When I ordered our armed forces into combat," said President Clinton in his televised victory speech announcing the end of the Kosovo campaign, "we had three clear goals: [first] to enable the Kosovar people . . . to return to their homes with safety and self-government." Return them? There were virtually no refugees at the time he ordered the attack. The mass expulsions occurred after NATO began bombing.
In fact, on the day he did order the armed forces to attack, Clinton gave this as the clear goal in another televised address to the American people: "We act to protect thousands of innocent people in Kosovo from a mounting military offensive."
Transmuting the fundamental aim of a war from "protect" to "return" was not merely a lie but, characteristically for Clinton, both brazen (he had announced the original policy just eleven weeks earlier before an audience of millions) and unnecessary. He could simply have stated how determined the allies were to see the Kosovar refugees returned. He did not have to say that it was his objective from the very beginning.
But perhaps it was not so unnecessary. It allowed him to conceal the fundamental failure that underlay the later victory. That failure was a failure of means.
The war was meant to prevent the humanitarian catastrophe that began hours after the NATO bombs started falling. That catastrophe might have been averted - the Serbs deterred from ethnically cleansing the Albanians - in one of two ways: either by pure deterrence (the mere threat of bombing) or by early surrender (a bombing campaign so devastating as to paralyze the Serb will to retain, let alone ethnically cleanse, Kosovo).
Pure deterrence was the original Albright plan and expectation at Rambouillet. It failed because Clinton - late of Iraq and Korea and of endless empty threats against Serbia itself - had no deterrent credibility.
