Timehost: Welcome to the TIME room! Our topic tonight is the NATO attack on Yugoslavia and our guest is Carnes Lord, a professor of American foreign policy and national security policy at Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and a former assistant on national security affairs to Vice President Dan Quayle. Welcome, Prof. Lord.

Professor Carnes Lord: Happy to be with you tonight.

Timehost: Let's go to our first question.

jpongsaj asks: Professor: What is your view on the air strikes?

Carnes Lord: Well, it's a little early to tell what's happening exactly. Although, from the news, it appears that we've struck targets within Serbia, near the capital of Belgrade, which could suggest that this is going to be a wider war than anybody thought, even at this early stage. This is a larger issue, obviously that goes to the heart of NATO. There's a very large question as to what we as an alliance intend, and what we hope to accomplish, given the limitations that we've imposed on our own military activities, and what the Serbs can do to counter our strikes.

bevislane1 asks: Is there any way that this could have been avoided?

Carnes Lord: It doesn't seem so at this point. Mr. Milosevic, the Serb leader, seems to have made up his mind months ago that he was not going to compromise on the fundamental issue of having NATO troops in his own country. Troops protecting people that he regards as waging a campaign of separatism against Serbia.

Stamm444 asks: Professor, do you think Clinton is justified in comparing Milosevic to Hitler?

Carnes Lord: I really don't. I think this is a weak point in the NATO rationale for the assaults on Serbia. One of the three rationales that the Administration has offered has to do with preventing a wider war in the Balkans, and to make this case, the President has drawn an analogy to the situation in the late 1930s, which I think few will find persuasive. First, because Serbia is not Germany. It's not an imperial country. It lacks the power to create problems much beyond its own borders. The second point is that the fear that there will be a spillover of the conflict, regardless of what the Serbians plan, is hard to believe, given what we know of the relatively rational approaches that other countries in the neighborhood are taking to all this -- Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey, Macedonia, and even Albania. There's very little reason to believe that any of these countries are ready to involve themselves in this conflict, even if there are refugees or even a spillover of violence across borders.

Popuin asks: Is there any threat of the Russians joining the Yugoslavs?

Carnes Lord: I don't think so, although it is somewhat alarming that President Yeltsin, in his remarks to the press today, did apparently claim that these actions would lead to a break in relations between Russia and NATO, and that the Russians might indeed take certain military measures. There have been some reports from Russia of possibly selling new air defense missiles to the Serbs, and possibly even more disturbing moves involving tactical nuclear weapons. It's hard to believe that the Russians are serious at this point. But we'll have to wait and see how it develops. The political problem with Russia is probably more critical than the military one. The Russians have indicated that they will press vigorously to involve the UN Security Council in this matter,that they regard the NATO actions as illegal under international law without UN approval. So I expect they will push vigorously on that front. Let me also add that UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said that the Security Council should be involved in all this, and seemed to support the Russian position.

Timehost: You mention that it's hard to believe the Russian threats are serious. One questioner asks what was with the Russian MiGs in Baku, then?

Carnes Lord: Yes, there was a report that a shipment of Russian MiGs was intercepted in Azerbaijan yesterday.If that report is true, it does show that the Russians are interested in being seen internationally as strong supporters of the Serbs in a military way. I don't think it will go beyond that stage to involve any direct Russian military activity on behalf of the Serbs.

weezichk asks: Who is supplying the Serbian army with arms?

Carnes Lord: Well, the Serbs themselves are a major producer of arms. They don't really rely on other countries for the basic weaponry of their army. One of the questions in the current attack on Serbia is whether NATO is targeting the Serb arms manufacturing centers.To the extent that NATO does massively strike at Serb arms depots and manufacturing centers, then I think the question will become more interesting -- who is going to resupply them, and to what extent there will be outside commitments to the Serbs for arms resupply?

c17pilotgm asks: Do the Serbs have any significant terrorist capability? And do they have it against US targets?

Carnes Lord: This is an interesting question. I don't think we know much about their ability to project terrorist ability beyond their borders. However, they clearly would have the capability within Bosnia. One of the things that NATO should anticipate is possible terrorist action against NATO troops in Bosnia.

