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ARCHIVE: Mme Albright and KosovoApril 10, 1999 NOTE: This archive, intended for research purposes, contains copyrighted material included "for fair use only." Contents
Introduction: This is neither a complete or kind file. Madeleine Albright has not given any public indication that she has any facility or capability in foreign policy. "The soldiers knew someone had blundered." Twice Yugoslavia saved Mme Albright and her family; once from the Nazis, once from Stalin. Though she speaks Serb very well, she does not like the Serbs. Nor does she understand them. Now she has an air campaign to punish Belgrade for crushing the KLA's revolt. If scapegoats are needed for sacrifice in end this crisis gracefully, Mme Albright and Robert Dole are prime candidates (see Dole-KLA archive also in this section of the website). Decide for yourself. Benjamin Works The Articles: 1. Albright's State Deportment by IAN WILLIAMS SEASONS OF HER LIFE: A Biography of Madeleine Korbel Albright. Flirtatious and ferocious at the same time, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright stamps the world stage over Kosovo, threatening fire from heaven if Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic does not agree to peace terms. Just as over Bosnia, she may even believe what she says. Unfortunately, the Serb leader is much better informed. He knows that whatever the public differences, Belgrade and Washington are united in wanting to avoid NATO airstrikes (even if they come to pass). Albright's grandstanding is a necessary part of the charade in which the United States acts scary and the Serbs act scared. With her ability to be stridently parochial, and insular as well, in six different languages, Madeleine Albright has been the perfect Secretary of State for this Administration. Never one to let substance interfere with a good soundbite, she has reinvented herself whenever it has been advantageous to her ambitions. But does she really merit a biography on the scale of Seasons of Her Life? As Ann Blackman frames the problem, "What makes her, among all the other brilliant men and women in America, stand out?" Almost inadvertently, emerging from Blackman's hard work is a portrait of Albright that shows she would be outstanding mainly by dint of her mediocrity in any such gathering (thus well meriting the nickname Madeleine Halfbright, which State Department staff members gave her after her appointment as US ambassador to the UN). However, she would also stand out for her burning ambition--and for her intensive cultivation of social and political connections of the kind available to someone of substantial wealth. (Madame Secretary benefited from a generous divorce settlement after what she has described as a "Cinderella marriage" to a millionaire.) Blackman actually writes that "Albright's greatest appeal is that she is just like us, only wealthier"! This has perhaps unwitting overtones of Hemingway's putdown of F. Scott Fitzgerald's remark about the rich--"They are different from you and me": "Yes, they have more money." But it really sums up the secret of Albright's success more aptly than any neofeminist reading of progress from the log cabin of Kinder, Küche, Kirche to political glory. In becoming the first woman to head the State Department, Albright achieved cult status in some superficially minded quarters. People Blackman terms the golden girls--Democrats like Barbara Mikulski, Barbara Kennelly and Anne Wexler--spoke out prominently in her favor, for example. But many of us who followed the careers of Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher and Indira Gandhi need convincing that the absence of cojones in itself guarantees wisdom, virtue or empathetic statesmanship. Even so, those redoubtable women, political warts and all, were elected despite their sex. Blackman's account makes it clear that Albright was appointed to public office by a symbol-sensitive White House because she was a woman. "Frankly, [President Clinton] wanted another woman in the cabinet," Blackman quotes a wisely anonymous but assumedly knowledgeable source as saying. In fact, cojones did help Albright directly, since her use of the word at the United Nations over Castro's downing of a flight of Cuban exiles helped lock her in the media eye as a staunch anticommunist--and an electoral asset for the President in Florida. Blackman's bibliography cites Albright's PhD dissertation, her MA submission for Columbia, one from Wellesley and a mere quartet of memorable public speeches, significant for their carefully crafted soundbites rather than their insights. Certainly no male so thinly qualified would have even been on the short list to head State--nor would a better-qualified woman lacking Albright's social connections. Among her predecessors, Warren Christopher may not have played to the gallery, but he had a long record of public service and had been Deputy Secretary of State prior to his Cabinet appointment. Cyrus Vance had been Deputy Secretary of State as well (and LBJ's emissary to North Vietnam) before he was elevated. Blackman's journalistic integrity rescues this book from the hagiographic gushing that it occasionally approaches. However, that creates a constant dissonance between biographical intent and delivery of the content. For example, she asserts that Albright has made sure that "women's rights are a central priority of US foreign policy" but then goes on to report that there has been no great leap forward in the number of female ambassadors on her watch. She quotes a close friend of Albright as saying, "Gender didn't hit her in any real way until she got to the United Nations. Feminism wasn't an important cause for her until recently." Even at that, it appears mainly to be a stepping stone. For example, Blackman reports that while Albright was nominally in charge of the US delegation to the International Women's Conference in Beijing, she disdained actual attendance, except insofar as she could share Hillary Clinton's plane for the one-day fly-in visit. Significantly, the book is as silent as Albright was herself about the sexually adventurous Clinton's sacking of Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders (another, more neglected female first) for her statement at the UN that masturbation did not carry a risk of AIDS. In a more political vein, Albright's first move on arrival at the UN was to push out April Glaspie, the former chargé d'affaires in Iraq who carried the can for the Bush Administration in its confused signals to Baghdad before the start of the Gulf War. Glaspie had been serving her penance at the US Mission to the UN. In short, sisterhood may have been a force in getting Albright appointed, but it is not a concept she has put into practice much herself. Blackman also records that her globetrotting