The Policy Bomb

What a terrible moment for NATO to celebrate itself. Washington is busy gussying up for the red-letter weekend marking the alliance's 50th anniversary, but the bloom is gone. There will be no symbolic flyby while most of NATO's planes are engaged in firing lethal munitions at an enemy that will not cry uncle. There can be no self-congratulation while NATO generals are apologizing for two deadly mishaps that killed scores of Serb and Kosovo Albanian civilians. Even the lavish dinners will be muted by the thought of three-quarters of a million dispossessed Kosovars trapped inside the province at the mercy of Serb terror, hunger and disease. The summit, which begins this weekend, was supposed to define "a new NATO for a new era." Instead, it has its hands full figuring out how to win a regular old-time war.

Last week didn't help much. Four weeks of bombardment by the West's air armada may have exacted a toll on Slobodan Milosevic's fuel depots and airfields, army barracks and police headquarters. But the laser-guided bombs and cruise missiles have been powerless to halt the carnage inside Kosovo. What was billed as a fast, decisive air campaign to frighten Milosevic into submission has degenerated into a grinding war of attrition, demanding more planes, more troops, fresh plans, new goals.

President Bill Clinton and the other men who lead NATO are now having to improvise. The lack of progress provokes calls from one side to send in the infantry and from the other to press for political accommodation. U.S. lawmakers returned from their Easter recess but couldn't decide where it was politic to come down in the most serious military conflict since the Gulf War, so they punted, putting off all debate and all votes until they see which way the war blows.

The Administration was clutching at straws too. On Thursday the President and various aides suddenly hinted at another war aim: if Milosevic won't capitulate, then NATO will bomb until it destroys enough Serbian forces to level the ground for Kosovo Liberation Army guerrillas to take over the province. "That is one of those fantasies that nonexperts create," scoffs a Western diplomat in Tirana. "[The K.L.A. has] gotten their asses kicked. So how can any reasonable man expect the K.L.A. can drive the Serbs out of Kosovo?"

NATO was distracted from diplomatic big-think last week by the more immediate need to allay the impact of its misfires on civilians in the war zone. When two missiles struck Train No. 393 while aiming to blow up a Serbian bridge across the Southern Morava River last Monday, at least 10 Serbs were incinerated and 16 other passengers badly wounded. While Belgrade played relentlessly on the West's heartless intentions, NATO brushed off the mishap as a "regrettable" consequence of Serbian intransigence.

But the alliance fared disastrously two days later when it first denied its planes had savaged a convoy of fleeing Albanians inside Kosovo, then fessed up to the terrible error. Serbia spared no efforts to display this second sample of Western "atrocity," escorting journalists from Belgrade to the grisly scene of corpses and bodies blasted apart. But as NATO struggled to downplay the unfortunate accident of war, there were suggestions that some of the scenes had been staged by the Serbs.