Louisk39 asks: Professor, do you think the Serbian army is any good? Their experience seems to be in killing men and boys, raping women, and looting civilian homes; a rabble with weapons.

Carnes Lord: This is difficult to tell. It's true they have not been engaged in serious warfare since the founding of the Yugoslav republic. However, the Serbian army is clearly better than the militias within Bosnia, including the Serbian militia. The army is much better trained and equipped, it's large, it seems to be relatively well motivated, and I think it could do a lot of damage to NATO. It's not going to be a pushover to the extent that the Iraqi army was, I believe. Let me add that the environment of Serbia and Kosovo is more favorable to defense than it was in Iraq-- because of the terrain, weather, etc. The Serbian army can also disperse itself and make itself a difficult target for NATO bombing because it doesn't have to concentrate militarily for its own purposes. To wreck a Kosovar village, you don't need a tank. You just need a platoon. And a platoon is something that's very difficult to target from the air.

viper1806 asks: Do you think these NATO air strikes will actually help anyone in Kosovo or will President Milosevic's power in Yugoslavia just grow stronger?

Carnes Lord: Well, this is one of the fundamental questions. The Clinton Administration and NATO have taken the positon -- and it's one of the three objectives of the campaign -- to deter Milosevic from violence against the Kosovars. Even within NATO there is some concern that the effect could be the opposite -- that it would provoke the Serbs to violence that is even greater than before -- inflaming passions into a spiral of even greater violence. It's difficult to say at this point. It seems that these concerns are real.

toniterror asks: Human rights are violated in Kosovo, but also in China. Why does NATP not bomb them?

Carnes Lord: Yes. (Smiles). It's a question I've asked myself. The three objectives that the President has spoken about -- deterring the Serbs from escalating the violence, maintaining the credibility of NATO, and preventing the risk of a wider war in the region -- of all these, the most immediate is the humanitarian issue. However, I think there is a serious question as to the gravity of the humanitarian problem, compared with other like cases, like China. Or Turkey, to take the case of an American ally. The President said a few days ago in response to a question that the figure of 40 dead, of Kosovars killed by Serbian forces, reached the threshold of alliance intervention. Well, that's a pretty low threshold. That's not to say that it's not deplorable, but doesn't this create a precedent for a for a rather open-ended humanitarian intervention? There's been a lot of talk about genocide in Kosovo, but there's a big difference, for example, between the genocide in Germany in World War II, or in Cambodia in the 1970s on the one hand, and Kosovo on the other. These are not comparable situations. To call it genocide is to devalue those other experiences. It would be one thing if the Yugoslavs were systematically trying to kill every Kosovar in their way, but that doesn't seem to be their strategy. In addition, the fact is that there is an armed resistance movement that they claim to be fighting -- and are fighting -- which allows them to claim that civilian casualtites are incidental to the campaign against the Kosovo Liberation Army. Now you don't have to accept those claims exactly to view the situation differently than you would in a case of classic genocide. I think there's been an unwillingness on the part of NATO and the US to define the humanitarian problem in a sufficiently precise way that lays down a reasonable standard for humanitarian interventions in the future.

Allegro51 asks: What do you think about the potential for a wider war if we did nothing and Milosevic continued in his present course?

Carnes Lord: Extremely slight. I don't see any inclination on the part of even the Albanian government to intervene on the behalf of the Kosovar Albananians. And even less an inclination from the other neighboring states. forrestthegump asks: Haven't these people been esentialy in conflict for decades? Do you think our air strikes will change the mindsets of either group?

Carnes Lord: I don't think the air strikes will change any minds any more than the NATO presence in Bosnia seems to have changed minds there. The problem then becomes whether NATO wants to inject itself on the ground in Kosovo for some indefinite period, the way we have in Bosnia, to keep the two sides apart with no clear political resolution in sight.

