OF SEVERAL MINDS.

A NEW KIND OF WAR

Only civilians are killed

A student's letter to a Paris newspaper observed that NATO has created something without precedent in human history: a war in which only civilians are killed. To be exact, the observation should be amended to say: "only Kosovar civilians" (in principle). The exceptional incidents in which NATO operations have killed Serb civilians have been treated by command, press, and NATO governments as scandalous exceptions requiring apologies to the Serbs. The apology is that in ground attacks from 15,000 feet up, mistakes can happen. NATO's pilots would be in danger if they flew under 15,000 feet.

On the other hand, Kosovar civilians die and are brutalized daily, but protecting them is not a part of this phase of NATO's operations. When NATO reaches the phase in its program when attacking Serbian forces from less than 15,000 feet is deemed safe, Slobodan Milosevic's police and terrorists are likely to have emptied Kosovo of its ethnic Albanians. That is his program. He is much closer to success than is NATO.

What is going on is a freakish mutation of war. Serb forces cleanse Kosovo of its ethnic Albanians, expelling the population, by plausible accounts murdering men and raping young women, with virtually no opposition from NATO. NATO is bombing air defenses, electric plants, bridges, empty barracks and other objectives of strategic warfare, because this is the war it planned. The fact that these bombings have no possibility of seriously affecting what is going on in Kosovo (before it is too late to make a difference) has no apparent effect upon the NATO command or upon the political council that sets NATO priorities.

NATO has its own war. The Serbs have theirs. Eventually Serbia will have no more bridges or refineries. Kosovo will have no more people. Since NATO's announced purpose is to defend the Albanian population of Kosovo, Milosevic will have won.

This strategic bombing spares pilots risk, which for some years has been the principal responsibility assigned to U.S. commanders-hence of the NATO command, which the United States dominates. NATO's rationale for fighting the war which suits its human and equipment priorities is that, logically (the logic of Pentagon planning), these attacks will so punish the Serbian leadership as to make it (in turn) logical for it to abandon its program of ethnic purification- the very program that has kept Milosevic in power for the last decade. Strategic bombing is supposed to persuade him to withdraw his forces from Kosovo. This will create the "permissive environment" NATO seeks, in which its forces can enter Kosovo as peacekeepers rather than fighters.

In recent days there have been reports, denied but plausible, that NATO ground forces nonetheless are being prepared for Kosovo-implying that NATO's repeated denials of ground intervention have been deception. Unfortunately, there is reason to doubt that these forces will be committed to combat. My own pessimistic interpretation-which I hope will be disproved-is that the 82nd Airborne has gone to Albania to protect the U.S. Army's Apache helicopters, and the Apache helicopters are in Albania to protect the 82nd Airborne and associated NATO forces.

It seems likely that these and other troop reinforcements are being prepared to defend Albania against Serbian intrusion, possibly to establish enclaves of refugee camps in zones of Serb-ceded "permissive environment" inside Kosovo, and to try to stabilize the extremely dangerous situations in Macedonia and Montenegro, already under attack from forces loyal to Belgrade. If such a non- combat deployment were eventually accompanied by negotiated or de facto partition of Kosovo, the outcome would be one which some in Washington think could, meretriciously, be presented as a NATO victory. Presentation is all.

Yet there still is time for NATO to redeem itself (and confound the pessimism I have expressed) by launching serious land operations to expel Serbian forces from Kosovo, and reestablishing the deported Kosovars in what remain of their homes-the avowed NATO objective. The NATO powers might still declare, and make, Kosovo an international protectorate, autonomously governed, whose eventual status would remain subject to broad international determination and negotiation with a Belgrade successor-government.

But the window of opportunity is closing, and the NATO public awaits leadership. Clear majorities of opinion exist today in most NATO countries in support of ground intervention. Such majorities are fragile, but what destroys them is evidence of futility. Success reinforces them.

What they are being given is evidence of futility: incompetent planning, tactical sterility, inadaptability on the part of NATO, shameful preoccupation with the security of its own forces at the expense of those the campaign was meant to protect, and repeated tactical defeat by Milosevic. If the Yugoslav president's forces are not cleared from Kosovo, he will have won this war, whatever spin Brussels and Washington try to place on the outcome. The twentieth century will have ended with a bang, a prospect NATO's macabre "celebration" in Washington neither conceded nor prevented. n

(c) 1999, Los Angeles Times