Balkan Ghosts: Mistakes of the Clinton team, mistakes of the Bush team.

In 1999, President Clinton took the United States into war confident that Slobodan Milosevic would yield in a matter of days. The Serb forces were more like gangs of roaming thugs than a real army. And as for Milosevic's regime, it was essentially a criminal enterprise, lacking real legitimacy. Who would be willing to die for such a cause?

But Clinton and his lieutenants misgauged both their adversary and the character of the war on which they had embarked. The Serbs, by husbanding their air defenses, breaking up into small units, and concealing their heavy weapons in villages, proved to be an elusive quarry. Rather than seeing the start of Operation Allied Force as a sure sign of their coming defeat, they used it as a pretext to accelerate a vicious campaign of ethnic cleansing, creating a flood of refugees that caught the U.S. and its allies flatfooted. Worse, whatever their views on Milosevic, the Serbian people turned out to feel even less kindly toward the foreigners bombing their country. Massive anti-American and anti-NATO demonstrations filled the streets of Belgrade.

With resources far exceeding those of tiny Serbia, the United States and its allies eventually prevailed. But doing so required not a limited air campaign of a few days, but eleven weeks of increasingly intense bombing. To break Serb resistance, Clinton ordered sustained attacks on Belgrade itself, producing images very much at odds with the war's proclaimed humanitarian rationale. Victory entailed the killing of several hundred Serb civilians.

In all, the war -- and the occupation of Kosovo that followed -- proved to be a far more complicated affair than had been anticipated or advertised. Though Clinton refused to acknowledge the fact, it qualified at best as something of a Pyrrhic victory, with NATO  solidarity badly frayed, China up in arms over the bombing of its embassy, and the returning Kosovars launching a campaign of anti-Serb ethnic retribution.

Conservatives expected that the return of Republicans to power would change all of this. A plainspoken, no-nonsense George W. Bush took the place of the erratic, undisciplined Clinton. The national-security team that Bush recruited -- led by Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, and Condoleezza Rice, and supported by deputies like Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Armitage -- came to office with gilt-edged resumes. Effective January 20, 2001, it was felt, amateur hour would come to an end.

Then came Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Let there be no mistake: Just as Clinton won his war in Kosovo, Bush will win his in Iraq. Only a lapse in political resolve could change the outcome, and President Bush shows no signs of cracking. But, no matter what the White House and Pentagon say, this administration -- like its predecessor -- seriously misjudged both its adversary and the character of the war itself. Indeed, to an embarrassing degree, its errors actually parallel those of the Clintonites in Kosovo.

The projected lightning campaign became something more akin to a slugging match. American and British troops had expected to be hailed as liberators; instead they met impressive resistance. A conventional fight (always the American strong suit) assumed a disturbingly unconventional cast as irregulars and even suicide bombers harassed rear areas. "What we were really hoping," commented a chagrined U.S. Marine general a week into the ground war, "was to just go through and everyone would wave flags and stuff."

As that expectation faded and the tempo of the Anglo-American advance on Baghdad slowed, the Bush administration suddenly faced the prospect of a more protracted, more costly, and more destructive war. And while the final outcome was never in doubt, the political consequences of the war began to look increasingly problematic. Billed as an essential first step toward bringing democracy to the entire Middle East, Operation Iraqi Freedom seemed increasingly likely to harden Arab antagonism against the United States.

How could the shrewd and hardheaded strategists of the Bush administration have fallen prey to errors that, during the Clinton era, they had loudly (and rightly) denounced?

First, and especially in the realm of precision technology, we have allowed ourselves to become too clever by half. As with Clinton in the Balkans, so too with Bush in the Persian Gulf. Thus, in spite of frequently voiced threats to employ overwhelming force, the plan actually implemented by U.S. Central Command strongly hoped that a calibrated strike would suffice to topple Saddam Hussein's regime. "Decapitation" combined with "shock and awe" would from the outset render the enemy essentially unable to orchestrate serious resistance. A corrupt, rotten regime would collapse from within. For all practical purposes, the enemy would succumb even before the battle was fully engaged.

This was a bold and imaginative conception of warfare. But it met with only partial success, at best. As a practical matter, whether or not the initial strikes killed or wounded Saddam Hussein, the Ba'ath regime soon regained its bearings and its control over Iraqi forces. Even the most sophisticated precision weapons have not turned war into a precise and predictable business.

Second, we credit ourselves with a capacity not only to measure but also to manipulate the enemy's willingness to fight. Like the Clinton team in Kosovo, the Bush administration convinced itself that no sane person would willingly risk loss of life or limb to defend a "doomed regime." In this instance, the Pentagon orchestrated a psychological operations effort unprecedented in scope and duration to persuade Iraqis to do what Secretary Rumsfeld called the "honorable thing" -- that is, to lay down their arms.

Again, the results fell well short of expectations. After all, surrendering without a fight in the face of a foreign invader is the very antithesis of soldierly honor. Moreover, history is replete with examples of people dying in very large numbers for doomed regimes, even for remarkably bad causes like Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. The truth is that until the shooting starts, we haven't a clue about the level of resistance we will face.

Third, to make operational problems more manageable, we tend to simplify the political context in which those operations are to occur - - that is, to subordinate political to military considerations. This invites wishful thinking: The issue is seen as one of good versus evil, with other nations expected to set their course accordingly.

In Turkey, however, this simplified political context plainly did not wash. Both domestic political developments (the recent election of a quasi-Islamist government) and security considerations (longstanding concerns about potential Kurdish autonomy) loomed at least as large as the threat posed by Saddam. The result was a major diplomatic setback: Washington failed in its efforts to persuade Ankara to let U.S. forces stage through Turkey into northern Iraq. That failure, in turn, dealt a crippling blow to U.S. plans to draw a noose of mechanized forces around Baghdad, and necessitated an operational pause so that other heavy formations could arrive to reinforce the overstretched Third Infantry Division.

Again: None of these errors is likely to change the war's final outcome (whose timing we cannot know). But the opening phases of Operation Iraqi Freedom ought to temper conservative expectations about just what "marrying American military power to American ideals" can accomplish, and at what cost.