For the first time ever, NATO warplanes-pairs of American F-16s and F/A-18s-struck at Serbian ground troops. The bombing raids were modest, destroying a truck, two armored personnel carriers and tents. Washington hoped that by using just a little force, it could deter the Serbs from pressing their attacks against the town of Gorazde, one of the Muslim “safe areas” nominally protected by the United Nations. A senior U.S. official last week described Clinton’s policy as “a delicate calibration of force and diplomacy.”
So far, the strategy seemed calibrated to produce exactly the wrong result. The bombing only riled up the Serbs and made them press harder. Serbian militiamen created a potential hostage crisis by placing more than 200 U.N. soldiers under a kind of house arrest. On Friday, the Serbs renewed their attack on Gorazde, sending tanks against a town occupied by 65,000 people. The next day, new airstrikes were ordered by NATO warplanes, including American A-10 “Warthogs.” A British Harrier jet was shot down as the Serbian onslaught continued (page 23).
In Iraq, the United Nations has for the past three years enforced a “no-fly zone” over northern Iraq to keep Saddam Hussein from preying on Kurdish tribesmen. The operation is a hangover from the American failure to finish off Saddam in the gulf war. Most Americans had forgotten all about the commitment to the Kurds, at least until disaster struck last week. Patrolling over northern Iraq, a pair of U.S. Air Force F-15 pilots shot down two American helicopters that they mistakenly identified as Iraqi. The “friendly fire” accident killed 15 Americans (including two women, a Foreign Service officer and a second lieutenant) and 11 others, nearly wiping out the command of Operation Provide Comfort, an allied program assisting the Kurds.
The timing of the Iraqi shoot-down and the Serbian boomerang couldn’t have been worse. President Clinton was just briefing congressional leaders on his administration’s new international peacekeeping policy when an aide drew him out of the Oval Office to tell him the bad news from Iraq. “How did this happen?” he demanded. The president understood that such blunders automatically undercut the public’s willingness-never high-to undertake foreign commitments. just as the United States was stepping up its involvement in Bosnia, the last thing Clinton needed was a reminder of the high cost of trying to keep peace in far-off places. At the same time, by calling his bluff in Bosnia, the Serbs exposed the futility of a policy that depends on limited airstrikes as its only means of enforcement. For Clinton, always a tentative player in the arena of foreign policy, the events of last week were a painful lesson that half measures can be worse than doing nothing at all.
At the Pentagon, the brass muttered “I told you so” about Bosnia, though not too loudly or on the record. just the week before, Defense Secretary William Perry and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. John Shalikashvili had warned that air power would be ineffective to save Gorazde. But the White House, eager to be seen as doing something to stem the carnage in Bosnia, had pushed aside the military’s doubts and signaled NATO that Washington would approve of airstrikes. Now Washington and its allies are left hoping that the Russians could persuade their fellow Slavs, the Serbs, to cease fire. Angrily protesting that the United Nations failed to inform Russian leader Boris Yeltsin before launching airstrikes, Moscow is in no great rush to help out the West.
As for the tragedy in Iraq, the Pentagon was at a loss to explain what had gone wrong. The pilots may have been keyed up-Saddam has been making belligerent noises lately about kicking out the “evil-minded people” who have helped the Kurds for the past three years. As the fighter pilots zeroed in on the helicopters, they gave no warning of an attack; none was required by the rules of engagement. They may have mistaken the U.S. Black Hawk helicopters for Soviet-made Hinds flown by the Iraqis. Black Hawks’ electronic IFF (Identify Friend and Foe) equipment may not have been working. Nonetheless, all the U.S. aircraft-fighters and helicopters alike-were being guided by an AWACS plane, a high-tech airborne traffic controller that should have known who was who.
Old soldiers have a simple explanation for seemingly inexplicable tragedies, summed up by the vulgar World War II acronym, SNAFU. The history of armies is all about blunders (page 27). Stonewall Jackson, perhaps the greatest of all Civil War generals, was shot by his own troops. Typically, about 15 percent of war casualties are from “friendly fire.” In modern peacekeeping operations, the real risk is from your own side, particularly in an age of high tech. Soldiers in a multinational force are not free to fire away; they have to be sure whom they’re shooting at and why. Yet, flying supersonic warplanes, they often have only split seconds to decide, and if they guess wrong, lethal “fire and forget” weapons still find the target. Mistakes are harder to cover up these days. It was 10 years before the public learned that as many as 200 American soldiers were killed during a D-Day rehearsal on the English coast during World War 11. The news of the Iraqi accident was on CNN within hours.
At least in Iraq, American pilots fly missions over flat desert land. In Bosnia, they must dive down deep valleys under low ceilings and pull out again before piling into a mountain. In the first raid last Sunday, air force pilots flying F-16s were unable to locate a Serbian tank in the rain and mist and settled instead for a “command post”-a few tents-up on a ridge. In the second raid, a marine aviator flew his F/A-18 so low that two of its bombs were duds (the fuses were set for a higher altitude). The 500-pound bombs dropped by the Americans were “dumb.” Lasers to guide smart bombs don’t work very well in bad weather.
