perhaps flying in a lot of airplanes into Italy, strategic airplanes, and then smaller feeder aircraft from there into Macedonia and elsewhere, I still think it would take us at least two weeks to begin to have a large enough force to take on the Serbs even in part of Kosovo, because I believe you're probably going to require 20,000 to 30,000 forces, even at a minimum, in a defensive holding perimeter before you have enough force to even necessarily liberate the entire province, or most of it. It would take you probably a couple of weeks simply to establish enough force to be able to feel confident that you can hold your perimeter.
So what's going to happen during that two weeks, obviously that's a huge question. What will happen to the ethnic Albanians? What will happen to NATO's own bases in the region as the Serbs know what we're up to? And people recall the great lesson of Desert Storm, if you're going to fight the Americans, don't let them have a long build-up phase before you do it.
So, it would be a difficult, dicey operation. There would be a period of danger for NATO forces in the early days. It would probably take two weeks, even to get partial protection in Kosovo. If we got lucky, perhaps a week to ten days. But I don't believe the 82nd Airborne and similar units from other NATO countries would necessarily be sufficient, and so we may have to wait kind of for a bigger operation which, as I say, is probably going to take two weeks even to get seriously started.
Third issue, what's the mission for these forces? I hinted at it a moment ago. Initially, I would think to protect the ethnic Albanians in as much of Kosovo as possible, essentially create a safe haven over time to liberate as much of Kosovo as possible. Whether or not independence was the ultimate goal would have to be thought through seriously. I think Richard will discuss some of the political and strategic framework.
My own preference would be not to go for a maximum strategy, not to declare independence as the initial goal, and also the liberation of all of Kosovo. If we declare those two goals initially, I believe the Serbian forces may very well be extremely motivated to fight us very hard.
And that brings me to my third--I'm sorry, my final, and my fourth issue, how many casualties to NATO forces might result? This is a huge unknown. There is no way to quantify this because the big issue is how hard would Serbia fight? And if Serbia says, okay, NATO's coming and they only want to take two-thirds of Kosovo back and we can have some face saving on the issue of autonomy versus independence, at least for a few years, and we can protect some of our shrines and battlefields and churches in the north of Kosovo and keep control of those, so let's not fight too hard.
If that's the Serb attitude, I believe it's entirely possible that we will see extremely low casualties, possibly even just dozens of causalities. You'd have to expect some losses, simply from accidents. This would be an extremely difficult operation, logistically. But I think that kind of an outcome is plausible.
But if Serbia fights hard on the grounds that either out of martyr complex or in the belief that NATO may change its mind if the price is high enough, if Serbia fights hard for either of those two reasons, I believe this war could be as deadly for NATO forces as Desert Storm was for the U.S.-led coalition.
In other words, it could even involve hundreds to low thousands of U.S. causalities with perhaps two to five hundred being killed in action. That's not out of the question by any means if we're looking at a ground war in this situation. If the Serbs simply shot down one troop transport aircraft, we could have 100 killed right there.
So, this is a very serious thing we're discussing. It's a little bit of a grim-faced issue and, as my colleagues were mentioning earlier, increasingly so by the hour. But I do think we have to start facing some of these questions head on.
And also, on a final note, be prepared to consider what military mission makes the most sense for ground forces, because not all ground operations are created equal and some could be much more difficult and much higher casualty in nature than others.
If we can protect the ethnic Albanians without having to go all the way to the northern border of Kosovo, without having to incite the maximum possible Serbian resistance, I believe we should consider such options as one part of our set of potential approaches from this point on.
Thank you.
R. Haass: In case that wasn't all sober enough, let me add, too, a little bit of analysis, and then we'll open it up for your questions.
Let me say something about the lessons of what we've seen unfold over the past week and in some cases over the past year. Let me quickly tick off close to ten of them, because it has consequences not simply for this crisis as it unfolds, but for future U.S. and NATO military interventions.
First and foremost, the time has long since arrived to revisit the entire concept that force should only be used as a last resort. It is hard to exaggerate how pernicious an idea this is. If it's meant as a humanitarian contribution, we have seen, time after time after time, that holding off the application of military force turns out to be anything but a humanitarian ideal. Lives get lost. People lose their homes. And the military options that you do have tend to grow smaller yet more expensive.
So again, if there was one thing that could be revisited is the entire bias against the early use of force in humanitarian crises such as this.
Secondly, we are seeing something very clear about the limits of air power. It is not a panacea. Indeed, we discussed phase two of the air operation and the use of air power in a tactical mode, but the entire concept of close air support suggests that there is something to support.
Tactical air power as an end in itself is limited just as is strategic air power. And the idea that that alone, that we can somehow fight these wars from a distance using standoff weapons and from the air only is unlikely, as we have seen.
Thirdly, and related to that is the inherent difficulty, messiness, choose your word, of civil wars. To put it another way, for us, our stakes are less than vital, or to use a Cold War analogy, these things tend to be simply a square on the chessboard. But for those who are engaged in these conflicts, this is the chessboard. Their stakes tend to be unlimited. It is winner take all, zero sum, what-have-you. And, as a result, it is very difficult for those of us on the outside, who have clearly limited stakes, to necessarily prevail.
