Kosovo war has gone horribly wrong

Remember the day - it seems so far off now - when the war started? When NATO missiles first hit Serbian targets even those with a weak stomach for killing were convinced by the something-must-be-done principle. On March 24th the issues seemed as clear as Hitler and Nazism in the hindsight of the Allied victory. Milosevic offered an opportunity to atone for appeasement in the Munich Agreement. In the fact of the horrific suffering being inflicted on the Kosovans, only the cynics or the lily-livered could evade the moral imperative.

Any doubts were dispelled by the stark opposition of good and evil, and the urgency of a task which could not wait for the interminable debates at the UN or the dithering of the EU. The humanitarian aims of the NATO strike could not have been announced more persuasively; the military means of achieving them seemed proportionate, necessary and limited.

It is easy to be wise after war. But even in March doubts were raised about the gamble which the NATO action entailed for the Albanians trapped in Kosovo. It appears now that NATO military chiefs knew of Milosevic's intentions, but their request for contingency planning in the form of ground troops was overruled by the politicians. Madeleine Albright was in a hurry.

Neither did it escape the doubters that April 23rd was scheduled to celebrate the 50th anniversary of a military organisation which had never been tested in war, and which needed the icing of its first military victory to decorate the cake. Four weeks should be enough to fix the problem.

Four weeks, $5 billion and hundreds of innocent deaths later, it has all gone horribly wrong. As NATO expands its targets to ensure that the territory under Milosevic control is scorched, it is NATO, not the Serbs, which draws the bordering states into the Balkan cauldron in a self-fulfilling prophecy of realist logic.

The arrogance which dismissed Russia as a partner in the search for a diplomatic deal - which might have saved Milosevic but would also have saved Albanians the misery inflicted on them - underlines the divisiveness at the heart of NATO's strategy for European security. Those of us who, yet again, were persuaded that something must be done and NATO must do it, now find ourselves committed, in Jonathan Eyal's terms, to "a policy which is quite frankly idiotic".

It is to misread the evidence available to point the finger of blame for this idiocy at the military. It was the military chiefs, not the politicians, who warned of the foolishness of underestimating Milosevic and whose advice to match the air attack with plans for ground troops was dismissed by politicians in a hurry to score the cheap political point.

Gen Wesley Clark, NATO's military commander for the Kosovan conflict, may not be everyone's ideal as a peacemaker but he is in the Gandhi class compared with Albright, Clinton and Blair, who between them have treated the Kosovo crisis like Biggles in a scrape.

There is a logic to the latest phase in the conduct of this politicians' war. It emerged in the Washington spectacle of politicians and military chiefs urging each other to repeat, "We are winning, he is losing", and in the now more hesitant, but still resolute, rejection of Russia's offer of mediation. It is the logic of institutional survival.

The political opportunism, which began as a by-product of the humanitarian aim of the war, has now become the overriding purpose of the Kosovo crusade. Whatever it costs, NATO must survive. NATO itself has become the war aim, to which the humanitarian needs and the long-term security of Europe must be subordinated.

The message that NATO must win or disappear could not be misinterpreted at its anniversary declarations of solidarity and purpose. "We are fundamentally there", announced Clinton, "because the alliance will not have meaning in the 21st century if it permits the slaughter of innocents on its doorstep".

"We cannot afford to lose this one", said Jamie Shea, NATO's spokesman. "We have invested too much time, too much effort . . . NATO has an obligation to be successful".

So much is at stake now that, almost certainly, NATO will win, Milosevic will blink and Albright will kick ass. The immediate price of changing the political aim is to change the military means. A war sold to the West on the basis of a quick fix through American know-how and technological precision, has now degenerated into more traditional violence.

If NATO must win through the chaos to which it has contributed, then the targeting must change. It is the logic of Bomber Harris, the controversial second World War air commander, in which only the innocents of one's own side are strictly collateral.

Bill McSweeney teaches international politics at the Irish School of Ecumenics