“We need a Europe that is safe, secure, free, united, a good partner with us for trading. … That’s what this Kosovo thing is all about.”-President Clinton, speech to American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, March 23.
“What if someone had listened to Winston Churchill and stood up to Adolf Hitler earlier? How many people’s lives might have been saved?”-Clinton, AFSCME speech, March 23.
“We’re coming close to starting World War III.”-Sen. Ted Stevens, floor statement, March 23.
“We have plans for a swift and severe air campaign. This will be painful for the Serbs. We hope that, relatively quickly, … the Serbs will realize that they have made a mistake.”-Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon, briefing, March 23.
“North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces have initiated military action against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. … The military objective of our action is to deter further action against the Kosovars and to diminish the ability of the Yugoslav army to continue those attacks, if necessary.”-Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen, DoD briefing, March 24.
“I don’t see this as a long-term operation. I think that this is something … that is achievable within a relatively short period of time.”-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, PBS “Newshour,” March 24.
“If NATO’s invited to [send a peacekeeping force], our troops should take part, … but I do not intend to put our troops in Kosovo to fight a war.”-Clinton, address to nation, March 24.
“This is in fact NATO’s attempt to enter the 21st century as global policeman. Russia will never agree to it.”-Russian President Boris Yeltsin, Kremlin statement, March 24.
“We’re going to systematically and progressively attack, disrupt, degrade, devastate, and, ultimately–unless President Milosevic complies with the demands of the international community–we’re going to destroy these forces and their facilities and support.”-Supreme Allied Commander Europe Gen. Wesley Clark, NATO briefing, March 25.
“These bombs are not going to do the job. It’s almost pathetic. You’re just going to solidify the determination of the Serbs to resist a peace agreement. You’d have to drop the bridges and turn off the lights in Belgrade to have even a remote chance of changing Milosevic’s mind. What you’ll get is all the old Vietnam stuff–bombing pauses, escalation, negotiations, trouble.”-Sen. John McCain, New York Times (NYT), March 25.
“It was always understood from the outset that there was no way we were going to stop these paramilitary forces who were going in there and murdering civilians in these villages.”-Clark, CNN interview, March 26.
“We are on the brink of a major humanitarian disaster in Kosovo, the likes of which have not been seen in Europe since the closing stages of World War II.”-Allied spokesman Jamie Shea, NATO briefing, March 28.
“We’re in it, and we have to win it, and we have to do whatever is necessary in order to ensure that this is not a failure. … That means that we have to exercise every option. … We must win this conflict with whatever it takes.”-McCain, ABC’s “This Week,” March 28.
“I don’t know if we can do it without ground troops.”-Gen. Michael Ryan, USAF Chief of Staff, NYT, March 28.
“We never thought we could stop this. You can’t conduct police actions from the air in any country.”-Clark, press interview, March 29.
“We miscalculated. We thought when the bombing started Milosevic would play the victim, not turn into Adolf Hitler Jr.”-Unnamed US official, NYT, March 30.
“I think right now it is difficult to say that we have prevented one act of brutality at this stage.”-Bacon, DoD briefing, March 30.
“That [possibly running out of certain munitions] is something that we do worry about. We have a supply now, but it won’t last forever.”-Bacon, DoD briefing, March 30.
“He’s hurting. We know that he is running short of fuel. We’re now starting to hit him very hard on the ground. … You will start to see the resolve starting to crack very quickly.”-Air Commodore David Wilby, NATO briefing, March 31.
“The thing that bothers me about introducing ground troops into a hostile situation, into Kosovo and into the Balkans, is the prospect of never being able to get them out.”-Clinton, CBS “60 Minutes II,” March 31.
“We may not have the means to stop it, but we have shown we have the will to try.” -NATO Secretary General Javier Solana, NYT, March 31.
“We clearly intend to loosen his grip on power and break his will to continue and, as weather permits, to chip off his assets in Kosovo. If we start to chip away at the institutions that keep him in power, he may think it over.”-Gen. Klaus Naumann, then chairman of NATO Military Committee, NYT, April 1.
“[In a 1998 NATO study of troops needed for a ground invasion], the numbers came in high. No one said yes, no one said no; it was taken off the table. … It was a complete eye-roller.”-“Senior Administration official,” Washington Post (WP), April 1.
“When you fly less than 50 bombing sorties per day for seven days, you’re not serious about what you’re doing. At best, it’s sporadic bombing.”-Retired USAF Gen. Buster Glosson, key figure in Gulf War air campaign, Associated Press, April 1.
“The ring is closing around the Yugoslav armed forces.”-Solana, NATO briefing, April 1.
“I’m surprised we didn’t bomb it [the downed F-117 fighter, because the standing procedure has always been that, when you lose something of real or perceived value–in this case, real technology, stealth–you destroy it. … Once you get the pilot out of there, you blow the thing to smithereens.”-Retired USAF Gen. John Michael Loh, former head of Air Combat Command, Defense Daily, April 2.
“We are prepared to sustain this effort for the long haul. Our plan is to persist until we prevail. … Let me be clear. The ethnic cleansing of Kosovo cannot stand as a permanent event.”-Clinton, remarks to press, April 5.
“I think we wish we had a larger inventory of certain types of weapons. There has been significant utilization of some of our more advanced cruise missile systems.”-Deputy Secretary of Defense John Hamre, speech in Philadelphia, April 6.
“So far, we haven’t heard complaints from the CINCs, that I know of, that they can’t do the mission. … So as we speak today, the readiness of the US military has not been really affected by this. We have the capability to cover all the regions as we speak today. The number of US aircraft in theater is nothing near the total aircraft or military capability we have today in the US military. Even though it is a fairly sophisticated, a fairly large commitment, we still have a significant amount of forces [in] reserve that can handle the two MRCs.”-USAF Maj. Gen. Charles Wald, DoD briefing, April 6.
“This is no time to pause. … We will reject any settlement that freezes the result of Milosevic’s genocide and rewards him for his brutality.”-Cohen, April 7.
“This is war as waged by humanitarians, idealists, and the flotsam of the counterculture. This NATO war machine is being directed by whom? By a German foreign minister from the pacifist Green Party. By the head of NATO, Javier Solana, who vigorously opposed his nation’s entry into NATO lest Spain develop close military ties to the United States. By an American secretary of state who supported the nuclear freeze and opposed the Gulf War. And by an American President who–well, forget his military history.”-Columnist Charles Krauthammer, WP, April 8.
“We’ve been officially reassured at a high level that Russia will not be drawn into the conflict in the Balkans.”-White House spokesman Joe Lockhart, Reuters, April 9.
“They want to bring in ground troops. They are preparing for that. They want simply to seize Yugoslavia to make it their protectorate. We cannot let that happen to Yugoslavia. … I told NATO, the Americans, the Germans: Don’t push us toward military action. Otherwise, there will be a European war for sure and possibly world war.” -Yeltsin, televised statement, April 9.
“NATO early on made an assessment … as to what [number of ground troops] it would actually take to do the job, and those numbers varied from lows down in the twenties–20,000 or so–up to a couple of hundred thousand.”-Gen. Hugh Shelton, JCS Chairman, ABC’s “This Week,” April 11.
“Russia is an absolutely essential player in the search for peace with Belgrade. We must respect its desire to play a constructive role in the security and stability of our continent.” -French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine, WP, April 13.
“This campaign has the highest proportion of precision weaponry that’s ever been used in any air operation anywhere. … [NATO is] using almost all precision strike weapons when the targets are point targets, and in some cases we’re actually attacking individual tanks on the ground with laser-guided weaponry. The reason for this is it’s a very efficient means of attack, it reduces collateral damage, and it reduces the continuing exposure of aircraft going after the same target.”-Clark, NATO briefing, April 13.
“We can’t have troops passing out blankets one day and then tell those same forces to conduct combat operations the next. You’ve got to train the force. You’ve got to prepare them.”-Retired Army Gen. George Joulwan, former SACEUR, WP, April 14.
“I would characterize the [rules of engagement] as as strict as I’ve seen in my 27 years [in the] military. … The rules have been, and are, that, unless you’re 100 percent sure in your mind what you’re hitting … you won’t drop.”-Wald, DoD briefing, April 14.
“All the suggestions–‘Did you consider this? Did you consider that?’ We did.”-Albright, statement to a House committee, April 15.
“The military mission … is to reduce, diminish, degrade the military capability that Milosevic’s forces have to conduct their campaign of brutal repression.”-Cohen, Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC), April 15.
“We could sit on the sidelines. We could fold our arms and say, ‘It’s not our problem.’ But I think that that would have been a real challenge to our own humanity.”-Cohen, SASC, April 15.
“We’re certainly engaged in hostilities. We’re engaged in combat. Whether that measures up to, quote, a classic definition of war, I’m not qualified to say.”-Cohen, SASC, April 15.
“Limited actions beget limited results.”-McCain, SASC, April 15.
“If the public knew our state of readiness, or our lack of readiness, there would be an outrage out there. The fact that we are roughly at one-half the force strength that we were in 1991–How many people know that?”-Sen. James Inhofe, SASC, April 15.
“I’d say Milosevic has lost. He’s losing his military infrastructure and his ability to sustain his forces. He’s losing his air defense system slowly but surely. We see signs of lower morale, evidence of desertions, leadership gaps, command-and-control problems. It’s not over. … We’re in the first 25 minutes of a two-hour movie. You can’t predict how it’s going to end.”-Bacon, WP, April 18.
“We won’t serve as a postman. We won’t deliver NATO’s ultimatums to Belgrade. That is not our mission.”-Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov, statement, April 26.
“Of course, [we] may have one flaw in our thinking. … Our flaw may be that we think [Milosevic] may have at least a little bit of responsibility for his country and may act accordingly, because otherwise he may end up being the ruler of the rubble.”-Naumann, statement to Defense Writers Group (DWG), April 26.
“We are winning. Milosevic is losing, and he knows it. He should face up to this, and he should face up to it now.” -Clark, NATO briefing, April 27.
“Step by step, bit by bit, we are cutting off his ability to reinforce or to sustain his forces easily down in Kosovo. Of course he can still walk them in through the gullies and the rivers and so forth, and it is never going to be complete, but it is certainly complicating their life down there.”-Clark, NATO briefing, April 27.