Related to that is the difficulty of using coercive force in these conflicts. By coercive force, I mean the idea of using military force to essentially alter the behavior, to alter the strategic calculus of one of the parties, and that's what this is about. The purpose of this force is not simply to defeat an adversary on the battlefield. It's to persuade the adversary to change his behavior, to essentially give it up.
The problem with that is, you leave the initiative in the hands of the adversary and that can work if the adversary's commitment is finite of if the amount of force you can bring to bear is so great that he cannot resist. But here again, we are perhaps seeing some of the limits of the coercive use of military force.
Another lesson is that gradualism or modesty tends rarely to be a good idea. To begin using force for whatever reason at one level, in this case, to clear out all sorts of air defense targets, is militarily understandable. On the other hand, when you act gradually, you give the other side time to retaliate, to create new facts on the ground, and you give the other side an opportunity to psychologically and politically react and compose itself. So gradualism, whatever sense it may make for you, also has in many ways a cost because it gives the other side clear opportunities.
Next is that only relevant force matters. One of the institutes in Europe publishes an annual publication called "The Military Balance," and it lists everything that you have in your arsenal. That doesn't matter a great deal. What matters is the force you can bring to bear effectively in a given combat theater. So the fact that the United States is on paper and has overwhelming military advantages matters not. What matters is simply the force that we are prepared to bring into the theater as opposed to the force the other side is prepared to bring into the theater. So overall tables are not what matters.
Similarly, the new technology is not a panacea. The idea that precision-guided weapons, the entire revolution in military affairs was somehow going to solve the problem of warfare as we end this century and begin the next one is clearly a vast hyperbole.
Again, this is particularly so in places like Kosovo and the former Yugoslavia where you have lots of built up areas. You do not have wide open, flat, sunlit terrain, as you had during Desert Storm, instead you have mountainous areas, villages and cities, cloud cover, rain. And what this does is, it tends to degrade the ability of this high-tech weaponry to play a decisive role.
On our side, politically, the preparation of public and congressional opinion in the United States is obviously very important and I would simply say that it has been inadequate. Public opinion will support interventions where either the interests are vital or the cost can be kept down. What we have in this situation, though, is, at least at the outset, a scenario where our interests are less than vital. They are important but they are clearly less than vital, or at least began that way, and I'll get back to that in a minute, but where casualties now have a potential to go up as well as the financial costs of this intervention. We saw that with the downing or the crash, however it happened, of the F-117.
And what we have seen then is inadequate preparation of the public and the Congress for however this might unfold. It is simply too late to begin the process of public preparation on the eve of the battle. It is the sort of thing that has to begin days and weeks and months, and in some ways, even years in advance, to make the case for this sort of a role for the United States and what it might entail. Instead, what we've had is a pattern of a disconnect between very ambitious rhetoric aimed at our adversaries and very modest rhetoric aimed at our own people. So what it has not done is prepared us domestically for what is likely to unfold.
What we do have, though, as a result of the last few days, I would say is the evolution in our stakes. We began with what I would say were important but less than vital stakes, essentially two-fold. On one hand, humanitarian, the lives of the two million or so inhabitants of Kosovo; and, secondly, strategic, about the security and stability of Europe, the utility of NATO as an instrument in the post-Cold War world.
We have seen both of those stakes go up. We've seen the humanitarian stakes rise. The latest figures are something like 40 to 50 thousand refugees a day maybe being created. We don't have reliable figures on how many people are losing their lives. And secondly, we are seeing the more that NATO gets involved, the more that NATO's credibility is clearly at stake.
But our stakes have also gone up in two other ways. One is that this has now become a test of the United States and NATO, and people around the world will draw their lessons, like it or not, about what the United States and NATO are willing and able to do on behalf of their interests in the post-Cold War world.
And lastly, the other group that will draw a clear lesson from this is the American people. If this intervention goes badly, if this becomes the 1999 version of Somalia or Lebanon, going back to an earlier decade, or Vietnam going back to yet an earlier decade, the repercussions will be tremendous, because what this will do is create a growing alienation between the American people, who begin somewhat disinterested with the role of the United States in the post-Cold War world, and the idea of the United States continuing to act as a great or even imperial power, trying to shape the nature of this world we now find ourselves living in.
So I would simply say that whatever ceiling was on the stakes when we began this a week ago, this ceiling has now moved up. Let me just speak personally, I am never comfortable with the idea that credibility somehow creates an interest and the idea that intervention itself becomes a self-fulfilling escalating interest.
But I think that is also a reality here, and one that we have to factor in. And what this leaves me to think is that either, to put it bluntly, if we are going to use ground forces, and it is increasingly hard to see how we can meet our minimum objectives here without the use of ground forces, it is important that we succeed. So this argues for getting in ground forces, if we are to go this way, as large numerically as possible, as capable as possible, as quickly as possible.
