Making A Deal: Why Milosevic Blinked

If personal survival is your war aim, then surrender is always an option. We will never know exactly when the decision took root in the contrarian lobes of Slobodan Milosevic's brain. But three weeks ago, his body language changed. For weeks, whenever he received Russian special envoy Viktor Chernomyrdin, the Serbian leader would loll arrogantly back in his seat and hold forth, filling the room with his self-serving discourse. Since launching a diplomatic shuttle on April 14, Chernomyrdin had spent dozens of fruitless hours with Milosevic, most of them listening. Then on May 19, the Russian detected a subtle shift. During a seven-hour chat, Milosevic kept leaning forward, paying attention, listening intently, as if hoping to hear something he could latch on to.

Last Thursday he evidently did. Serbia's truculent, unpredictable leader startled the world by abruptly accepting all of NATO's demands, almost the exact terms he had rebuffed on March 23 when he set off the air war. Now he had decided to stop it. It took him just over six hours of businesslike question-and-answer with the emissaries to make up his mind and formally capitulate.

Such a relief. In a test of wills in which one side had all the weapons but both underestimated the other's staying power, Milosevic cracked first. The chilling spectacle of NATO slamming 20,000 bombs and missiles into Yugoslavia can come to a merciful end. Bill Clinton proves--again--to be the luckiest President alive. At nearly the exact moment that Clinton gathered the Joint Chiefs to confront the unpalatable implications of a ground war to salvage the stalemated air campaign, Milosevic handed him victory.

Victory? The word is technically correct. The Serbs will be out of Kosovo, NATO in. The alliance can be proud it hung together, stuck to its demands and lost not a single soldier in combat--an amazing, unprecedented zero. The West stood up against the obscene barbarism of "ethnic cleansing," drawing moral lines for the world. Serbia's war machine has been mutilated. Air power vindicated itself.

But it would be wrong to exult. NATO miscalculated when it entered the war and waged it with self-imposed limits. The armed confrontation failed in its primary aim. Air strikes were undertaken to save Kosovo's Albanians from Serbian wrath, but the offensive that NATO launched gave Milosevic the opening to rampage through the province. It took 72 days of death and destruction to arrive back where the combatants had started: at the original precarious prescription for safeguarding the Kosovars. Except that now 855,000 of them have been expelled from their wasted homeland, thousands have died, and untold others have been subjected to atrocious crimes. No one can say how many will dare to go back. If they don't, Milosevic will have succeeded in his primary goal of cleansing as many Albanians from his nation as he could.