“He’s bringing reinforcements in continually. If you actually added up what’s there on any given day, you might actually find out that he’s strengthened his forces in there.-Clark, NATO briefing, April 27.
“We have never said that we can fight two wars simultaneously. What we have said is that we would want to structure our resources in a manner so that we can unequivocally fight one major regional contingency–a war–and to be able to have enough resources to deter our opponent from accomplishing [its] objectives in a second theater until we can clean up the operation in the first and move resources to take care of the second. … And I think we do have the resources for it. But right now, we’re committing the equivalent of the MRC worth of air assets for this operation.”-Hamre, to Senate appropriations committee, April 27.
“What good has been accomplished so far? Absolutely nothing. What long-term goal will be accomplished by having our troops there? None, unless you’re willing to occupy all of Yugoslavia.”-Rep. Tom DeLay, House Majority Whip, floor statement, April 28.
“There are deep reservations in the Congress about the prosecution of this war. It’s been screwed up from the first day.”-Rep. Heather A. Wilson, floor statement, April 28.
“The Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told us that this was no big deal, that we were going to bomb for a couple of days, 48 hours, and then stop bombing, and Milosevic would come to the table. When asked the question, ‘What if he does not come to the table?’ they said, ‘Well, we will go to Phase II, and Phase II is that we will bomb for a few more days. Then he will be going to the table, by crackie.’ And then we asked, ‘Then what?’ Then they said, ‘Well, we will bomb for another week and that will force him to come to the table and this will be all over with.’ And then we asked, ‘Then what?’ There was silence.”-DeLay, floor statement, April 28.
“I say to my colleagues, we have a war in Yugoslavia. We can call it whatever we want, but it is a euphemism unless we recognize it is a war. It is an unmitigated disaster. Our and NATO’s involvement in this war is an unmitigated disaster. That is the ugly truth, and everybody knows it. They certainly know and talk about it in the Pentagon.”-Rep. Doug Bereuter, floor statement, April 28.
“Clinton is a better communicator than anyone else. Once Clinton decides that’s what he’s going to do [to negotiate an end to war with Milosevic], he’ll sell it. If Nixon could sell the fall of Saigon as peace with honor, Clinton can sell this.”-“Senior Administration official,” NYT, April 29.
“Airpower works best when it is used decisively. Shock, mass are the way to achieve early results. Clearly because of the constraints in this operation, we have not been able to, haven’t seen that at this point.”-Gen. Richard Hawley, ACC commander, statement to DWG, April 29.
“We are going to be in desperate need, in my command, for a significant retrenchment in commitments for a significant period of time. … I think we have a real problem facing us three, four, five months down the road in the readiness of the stateside units.”-Hawley, DWG, April 29.
“We have no interest in destroying more targets in Serbia than is absolutely necessary. We dislike using power, really.”-Gen. Christian Hvidt, Danish chief of defense, NYT, May 2.
“We clearly can do two major theater wars. Now, if you had something happen in the Gulf, and if you had something happen in Korea, then we would have to make a decision.”-Gen. Joseph Ralston, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, NBC’s “Meet the Press,” May 2.
“The fact that the lights went out across 70 percent of the country, I think, shows that NATO has its finger on the light switch in Yugoslavia now, and we can turn the power off whenever we need to and whenever we want to.”-Shea, NATO briefing, May 3.
“We can have a bombing pause if it’s clear that it will be in aid of [a] larger purpose.”-Clinton, news conference, May 3.
“I don’t think you can characterize [the Administration goal] as ‘total victory.’ That’s not what I’m asking for.”-Clinton, news conference, May 3.
“The President of the United States is prepared to lose a war rather than do the hard work, the politically risky work, of fighting it as the leader of the greatest nation on Earth should fight when our interests and values are imperiled. … Shame on the President if he persists in abdicating his responsibilities, but shame on us if we let him.”-McCain, floor statement, May 4.
“We need to find a way to reconcile the conditions of a coalition war with the principle of military operations such as surprise and overwhelming force. We did not apply either in Operation Allied Force, and this cost time, effort, and potentially additional casualties.”-Naumann, NATO briefing, May 4.
“The mission is to pin them down, cut them off, take them out. … We have pinned them down, we have pretty much largely cut them off, and are about to begin to take them out.”-NATO spokesman Maj. Gen. Walter Jertz, NATO briefing, May 6.
“Let there be no doubt: This war must be won. … The overriding justification for military action is quite simply the nature of the enemy we face. We are not dealing with some minor thug whose local brutalities may offend our sensibilities from time to time. Milosevic’s regime and the genocidal ideology that sustains it represent something altogether different–a truly monstrous evil, one that cannot be merely checked or contained, one that must be totally defeated. … There are, in the end, no humanitarian wars. War is serious and it is deadly. Casualties, including civilian casualties, are to be expected. Trying to fight a war with one hand tied behind your back is the way to lose it. We always regret the loss of lives, but we should have no doubt that it is the men of evil, not our troops or pilots, who bear the guilt.”-Margaret Thatcher, Wall Street Journal op-ed article, May 6.
“It’s not a conventional thing, where one side’s going to win and one side’s going to lose.”-Clinton, remarks to press, in Germany, May 6.
Additional Verbatim Special: The Balkan War (not published in magazine)
“There’s no assurances that we won’t lose aircraft in trying to take on those air defenses…. There is a distinct possibility we will lose aircraft in trying to penetrate those defenses.” —Gen. Michael E. Ryan, USAF Chief of Staff, Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC), March 18 “Will the strikes achieve an end? What is that end? What happens if they do not come to the table? What happens if he uses this as a reason to attack? What is the end game? How long will the strike go? Will our Allies stay with us the entire time? … We could be getting into a very dangerous situation.” —Marine Gen. Charles C. Krulak, SASC, March 18 “We need a Europe that is safe, secure, free, united, a good partner with us for trading. … That’s what this Kosovo thing is all about.”—President Clinton, speech to American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, March 23. “What if someone had listened to Winston Churchill and stood up to Adolf Hitler earlier? How many people’s lives might have been saved?”—Clinton, AFSCME speech, March 23. “We’re coming close to starting World War III.”—Sen. Ted Stevens, floor statement, March 23. “We have plans for a swift and severe air campaign. This will be painful for the Serbs. We hope that, relatively quickly, … the Serbs will realize that they have made a mistake.”—Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon, briefing, March 23. “I am concerned that we are making a mistake. I don’t believe you can bomb a country into submission and force them into a peace agreement that they determine is against their interest. I don’t think you can bomb a country and say we are going to bomb you until you agree to have stationed 28,000 troops in your homeland. And this is Serbian homeland, and if you go back centuries, fighting has been going on in this country for centuries.” —Sen. Don Nickles, floor statement, March 23. “North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces have initiated military action against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. … The military objective of our action is to deter further action against the Kosovars and to diminish the ability of the Yugoslav army to continue those attacks, if necessary.”—Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen, DoD briefing, March 24. “I don’t see this as a long-term operation. I think that this is something … that is achievable within a relatively short period of time.”—Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, PBS “Newshour,” March 24. “Today, we and our 18 NATO Allies agreed to do what we said we would do, what we must do to restore the peace. Our mission is clear: to demonstrate the seriousness of NATO’s purpose so that the Serbian leaders understand the imperative of reversing course; to deter an even bloodier offensive against innocent civilians in Kosovo; and, if necessary, to seriously damage the Serbian military’s capacity to harm the people of Kosovo. In short, if President Milosevic will not make peace, we will limit his ability to make war.” —Clinton, address to nation, March 24. “We have acted with resolve for several reasons. We act to protect thousands of innocent people in Kosovo from a mounting military offensive. We act to provide a wider war, to defuse a powder keg at the heart of Europe that has exploded twice before in this century with catastrophic results. We act to stand united with our Allies for peace. By acting now, we are upholding our values, protecting our interests, and advancing the cause of peace.” —Clinton, address to nation, March 24 “If NATO’s invited to [send a peacekeeping force], our troops should take part, … but I do not intend to put our troops in Kosovo to fight a war.”—Clinton, address to nation, March 24. “Our mission is clear—to demonstrate the seriousness of NATO’s purpose so that the Serbian leaders understand the imperative of reversing course, to deter an even bloodier offensive against innocent civilians in Kosovo and, if necessary, to seriously damage the Serbian military’s capacity to harm the people of Kosovo.” —Clinton, address to nation, March 24. “Our strikes have three objectives: First, to demonstrate the seriousness of NATO’s opposition to aggression and its support for peace. Second, to deter President Milosevic from continuing and escalating his attacks on helpless civilians by imposing a price for those attacks. And, third, if necessary, to damage Serbia’s capacity to wage war against Kosovo in the future by seriously diminishing its military capabilities.” —Clinton, public statement, March 24. “This is in fact NATO’s attempt to enter the 21st century as global policeman. Russia will never agree to it.”—Russian President Boris Yeltsin, Kremlin statement, March 24. “We’re going to systematically and progressively attack, disrupt, degrade, devastate, and, ultimately—unless President Milosevic complies with the demands of the international community—we’re going to destroy these forces and their facilities and support.”—Supreme Allied Commander Europe Gen. Wesley Clark, NATO briefing, March 25. “These bombs are not going to do the job. It’s almost pathetic. You’re just going to solidify the determination of the Serbs to resist a peace agreement. You’d have to drop the bridges and turn off the lights in Belgrade to have even a remote chance of changing Milosevic’s mind. What you’ll get is all the old Vietnam stuff—bombing pauses, escalation, negotiations, trouble.”—Sen. John McCain, New York Times (NYT), March 25. “I’m not going to speculate on what future targets could be, but just to say that President Milosevic and his military leaders should understand that there is no sanctuary for them, their military forces, their command and control elements, as this campaign continues because they’re part of the mechanism of the Serb military and security forces and they’re oppression and so that’s the intent of that language.” —Clark, remarks to reporters, March 25. “It was always understood from the outset that there was no way we were going to stop these paramilitary forces who were going in there and murdering civilians in these villages.”