Word: states
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...destroy as many as possible of Serbia's 1,000 surface-to-air missiles and almost 2,000 antiaircraft guns, making the air safer for the planes that will later go sniffing after tanks and artillery. Milosevic's air-defense system is, as NATO commanders keep insisting, "state of the art." But he and his lieutenants have not been cooperating with plans for its destruction. They have kept most of their missiles hidden in thick forests, their radars turned off so they remain invisible to NATO's missiles. The Pentagon is particularly interested in rooting...
There was something else: it was impossible for many in the White House--particularly Secretary of State Madeleine Albright--to avoid the feeling that their credibility was on the table. The Administration has settled on a foreign policy driven largely by ultimatums, and the price of such absolutism is that you must deliver on your threats. The U.S. had said it would bomb; therefore, it had to bomb. There is still hope in some corners of the Administration that NATO will somehow bomb Milosevic back to the bargaining table. But there is also gnawing fear that it will never happen...
...wishful thinking. They hope he will now agree to something like the autonomy deal the Kosovars have already signed and will simply blame NATO for forcing him into it. (Oddly, one thing NATO and Milosevic do have in common is a belief that Kosovo should not be an independent state.) But few people think that is about to happen...
Even that may be tricky. John Hillen, a military scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, says NATO's actions "need to add up to some sort of sustainable end state"--something he believes is lacking. "They're counting on everything falling into place here," says Hillen, a former Army officer who served in the Gulf War. "Even if they prevail, the best result is a 10-to-12-year peacekeeping mission, serving between two parties whose ambitions are totally unrequited...
...Milosevic has again chosen war. Like a shark that has to keep moving to stay alive, he is willfully exposing the withered state of Serbia to the might of NATO for the sake of his own power. As always, he gambled that talk, hopes, threats and indecision would wear his enemies into retreat. When that didn't happen, he put in jeopardy virtually everything left to him, courting death for his people and damage to his country, the destruction of his military machine, the hastened secession of Kosovo and Montenegro, and perhaps even the end of his regime...