RAPID FIRE - Silver Bullets

The first from that article by Elizabeth Drew (a real journalist who writes for The New York Book Review:

"Much has been made of a single sentence in a long argument that Clark had with General Sir Michael Jackson, the British officer in command on the scene at Pristina airport, who said, "I'm not going to start World War III for you." Clark devoted an entire chapter to the airport incident in his first book, and his account has been confirmed by others. He explains that at first he had the support of the Clinton White House and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well as the secretary-general of NATO, Javier Solana. But when the British refused to support him, largely in response to Jackson's objections, Washington backed down. Clark himself reported Jackson's now-famous hyperbolic line to Shelton as an example of what he saw as an emotional overreaction. [Clinton National Security Adviser Samuel] Berger says, "To say that Wes was reckless is to misunderstand the context; it's an absurd notion."
Read the whole article here (It's good!):
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16795
PDF version available if original link ever dies- Download file

And here's another take on it:
Sending in Russian paratroopers was absolutely unnecessary and extremely provocative. The area was still very volatile and crawling with Serbian paramilitary units. It would have been very easy for the Russians to be mistaken for Serbs by NATO units, especially at night. The airport had no strategic value - Russian officials were making a purely political statement. By the same token, if the airport had no strategic value, why was Clark so concerned? Especially since the Russians were our quasi-allies in this complicated political conflict.

...back in 1999 Russian military officials admitted they were ill-equipped to fight even a limited engagement anywhere in the world. One general wrote in a contemporary Russian military journal that they would have been hard-pressed to field an army of 10,000 troops at the time. Almost assuredly they would have backed off if NATO had called their bluff. Did Clark understand this weakness better than anyone else, and did NATO miss a genuine opportunity to assert its dominance over the Russians? Isn't that the raison d'etre for NATO?

It makes sense that Clark, being the highest ranking military commander in all of Europe and an expert on central Europe, knew better than any person on the planet what the capabilities and tendencies of the Russian army were - that was his job. Clark knew exactly what he was doing and what the risks were. He knew the Russian high command would never risk a humiliating and historical defeat at the hands of the Americans - which even the Russians admit would have been the outcome. Their military machine was on the verge of total collapse in 1999. One strong piece of evidence for that is how the Pristina issue was finally resolved. The 200 paratroopers could not be resupplied and the Americans eventually sent in food and water - essentially a humanitarian mission. That's how pitiful the Russians were. So all in all, I think the doomsday scenario can be discounted, and contemporaneous military observers agree that Gen. Jackson's "WWIII" comments were pure hyperbole.
http://epivox.com/wesleyclark-knoxville/local_editorials.cfm
Download file

Clark's problem was that he was a great general but not always a perfect soldier--at least when it came to saluting and saying, "Yes, sir." In fact, when he got orders he didn't like, he said so and pushed to change them.
>snip

More presciently, Clark was right about the Russians. When fewer than 200 lightly armed Russian peacekeepers barnstormed from Bosnia to the Pristina airport in Kosovo to upstage the arrival of NATO peacekeepers, Clark was rightly outraged.

The result was a humiliation for NATO, a tonic for the Russian military and an important lesson for the then-obscure head of the Russian national security council, Vladimir Putin. As later Russian press reports showed, Putin knew far more about the Pristina operation than did the Russian defense or foreign ministers. It was no coincidence that a few weeks afterward, Russian bombers buzzed NATO member Iceland for the first time in a decade. A few weeks after that, with Putin as prime minister, Russian troops invaded Chechnya. Putin learned the value of boldness in the face of Western hesitation. Clark learned that he had no backup in Washington.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A51403-2000May1¬Found=true

CLARK AND PRISTINA AIRFIELD: I'm disappointed to note that Katrina vanden Heuvel decided to introduce her Nation audience to the hyperbolic allegation that Wesley Clark advocated a dangerous assault on a small group of Russian forces who broke an agreement with NATO by unilaterally occupying Pristina Airfield just after the conclusion of the Kosovo conflict. With all due respect to vanden Heuvel (and I have a lot--there's a reason she's on the blogroll), she seems to be missing crucial elements of the context and as a result has gotten the timeline of the incident wrong. I don't blame Ms. vanden Heuvel personally, as the version of the story she presents in her article has been repeated by many respectable journalists who should also know better. This reason this version gets more play not because it fits the facts, but because it fits Gen. Jackson's infamous quote in his confrontation with Clark, which is evocative mainly because it contains the phrase "World War III."

Unfortunately, this more dramatic account mixes up the order of the events and can only be plausible to people who are largely unaware of the context. Although the West was indeed shocked that the Russians occupied Pristina Airfield, the Russians could not have simply dashed into the airport out of nowhere on June 12. Instead, NATO noticed early on June 11 that something might be up when a Russian battalion with the peacekeeping mission in Bosnia had left its positions on June 10 and was headed toward Serbia. As NATO's political leadership had already been well aware that the Russians were unhappy with how the political negotiations were happening and that some members of their military were advocating moving unilaterally into Kosovo, these movements prompted NATO to began considering a variety of responses to the Russians' troop movements.

