Into The Fire

• Share

If there was a single moment that captured both the fear and the optimism in NATO's shatteringly violent assault on Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milosevic last week, it came after the second wave of attacks, when British Air Commodore David Wilby played an astonishing "bombsight" video. The snippet--about eight seconds long--showed a NATO bomb streaking into an ammunition depot in Kosovo. Milliseconds after the bomb strike, the video showed a large explosion. And then an almost imperceptible snake of flame sneaked outward to a nearby building and triggered a blast so bright and hot it turned the infrared video image from night to day. In pilot jargon, the big bang was a "secondary"--a sign that targeters had picked a site loaded with combustible stuff.

But the video was also a worrisome metaphor for the strike itself. In the days after last Wednesday night's initial air attack, the anger and determination that brought NATO and Yugoslavia head-to-head seemed to snake out like that tiny flame in the video, triggering all kinds of "secondaries." On Saturday night the combat came home to Americans, who had their television shows interrupted by images of an F-117A Stealth fighter in flames on the ground inside Yugoslavia--and the astonishing story of the rescue of the downed pilot. Earlier in the week U.S. embassies from Moscow to Paris were besieged by furious Serbs, American allies like Italy and Greece nervously waffled on their support for the bombing, and neighboring states from Albania to Macedonia were convulsed by the prospect of ethnic violence. Inside Yugoslavia, in what may come to be regarded as the worst of the secondary effects of the strike, Serbian troops stepped up their campaign against Kosovo's Albanian citizens, squeezing the province in a pincer movement that stabbed south from Belgrade and north from the Macedonian border. The offensive produced thousands of refugees and inspired terrifying reports of mass killings.

For more than a century, the world has worried that the Balkans were a tinderbox. Last week NATO went in with a big match--and by week's end it was impossible to see if they had started a brush fire or, for the third time in 100 years, a conflagration. "Look," President Clinton told his wound-up crisis team in a Saturday morning Oval Office meeting, "this is not a 30-second commercial."

That was abundantly clear Saturday night as the world ogled the burning wreckage of the F-117A, a plane that more than any other symbolized the nation's technical and strategic superiority. Before the attack, Pentagon planners estimated NATO would lose 10 planes in the initial wave of strikes. President Clinton warned the nation that the conflict was not without risks. But NATO skated around those risks so effortlessly at first that it was possible to hope for a war without costs. Even amid the relief at the pilot's rescue, it was difficult to retain that illusion.