—Clark, CNN interview, March 26. “We are on the brink of a major humanitarian disaster in Kosovo, the likes of which have not been seen in Europe since the closing stages of World War II.”—Allied spokesman Jamie Shea, NATO briefing, March 28. “We’re in it, and we have to win it, and we have to do whatever is necessary in order to ensure that this is not a failure. … That means that we have to exercise every option. … We must win this conflict with whatever it takes.”—McCain, ABC’s “This Week,” March 28. “I don’t know if we can do it without ground troops.”—Ryan, NYT, March 28. “For the last 10 years, Milosevic has been trying to end the rights of the Kosovar people. … Before, he was doing it with impunity. We are now making sure that he pays a very heavy price. … I think that it is just simply an upside-down argument to think that NATO or we have made this get worse. Milosevic is to blame; he is the one who is making it worse. What we were trying to do is make sure that he pays the heaviest price for what he is doing. But I think it must be very clear that to say that this has now backfired is just dead wrong.” —Albright, CBS’s “Face the Nation,” March 28. “We never thought we could stop this. You can’t conduct police actions from the air in any country.”—Clark, press interview, March 29. “We miscalculated. We thought when the bombing started Milosevic would play the victim, not turn into Adolf Hitler Jr.”—Unnamed US official, NYT, March 30. “I think right now it is difficult to say that we have prevented one act of brutality at this stage.”—Bacon, DoD briefing, March 30. “That [possibly running out of certain munitions] is something that we do worry about. We have a supply now, but it won’t last forever.”—Bacon, DoD briefing, March 30. “Before, Milosevic could do this [ethnic cleansing] with impunity. Now he is paying a price and obviously we want to make that price as high as we possibly can to stop this terrible violence and suffering. Of course there are no instant solutions and I’d like to warn everybody against expecting an instant solution. … We all know President Milosevic’s record but I think that even we have been shocked by the sheer proportions of what we see happening in Kosovo today. I don’t think anybody could have anticipated that it would be quite as bad as it seems now to be becoming.” —Shea, NATO briefing, March 30. “He’s hurting. We know that he is running short of fuel. We’re now starting to hit him very hard on the ground. … You will start to see the resolve starting to crack very quickly.”—Air Commodore David Wilby, NATO briefing, March 31. “The thing that bothers me about introducing ground troops into a hostile situation, into Kosovo and into the Balkans, is the prospect of never being able to get them out.”—Clinton, CBS “60 Minutes II,” March 31. “We may not have the means to stop it, but we have shown we have the will to try.” —NATO Secretary General Javier Solana, NYT, March 31. “We clearly intend to loosen his grip on power and break his will to continue and, as weather permits, to chip off his assets in Kosovo. If we start to chip away at the institutions that keep him in power, he may think it over.” —Gen. Klaus Naumann, then chairman of NATO Military Committee, NYT, April 1. “[In a 1998 NATO study of troops needed for a ground invasion], the numbers came in high. No one said yes, no one said no; it was taken off the table. … It was a complete eye-roller.”—“Senior Administration official,” Washington Post (WP), April 1. “When you fly less than 50 bombing sorties per day for seven days, you’re not serious about what you’re doing. At best, it’s sporadic bombing.”—Retired USAF Gen. Buster Glosson, key figure in Gulf War air campaign, Associated Press, April 1. “The ring is closing around the Yugoslav armed forces.”—Solana, NATO briefing, April 1. “After one week of our air operations, I am confident that we are having a major impact on Belgrade’s criminal war machine. We are degrading its ability to carry out the current acts of violence in Kosovo.” —Solana, NATO briefing, April 1. “Those of us who’ve grown up in liberal democracies have a hard time truly appreciating what’s happening right now in Kosovo. It’s a grand combination of terror and ethnic cleansing on a vast scale. It’s being perpetrated largely against defenseless civilians by the last vestige of a hard-core communist dictatorship in Europe. Man does not do this to his fellowman.” —Clark, NATO briefing, April 1. “We never considered this a race. I said from the outset it was a systematic, progressive attack, degradation, disruption of their military machine and security machine. It was not a race. It was an effort designed to slow down, block ultimately, to deter further action or, should that fail, to inflict on President Milosevic the loss of those assets which he prizes very highly. That effort continues, and, as far as the race is concerned, as I’ve looked at the battlefield on the ground, through our many, many information sources in there, it’s going to be a long time before people in Kosovo give up their desire to live in autonomy and democracy in their own land. So I think that there’s a little bit of mythology going on about how fast the Serb forces are working on the ground, and I’d advise you not to be taken [in by] it.” —Clark, NATO briefing, April 1. “We’ve always said, from the outset, that airpower alone cannot stop paramilitary murder on the ground, and that’s what’s going on down there. We know that, and it’s been well-recognized.” —Clark, NATO briefing, April 1. “How can we win the hearts and minds of the people of Yugoslavia if we destroyed the [historic Belgrade national] palace?” —A “NATO official,” NYT, April 1. “I’m surprised we didn’t bomb it [the downed F-117 fighter], because the standing procedure has always been that, when you lose something of real or perceived value—in this case, real technology, stealth—you destroy it. … Once you get the pilot out of there, you blow the thing to smithereens.”—Retired USAF Gen. John Michael Loh, former head of Air Combat Command, Defense Daily, April 2. “The challenge of just using airpower is that you leave it in the hands of your adversary to decide when he’s been punished enough. So the initiative will remain with President Milosevic.” —Retired Army Gen. Colin Powell, former Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, remarks to press in Blacksburg, Va., April 3. “Let me reiterate that the President has said that he has no intention or plan of sending in ground forces in anything but a permissive environment. … That is what I’ve been saying. … What we are doing is systematically diminishing or degrading his ability to have that kind of control over the area.” —Albright, NBC’s “Meet the Press,” April 4. “The military action is not consistent with the rhetoric. Their plans require the approval of the political arm of NATO, the military arm of NATO, and then officials in Washington. With all those bottlenecks, the chance of success is small.” —Glosson, NYT, April 4. “NATO’s plan had never envisaged beginning the air campaign with a massive application of air bombardment. This was not the start of a war where we were determined to win as quickly and as harshly as possible to overwhelm his entire military forces.” —Air Marshal Sir John Day, deputy chief of British defense staff, NYT, April 4. “We are prepared to sustain this effort for the long haul. Our plan is to persist until we prevail. … Let me be clear. The ethnic cleansing of Kosovo cannot stand as a permanent event.”—Clinton, remarks to press, April 5. “I think it’s safe to say that I don’t think anybody [in the US Joint Chiefs of Staff] felt like there had been a compelling argument made that all of this was in our national interest.” —A “senior officer,” WP, April 5. “Are we hitting the fielded forces on the ground hard enough? The answer is, we are just starting to hit them. … We have ramped up the number of sorties that we are doing, and we are prosecuting and taking the fight to them very hard, and I think you will find very direct results coming very shortly.” —Wilby, NATO briefing, April 5. “What we are doing is dealing with a crisis that President Milosevic created. The refugee crisis is not a result of the NATO bombing; it’s the reason NATO bombed.” —State Department spokesman James Rubin, briefing, April 5. “The task here is to make sure it [NATO’s bombing of targets in Yugoslavia] doesn’t crowd out important domestic issues.” —Joe Lockhart, White House spokesman, US News & World Report, April 5 (4-12 issue). “I think we wish we had a larger inventory of certain types of weapons. There has been significant utilization of some of our more advanced cruise missile systems.”—Deputy Secretary of Defense John Hamre, speech in Philadelphia, April 6. “So far, we haven’t heard complaints from the CINCs, that I know of, that they can’t do the mission. … So as we speak today, the readiness of the US military has not been really affected by this. We have the capability to cover all the regions as we speak today. The number of US aircraft in theater is nothing near the total aircraft or military capability we have today in the US military. Even though it is a fairly sophisticated, a fairly large commitment, we still have a significant amount of forces [in] reserve that can handle the two MRCs.”—USAF Maj. Gen. Charles Wald, DoD briefing, April 6. “We will have plenty of time to go back and look at what we did or did not do.” —Albright, remarks at the Brookings Institution, April 6. “It is already clear that the crisis in Kosovo cannot have a happy ending. Even if NATO eventually succeeds in allowing the refugees to go back, well over 1 million people have been displaced. A massive legacy of hatred will exist in the Balkans, spilling over from Serbia and Kosovo into Albania, Bosnia, Croatia, Macedonia, and Montenegro. There will be a prolonged problem with Russia, and the need for a whole new exercise in containment to block Serbia from future military action. If NATO does not succeed, nearly 2 million Muslim Kosovars will suffer, the Balkans are up for grabs, and the credibility of NATO and peacekeeping in general will be severely undermined.” —Military analyst Anthony H. Cordesman, in an April 6, 1999, report on Operation Allied Force. “This is no time to pause. … We will reject any settlement that freezes the result of Milosevic’s genocide and rewards him for his brutality.”—Cohen, Brussels press conference, April 7. “We have always known that the campaign would be difficult and time consuming, and I emerged from my meetings [at SHAPE] this morning and this afternoon convinced that NATO indeed intends to stay the course.” —Cohen, Brussels, April 7. “From my discussions with General Clark, it is clear that NATO forces are beginning to inflict increasing damage on Yugoslav forces that are responsible for the deaths and devastation in Kosovo. This is no time to pause.” —Cohen, Brussels, April 7. “Whatever General Clark feels he needs in order to carry out this campaign successfully, he will receive.” —Cohen, Brussels, April 7. “As we contemplated the use of force over the past 14 months, we constructed four different models. One was that the whiff of gunpowder, just the threat of force, would make [Milosevic] back down. Another was that he needed to take some hit to justify acquiescence. Another was that he was a playground bully who would fight but back off after a punch in the nose. And the fourth was that he would react like Saddam Hussein [who rode out Gulf War attacks in 1991 and since]. On any given day, people would pick one or the other. We thought the Saddam Hussein option was always the least likely, but we knew it was out there, and now we’re looking at it.” —A “senior official,” WP, April 7. “This is war as waged by humanitarians, idealists, and the flotsam of the counterculture. This NATO war machine is being directed by whom? By a German foreign minister from the pacifist Green Party. By the head of NATO, Javier Solana, who vigorously opposed his nation’s entry into NATO lest Spain develop close military ties to the United States. By an American secretary of state who supported the nuclear freeze and opposed the Gulf War. And by an American President who—well, forget his military history.”