As Mike O'Hanlon suggested, the goal at this point need not be to protect every square inch of Kosovo. We need not necessarily declare ourselves publicly in favor of Kosovo's independence, but it should try to create as large a humanitarian zone or safe haven in Kosovo as well as across the border into Macedonia. And that we might have to, in a sense, secure that area and then play or fight for the longer haul.
But we shouldn't underestimate this. This has become the largest foreign policy crisis of this administration in six-plus years and the stakes have grown tremendously over the past week.
With that.
R. Nessen: Thank you, Richard, and Michael and Ivo, for all that information.
We will now take your questions. We have wireless mikes. Michelle over here and I think Leslie. So if you'll state your news organization and your name, and if you guys will clip on your mikes, we are ready to go.
Start here.
Participant: Steven Gross [sp] with the Danish newspaper--[inaudible]. I have a couple of questions. What does this mean for the future status of Kosovo and international law, and can you see any other consequences for conflicts that run along the same lines in the former Soviet Union and Africa or anywhere else?
And second question is, what are the implications for the NATO summit? Will this influence the strategic concept in any way? And, when you say the future of NATO is at stake, could you elaborate a little bit more?
Thank you.
M. O'Hanlon: Let me take a stab at the first and the third one. On the future status of Kosovo, it seems to me that the moment we went to military action, you have inevitably a de facto independent Kosovo. This was on the table from the very beginning.
The notion that NATO could somehow bomb the Serbs and not be the air force of the KLA has always struck me as, to be blunt, absurd. Every tank we hit is a tank that the KLA doesn't have to worry about. Every artillery piece we hit is an artillery piece the KLA doesn't have to worry about.
We are changing the military bounds on the ground and, as a result, the KLA, which may have signed onto a political agreement in Rambouillet when it didn't see a way out militarily, is going to, over time, see a way out militarily, if we are effective.
If we're not, if Kosovo is going to be emptied out, then the future of Kosovo is going to be the same as its past in the last 10 years which is an integral part of Serbia. It just won't have Albanians living there.
The NATO summit, clearly this is going to be topic one on the NATO summit. It's, in fact, one of the reasons why we got involved in this business. The administration and its allies were not prepared to see a major military confrontation in Kosovo on the eve of the NATO summit. That's why the massacre in Racak on 15 January finally led the administration to say, okay, there are circumstances under which we will put in ground troops.
Clearly, the future of NATO here is at stake, and that had better be reflected in a strategic concept. If NATO today is in the business of extending the security and stability that its members have long enjoyed through areas in Europe that are not secure and stable, as it is by enlarging in its alliance, by engaging in Bosnia and the Balkans, then failing here means that it needs to find a new purpose. And I don't see another purpose than the one in which one engages in the extension of stability and security.
To deter a threat to NATO when we can't deal with the tempete de teabre [sp] in Belgrade strikes me as highly implausible. So, the success of NATO and the summit is going to be fundamentally tied to what we do in the next three to four weeks with regard to Kosovo.
R. Haass: Let me answer the second part of your question about humanitarian intervention and what this says for other areas. I think what we're seeing here in international relations is the evolution of a new doctrine. And basically what we're saying is, sovereignty is not an absolute, but that sovereignty reflects something of a contract between governments and their people, between governments and the governed.
And when the governments violate that contract, when you have repression on a massive scale, the international community has the right or even the obligation to intervene on behalf of the weak and powerless people of that society. That I think I what we're seeing here. It's not unique to this situation. We saw this in other places, say, in Somalia, we saw it in Bosnia, what-have-you.
The form of that intervention can vary. The intervention that the international community takes can be diplomatic. It can be economic sanctions. It can be military force. And, as you have seen here this morning, military force itself can represent an entire spectrum of operations. Intervention is not an either/or type question.
But I don't think you're necessarily going to come up with a doctrine that's going to be consistent, where we're always going to intervene, or we're always going to intervene in the same way. In Chechnya, or a decade ago in Tiananmen Square, the international community didn't intervene or only intervened, you know, with diplomacy, in the case of China, economic sanction. Here we're intervening fairly heavily with air power. In other situations we've intervened with ground forces and we may well here.
I think in each situation you've got to ask yourself a number of questions about the scale of the atrocities. Not every repression, to be blunt about it, is an actual or potential genocide. You've got to ask yourself as to the likely reactions of the parties. You've got to look at the cost of the intervention. You've got to look at how many other countries or organizations are willing to come in alongside you, in a sense, how the burden can be shared. You've got to look at the full range of interest you may have at stake beyond the humanitarian and so forth.
So again, you're not going to have a neat template that's always going to come up with a consistent answer, but you're going to have to ask yourself in every instance the same set of demanding questions in order to figure out what is the appropriate response.
R. Nessen: Yes, back there.
Participant: Paul Courson with CNN. Asking, please, about the long-term and short-term impact on diplomacy between the U.S. and Russia and, as they send an envoy to the region, whether we're missing something as far as the role of diplomacy at this point in time?
