Wesley Clark on Slobodan Milosevic

Wesley Clark, who was my favorite candidate for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 2004, has made available on his Web site a copy of the op-ed he did for the Wall Street Journal on 03/13/06 about the late Slobodan Milosevic, with whom he dealt personally in negotiations:  A Petty Hitler.  He writes:

Slobodan Milosevic's death in The Hague is a real tragedy for the international community. But most of all it will be a tragedy for the Serbs themselves. It will likely be another step in a series of historic Serb failures, martyrdom and isolation, all of which Milosevic himself grandly evoked to gain and maintain his power. I knew him as a nationalist leader and wartime adversary. ...

While his death at The Hague ends his interminable trial, nothing is resolved. His death only compounds many of the difficult issues still facing the international community, Europe and Serbia itself. ...

He was rational and sometimes cunning, often a brilliant tactical negotiator but ultimately a fool of a strategist, whose reckless crimes included murder and genocide, and who has cost humanity as a whole and his own Serbs dearly.

Clark gives a quick summary of the circumstances of the Kosovo War, for which he was the NATO commander:

In the spring of 1998 he unleashed the next round of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, this time turning his Special Police against a prominent Albanian family in Kosovo, killing 60 of them, including women and children. For most of that year NATO struggled to find a balanced approach, alternating negotiations with intensifying threats to head off another war in former Yugoslavia. But Milosevic foolishly believed he could defy NATO warnings and launch a broad ethnic cleansing effort with impunity.

It was another strategic miscalculation by Milosevic. NATO followed through in its threats, unleashing a 78-day, gradually intensifying air campaign and threatened ground intervention. Coupled with Russian diplomatic assistance and his indictment for war crimes, Milosevic was forced to pull his forces out of Kosovo. It was yet another blow to his vision of a greater Serbia. When he tried the next year to win re-election, his opponents in Belgrade were ready -- demanding an honest vote and his resignation. Soon he was delivered to The Hague.

I supported the Kosovo War at the time.  And in retrospect I still think it was justified and necessary.  It was also acceptable in international law - but it was a stretch.  The gaps in international law in that situation led the world community to begin to think seriously about how to create a better legal framework for "humanitarian intervention".  The Iraq War has dramatically reminded everyone of the risks and destructive implications of preventive wars of choice.  And it has seriously set back progress on "humanitarian intervention", which Darfur could use more of right now.  Eric Heinze discusses this issue in Humanitarian Intervention and the War in Iraq: Norms, Discourse, and State Practice Parameters (US Army War College) Spring 2006.