—Columnist Charles Krauthammer, WP, April 8. “We’re going to progressively intensify and tighten the pressure. I’m looking at various means to augment those forces, … both reconnaissance and strike, and various other things [that could produce] vastly increased assets.” —Clark, WP, April 8. “From the outset, this operation never had more vision than the next day. I think President Clinton has been very poorly served by his foreign policy advisors.” —Sen. Robert Torricelli, NYT, April 8. “I don’t buy the idea that our credibility is at stake—vs. what? The credibility of NATO vs. losing 5,000 American troops? That doesn’t make any sense to me.” —Sen. Pete Domenici, Albuquerque Journal, April 8. “Serb radio and television is an instrument of propaganda and repression. It has filled the airways with hate and with lies over the years and especially now. It is therefore a legitimate target in this campaign.” —Wilby, NATO briefing, April 8. “We’ve been officially reassured at a high level that Russia will not be drawn into the conflict in the Balkans.”—Lockhart, Reuters, April 9. “They want to bring in ground troops. They are preparing for that. They want simply to seize Yugoslavia to make it their protectorate. We cannot let that happen to Yugoslavia. … I told NATO, the Americans, the Germans: Don’t push us toward military action. Otherwise, there will be a European war for sure and possibly world war.” —Yeltsin, televised statement, April 9. “NATO early on made an assessment … as to what [number of ground troops] it would actually take to do the job, and those numbers varied from lows down in the twenties—20,000 or so—up to a couple of hundred thousand.”—Gen. Hugh Shelton, JCS Chairman, ABC’s “This Week,” April 11. “I’m not a student of Milosevic, in terms of psychology, but my own instinct is, don’t count on how he’ll react in any given situation. I would plan for the worst with Milosevic, like with Saddam Hussein. My recommendation was, ‘Let’s be prepared to go with as much as we can, as fast as we can.’ ” —Cohen, WP, April 11. “We thought the Serbs were preparing for a spring offensive that would target KLA strongholds, which had also been reinforced in previous months, but we never expected the Serbs would push ahead with the wholesale deportation of the ethnic Albanian population.” —Clark, WP, April 11. “We will not be taken in by Milosevic’s half-truths and evasions, and we must resist the temptation to seek a premature peace. Clearly, Milosevic is trying to divide us, but we will not be divided. We are wedge-proof.” —Albright, remarks to North Atlantic Council ministers in Brussels, April 12. “This is America at its best. We seek no territorial gain. We seek no political advantage. We have promised, if we are part of a multinational force in Kosovo, we will protect the Serb minority with exactly the same vigilance as we stand up for the Kosovar Albanian majority. This is America trying to get the world to live on human terms.” —Clinton, remarks at Barksdale AFB, La., April 12. “Russia is an absolutely essential player in the search for peace with Belgrade. We must respect its desire to play a constructive role in the security and stability of our continent.” —French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine, WP, April 13. “This campaign has the highest proportion of precision weaponry that’s ever been used in any air operation anywhere. … [NATO is] using almost all precision strike weapons when the targets are point targets, and in some cases we’re actually attacking individual tanks on the ground with laser-guided weaponry. The reason for this is it’s a very efficient means of attack, it reduces collateral damage, and it reduces the continuing exposure of aircraft going after the same target.”—Clark, NATO briefing, April 13. “This has been an extremely unimaginative and in some ways lackadaisical campaign.” —Eliot Cohen, Johns Hopkins University, Wall Street Journal (WSJ), April 13. “We can’t have troops passing out blankets one day and then tell those same forces to conduct combat operations the next. You’ve got to train the force. You’ve got to prepare them.”—Retired Army Gen. George Joulwan, former SACEUR, WP, April 14. “I would characterize the [rules of engagement] as as strict as I’ve seen in my 27 years [in the] military. … The rules have been, and are, that, unless you’re 100 percent sure in your mind what you’re hitting … you won’t drop.”—Wald, DoD briefing, April 14. “All the suggestions—‘Did you consider this? Did you consider that?’ We did.”—Albright, statement to a House committee, April 15. “The military mission … is to reduce, diminish, degrade the military capability that Milosevic’s forces have to conduct their campaign of brutal repression.”—Cohen, SASC, April 15. “We could sit on the sidelines. We could fold our arms and say, ‘It’s not our problem.’ But I think that that would have been a real challenge to our own humanity.”—Cohen, SASC, April 15. “We’re certainly engaged in hostilities. We’re engaged in combat. Whether that measures up to, quote, a classic definition of war, I’m not qualified to say.”—Cohen, SASC, April 15. “Limited actions beget limited results.”—McCain, SASC, April 15. “If the public knew our state of readiness, or our lack of readiness, there would be an outrage out there. The fact that we are roughly at one-half the force strength that we were in 1991—How many people know that?”—Sen. James Inhofe, SASC, April 15. “With respect to ground forces, Mr. Chairman, you raised this issue and I know that Senator McCain and others have talked directly about this. Let me say that the reason that we have gone forward as we have with an air campaign is that there was not a consensus within the NATO alliance to do anything but this. There was a year—nearly a year, let me say three-quarters of a year—spent dealing with the NATO allies in terms of taking collective action.” —Cohen, SASC, April 15. “Milosevic may think that he has eliminated the KLA [Kosovo Liberation Army]. He has not. According to the intelligence reports, some members were killed—in the low hundreds, perhaps—but we have many more who have been radicalized by the brutality carried out by Milosevic’s forces. They will come back stronger, and he will find himself having to confront a guerrilla force that over a period of time will in fact defeat his army.” —Cohen, SASC, April 15. “Political leaders in Washington studying operational plans and eliminating targets for political reasons—or out of the misguided notion that the military action can be so finely tailored to conform to the intricacies of negotiating tactics—is a recipe for disaster. … You fight a war to win, or you don’t fight it at all.” —McCain, SASC, April 15. “I’d say Milosevic has lost. He’s losing his military infrastructure and his ability to sustain his forces. He’s losing his air defense system slowly but surely. We see signs of lower morale, evidence of desertions, leadership gaps, command-and-control problems. It’s not over. … We’re in the first 25 minutes of a two-hour movie. You can’t predict how it’s going to end.”—Bacon, WP, April 18. “The politics of my country and my politics have never been the banishment of any citizen of Yugoslavia from any part of our country. I have to tell you that during the war in Croatia we protected the Croats in Serbia. We protected the Moslems in Serbia during the war in Bosnia. … You are right. There are many [Albanian] refugees. But that is the result of the bombing and the refugees are not only Albanians. Everyone runs away because of the bombing—Serbs, Turks, Gypsies, Moslems. Of course, the number of Albanians is the greatest. Everyone runs away. Birds run away, wild animals run away. Everyone runs away because of the bombing. Everyone runs away. In truth, who can’t understand that civilians are to play heroes, that they are to stay where the bombs are dropping on them. That is not possible. You know that before 24 March, when the filthy aggression on this country started and when the bombs started dropping, there were no refugees. When the bombing started, refugees appeared as the result of the bombing and everyone knows that.” —Slobodan Milosevic, CBS-TV interview, April 19. “The degree of damage to the infrastructure and particularly on oil storage and refinement capability, the production of ammunition, the storage of ammunition, and even now some of the industrial targets is having a negative impact on not only the sustainment of the [Serbian] force, but also, I believe, the morale of the force and the morale of the people as this infrastructure is increasingly damaged and destroyed.” —Rear Adm. Thomas Wilson, JCS director of intelligence, DoD briefing, April 22. “Each president of the NATO countries, at least the major players [are given] an opportunity to at least express their judgment [on the targets]. You always want to be in a position of having the commander in chief or the president of a country have a chance to look the list over and make at least a recommendation.” —Cohen, NYT, April 25. “We are not drifting. We are moving forward with a strategy that I believe strongly will succeed, one that we have reaffirmed here and intensified. I think the important thing for everyone to understand is that, in order for this strategy to succeed, we need two things. One, vigorous execution, and, two, patience.” —Clinton, WP, April 25. “We sent our pilots into the air to destroy the oil refinery and supply system of Serbia, and they did so successfully. They risked their lives to do it. How can we justify risking the lives of the pilots to go up and destroy the refinery and the supply capacity of Serbia, and then say, ‘But it’s OK with us if people want to continue to supply this nation and its outlaw actions in Kosovo in another way?’ ” —Clinton, WP, April 25. “The Russians, every now and then, they make phrases which go a little bit beyond where they should go.” —Solana, ABC’s “This Week,” April 25. “We won’t serve as a postman. We won’t deliver NATO’s ultimatums to Belgrade. That is not our mission.”—Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov, statement, April 26. “Of course, [we] may have one flaw in our thinking. … Our flaw may be that we think [Milosevic] may have at least a little bit of responsibility for his country and may act accordingly, because otherwise he may end up being the ruler of the rubble.”—Naumann, statement to Defense Writers Group (DWG), April 26. “If you fight a coalition campaign, you will, first of all, never achieve surprise since 19 democratic nations make sure that any one will know. Secondly, you will initially always be confined with regard to the use of power. You will not be allowed to use overwhelming force. The consequence of that is, that you will presumably go for phased escalations in coalition warfare. That is exactly what we did and what they are still doing. Then, coalition warfare means a balance between the various interests of the different nations, and you automatically end up with the lowest common denominator if you want to keep the coalition together. That again is a marked difference from a national campaign” —Naumann, statement to DWG, April 26. “We are winning. Milosevic is losing, and he knows it. He should face up to this, and he should face up to it now.” —Clark, NATO briefing, April 27. “Step by step, bit by bit, we are cutting off his ability to reinforce or to sustain his forces easily down in Kosovo. Of course he can still walk them in through the gullies and the rivers and so forth, and it is never going to be complete, but it is certainly complicating their life down there.”—Clark, NATO briefing, April 27. “He’s bringing reinforcements in continually. If you actually added up what’s there on any given day, you might actually find out that he’s strengthened his forces in there.”—Clark, NATO briefing, April 27. “We have never said that we can fight two wars simultaneously. What we have said is that we would want to structure our resources in a manner so that we can unequivocally fight one major regional contingency—a war—and to be able to have enough resources to deter our opponent from accomplishing [its] objectives in a second theater until we can clean up the operation in the first and move resources to take care of the second. … And I think we do have the resources for it. But right now, we’re committing the equivalent of the MRC worth of air assets for this operation.”