ALLIED MISCALCULATIONS AND FALSE HOPES

To begin with, despite the ultimate success of Allied Force, a mis‑judgment of near‑blunder proportions came close to saddling the United States and NATO with a costly and embarrassing failure: NATO’s leaders did not appreciate the historical and cultural importance of Kosovo to the Serbs and the consequent criticality of Kosovo to Milosevic’s continued political livelihood. Fortunately for the allies, their faulty assessment was not a show‑stopper, although it easily could have been had Milosevic refrained from launching his ethnic cleansing campaign and instead merely hunkered down in a defensive crouch to wait out the bombing in a contest of wills with NATO. Once he elected to raise the stakes by proceeding with Operation Horseshoe, however, NATO’s determination to prevail at all cost deprived his strategy of any foundation it may previously have had.

One reason for NATO’s overconfidence that air power alone would suffice in forcing Milosevic to yield on Kosovo was almost surely a misreading of the earlier Bosnian war and the role of Operation Deliberate Force in producing the Dayton accords of 1995. As has been widely noted since Allied Force ended, Bosnia was a part of the former Yugoslav Federation where Milosevic generally got what he wanted and to which he was not particularly deeply attached. In the negotiations that eventually yielded the Dayton accords, Milosevic succeeded in keeping Kosovo unburdened by their strictures at the price of abandoning Sarajevo to the Muslims, in a direct and outright betrayal of his Bosnian Serb compatriots, because there was no significant Serb minority living there.

In contrast, Kosovo was generally acknowledged to be of profound historical importance for Serbia. Among other things, it contained Kosovo Polje, the site where the Ottoman Turks defeated the Serb kings in 1389. As journalist Michael Ignatieff has pointed out, “it was here that the Kosovar lands passed under Turkish Ottoman control for more than five centuries; it was here that the Serbian dream of reconquering Kosovo one day was born, a dream not realized until just before World War I. And it was here, in 1989, that Milosevic held his infamous rally of 250,000 supporters which launched his campaign for a Greater Serbia.”[403]With that depth of commitment, it was all but inconceivable that Milosevic would be talked out of Kosovo by allied diplomacy, even if supported by a threat of NATO bombing which he was inclined, for good reason, not to take seriously.[404]

Expounding further on the erroneousness of assuming that Operation Allied Force would produce the same relatively quick and easy results that the earlier Operation Deliberate Force had produced in the Bosnian crisis of 1995, Adam Roberts noted that “the mythologizing of [that earlier] campaign ignored one inconvenient fact: that it followed a period of sharp Serb military reverses on the ground, including the mass expulsion of the Serbs from the Croatian Krajina. Also, the 1995 bombing was not against Serbia proper, and thus did not arouse the same nationalist response as would the bombing in 1999. The real lesson of those 1995 events might be a very different one: that if NATO wants to have some effect, including through air power, it needs to have allies among the local belligerents and a credible land‑force component to its strategy.”[405]A false assumption that air power alone had produced the Dayton accords may thus have contributed further to NATO’s miscalculation that Milosevic could be induced to give up in Kosovo after merely a few days of token bombing.[406]Aleksa Djilas, son of the Yugoslav cold‑war dissident Milovan Djilas and an able intellectual in his own right, attested from first‑hand knowledge that the West had “badly underestimated the Serbian attachment to Kosovo.”[407]In light of that, rather than ask why it took so long for NATO’s bombing to coerce Milosevic to back down, a more appropriate question might be why he yielded as quickly as he did.