Anonymous ID: 5d6f0d Sept. 4, 2020, 11:40 a.m. No.10527678   🗄️.is đź”—kun   >>7693 >>7883 >>7940 >>8087 >>8147 >>8153 >>8240 >>8246 >>8279

Blunder in the Balkans

 

The Clinton Administration’s Bungled War against Serbia

 

The Clinton administration has made one miscalculation after another in dealing with the Kosovo crisis. U.S. officials and their NATO colleagues never understood the historical and emotional importance of Kosovo to the Serbian people, believing instead that Belgrade’s harsh repression of the ethnic Albanian secessionist movement in Kosovo merely reflected the will of President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia. The administration’s foreign policy team mistakenly concluded that, under a threat of air strikes, the Yugoslav government would sign a dictated peace accord (the Rambouillet agreement) to be implemented by a NATO peacekeeping force in Kosovo. Even if Milosevic initially refused to sign the Rambouillet agreement, administration leaders believed that Belgrade would relent after a brief “demonstration” bombing campaign. Those calculations proved to be disastrously wrong.

 

President Clinton and his advisers justified their decision to use force with two arguments: that NATO bombing was needed to prevent a Serbian military offensive in Kosovo with attendant “ethnic cleansing,” and that vigorous action was essential to prevent the Kosovo conflict from spilling over into neighboring states, thereby destabilizing the southern Balkans. Administration leaders also hoped that NATO pressure would undermine Milosevic’s political power and embolden the democratic opposition in Serbia. The bombing campaign has been wholly counterproductive with regard to all three objectives.

 

https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/blunder-balkans-clinton-administrations-bungled-war-against-serbia