Air power is generally ineffective against ground troops unless the attacker can use “area munitions”-napalm or cluster bombs that can clear out large swaths of terrain. NATO commanders have decided to use neither weapon. The reason? Bad TV. Napalm leaves its victims shriveled and charred. Cluster bombs tear them into shreds. The West is worried how this might look on the nightly news.
They are especially worried about the impact of such horrific images on the Russians. As it was, the bombing raids last week stirred a wave of paranoia in Moscow. Nationalist leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky wildly charged that the NATO strikes against the Serbs were “the beginning of World War Ill.” Yeltsin supporters despaired. “Why should the Americans play into the hands of Russian extremist forces like this?” asked Yevgeny Ambartsumov, a foreign-policy expert and deputy in the Russian Parliament. State Department officials insisted that, privately, the Yeltsin regime is still willing to cooperate in the search for peace. Yeltsin does have one strong motivation to try to work out a settlement in Bosnia: to deprive his increasingly restive opponents of an issue they are using, with good effect, against him.
The tension in U.S.-Russian relations last week was just another deflating blow to Clinton’s once expansive foreign-policy ambitions. During the 1992 presidential campaign, he postured as an internationalist who was willing to commit American power and resources to bring order and democracy to the post-cold-war world. Once in office, however, he was distracted by troubles at home. When he did make a move abroad, he was tentative and highly sensitive to public-opinion polls that showed Americans unwilling to pay a price for world leadership. He has tried to work through the United Nations and to avoid committing ground troops through the threat of airstrikes, but both approaches have backfired.
Before anyone in the administration had quite realized what was happening, the United States had blundered from a relief operation into a guerrilla war in Somalia. When C-130 gunships couldn’t keep the peace-and 18 Americans died in a vicious fire fight-Clinton’s withdrawal made a mockery of American staying power and emboldened military dictators in Haiti to defy U.S. attempts to restore a democratically elected regime. Haiti now simmers, another crisis waiting to erupt. Half a world away, Saddam may sense that Clinton has been weakened by last week’s setbacks. If so, Clinton’s bellicose rhetoric against the Serbs could turn into a true test of U.S. commitment in the Persian Gulf.
Though he clearly feels more comfortable dealing with domestic issues, Clinton is trying to at least give the appearance of involvement in foreign policy. This week he is expected to formally sign off on a presidential directive, PDD-13, that for the first time makes international peacekeeping an explicit foreign-policy objective of the United States. But the document is a far cry from Clinton’s soaring campaign rhetoric. Worked over by suddenly cautious Clinton aides, PDD-13 is riddled with conditions and caveats that would sharply limit any American involvement in a U.N. peacekeeping operation. Candidate Clinton supported a standing U.N. army able to respond at a moment’s notice to emergencies around the world. Today, Washington is so wary of commitment that the Pentagon won’t even provide a description of the equipment it might lend the United Nations to transport peacekeepers abroad.
Clinton is held back in part by public opinion, which has little interest in the world. No nation can be an effective peacekeeper if it is unwilling to take at least some casualties, yet it is clear that Americans will not tolerate even the occasional body bag coming home. The ubiquitousness of CNN cameras helps to draw the United States into Third World quagmires. Yet at the same time, images of dead GIs, especially ones being dragged through the streets of a hellhole like Mogadishu, can just as quickly force the United States to back out. Constancy, a requirement of effective foreign policy, is sacrificed.
Television puts leaders on the spot before they are ready to decide. “There’s an immediate, reckless nature to foreign-policy crises these days,” said Rep. Lee Hamilton, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “Policymakers are forced to react instantaneously. If you don’t respond, it appears that you are ducking your responsibilities.”
No wonder that Bill Clinton-like presidents before him-has tried to exert power on the cheap. Clinton is not the first president to discover that air power is not a magic bullet, and many of his predecessors have failed to back rhetoric with action. But Clinton and his top foreign-policy advisers seem unusually adrift. Their “delicate calibrations” upset by sneering Serbs, administration officials were left groping for some new approach to the Bosnian quagmire. Stripped of quick fixes, the administration’s foreign policy still suffers from the lack of an animating idea.
In the skies over Iraq, two American jet fighters and two U. S. helicopters flew to a fateful rendezvous. The fighter pilots may have mistaken the American Black Hawk helicopters for Iraq’s Russian-built MI-24 Hinds. The two choppers are about the same size. And the Black Hawks were equipped with external fuel tanks, which may have looked like the stubby weapons pylons mounted on the sides of the Iraqi gunships.
Two U.S. F-15 planes and an AWACS plane take off for a routine patrol
Lift off of two U.S. helicopters heading for an allied meeting in Iraq
The two helicopters stop in Zakhu to pick up a team from the allied Military Coordination Center and take off again
The F-15s spot the helicopters and mistakenly identify them as Iraqi. They notify the AWACS plane and apparently receive attack clearance
F-15s each fire a missile destroying both helicopters
Ground radio operators at Diyarbakir become aware of lost contact with helicopters