M. O'Hanlon: There's two halves to your question. On the question of the United States and Russia, this is clearly contributing to and exacerbating a decline in the state of U.S.-Russian relations. To use a stock market metaphor here for a second, if the U.S.-Russian relationship were a share of stock, clearly its value has gone down over the past several years, and clearly it's gone down somewhat sharply over the past several days and weeks. There is a fairly large divide between us and Russia and how we see this.
I think what we're likely to see on the formal side in Russian response is clearly diplomatic efforts to try to bring this crisis to an end. On a lesser level, I think it's not inconceivable that you will see, for example, some signs of Russian "volunteers" possibly going to help the Serbs in some way, the 1999 version of the Spanish Civil War.
I would not be surprised if you saw some "humanitarian" aid go from Russia, and I think what this is going to reflect is a growing nationalist, anti-American sentiment in Russia, not just among the elites but amongst the people, and we need to recall that this is taking place against an economic free fall in Russia, against the December parliamentary elections, and against next June's presidential elections. And clearly, tapping into the anti-American nationalist chord is something that Russian would-be presidents and would-be members of the Duma are going to compete for.
I think the idea that the Russians might stimulate some diplomacy here, and I'll turn to Ivo for a second to turn to that, is quite possible. I don't think the United States should be in the position of opposing the diplomatic efforts of the Russians or anyone else. But again, we've got to look at any potential proposal and any relationship between diplomacy and military operations. We've got to look at that closely to make sense that what is being offered is not something designed to inhibit Western air attacks or conceivably even the entry of Western ground forces, at the same time, it does little or nothing to frustrate the operations of regular or irregular forces on the ground on the part of the Serbs.
I. Daalder: Let me just add on the diplomatic side. One of the interesting things about Russian diplomacy, up to last Wednesday night, was that together with the United States and the other contact group countries, Russia was right there. It even approved of the threat of bombing; it just was opposed to its implementation. And, after all, we've been threatening bombing for a year, so it wasn't that strange to think that we might not want to implement it this time either.
So diplomatically, where the Russians are is where we are. There's a Rambouillet accord which the Russians helped participate and participated in formulating and negotiating in Rambouillet, and there is a deal on the table, and that deal remains the same. If you want to sign up to this accord, not just its political but also its military elements, which includes the deployment of a NATO-led force, which the Russians have said they would like to participate in, then Mr. Milosevic can tell Mr. Primakov that when Mr. Primakov gets to Belgrade. And if he signs the agreement, the campaign is over.
I wish him all the success. I hope he succeeds, but I think after the last five nights of bombing and the reaction we've had out of Belgrade, I'm not saying that he will.
R. Nessen: Yes, right here.
Participant: I'd like you to talk about the culture of war between the United States and her allies, there appears to be an understanding on the U.S. side that you can achieve this in a bloodless way from the air. That's not the European culture of war. What is it that the U.S. is prepared to do? What is it that it wants Europe to do? Is it the Europeans will provide the grunts? Is that what it might come down to?
I. Daalder: I guess I would start that by saying that conceptually, Europeans are right, but in terms of serious military planning, Americans are right. In other words, Europeans say all the right things but they can't fight away from their home territories for the most part, with the notable exception of Britain and the partial exception of France.
So, theological debates on this matter aren't going to do us much good. At this point we have to think, what are our assets and what are the plausible set of missions, and I think as long as Europeans and Americans talk about these more arcane matters, it's an interesting debate. But right now, we kind of have to say, what are the real options in Kosovo? And at this point we all have to see what we can do to chip in to solve the problems.
Participant: The Europeans are play a part on that in terms of the ground troops is what I'm getting to?
I. Daalder: Europe would certainly have to play a major part as an entity, yes. And I think it can, partly because the location is not that far away. But if you're talking about fighting even further away from European home territory, then you really get down to the British and the French, and even there the contributions are quite limited.
In this case, though, I would certainly hope that, especially if we set up some kind of a rail and road deployment system, which is plausible, perhaps a rail deployment into the Hungary or Bosnia area, followed by some kind of a ground force protected region that is set up in order to allow other ground forces to flow through. If we set something like that up, I believe Europe can play a major role.
M. O'Hanlon: Let me say two things on that, very quickly. It was the Europeans who had forces on the ground in Bosnia for years, however limited their mandate was, before the United States went in. They went in in a non-consensual environment; we would not.
I haven't noticed in European public or lead opinion quite the same allergy to casualties that you see here. So, I would not assume that the drag or the resistance on sending in ground forces would largely come from the other side of the Atlantic. It might be more pronounced here.
Secondly, it might also at that point become necessary to speak about something other than Europe as a collective, or even as NATO. It's not obvious to me that you will necessarily continue to have consent or consensus at that point, and it's clearly not all 19 members of NATO are going to be sending ground forces. A much smaller number are, if we get to that point.
And it's not even clear necessarily that you would even have it done as NATO in a formal sense. It could be done as something like a combined joint task force or even a more ad hoc coalition, because it's going to come down to the few countries who are really able to contribute at that point.
R. Nessen: Yes, right here.
Participant: Ben Barber from the Washington Times.
