Force Is All That’s Left

A failure of diplomacy, threats unfulfilled, a militant culture underestimated. That troubled trail has brought the United States and its NATO allies to the edge of another war in the Balkans. American pilots will be in the vanguard. It’s right to ask why, and many politicians in Washington are doing that.

“We have done everything we could do to solve this peacefully,” President Clinton said as the last U.S. diplomats left Belgrade empty-handed. Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic rejected their demands that his troops halt their offensive against ethnic Albanian guerrillas in Kosovo province and agree to the political formula for Kosovar autonomy reached in talks near Paris.

“When President Milosevic started the war in Bosnia seven years ago, the world did not act quickly enough to stop him,” Clinton said Tuesday. He’s right. That failure was a fact then and is a fact in Kosovo today. The NATO pilots who are expected to risk their lives over Serbia this week might have been spared the peril had Washington and its allies been quicker on the trigger themselves. Milosevic understands force. That’s clear from the way he uses it.

In refusing the Paris deal, the Serbian leader appeared flexible on the question of some level of autonomy but flatly rejected NATO’s insistence on inserting 28,000 of its troops, including 4,000 Americans, into the province as peacekeepers while political modalities are established. The failure of the NATO plan predictably prompted sharply increased Serbian attacks on Kosovar guerrillas and civilians.

This struggle has deep and antagonistic roots. Diplomats shake their heads wearily at the mere mention of the Balkans, to them a synonym for trouble. Now that trouble encompasses Washington.

As American diplomat Richard Holbrooke flew west out of Belgrade to tell President Clinton of his mission’s failure, Russian Prime Minister Yevgeny M. Primakov, flying west on the same track, reversed course to return to Moscow when Washington said it could give him no assurance that bombs would not be falling in Belgrade while he was in the American capital.

The focus must remain on Milosevic--on what is possible while he remains in power and what is not.

* Limited autonomy for the Albanians in Kosovo could be worked out, despite the bloody conflict of recent months. It would include control of local governmental matters and police. A Kosovar military would be out of the question.

* The proposal for NATO peacekeepers for the province has been thoroughly rejected by Milosevic, and there is zero likelihood that they would be ordered to fight their way in. What would they be fighting for? Kosovar independence? That is not NATO’s job.

The crisis of the splintered Yugoslavia has taken too many lives. The goal for NATO and the White House should be an end to violence. The air assault is strategically necessary. Escalation beyond that is not.