—Hamre, to Senate appropriations committee, April 27. “Essentially, this air defense system is ineffective. When it is turned on, when it attempts to target us, it is destroyed, so what [Milosevic] has tried to do is conserve it by using it sparingly and when he uses it we strike back and take it out.” —Clark, NATO briefing, April 27. “The Yugoslav military now we believe number, along with the police, at least 40,000. They have been reinforced in the last three or four days by an influx of newly-mobilized reservists to replace combat casualties, and they’ve also been reinforced by the continuing assistance and movement of elements from the Yugoslav Second Army which is based in Montenegro; they are fighting over the border.” —Clark, NATO briefing, April 27. “Prior to the initiation of the bombing, I repeatedly expressed my uneasiness about the Rambouillet process; but, having begun the military operation, we must win it militarily. To back down would demonstrate a dangerous lack of commitment and credibility, both to nations tempted to take advantage of our perceived weakness and to our NATO allies.” —Former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, letter to Bliley, April 27. “It is absolutely essential that NATO should prevail fully, and thus without making any compromises regarding the demand it made prior to the bombing in the course of the current Kosovo conflict. Failure to do so would be most damaging to America’s global leadership and would doubtlessly undermine both the credibility and the cohesion of NATO.” —Former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzesinski, letter to Rep. Tom Bliley, April 28. “What good has been accomplished so far? Absolutely nothing. What long-term goal will be accomplished by having our troops there? None, unless you’re willing to occupy all of Yugoslavia.”—Rep. Tom DeLay, House Majority Whip, floor statement, April 28. “There are deep reservations in the Congress about the prosecution of this war. It’s been screwed up from the first day.”—Rep. Heather A. Wilson, floor statement, April 28. “The Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told us that this was no big deal, that we were going to bomb for a couple of days, 48 hours, and then stop bombing, and Milosevic would come to the table. When asked the question, ‘What if he does not come to the table?’ they said, ‘Well, we will go to Phase II, and Phase II is that we will bomb for a few more days. Then he will be going to the table, by crackie.’ And then we asked, ‘Then what?’ Then they said, ‘Well, we will bomb for another week and that will force him to come to the table and this will be all over with.’ And then we asked, ‘Then what?’ There was silence.”—DeLay, floor statement, April 28. “I say to my colleagues, we have a war in Yugoslavia. We can call it whatever we want, but it is a euphemism unless we recognize it is a war. It is an unmitigated disaster. Our and NATO’s involvement in this war is an unmitigated disaster. That is the ugly truth, and everybody knows it. They certainly know and talk about it in the Pentagon.”—Rep. Doug Bereuter, floor statement, April 28. “We forgot the most important lesson of Vietnam. It is fatal to enter a war without the will to win it. Those who sought this war lack the political courage to win it.” —Rep. Kevin Brady, floor statement, April 28. “Clinton is a better communicator than anyone else. Once Clinton decides that’s what he’s going to do [to negotiate an end to war with Milosevic], he’ll sell it. If Nixon could sell the fall of Saigon as peace with honor, Clinton can sell this.”—“Senior Administration official,” NYT, April 29. “Airpower works best when it is used decisively. Shock, mass are the way to achieve early results. Clearly because of the constraints in this operation, we have not been able to, haven’t seen that at this point.”—Gen. Richard Hawley, ACC commander, statement to DWG, April 29. “We are going to be in desperate need, in my command, for a significant retrenchment in commitments for a significant period of time. … I think we have a real problem facing us three, four, five months down the road in the readiness of the stateside units.”—Hawley, DWG, April 29. “Our current shortages are in two areas. One is CALCM and we are at a point where you’ve got to be very judicious in your use of CALCMs because there aren’t many left. … Then JDAM is the other munition. … I think at the current expenditure rate, it is going to be really touch and go as to whether we will ‘go winchester’ on JDAMs before we get the next delivery.” —Hawley, DWG, April 29. “I would argue we cannot continue to accumulate contingencies. At some point you’ve got to figure out how to get out of something. We’ve been in Korea for 50 plus years. We’ve been in Saudi Arabia and Turkey for almost 10 years now. Now we are adding a significant operation in Europe.” —Hawley, DWG, April 29. “It gets under my skin when people say airpower is not working because Milosevic hasn’t caved yet. Airpower is doing exactly what we’re asking [of it]. The question is, is the strategy working? We made a conscious decision to adopt a strategy which restricts us to airpower alone, and everybody should understand that it will take a lot longer for airpower to be effective under those circumstances.” —Hawley, DWG, April 29. “It is important to realize that NATO’s air effort against Yugoslavia is only a fraction of what we did in the Gulf. Then, it was a no-holds-barred attack. This one is more sequential and incremental. It’s a pretty inferior copy.” —Eliot Cohen, WP, May 1. “We have no interest in destroying more targets in Serbia than is absolutely necessary. We dislike using power, really.”—Gen. Christian Hvidt, Danish chief of defense, NYT, May 2. “We clearly can do two major theater wars. Now, if you had something happen in the Gulf, and if you had something happen in Korea, then we would have to make a decision.”—Gen. Joseph Ralston, JCS vice chairman, NBC’s “Meet the Press,” May 2. “The time has come that we should pull out of some of these commitments or enlarge the force and better equip them.” —Rep. Floyd Spence, chairman of House Armed Services Committee, NYT, May 2. “As Jesse Jackson would say, give peace a chance here.” —Sen. Trent Lott, Majority Leader, CNN, May 2. “The fact that the lights went out across 70 percent of the country, I think, shows that NATO has its finger on the light switch in Yugoslavia now, and we can turn the power off whenever we need to and whenever we want to.”—Shea, NATO briefing, May 3. “We can have a bombing pause if it’s clear that it will be in aid of [a] larger purpose.”—Clinton, news conference, May 3. “I don’t think you can characterize [the Administration goal] as ‘total victory.’ That’s not what I’m asking for.”—Clinton, news conference, May 3. “[The US and NATO] must seize this moment to take the step to dramatic diplomacy from bloody, protracted war. … We have the power to bomb. We should have the strength to negotiate. If we take the position of demonization, there is no reason ever to negotiate. We demonize Milosevic. They demonize President Clinton. The cycle of demonization must stop.” —Jesse Jackson, remarks to reporters at Andrews AFB, Md., May 3. “I am not trying to drag this out, but I am determined to pursue our policy until we know that we have a chance to do what has to be done in order for this to work.” —Clinton, news conference, May 3. “The President of the United States is prepared to lose a war rather than do the hard work, the politically risky work, of fighting it as the leader of the greatest nation on Earth should fight when our interests and values are imperiled. … Shame on the President if he persists in abdicating his responsibilities, but shame on us if we let him.”—McCain, floor statement, May 4. “We need to find a way to reconcile the conditions of a coalition war with the principle of military operations such as surprise and overwhelming force. We did not apply either in Operation Allied Force, and this cost time, effort, and potentially additional casualties.”—Naumann, NATO briefing, May 4. “The President does not want the power he possesses by law because the risks inherent in its exercise have paralyzed him. Let me identify for my colleagues the price paid by Kosovars for the President’s repeated and indefensible ruling out of ground troops. Mr. Milosevic was so certain of the limit to our commitment that he felt safe enough to widely disperse his forces. Instead of massing his forces to meet a possible ground attack, he has deployed them in small units to reach more towns and villages in less time than if the President had remained silent on the question of ground troops. In other words, he has been able to displace, rape, and murder more Kosovars more quickly than he could have if he feared he might face the mightiest army on Earth. That … is a fact of this war that is undeniable. And shame on the President for creating it.” —McCain, Senate floor speech, May 4. “Bombing pauses seem to be an idea in vogue. They were popular once before, in another war, and I personally witnessed how effective they were. No, … I don’t have much regard for the diplomatic or military efficacy of bombing pauses. As matter of fact, it was only when bombing pauses were finally abandoned in favor of sustained, strategic bombing [Operation Linebacker II, December 1972] that almost 600 of my comrades and I recovered our freedom. I dare say, some of the years that we had lost were attributable to bombing pauses. I will not support a bombing pause … until Milosevic surrenders, not a moment before.” —McCain, Senate floor speech, May 4. “My father gave the order to send B-52s—planes that did not have the precision guided munitions that so impress us all today. He gave the order to send them to bomb the city where his oldest son was held a prisoner of war. That is a pretty hard thing for a father to do, … but he did it because it was his duty, and he would not shrink from it. He did it because he didn’t believe America should lose a war, or settle for a draw, or some lesser goal that it had sacrificed its young to achieve. He knew that leaders were expected to make hard choices in war. Would that the President had half that regard for the responsibilities of his office.” —McCain, Senate floor speech, May 4. “Give peace a chance. Yes, peace is a wonderful condition. Sweeter than many here will ever fully appreciate. The Kosovars appreciate it. They are living in its absence, and it is a horrible experience. But the absence of freedom is worse, they know that too. They know it well. And if the price of peace is that we abandon them to the cruelty of their oppressors, then the price is too high.” —McCain, Senate floor speech, May 4. “If we cannot keep our word to prevail over this inferior power that threatens our interests and our most cherished ideals, then it is unlikely that we will long know a real peace. We may enjoy a false peace for a brief time but that will pass. Whatever your views about whether we were right or wrong to get involved in this war, why would you think that losing will recover what we have risked in the Balkans? If we fail to win this war, our allies and our enemies will lose their respect for our resolve and our power. You may count on it. … And we will soon face far greater threats than we face today. We will know a much more dangerous absence of peace than we are experiencing today. … I ask my colleagues, in this late hour, to put aside our reservations, our past animosities, and encourage, implore, cajole, beg, shame this Administration into doing its duty. Shame on the President if he persists in abdicating his responsibilities. But shame on us if we let him.” —McCain, Senate floor speech, May 4. “As I said in my briefing, we see a real chance that we can make it [with an all-airpower operation], and for that reason, I think there is no necessity at this point in time to change strategy. We would give out all the wrong signals. We are making progress, we are nibbling away night by night and day by day at some of [Milosevic’s] military capabilities. Why should we change?” —Naumann, NATO briefing, May 4. “This is a game with as many innings as we want, and I think [Milosevic] is running out of baseballs.” —Wald, WP, May 4. “Our objectives are clear and firm. … I want to say them one more time. This is not complicated. The Kosovars must be able to go home, safe, and with self-government. The Serbian troops must be withdrawn, and instead there must be an international force—with NATO at its core but, hopefully, with many other nations participating—to keep the peace and protect all the people of Kosovo, Albanians and Serbs alike. … For those people to go home and have self-government, there has to be an international security force with NATO at its core that will protect everybody there.” —Clinton, remarks at Spangdahlem AB, Germany, May 5. “We have no quarrel with the Serb people. I say that again: We do not want to be guilty of the sin we are standing and speaking against. We have no quarrel with the Serb people. America has many great Serbian Americans.” —Clinton, remarks at Spangdahlem AB, May 5. “The mission is to pin them down, cut them off, take them out. … We have pinned them down, we have pretty much largely cut them off, and are about to begin to take them out.”