I'd like to ask Michael a question. I think there are 30,000 troops in Bosnia. Is it any possibility for those troops to move overland into the theater immediately, and how long would that take?
And a question for Mr. Haass, how should the United States prepare the U.S. public for eventuality of taking in ground forces?
And the final question is, if there is going to be such a campaign, wouldn't that involve a massive attack on Belgrade itself and on Yugoslavia? Not on Kosovo, but on the heartland of Serbia if there's going to be a war. How could you limit the war to Kosovo?
M. O'Hanlon: Good question. On the deployment, I think one of the faster ways for NATO to get forces into Kosovo is by using forces in Bosnia as part of the spearhead. However, that's not going to be trivial. For one thing, many of the forces in Bosnia are in Central and Western Bosnia. They have to move tens, if not hundreds, of kilometers through largely Serb-held parts of Bosnia even to get to Montenegro, which as you know is part of the Yugoslav Federation.
So you would have to anticipate the possibility of some resistance, which means you have to marshal your forces before you start to move. You can't just dribble in a few tens or hundreds of people at a time. So I think that operation, without having looked at the details, would probably be on the order of the one week to two weeks, probably closer to the latter, that I mentioned earlier, as kind of a minimum time that you would need to get a fair number of forces into Kosovo.
R. Haass: The question, just to finish, he asked two questions. The other problem, by the way, with moving a lot of forces out of Bosnia is, one wants to keep Bosnia stable and secure. And, at some point, one would have to be careful about the consequences there.
How to prepare the U.S. public? It's a little bit like they used to say about voting in Chicago. You want to do it early and you want to do it often. There's no substitute here for repeated presidential leadership. The Oval office, whether you want to call it the country's best classroom, or the bully pulpit, or whatever image you want, is the only way in times of crisis, and in times of war, that you can begin to have a chance to create adequate public and congressional support.
And both are going to be difficult. Again, you're fighting against massive disinterest. Foreign policy is just not high on the American people's agenda and you're fighting, in this case also, uphill against great concern that this intervention is either not worth it, given the fact that our interests are less than vital, or is unlikely to succeed. And that somehow or whatever that the likely cost, in terms of financial cost and human cost, are going to outweigh the likely benefits. So you're fighting against tremendous discomfort or disinterest or both.
So it would take a level of engagement on the part of the president and his senior officials that we have yet to see in six years in the Clinton administration when it comes to foreign policy. It's the sort of level that perhaps we've seen only, say, when it came to the selling of the health care plan, that this became a concerted, consistent priority of the administration.
Whether attacking Yugoslavia or Belgrade in that context would be the best approach, I have my doubts. That's the sort of strategic campaign that seems to me could conceivably stiffen resistance there, wouldn't materially affect the battlefield in Kosovo. It might create real problems with your allies in Europe and with Russia.
So I would want to think hard about how much a strategic bombing dimension we introduce, rather than focusing most of our energies on essentially creating a viable, humanitarian area in Kosovo.
R. Nessen: Yes.
Participant: [Off mic]--Austria. I have two questions. Some congressman and senators suggested that U.S. should not send ground troops, but they should provide military supplies for the KLA?
The second question is, you mentioned that it's important if there would be a ground war, or ground troops, that the logistics that they are going to go to Kosovo as soon as possible. Austria, obviously, is not a member of NATO, but a member of the EU, and the Partnership for Peace. Obviously, until now, is not willing to cooperate with NATO. Should the U.S. and NATO put some pressure on Austria?
I. Daalder: Let me take both those questions. The notion of arming the KLA makes us feel good but I don't think it has a hell of a lot of impact on the situation on the ground, particularly if it's limited to $25 million, which is not how you fight a major war against the Serbs. So, I think it's a well-intentioned effort that I have no real problem with other than it happens to violate a U.N. embargo. But it's not going to be effective. It's just not going to do the job.
And I think it's somewhat disingenuous to suggest that this is part of your solution when in fact it's just kicking the can down the road and not wanting to face up to the fact that if we want to do anything in Kosovo, we have to have American troops on the ground.
Secondly, with regard to Austria, I think the decision by Austria to close its air space is most unfortunate. I believe that NATO is in the business here, not of doing something that is good for NATO, or just for NATO, but it is good for European security and stability. Last time I looked, Austria was in the middle of Europe. It is surrounded by highly unstable, at least on its eastern side, a highly unstable region. I think it would be in its interest to support efforts, even if it doesn't do so directly, but at least not impede efforts that are designed to ultimately promote its security and stability.
And if Austria would like to join NATO, which many in Austria would like to do, some of us outside of Austria would like it to do as well, this is no way to become a member.
R. Nessen: Dan.
Participant: Dan Schorr, NPR.
The more I listen to the three of you, the gloomier I become. I listen to you, Ivo, say that typically, and I think you're probably right, our intervention decisions are made, if not too little, then too late. Michael, I listen to you on what it takes to mount a multinational force and move it and logistics. And if I put it all together, it's over. We're faced with a fait accompli.
