Word: nato
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Therein lies the crux of NATO's dilemma. Except for Britain, no other nation has seemed willing to sacrifice its soldiers to this cause, in the skies or on the ground. Yet this week the U.S. will urge NATO to send 50,000 ground troops to the region, either to escort the Kosovars home with Milosevic's assent or to threaten an invasion without it. The war could succeed faster if the allies risked their own troops more, but political leaders fear the first body bags would destroy the public support they need to keep the confrontation going...
...NATO continues to shrink from any change in its carefully calibrated "Goldilocks" air campaign--not too hard, not too soft. The chief culprits appeared to reside in Washington, where "there are people in the military who are putting the brakes on," says a U.S. diplomat...
Nothing illustrated Washington's hesitancy more than the Apache debate that burst into the open last week. Just 48 hours into the war, NATO Commander Wesley Clark called on Washington to send in the state-of-the-art AH-64 helicopter gunships as the best weapon against Milosevic's ferocious ground-level cleansing of Kosovo. After a week of backroom debate, a deeply reluctant Pentagon and White House agreed to deploy the Army's premier tank killers--but not to use them in battle. More than two weeks later, to great fanfare, the first of 24 began arriving in Albania...
...demands by the Blair government to start assembling a ground force that could go into Kosovo even without agreement from Milosevic. Long after the threat might have spooked the Serbian leader, Clinton for the first time last week reserved the right to send in ground troops. Two days later, NATO Commander Clark visited the Pentagon to push for deployment of the 50,000 ground troops, trying to make sure they'd be there before the snow flies. But Italy and Greece called for a bombing pause before addressing the ground-troops issue...
Since the war's start, allied unity has been more important than lethality. Unless NATO reaches a credible consensus to gather a serious invasion force, the Tower of Babel talk won't do much to move Milosevic. Threatening to dispatch troops at the start might have given him pause, or at least forced some of his soldiers to stay home and protect Serbian borders instead of depopulating Kosovo. Had a relatively small ground force been deployed by now, it could have made the air war more lethal by spotting targets and flushing Serbian armor from hiding. But now the noisy...