Andrs4 asks: Why did the US choose to act through NATO rather than the UN? Is NATO swifter to act? The UN did act strongly in the Gulf War, also led by the Americans at the time, so I was curious as to why use the NATO option

Carnes Lord: Well, I think it's clear that the UN Security Council would not have supported the operation because of Russia and possibly also China.

AustinGuy_70 asks: Professor Lord, President Clinton has asserted that an attack was launched as a containment mesaure. However, isn't it possible that the attack might have the opposite effect? Wouldn't other countries who view the attack as unauthorized by NATO view it as an ominous precedent and alter their political position with regard to their own defense systems?

Carnes Lord: Well, I do think there is a problem on the general issue of violation of the sovereignty of a UN member state. This is different from Bosnia in that we are intervening in the internal affairs of a member state of the UN and on grounds that are controversial in the international community. There are countries around the world who are disturbed by the apparent trend towards violation of national sovereignty here. There's no other country I can think of that has the fear of US military intervention, with the exception of Iraq, and I don't see a developing trend here, but I can understand where some countries might have such a fear.

SingleMaleSurgeon asks: Mr. Lord, is this worth it for Americans? My brother is a pilot and flying there. Is it worth his life?

Carnes Lord: That's tough. I do believe that there is an important US and NATO interest in carrying out the commitment we have made. I do believe that the Milosevic regime in Serbia is doing very bad things. Were this to involve a very long war we would have to think twice about engaging in it. I do think that it is a relatively risk-free operation, and on balance, one can certainly argue that it's in our national interest.

cmaeti asks: Is the US a gendarme?

Carnes Lord: (Laughs.) Well, yes. We seem to have adopted that role. I think there's a difference, clearly, though, between a gendarme role within NATO and one outside NATO. There are very clear reasons for engaging in Europe in a situation that we would not engage in elsewhere. I do think, as I've indicated, that the alliance rationale is stronger than the other rationales -- the humanitarian or the wider-war rationales.

bugtwister asks: Could there be any damage to the United States?

Timehost: In terms of its reputation as the world's lone superpower, perhaps?

Carnes Lord: Well, yes, I do think there's a very definite risk not in huge casualties, but in looking inept. It seems to me that we haven't clearly thought this through in terms of what might happen either on the ground in Kosovo or in a wider context. There are definitely potentials for Serbian counteractions, particularly in Bosnia, that haven't been discussed. Maybe they've been considered, but we haven't seen them discussed. More broadly, there's not a political solution at the end of this road. And this runs the risk of making the US look politically and diplomatically inept.

i_really_want_to_know asks: What did you think of the President's speech and the Pentagon briefings today?

Timehost: How do you think the Administration has handled this whole crisis?

Carnes Lord: There's an interesting parallel between the current situation and the Iraq crisis in December, which showed some of the same weaknesses in the handling by the White House and the Admnistration. Part of it has to do with the fact that the White House has left Congress out of the loop until the last minute. And therefore, to a large extent, the public as well. The Administration has gotten itself into a kind of diplomatic dead end in the case of Iraq and now Yugoslavia, but seemed to convince itself, if not others, that there could be a diplomatic solution, and, therefore, did not really make preparations in the public's mind for military action.

Timehost:: Professor Lord, before we end, do you have any closing thoughts on the NATO action?

Carnes Lord: It will be interesting to see what the immediate effect of the military actions will be. Some in the Administration seem to think bombing will concentrate the mind of Mr. Milosevic, and, if not that, there will be an internal reaction in Serbia from the public and the military, and there is some possibility of that. But I have to think that Mr. Milosevic understands his country better than NATO does, and I have to think that the impact will be dramatic on him. I think the real issue will be whether NATO will be prepared to go in on the ground to ensure the terms of the diplomatic settlement that it thought it had reached. Short of doing that, I at least am very skeptical that bombing by itself will result in a political resolution.

Timehost:: Thank you very much for joining us this evening!

Carnes Lord: Thank you. Happy to do my part. I hope it was helpful.

TIME.com Special Report: A Kosovo Primer

Copyright © 1999 Yahoo! Chat and TIME. All rights reserved.

WRITE TO US