The devastation is completed, and the question then becomes perhaps for NATO at its celebratory meeting next month, the question then becomes, what now? Do we mount a force to go in and liberate Kosovo? What happens after all the things that you've so well, but gloomily predict after all that happens?
R. Haass: I didn't wake up very happily either, I must say. This thing has escalated so quickly, in my view, and in the sense of not just what's happening on the ground but in narrowing the options that we face, and I don't think that we can live with what in effect would be another Bosnia, another decision to say, okay, we'll get away with it this time; i.e., ethnically cleansing Kosovo. We'll deal with the refugees in one way or another, but that's just the way it is.
So, I'm hard pressed to see how at the end of the day, when it is April 25th and the NATO leaders are all sitting in the Reagan Building, that what they're going to say, well, what happened in there, you know, that just happens. It's not our fault. We tried our best. I just don't see how they come to that conclusion.
And the obvious other conclusion is, we're not going to accept it. The status quo is unacceptable. We will have to go in and take over Kosovo again in order to provide--the mound of refugees that are moving into Albania at, what, a rate of 35,000 a day? This is a country where the government doesn't even control its own building, where it sits. This is a massive crisis for any country, but particularly for Albania.
The destabilization in Macedonia that we have because of the large influx of refugees there, where you may get the radicalization of the local Albanian population and the very scenario for which we went to war, at least the president explained we went to war, with the wonderful maps, and I even got confused in the end, but that's what we're facing. We can't accept that at the end of the day.
And, if we do accept it, that celebration we're going to have on April 25th is going to be truly tragic. It's going to mean the end of that alliance.
M. O'Hanlon: I would say, Dan, I would hope the administration would state fairly clearly that Rambouillet as a basis for diplomacy at this point may not be enough, an ironclad minimum requirement is that at least two-thirds to three-quarters of Kosovo not be ethnically cleansed. And, if is, we will do what we have to do to make sure that that is reversed.
So, I believe putting something like that on the table, for one thing, gives us the humanitarian justification, to remind the Russians, is driving our intervention. This is not an anti-Serb policy so much as a pro-ethnic Kosovar, ethnic Albanian policy. And it also draws a firm line for the Serbs.
If we do that and we also threaten the use of ground force to impose it if necessary, I believe there's a very good chance we won't have to, because if we let the Serbs have some face saving out of this and some modest accomplishments on the ground, and that's not a comfortable thing to talk about in American politics, in this century in particular, I think we have a good chance of avoiding the need to carry out these threats.
But I would state that as a requirement very plainly and hope that it helps carry the day.
R. Nessen: Here.
Participant: Alex Spriggs here from the German TV PRO 7.
I'm just wondering, we're having a lot of talks about humanitarian catastrophes. It's a very new situation, because wars up until now have not been fought just for humanitarian reasons, and if we look at the problem in a more cynical way, apart from the humanitarian catastrophe, what is the real strategic reason for entering with ground troops and trying to reverse this situation?
Is it not true that the Serbs, up until now, have actually lost everything they have fought for? They lost Slovenia if you like. They lost Croatia. They eventually lost Bosnia as well. And they will end up losing Kosovo, probably, and maybe Montenegro as well. So, from a strategic point of view, what's the danger for the alliance and for the United States if they don't enter there with ground troops and if they don't reverse the situation, just forgetting the humanitarian catastrophe for a minute?
M. O'Hanlon: Well, it seems to me that the premise of your question is suspect. If the United States and NATO do not do more than they are presently doing, why would Belgrade lose Kosovo? Right now, they're in their process of emptying it of its inhabitants and asserting central government control and, who knows, one day occupation. So unless something more is done, they will have succeeded. So one has to think about the precedent of that. One has to think about the fact that you will have upwards of a million refugees, and the consequences of that, not simply on a humanitarian level, but the threat to stability of several surrounding countries.
And then, as I suggested before, I think the fact that this has gone as far as it has, if the United States and NATO allow this to become a fait accompli, I do think it will have consequences to this organization, maybe not quite as dramatic as Ivo suggested, but any meeting here in a month is going to be awfully hollow.
It would have consequences for how the U.S. is perceived in the world, and one would have to play that out, but places as far afield as North Korea or Iraq, people are going to be taking notes from this. You can't disaggregate everything and think that what you do in one part of the world has no consequences or for your interests in other parts of the world. So I think there are real interests here.
And again, I'm not saying they're necessarily vital. But I think, again, whatever they were a week ago, they're greater today, both humanitarian and non-humanitarian. And, as a result, one has to think now about the costs of not escalating as much as the cost of escalating.
And one of the things I think the three of us here are suggesting this morning is that the costs of not escalating at this point are high. Alas, the costs of escalating at this point are high. There are no good options at this point. I think this is, you know, the judgment call. What I think you're hearing up here is an uneasy consensus that the costs of not escalating at this point are greater than the costs and risks of escalating.
