Word: nato
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Steven Gonzales--captured, humiliated, perhaps tried, perhaps killed. This war is sophisticated supertech airplanes dropping tons of ordnance night after night that fail to stop the enemy's rifle-toting soldiers. This war is Slobodan Milosevic, cleverer and crueler than planners expected, so far getting the better of NATO...
Disagreements would not erupt in war, Winston Churchill said, unless the other side also believed it could win. The strongman of Serbia has once again confounded the best-laid plans of the West by fighting back when he was supposed to fold. He ceded the skies to NATO, letting the bombs and missiles rain down while barely activating his air defenses. Meanwhile, on the ground, his army pursued two-pronged tactics: pushing tens of thousands of Albanian Kosovars out of the country and engaging in a murderous offensive against the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army...
...wonder weapons of air power looked futile against primitive "ethnic cleansers" with guns. The long-threatened bombing campaign failed to deter the rape of Kosovo and even appeared to be speeding it. Publicly, NATO insisted that the blame for the refugee flight lay solely with Milosevic, not Western bombs. But privately, officials offered a line that made more sense alongside the awful images. Military planners lamented that bad weather, clever Serb tactics, White House worries about collateral damage--and a reluctance to risk pilots' lives--kept them from hitting at Milosevic as hard as they wished. And diplomats complained that...
Perhaps the most astonishing reality to confront was that the largest NATO military action in the alliance's 50-year history offered scant relief for the crude savaging of Kosovo. Officials doggedly insisted the "cumulative effect" of NATO's bombardment was starting to tell on the Serb war machine. They also said the late-week strikes against Belgrade itself were only a beginning. Even though many in NATO were nervous about bombing a European capital, the images of Belgrade buildings on fire was the first p.r. victory for the allies--and it made them hungry for more. As planners unleashed...
...inner circle. "We knew this going in, so we've got to stay the course." But outside the White House, it was hard to understand what "the course" now was. As bombs kept falling, refugees kept fleeing and Milosevic refused to budge, it was no longer clear what a NATO victory would look like or whether anyone knew how to get there...