Word: nato
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Although NATO has managed to overcome most of the setbacks caused by its miscalculations, it may take years to recover from others. Herewith a catalogue of U.S. policy Pollyannaisms, and the rude awakenings they occasioned...
...Rambouillet talks, which began in February, were premised on the idea that if Belgrade was presented with an ultimatum to hand the province over to NATO or face the alliance?s military wrath, Slobodan Milosevic wouldn?t risk a fight. The assumption was based on the Bosnia conflict, where he signed on to the Dayton Peace Accords after NATO began bombing Serb positions...
...Rambouillet hadn?t reckoned with the deep historical attachment to Kosovo across the political spectrum in Serbia. It would have been difficult for any politician to concede to NATO?s demands, let alone for Milosevic, who?d built his nationalist credentials on the promise to protect Kosovo?s Serbs, and whose officer corps was even more nationalist than he. Moreover, the Dayton analogy may have been stretched, in the sense that Dayton came after a three-year ground war that had left both sides exhausted. The Serbs called NATO?s bluff, leaving the alliance compelled to respond forcefully...
...paper, Operation Allied Force may be the sharpest-looking war in American history. The numbers are remarkable: 99.6% of allied bombs--NATO dropped 20,000 of them--found their targets. NATO pilots flew some 35,000 sorties, and though two U.S. planes were shot down, it was the kind of war in which a fighter jock could be hit on an overnight raid and by sunrise be sipping coffee in Italy--and praising the Lord for helping him find the ejection handle. Stunningly, in a war that NATO believes killed some 5,000 Yugoslavs, not a single allied pilot died...
Last Thursday he evidently did. Serbia's truculent, unpredictable leader startled the world by abruptly accepting all of NATO's demands, almost the exact terms he had rebuffed on March 23 when he set off the air war. Now he had decided to stop it. It took him just over six hours of businesslike question-and-answer with the emissaries to make up his mind and formally capitulate...