And that what we might need to think about very hard and very fast is a form of ground intervention, not necessarily on behalf of Kosovo's independence, but on behalf of saving lives, on a humanitarian basis, and perhaps creating a large humanitarian zone in some of the neighboring areas but also within parts of Kosovo. And that over time, using perhaps force, using sanctions, using covert tools, using diplomacy, some mixture of the four, to try to regain as much of the territory as you can.
And I think, you know, so you've got an immediate problem to keep the humanitarian nightmare from hemorrhaging completely out of control, which it's on the verge of doing, and then you've got a longer-term problem, coming back to Dan Shore's question, of trying to reverse some of the developments of the last five or six days for reasons of European order as well as global order. That is the task that is before us.
I don't think any of us is underestimating how difficult or expensive it might be. All we are suggesting, one should not underestimate the cost of not going down that path.
R. Nessen: You had a question.
Participant: John Barry, Newsweek.
Can I ask you to speculate, don't just take advantage of 100 percent hindsight but I'd really be interested in your judgment. Two of you have worked in the NSC, and all three of you have experience of coping with NATO.
It is an absolute truism that somebody has to ask questions, yes, what if in doing any forward planning, or if what if doesn't work, what do we do then? It's also quite basic that Milosevic has a history of doubling his bets. When under pressure, that's exactly what he did to clean out Srebrenica and so on.
What happened? I mean, clearly nobody said what if, or if they did, was it just put in the too difficult to handle category and went into the pending basket on some tray somewhere?
It really fascinates me, as an example of somebody not saying, here we have a three-week air campaign, but we know that Milosevic believes he needs one-week to clean Kosovo, or there is a mismatch, isn't there? Surely someone should have asked that. Give me your best judgment about what happens in the NSC, what happened in that?
I. Daalder: Can I duck? Let me speculate into two different directions. One is I do think that, one, the strategy was, if just we threaten enough, he'll come around. And we don't -- you know, this mantra we now have that diplomacy backed up by force seems to assume that we really don't have to look at what it means to implement force. It's just enough to sort of go around with some aircraft, deploy some B-52s, and everybody will be scared. It turns out that's really not what happens because sometimes they'll call your bluff.
And I think Milosevic decided on February, whatever it was, 18th, the day Rambouillet broke up. He said, they're not going to bomb us. I'm going to call your bluff. I'm going to deploy 40,000 troops and I'm going to take over Kosovo. Simple. And he's been at it ever since, which is why he let the monitors go, because it allowed him to do it very quickly.
Secondly, I think we really believed our own rhetoric that said that the only thing that Mr. Milosevic understands is force, with the assumption that if we just use a bit of force, he'll come to his senses. And we really didn't look at what makes Mr. Milosevic tick, which we also know, which is maintaining power.
Strategic bombing is not a way to undermine your local power base. We know. It tends to solidify popular support for the leader, which is what happened. And it's, you know, generally you don't get armies turning against leaders when you attack a country. I think that was a miscalculation.
The what if was done, not in the United States, but at NATO headquarters, I hope. And I will underline "I hope". If we do not have plans on the shelf, whatever we say publicly, about how we send in troops into Kosovo, somebody ought to be fired for gross negligence.
To go around, running in this town and saying we have no plans to send in ground forces is gross negligence. We ought to have plans. We might not have an intention to use them. I don't have any problem with that. But to say that planning is a bad idea is not what the joint staff and certainly not what Wesley Clarke is all about. And my guess is that Wesley Clarke was closer to knowing what was going on, knew that this was a long bombing campaign, and has the plans ready.
M. O'Hanlon: I actually disagree with just one thing Ivo said. It was a throwaway line he made. To say that we have no intention of introducing ground troops also strikes me as having been incorrect. Part of affecting the other side is to lead them to think that the consequences of their own action will lead to great costs, potentially to failure. To be so explicit about what we were not prepared to do made it fairly comfortable for Mr. Milosevic to calculate.
And what's so interesting about this is that it highlights, more than anything else I've seen over the last week, the contradiction here between trying to be an effective world power and trying to reassure the American people it's not going to be expensive. It's very hard to be a world power, a great power, much less an imperial power which is what we pretend to be. It's very hard to be that on the cheap. So if we're constantly trying to reassure the American people what it's not going to cost, we're undermining the deterrent message, the menace in the use of force that's got to be there if we are going to have any chance of using force in a coercive manner or effectively.
So everything we say to reassure the American public and the Congress undermines the force of our words and our actions, but undermines our prospects on the battlefield. And if that contradiction wasn't obvious to everybody before this week, it ought to be obvious now.
R. Nessen: All right. We are going to take about two or three more questions. Right here in the middle.
Participant: My name is Nikolai Zimin from Russian newspaper, Segotnya. It's amazing. It's amazing to hear independence callers as speaking like a representative of the current administration. So, does it mean that because Russia is so weakened now--let me say it this way, the United States is pretending to prevent catastrophe in Europe began the real war there. So, does it mean that now, with Russia weakened, you're not afraid anymore of another Vietnam?
R. Haass: Let me just, on your very first point, say that I'm pretty confident that there is nobody in the administration who thinks that the three of us are doing their bidding at the moment by saying that we ought to send in ground troops, just to be clear about that.