As such, Clark received authorization from NATO chief Javier Solana as well as U.S. Joint Chiefs Vice-Chair Joe Ralston to devise a plan to occupy the airfield in advance of the Russians' arrival. However, the planning was shelved because the politicians ended up believing Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov's assurances that the battalion would stop at the Serbian border--including a promise he had personally given Madeleine Albright that morning. It remains unclear to this day as to whether Ivanov was lying or outside of the loop. Meanwhile, Russia's diplomatic struggle to obtain overflight rights from Hungary and the Ukrane had already begun and they ended up losing to NATO. So the Hungarians' denial of overflight rights was already in effect before the Russians were in place at the airfield (see The Kosovo Conflict: A Diplomatic History Through Documents for Albright's June 11 statement about Ivanov's promise and other official pronouncements).

When the Russians actually occupied the airfield on June 12, NATO initially wanted to place troops and armored carriers on part of it to block it--not to storm it--because there was a relatively low risk of a confrontation at the airfield--which was large and occupied by only a token force--whereas there might be a very serious risk if the Russians decided to force their way through Hungarian airspace. Then the Hungarians and NATO would be faced with deciding whether to shoot down Russian transports. Much better, Solana and U.S. leaders had reasoned, to avert such a grave situation by making it impossible to land Russian reinforcements in Kosovo. As SACEUR, Clark's job was to develop and implement this plan. However, because NATO is an alliance that work on consensus, every nation possesses a de facto veto over how its troops can be used (also known as a "red card"). In this case, the bulk of the available forces were British, and Jackson decided that he disagreed strongly enough with the policy that he wanted to exercise London's veto. When the two generals consulted their political masters, Washington reversed course--probably more as a result of a desire to placate London and the rest of NATO than out of a fear of provoking Moscow.

Who was ultimately correct here? You might argue that Jackson was correct because they ended up resolving the situation diplomatically without needing the particular operation Clark had ordered. But we have empirical evidence that nothing close to a serious confrontation would have occurred had Clark's orders gone through: several days later, with the situation at Pristina still pretty much the same, both Clark and Jackson authorized French and British units to take positions at the airport. The troops got there. The Russians denied them access. Everyone stood around and radioed back to their commanders for further instruction. Then the NATO units left. Lo and behold, no one got shot. No massive diplomatic crisis. No World Wars began.

Whether the Pristina Airfield story repeated by right-wing Clinton/Clark haters, extreme leftists who still insist that Milosevic was a just and democratic leader, or mainstream journalists eager to present a dramatic story but unwilling to do the legwork to check the facts, it's clear that the only reason it has any legs is because of Jackson's pithy but entirely hyperbolic quote. I was heartened to see that Ms. vanden Heuvel at least made reference to Clark's side of the story, but given what we know about the actual history of situation, her choice to give the dramatic but implausible alternative top billing is surely incorrect. Furthermore, I am perplexed that she would use this incident to characterize Clark as someone who needs learn how to build alliances rather than risk showdowns. Considering that Clark's well-known support for NATO and international institutions have grounded his consistent and thoroughgoing critique of the Bush Administration's foreign policy, and have made him a target for conservatives, vanden Heuvel's angle of attack seems very odd indeed.

I can only assume that vanden Heuvel hasn't been following Clark closely and isn't aware of his foreign affairs positions, and is simply running with a meme that The Nation picked up along with its general opposition to the Kosovo intervention. The Nation is a publication that has an honorable history, and I have confidence that it and its normally very capable editor will have the integrity to investigate both Clark and this story a little deeper and to develop positions that have a better grounding in the facts.
http://antidotal.blogspot.com/2003_09_14_antidotal_archive.html#106364517252030920

Gen Jackson criticized by Kosovo report
http://www.agitprop.org.au/stopnato/19991018nato3.htmReferring to Gen Sir Mike Jackson, the commander of Kfor, the report says: "ComKfor's intent was not always transmitted with sufficient detail and co-ordinating instructions. Even when detail was requested from Kfor it was not always forthcoming. This led to improvisation at brigade level and a consequently asymmetric effect within Kfor as different brigades made their own interpretations."

Confusions also occurred through unclear divisions of responsibility between each Nato country's own national headquarters and alliance headquarters in Brussels. "The division of responsibilities between national and Nato operational chains of command took some time to become clear," says the report.

Brig Freer was in charge of the Parachute Regiment and Gurkha soldiers who were the first, apart from special forces, to enter Kosovo, on June 12. The report, prepared for the Ministry of Defence's comprehensive "lessons learnt" exercise on the Kosovo war, and copied to Gen Jackson, is unusually strong criticism of the command structures in the operation. Because there was little or no Serb opposition to the arrival of the Nato peacekeepers, the failings identified were not fatal.
....
The report supports recent testimony to the United States Congress by Gen Wesley Clark, Nato's overall commander during the Kosovo campaign. In July, Gen Clark told congressmen that the Alliance was "hamstrung by competing political and military interests that may have prolonged the conflict".

Even last week, RAF chiefs admitted that they still had no idea exactly how much damage had been done. "We don't know how many tanks were destroyed and we will have no way of knowing," said Air Vice Marshal Jock Stirrup, the assistant chief of the air staff.

World: Europe
German to assume K-For command
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/444350.stm
German General Klaus Reinhardt is to replace Britain's General Sir Mike Jackson as commander of Nato's Kosovo peacekeeping force, K-For.