—NATO spokesman Maj. Gen. Walter Jertz, NATO briefing, May 6. “Let there be no doubt: This war must be won. … The overriding justification for military action is quite simply the nature of the enemy we face. We are not dealing with some minor thug whose local brutalities may offend our sensibilities from time to time. Milosevic’s regime and the genocidal ideology that sustains it represent something altogether different—a truly monstrous evil, one that cannot be merely checked or contained, one that must be totally defeated. … There are, in the end, no humanitarian wars. War is serious and it is deadly. Casualties, including civilian casualties, are to be expected. Trying to fight a war with one hand tied behind your back is the way to lose it. We always regret the loss of lives, but we should have no doubt that it is the men of evil, not our troops or pilots, who bear the guilt.”—Margaret Thatcher, WSJ op-ed article, May 6. “It’s not a conventional thing, where one side’s going to win and one side’s going to lose.”—Clinton, remarks to press, in Germany, May 6. “I think Russia is moving toward the NATO position. I mean, the NATO position is still more specific, and basically, as you know, is a Bosnia–like presence—an international military and civilian presence, with NATO at its core. … I think that they [the Yugoslavs] have to see that they’re increasingly isolated.” —National Security Advisor Sandy Berger, press briefing, May 6. “The only accurate measure of NATO’s success is when the Kosovar refugees feel secure enough to go back to their homes.” —Retired USAF Gen. Charles A. Horner, Desert Storm air boss, WSJ, May 7. “Americans have borne the heaviest costs and risks of waging war on Serbia for its massive atrocity against two million Kosovars. Now, it appears the Germans and Russians will dictate the terms of a peace. Bill Clinton’s generosity with American authority apparently knows no bounds. … The man [Vice President Gore] likened to Hitler will again be spared, just when he is in a deep jam. He will be delivered from the harsh punishment of NATO and consigned to a kinder, gentler mentor, the UN Security Council, where at least 40 percent of the permanent members are on his side.” —WSJ editorial, May 7. “Everyone with a political ax to grind is supporting a different history of events, whether they blame a gradually escalated air campaign, (or) this mistake the West keeps making of bargaining with our enemies, (or) a Commander in Chief who is a better follower within the Alliance than he is a leader, or the inevitable frustrations of coalition warfare. Perhaps only God can truly sort out where the true blame lies.” —Cordesman, National Journal (NJ), May 8. “On one side are people who believe that war can be made an efficient arm of politics. On the other are those of us who believe that war is so inherently chaotic and inefficient—and is impacted by so many political constraints—that you should never undertake military action unless you are willing to pay the up-front costs of being decisive early on. That’s essentially the Powell Doctrine, and I thought it was right in 1991, and it’s right now.” —Cordesman, NJ, May 8. “Not having ground troops in place in the region permitted Milosevic not only to accelerate his ethnic cleansing, but it precluded him from having to arrange Serbian defensive forces differently, to protect both northern and southern borders. So it was foolish of President Clinton to rule out a ground option, but it’s a good example of a political leader perceiving political imperatives in a way that hamstrings military success.” —Retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Charles Link, NJ, May 8. “I can tell you I benefited greatly from being allowed to formulate the air campaign daily and give it my best shot, and to defend it nightly before Gen. Schwarzkopf, who had only one boss back in Washington. And everyone in theater benefited from being away from Washington, where there was strong political leadership willing to delegate us responsibility. It wasn’t war by committee. I sense there’s some war by committee and trial and error going on in this operation. I subscribe, rather, to the strategy of giving it your best shot from the get-go.” —Horner, NJ, May 8. “This can all end tomorrow with an agreement that meets the minimum conditions to restore Kosovo to civilized life—that is, the Serb forces have to leave; a multinational security force with NATO involvement has to come in; the Kosovars have to be able to go home with security and autonomy.” —Clinton, press remarks, Tinker AFB, Okla., May 8. “The acts of bombing against Yugoslavia are not just illegal acts; they constitute a violation of human rights and the perpetration of the crime of genocide,” —Yugoslav representative Rodoljub Etinski, statement to World Court, May 10. “One word about the Chinese Embassy [bombing]. … It was an intelligence failure. It was not a pilot error; it was not a mechanical error; it was an intelligence failure. Some interpreted my remarks as trying to shift blame to the State Department. Completely wrong. This was an intelligence failure, a series of mistakes that were made throughout the intelligence community which, in fact, ended up by allowing the Chinese Embassy to be misdesignated in terms of the targeting. And so it’s not a question of pointing any fingers. The fingers point clearly to an intelligence breakdown.” —Cohen, Senate Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, May 11. “We’ve had only, let’s say, a half a dozen of unrestricted days where we have not had to pull our forces, the air missions, back. We’ve had day after day or night after night when various flights of combat aircraft have had to turn around and come back because they couldn’t penetrate the weather. We’ve had five or six really clear days out of that 45 days, so you place in that some perspective when we compare it to, let’s say, Desert Storm. In Desert Storm we bombed for 44 days in a climate that was clear, [and it was] flat land. Certainly there were heavy defense systems in Iraq as well, but there was a much different challenge for the pilots under those circumstances, compared to the one that we have now. Again, not comparing—comparisons are said to be odious—but nonetheless you have to look at what we had to accomplish in that mission, plus what we have to accomplish in this one. And I would say that if you look at the Desert Storm, I think we lost an average of one aircraft a day during that time—again, many more missions being flown, under a different environment—but we had more losses than we’ve had today. We’ve tried to minimize our losses, and frankly, that’s been the subject of some criticism: ‘Why are you hanging up so high?’ Well, because they have some very sophisticated air defense systems, and we could lose a pilot a day or a plane a day if we were to simply go down lower and lower. They’re waiting for that. I’ve always felt that you don’t fight on the enemy’s terms. You fight on your terms, and you try to do that which will accomplish your goals.” —Cohen, Senate Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, May 11. “On the MTW capability, Major Theater War capability: As you know, we have always tried to structure our forces in a way that we could handle two nearly simultaneously. We have never been structured to handle three. What we have now in Kosovo is roughly a Major Theater War under way. … That means that we’re at three MTWs rather than just two. And so, we didn’t plan for this.” —Cohen, Senate Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, May 11. “At the same time that I am executing SACEUR’s No. 1 priority—killing the army in Kosovo—I also need to strike at the leadership and the people around Milosevic to compel them to change their behavior in Kosovo and accept the terms NATO has on the table.” —Lt. Gen. Michael Short, JFACC, NYT, May 13. “Airmen would have liked to have gone after that target set on the first night and sent a clear signal that we were taking the gloves off from the very beginning, that we were not going to incrementalize, that we’re not going to try a little bit of this and see how you like it and try a little bit of that and see how you like it.” —Short, NYT, May 13. “The way we did business during the first couple of nights in Baghdad [in the 1991 Gulf War] went to the heart of the problem. We sent a clear signal to Saddam that we were after the very heart of his operation. Nineteen nations voting, competing pressures, that makes it very, very difficult to do that.” —Short, NYT, May 13. “I am an executor more than I am an air campaign planner.” —Short, NYT, May 13. “I don’t think there’s any question it [the lack of land forces] affects me. I’d like to have that company commander down there on the ground saying to my son, the A-10 driver, ‘OK, they are dug in 500 meters in front of me. I can see tanks. I can see artillery dug in. I can see troops massed on the other side of that village.’ ” —Short, NYT, May 13. “I put out guidance saying that, if you are working a target area and you’re not sure, call me, and I’ll tell you whether to drop or not. Call me and describe the village and say, ‘Boss, I see a village and I see tanks parked next to the houses in the village. What do you want me to do?’ And I’ll say, ‘Tell them to hit the tanks.’ And if he hits a house by mistake, that’s my responsibility. I need to take the monkey off the young captain’s back. They’re up there at 400 to 500 miles an hour, people shooting at them, dodging in and out of the weather. They don’t need the additional responsibility of, ‘What’ll happen if I miss that tank? Will I be in trouble?’ ” —Short, NYT, May 13. “General Clark has set for me, as my No. 1 priority, the killing of that army in Kosovo. And I think I am going to be able to do that. Not tomorrow or the next day, but we have flown our first daytime B-52 airstrikes in Kosovo, dropping Mk 82s. And if I’m a young Serb soldier, eating my lunch at 2 o’clock in the afternoon and out of the gray skies over my head comes a hundred-plus Mk 82s, that ought to be a signal that we’re entering a new phase of the air campaign and we’re taking the gloves off a little more.” —Short, NYT, May 13. “No power to your refrigerator. No gas to your stove. You can’t get to work because the bridge is down—the bridge on which you held your rock concerts, and you all stood with targets on your heads.” —Short, NYT, May 13. “I meant it when I said good must triumph over evil. I meant it when I said we must defeat the monstrous crime of ethnic cleansing. I meant it when I said our objectives were clear and were non-negotiable. I mean it now.” —British PM Tony Blair, in London Evening Standard, May 13. “To those who say we should now halt our campaign because of a NATO bomb hitting the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade or hitting a civilian convoy, I say two things: First, those who want a war that is perfect, with no mistakes, no errors, no civilians hurt, are not realistic about war. Second, remember each and every day: For all those hit in error by NATO, there are literally thousands of Kosovar Albanians brutally massacred as an act of deliberate policy by Milosevic.” —Blair, London Evening Standard, May 13. “There are those who say Europe and its North American allies have no business intervening in the ethnic conflicts of the Balkans. They are the inevitable result—these conflicts—according to some, of centuries-old animosity which were unleased by the end of the Cold War restraints in Yugoslavia and elsewhere. I, myself, have been guilty of saying that on an occasion or two, and I regret it now more than I can say. For I have spent a great deal of time in these last six years reading the real history of the Balkans, and the truth is that a lot of what passes for common wisdom in this area is a gross oversimplification and misreading of history. The truth is that, for centuries, these people have lived together in the Balkans and Southeastern Europe with greater or lesser degree of tension, but often without anything approaching the intolerable conditions and conflicts that exist today.” —Clinton, speech at Ft. McNair, D.C., May 13. “Political leaders do this kind of thing. Do you think the Germans would have perpetrated the Holocaust on their own, without Hitler? Was there something in the history of the German race that made them do this? No. We’ve got to get straight about this; this is something political leaders do.” —Clinton, Ft. McNair, May 13. “Let me start with some more clear words. Despite reports in the Serb media we have not, repeat we have not, detected any evidence that Serb ground forces are leaving Kosovo so far. However, we strongly believe that the effectiveness of our recent air strikes against ground forces in Kosovo has caused some tactical redeployment in the forward areas, probably to seek better refuge or to regroup.” —Jertz, NATO briefing, May 13. “In order to strengthen the chances of diplomacy, NATO should declare a limited halt to the bombing.” —From text of resolution passed by the German Green Party, NYT, May 14. “Yes, I’m a warmonger, and I suppose Slobodan Milosevic should be awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace. … I plead with you to help me and give me your support—and not cut me off at the knees—so I can emerge from this congress strengthened and can continue our policy.” —German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, statement at Green Party conference, May 14. “[Russian President Boris Yeltsin] reiterated firmly that, if the shelling and bombing of Yugoslavia continue, despite the vigorous efforts Russia is making to seek a political settlement, and if Russia’s proposals are not taken into account, Russia will be forced to review its participation in the negotiating process.” —Ivanov, NYT, May 14. “The chronic blunder that has characterized Western diplomacy throughout the Balkan wars [has been] excessive rhetoric supported by underwhelming force. … We should face the facts. The Administration’s ineptitude is about to produce a defeat for the United States and NATO that will shake the foundations of the Western Alliance. It has driven the Russians and the Chinese into a common position, with real leverage over our policy and every incentive to hurt us.” —Alexander M. Haig, a former Secretary of State and SACEUR, and Harvey Sicherman, president of Foreign Policy Research Foundation, WP, May 14. “We are trying to do everything possible to make these lives and stories real, not to let them fade into the background…. Think about those trains. I don’t know how many of you saw ‘Schindler’s List’ or ‘Sophie’s Choice.’ Think about what that means—driving people from their homes, separating families, loading them into trains.” —Hillary Rodham Clinton, press remarks in Macedonia, May 14. “This accident at Korisa did not shake NATO’s resolve in any way. The air campaign will continue with increasing force, particularly against Serb ground forces and police units in Kosovo. We’ve already taken out one-third of the combined total of tanks, armored personnel carriers, and artillery pieces, and we will continue our assault against those forces on the ground. In fact, the destruction will accelerate. Second, NATO deeply regrets civilian casualties at Korisa or anywhere else in Yugoslavia that result from the campaign against the Yugoslav forces. We try very hard to avoid these casualties, but combat is inherently dangerous and accidents cannot be avoided. … This mission, like every other, will be reviewed, and the airmen and their commanders will learn what they can from it and continue. But I don’t anticipate that there will be a sweeping change. We can’t cross legitimate military targets off the list, and we won’t.” —Bacon, DoD briefing, May 15. “I don’t believe you can win wars by tossing bombs around like popcorn.” —Sen. Diane Feinstein, Washington Times, May 16. “Last November, with violence in Kosovo on the rise and no diplomatic solution in sight, NATO commander Gen. Wesley K. Clark ordered his planners to prepare for an air campaign against Yugoslavia. According to officers who carried it out, Clark’s order contained an eyebrow-raising restriction: ‘no loss of aircraft.’ It was a stunning request to airpower strategists who had lived through the US–crafted war against Iraq in 1991.” —Reporters William Drozdiak and Dana Priest, WP, May 16. “This air war is different than any we have ever fought. There is a feeling of frustration among the Air Force about the way it’s going, but I say, ‘Tough. Grow up. That’s life.’ We aren’t in charge. The politicians are in charge because there are other, larger considerations.” —Col. Phillip Meilinger, USAF, Naval War College professor, WP, May 16. “The way the air war has been designed suggests it was a very bureaucratized, compartmentalized, and not a very competent approach. The target list has clearly not been designed to have a systematic impact on the Serb forces. … This is very unprofessional on the part of the various political authorities.” —Col. John Warden, USAF (Ret.), WP, May 16. “For all his [Milosevic’s] desperate bravado and state media propaganda, our military campaign is working. We are doing his killing machine more damage than he dares let the world see.” —Albright and Cook, WP op-ed piece, May 16. “I remember him [National Security Advisor Sandy Berger] saying once, ‘Are we going to bomb Kosovo? Can I explain that to Congress? They’ll kill us.’ ” —A “senior administration official, a colleague of Berger’s in setting national security policy,” WP, May 16. “It’s a bad strategy [incremental, escalatory use of force in the Balkans]. And it is the job of the National Security Council to explore what happens—not if everything goes right, but what if everything goes wrong?” —Brent Scowcroft, former National Security Advisor, WP, May 16. “We are at our maximum advantage in an air campaign. We have a 100-to-1 power ratio over Milosevic. We hit him every day, and every day we hit him harder, and the cost to us has been, thank God, relatively minor. [If Clinton had pressed for a ground war in Kosovo], we would have been paralyzed by a debate in NATO, and paralyzed, in my judgment, by a debate in this country by what was, at that point, a hypothetical, distant option.” —Berger, WP, May 16. “People understood this [Clinton’s strategy of using only airpower] was going to go south or go north, and we got it to go north. Sandy was critical to coordinating all the elements of that.” —White House Chief of Staff John D. Podesta (referring to the Administration’s success at fighting off Britain’s push for ground troops), WP, May 16. “Where [the Powell Doctrine] needs to be updated is on the question of whether or not military force can be used for more limited purposes than the decimation of the enemy. It cannot mean that we have no choices between nothing and everything.” —Berger, WP, May 16. “Ultimately, we’ll be judged by the result [of Operation Allied Force]. I remind my colleagues of that every day.” —Berger, WP, May 16. “Bombing can never be a means to impose human rights. It is a clear violation of international law, and, over seven weeks, it has only made matters worse. I am nervous—nervous for my children. I have a sense [that] we may be embarking on World War III. How long can Russian tolerate being ignored?” —Heidi Bauer, member of German Green Party, NYT, May 16. “The truth is bitter. The truth is sad, but the truth is we are right to choose force in the Balkans.” —Daniel Cohn-Bendit, prominent German Green Party leader, NYT, May 16. “Handling these teacup wars is the greatest challenge in foreign policy today. Every time they occur, they trigger the old kind of security and competition problems [with Russia and China] This is not to say that … we’re going to have a major new conflict with Russia and China, but it will be a period of real strain.” —Leslie H. Gelb, State Department politico-military director in Carter Administration, Los Angeles Times, May 16. “For the Serbs to publicly lament the deaths [of Kosovar Albanians in a mistaken NATO attack] is almost tantamount to Adolf Eichmann complaining about allied forces bombing the crematoriums. These are crocodile tears coming out of mass killers.” —Cohen, CBS “Face the Nation,” May 16. “If I can just add a point, I don’t believe that the United States would have gone to the trouble, time, and expense to deploy 24—22 now—Apaches in Albania with upwards of 5,000 supporting troops and a multiple-launch rocket system as well, which took hundreds of flights to deploy, and then done all of this intensive night and day training, if there was no intention to use the Apaches and to use them effectively.” —Shea, NATO briefing, May 16. “The Serbs are digging in and camouflaging. They’re in it for the long haul. … It’s a tough situation that’s going to require a lot of patience.” —Marine Col. Kenneth J. Glueck Jr., 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit off Albania, WP, May 17. “Russia is following its own interests, trying to get back into good graces with the West. Every NATO bomb that drops on Yugoslavia has a Russian stamp on it.” —Goran Matic, Yugoslav minister without portfolio, NYT, May 17. “They [Army AH-64 Apache attack helicopters] are like the old Alfa Romeo sports cars. High performance, but also high maintenance—and high risk.” —A “NATO official,” LAT, May 17. “We did not have some of our newest and most capable weapons at their highest rate of procurement at a time when we found them to be very useful, and when our models identified them as the preferred weapon. … Someone could point a finger at us and say we misassessed, but we struggled for nearly two years on the Deep Attack Weapons Mix Study to sort out which weapons were most valuable. Each of the services attacks the war in a different way, and we had to understand their [the Army’s and Navy’s] assumptions. … People are saying, ‘JDAM is a wonderful weapon; why didn’t you have a higher rate of procurement?’ The fact is, it was a developmental weapon until just recently. [A major concern involved] the F/A-18C/D, which has a flutter problem with the weapon and its guidance system on the inboard weapons station when the aircraft is flying at high speeds. We need that resolved before the weapon can go into high-rate production. Otherwise, we buy a lot of weapons that work on the B-2 and F-15E, but not throughout the F/A-18’s flight envelope.” —Lt. Gen. Gregory S. Martin, USAF senior acquisition officer, Aviation Week, May 17. “I have not, in all my life, seen such a scale of anti-American, anti-Western sentiments as exist in Russia today. [The bombing is] rejected—not simply by the Russian Foreign Ministry or political leaders of Russia—it is categorically rejected by the people. … Inside the Russian political spectrum, the effect of this strike is very selective, in the sense that it hit the liberal forces the hardest. [Communists and hard-line Russian nationalists] could not even have imagined a present of this scale. … The West committed a large-scale political mistake, and I think that this mistake is the largest since World War II. What were the goals? To undermine the legitimacy of the political regime of Milosevic? The result is directly the opposite. To stop ethnic cleansing in Kosovo? The result is directly opposite. … There is damage, and it is very big. It is not short-term, but long-term, serious damage.” —Prominent Russian reformer Anatoly Chubais, WP, May 17. “We’ve let them [NATO’s European members] play Tom Sawyer with us too long. They let us paint their fence.” —Rep. Barney Frank, Army Times, May 17. “I’ve talked to folks over there. There’s not a lot of complaining going on, in actuality, about the altitudes that are having to be flown. I think the anxiety … is that there is a misperception at the success of this campaign, in a lot of fronts. I think the pilots I’ve talked to are frustrated that people don’t understand how well it is going. I think they do realize the majority of the American public supports this. But what they hear is what they read, many times. The only time they really get to hear any of this is when I get up here and tell them about it. … So, the majority of pilots are very proud of what they’re doing. They’re doing it in a professional way. … They know what’s happening. Their frustration is that a lot of the world doesn’t realize how well this is going.” —Wald, DoD briefing, May 17. “I would have argued for a campaign that, if it couldn’t include ground troops, then don’t take away also the threat of ground troops. … In this case, we have 19 nations of NATO who have to be in political alignment. And the political judgment was made that you can’t use ground forces, you can only use airpower. Whether that makes political sense or not, I will leave to others to determine. But what it said to Milosevic is: ‘I don’t have to worry about a ground invasion. I have to make a calculation as to how much punishment I can stand from here. That’s the only calculation I have to make.’ … But we have not broken their political will, and we have not damaged the center of strategic gravity of all this—the armed forces of Yugoslavia and Serbia—in a way that has caused them to break and run. I don’t know when that time will be reached.” —Powell, National Press Club address, May 17. “I want to focus on one topical set of those atrocities, and that is the repeated report by refugees that they or their neighbors were used as human shields by the Serb forces. I can tell you that we have now gathered 80 separate reports from refugees in Macedonia of the use of human shields by the Serb forces within Kosovo. They include, for instance, at Klina the use of 500 Kosovo men as human shields during fighting with the Kosovo Liberation Army. One refugee described how he was forced to lie naked in a field in front of the Serb artillery whilst they shelled the Kosovar positions. Another case comes from Orahovac where 700 men were forced to stand, with their hands tied, in front of tanks for two days. The refugees who brought that story only escaped by paying and bribing their guards in Deutschmarks.” —Cook, NATO briefing, May 17. “Day by day, Milosevic is seeing his military cut down. You’re seeing the systematic destruction of his military capacity. We are waging a campaign based on our terms, not his. It’s coming at him from 360 degrees, 24 hours a day. We are going to continue this campaign.” —Cohen, New Orleans speech, May 17. “The vast bulk of this military operation is being carried out by US forces, although Kosovo is a very long way from Kansas. Their commitment and leadership is something for which President Clinton should be praised, rather than the sneers he receives from the right in this country [Britain].” —Blair, NYT, May 18. “I … always said that we intend to see our objectives achieved and that we have not, and will not, take any [military] option off the table.” —Clinton, press remarks, May 18. “When the weather is good—as it generally is at this time of year—most of what the Apaches could do can be done by the A-10s at less risk. They are there to be used under appropriate circumstances, when the military commanders decide that it should be done. It’s not a political decision in any way.” —Clinton, press remarks, May 18. “I don’t think that we or our allies should take any options off the table, and that has been my position from the beginning—that we ought to stay with the strategy that we have and work it through to the end.” —Clinton, press remarks, May 18. “The end of the war must be sought through dialogue, not military victory.” —Italian Prime Minister Massimo D’Alema, press remarks in Brussels, May 18. “Right now, the [Yugoslav] army is worried about defending the major passes into Kosovo. Most of the army is committed to digging in, mining, and fortifying. … It is a conscript army, and there is a pretty unhappy group of soldiers out there right now. Most of these guys should have been released in December, and they did not get paid last month because the paymaster did not get through. But the bottom line is that you still got an intact army out there. Are they ready to mutiny? No. Are they ready to desert in mass? No. Do they feel good about what they have done? Probably the officers do. And they are digging in. … They believe NATO is coming. [The Yugoslav army is] desperate to close that border and knows it cannot win unless it does so.” —An “Allied intelligence official,” NYT, May 19. “The strategy is to cut this guy off in Kosovo and impede them from moving supplies from the middle of the country to the south of the country. … It is a complex mission and will take patience. It will take some time to get the fielded forces to the point where we have a decisive impact on his ability and willingness to pursue these atrocities. … Months.” —Gen. John Jumper, commander of Allied Air Forces Europe, NYT, May 19. “They [Clinton Administration officials] are under great pressure. I think they’ll frantically seek a deal—a dirty compromise—and spin it and hope the Dow continues to go up. The whole thing is very dispiriting.” —McCain, NYT, May 19. “What is happening in Yugoslavia at this time is really a civil war. Responsible politicians here and in the States should find a way of getting out of this.” —Alan Clark, British Defense Minister during the 1991 Gulf War, USA Today, May 19. “[Germany] rejects the sending of ground forces. That is the German position, the German position supported unanimously by the members of the German Parliament. Of course this is first and foremost a German position. If I understood NATO strategy correctly, … that position is also the present position of NATO. … The strategy of an Alliance can only be changed if all of the parties involved agree on it, so I trust that NATO strategy is not going to be changed. … I see no reason whatsoever of a change in our strategy. … I have said everything that is to be said on this particular issue, and you will not get more out of me if you go on pestering me with these questions. … I think I made myself very clear on this. I oppose sending in ground forces.” —German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, NATO press conference, May 19. “The first lesson when dealing with the Balkans is not to send mixed signals. We don’t believe it makes sense to change our strategy just at the moment when there is some light at the end of the tunnel.” —Michael Steiner, chief foreign policy advisor to Schroeder, WP, May 20. “This [use of USAF AC-130 gunships to attack Serb ground forces] is the main new tactic they [NATO planners] are using. It shows the seriousness with which we’re pursuing them. It’s quite refreshing.” —A US “official,” WP, May 20. “You’re seeing, almost any place you look now, signs of problems for Milosevic.” —Lockhart, LAT, May 20. “[In Tirana, Albania] children use felt-tip markers to tattoo ‘Apache’ on their arms and t-shirts. In the Italian-style cafes, armchair warriors drink beer and swap tall tales of secret Apache missions that NATO says never took place. Local radio stations broadcast Apache sightings with the frequency of incorrect weather reports. ‘Every helicopter in the sky is an Apache, and everyone believes they are invincible,’ says Zeneli Orhani, a professor of psychology at the University of Tirana who has spent the past seven weeks counseling ethnic Albanian refugees. ‘The Apache is the only faith the Kosovars can turn to, their only hope of returning to their homes.’ ” —Reporter A. Craig Copetas, WSJ, May 20. “When the Apaches were two weeks late in getting to Albania, it was clear the Army was scraping the bottom of the barrel. Those birds are stiffed up and polished for a public relations war. The only thing they’re good for is cannibalization.” —A “retired Army officer,” WSJ, May 20. “What we have is a committee that lacks a chairman. There is a lack of direction because no one is leading the way.” —Ivo Daalder, the former NSC director of European Affairs, NYT, May 20. “The real danger for Blair comes if he wins the argument [for introducing ground forces in the Balkans] — and ends up in a grisly guerrilla war.” —Blair’s biographer, Jon Sopel, USA Today, May 20. “We want a fair political agreement. … We want this region to be reconstructed and for those responsible for the destruction of our economy to pay the damages.” —Yugoslavia’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Nebojsa Vujovic, WSJ, May 20. “One serious disease is the inferiority complex. In Russian we call it a lousy condition. And there’s also a victor’s complex. I think that our much-respected United States finds itself a victim of this complex at the moment. … Tell me, is Kosovo really such a big conflict that it required that all the power of NATO—which now commands two-thirds of the world’s military forces—should be aimed at it?” —Mikhail S. Gorbachev WP, May 20 “I do believe that we should be … beginning the preparations for the introduction of tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles, armored personnel carriers, and ground forces. I’m not convinced that airpower alone will get the [Yugoslav] forces out of Kosovo. … I believe we have to do everything we can to stop Milosevic.” —Sen. Tom Harkin, Omaha World-Herald, May 20. “I think they [Army officers] are out to prove the validity of the AH-64 as a deep-strike platform, alone and unafraid, and that the Army can do what the Air Force can’t—fight and win this type of low-war where targets are meaningful. Their eagerness to run like a man in a dark room full of vipers amazes me. They have the opportunity to turn the light on and see what’s going on but they won’t—too arrogant. … I’m deeply concerned about the potential of an ambush … and young aviators going down deep behind enemy lines by their own inexperience or the enemy’s ingenuity.” —USAF air liaison officer stationed with Army forces in Tirana, Albania, Inside the Pentagon, May 20. “In the eighth week of bombing, it cannot conceivably be said that the goal of avoiding a humanitarian disaster has been achieved.” —Michael Howard, member of British opposition Conservative Party member, WP, May 21. “Milosevic will get only what he has earned, which is the contempt of humankind. He and his cronies will remain subject to indictment by the War Crimes Tribunal.” —Albright, USA Today, May 21. “Distasteful as it is to bargain with Mr. Milosevic, the fact is that he holds a million hostages. … Nothing better will be achieved by bombing indefinitely. We bombed Vietnam for seven and a half years in pursuit of goals we refused to compromise and never secured. Nor will anything better be won by moving toward ground invasion and destroying the remaining Kosovars in order to save them.” —Daniel Ellsberg, ex–Pentagon official, NYT, May 21. “Nothing has been more disturbing to conservative Kosovo hawks than the identity of their allies. To be supporting a foreign policy backed by Christopher Dodd; to be seated in a cheering section next to David Bonior; to find oneself applauded by Ted Kennedy—it is truly enough to cause us to rethink.” —Elliott Abrams, an assistant secretary of state in Reagan Administration, National Review, May 31.