I. Daalder: There's really two separate questions here. Whether this leads, to use your word, to another Vietnam, is something we've been talking about this morning. I don't think any of us are suggesting anything remotely like that, although we are suggesting a potentially difficult and costly intervention if we do end up using ground forces.
Let me just say something about Russia here. The fact that what had been an uneasy collaboration with Russia and the contact group up to a week ago has now clearly led to a breach, I expect gives no one satisfaction, in or out of the administration. It is a troubling development, simply because we have such an important and difficult agenda, apart from this, with Russia, whether it's managing our respective nuclear arsenals, trying to discourage the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, trying to see Russian democracy get on a firm footing, trying to restore Russian economic stability, what-have-you.
So the idea that this crisis has come along and will clearly make it that much more difficult to collaborate with Russia on any of the rest of these gives no one satisfaction, because many of the other things I mentioned truly involve the vital interests of the United States.
And what we're seeing here is a scenario or a crisis that initially did not, and I would say still does not, involve the vital interests of the United States, but it will clearly complicate our effort to work with Russia in those areas that do involve our vital interests.
So the idea that things have reached this point is one of the costs of this crisis and I think it, you know, will, unfortunately, just add to the difficulty of the United States and Russia working out anything like a constructive post-Cold War relationship.
R. Nessen: In the back.
Participant: Seth London, Belo Broadcasting.
One point that some Hill lawmakers have made is that there are many crises which the United States could indeed tackle besides Kosovo, but that there is a preference here because this concerns Europe. I'd like to hear your response to that.
M. O'Hanlon: I'd say two things on that. I think it's true in Europe there are other reasons beyond the humanitarian to get involved. One does have other interests. And in the calculus of intervention, one way is not simply the humanitarian stakes, but one raises the political, economic and strategic stakes.
And the fact that one does have vital interests in Europe, one does have NATO, one does have tremendous economic interests there, and so forth, that adds to the bias in favor of doing something here. One also has partners who are willing and able to work with us. And again, that adds to the bias in favor of intervening.
The fact that on some other occasions we have chosen not to intervene elsewhere, I would simply say, at least on one occasion, which is Rwanda, was a major error of American foreign policy. And indeed, coming back to where we are in this conversation, what you don't do is as important as what you do do, or nonintervention is as much of a policy option with just as many consequences as intervention. So in Rwanda, the fact that the United States and the world community sat on their hands, and somewhere between 500,000 and a million people lost their lives, it shows the tremendous cost of not acting.
Right here, today, we are all, in this room and beyond, obviously preoccupied increasingly with the costs of intervention, and above all with the costs of escalation. And what, again, I think you're hearing from us is, yes, let's be really careful about measuring those costs. Let's think hard about how we design an intervention if we do have to escalate. On the other hand, let us not ignore the costs of not intervening or not escalating because those will be real as well.
R. Haass: Let me just add one small point. I think that the president on Wednesday made a very good case of why this is different than others. He said there is a moral imperative to protect these people because we engaged in a diplomatic negotiation in which we asked these people to put their trust in our hands.
They signed up to the peace agreement we put on the table. They agreed, under that peace agreement, in effect, to disarm, but only if in return they got a security partnership with us and with NATO, and they did get that. For us, therefore, to have said, well, wait a minute, you know, it turns out we really don't believe in it, creates a moral dilemma that is different. However much Sierra Leone or other crises that we all talk about may, in fact, in humanitarian terms be vastly worse, we have not promised the people of Sierra Leone to take care of them. We did promise the people of Kosovo to take care of them. That is a moral imperative.
R. Nessen: And we'll have the last question right here.
Participant: This Secretary of State has been praised at the outset. And this Secretary of State has been praised for her being in office for her being outspoken and using clear and sometimes harsh words. Do you think that this way of having this sort of diplomacy has contributed to the crisis that we're finding ourselves in now?
I. Daalder: I would simply say that this goes way beyond the person of the Secretary of State, but what it does highlight is that words matter. And when the United States government, for not just weeks but months or even years, makes commitments, privately as well as publicly, those commitments carry with them responsibilities.
So when President Bush issues the so-called Christmas warning, when the current administration reiterates its support for it, when it makes all sorts of threats, it then increases the importance that it be prepared to follow through and that it think very carefully about how the other side might react and what following through effectively may entail.
So I would just simply say our words have consequences and what we are seeing now is that at times the administration seems not to have necessarily heeded the consequences of what it was saying to our friends as well as to our adversaries.
R. Nessen: Does the panel have any final comments, Richard?
R. Haass: I think we've talked long enough at this point.
R. Nessen: Well, thank you, too. Richard Haass, Ivo Daalder, and Michael O'Hanlon. They will be available to you as the crisis moves forward to provide you with additional information.
We have some materials in the back, some background materials and also some of the pertinent books that the panel has written, if you haven't seen them already. And you can also check the Brookings website for ongoing information, www.brookings.edu.
Thank you all very much for coming.
[END OF BRIEFING.]