protagonist was not going to attend the Copenhagen UN Social Summit at all, considering the war against global poverty too soft a subject for her consideration. Until, that is, Al Gore announced he was going, whereupon Albright, then UN ambassador, decided to hitch a lift with him. As Blackman says, she "understood that if she were to have any chance at higher office, she would need to spend time with people who could influence the decision." Brown-nosing becomes an art form in these pages, which occasionally read like Diary of a Nobody in the third person, as they record Albright's delight at getting this or that invitation, or mortification at being left off this or that power list. Despite the log-cabin-to-State-Department nonsense that she and her spinmeisters have woven, it is clear that Albright came from a relatively affluent and privileged background. No amount of spin can transform a privileged, upper-middle-class upbringing, with governesses and Swiss private schools, into a life of deprivation. Few people would regard being the daughter of a college professor and having to take a scholarship to Wellesley as swimming against the social stream. After marrying into money, Albright used her wealth to consolidate her position as a Georgetown hostess whose rabidly hawkish cold war sentiments, seemingly picked up through hero worship of her Czech émigré father, could always find a popular echo among Democratic movers and shakers. (Albright was an outsider of her own creation, since she had set herself on being rich, WASP and Wellesleyan and remade herself in this image, renouncing Catholicism for a comfortable Episcopalianism.) At least we are spared any hint of a radical past. Albright, it seems, was a proto-neocon from the beginning. During the sixties, when, Blackman stereotypically tells us, "antiwar radicals who grew their hair long and smoked pot" and "black-power advocates sporting 'Afros'" besieged college presidents, Albright found the demonstrations at Columbia "a pain in the neck." Albright, we deduce, neither wore an Afro nor smoked the demon weed; instead, she struggled with her postgraduate work and wrestled with the dilemma of whether to leave the children at home with the housekeeper. Interestingly, and once again reflecting the dissonance between the biographer's task and this volume's contents, the body of Blackman's text takes seriously Albright's amazing amnesia about her Jewish ancestry and the price her grandparents paid for their ethnicity. Blackman does record in her introduction that she found "very few people who believe [Albright] was truly ignorant of her family heritage." As Blackman herself says, it "stretched the imagination." Within months of her appointment as Secretary of State, in other words, Albright was revealed to be someone who was either suffering premature Alzheimer's or who was pathologically covering up knowledge of her family history. On the face of it, neither is an optimal characteristic for running the foreign policy of the world's only superpower. Blackman fails to consider what the effect of these revelations would have been if they had surfaced before her appointment: Discussions made public at the time reveal that Albright might have found herself scoring more negative points for her Jewishness than positive points for her womanhood at a bean-counting White House. There is much in this book with the ring of truth--but what rings out loudest is the sound of silence when it comes to examining the record of Albright's public life as opposed to her personal history. Blackman disclaims any attempt to analyze her subject's approach to US foreign policy in favor of following "the path Albright walked to shatter the glass ceiling." Would it be conceivable for a biographer of Henry Kissinger to write about his struggle with his Austrian-Jewish origins in an administration that was frequently tinged with anti-Semitism--and not mention Vietnam or Cambodia? Yet in Seasons of Her Life, Blackman gives almost as much prominence to Albright's presidency of the trustees of the Beauvoir Elementary School in Washington, DC--an affluent private establishment not much patronized by the majority population of the District--as she does to her career at the UN. In one way this is reasonable, since it was the nearest thing to public office Albright held before becoming ambassador to the UN in 1993. There is much talk of facials, hairdos, dating and dresses, but not one single mention of Rwanda. In fact, in 1994 Albright fought single-handedly in the Security Council to stop any UN reinforcements whatsoever from going to Kigali while somewhere between half a million and a million Tutsis were being massacred. All agree that loyalty to Clinton has been one of her virtues. She was never more loyal than in this championing of Presidential Decision Directive 25, which ruled that the United States would veto any UN peacekeeping operation that did not directly benefit US interests. Her pride in her Czech origins is continually stated, but in this case it was ironically justified. "The crocodiles in the Kagera River and the vultures over Rwanda have never had it so good," Karel Kovanda, the Czech ambassador to the UN, reprimanded his colleagues on the Security Council (and by implication one in particular) in an attempt to get reinforcements for the tiny UN contingent in Kigali. In another example of diplomacy by soundbite and photo-op, Blackman reports that Albright went to Somalia to wear a flak-jacket with US troops for the cameras and that she decided Boutros Boutros-Ghali should be fired as Secretary General of the UN because of that organization's failure there. However, Blackman does not mention her heroine's role in pushing the UN to fight a vendetta with Somali warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid, which could be regarded as the cause of the debacle in which eighteen US Rangers were killed. Nor does she mention that the key incident in which the soldiers were killed was an American operation initiated and carried out without even informing, let alone consulting, UN forces on the ground. Blackman gives the dubious credit for sacking Boutros-Ghali to Albright without really explaining why she did it. Perhaps closer examination would have led Blackman to examine the most likely hypothesis: that, Salome-like, Albright danced in front of Jesse Helms with Boutros-Ghali's head, in return for promises of easy confirmation as Secretary of State from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman. Blackman fails to explore what is, on the face of it, a highly unlikely yet continuing alliance between Albright and Helms. In fact, they share an intensely parochial and reactionary view of the world. Perhaps the most germane comment is the cable home from former British Ambassador Sir John Weston, who, in best "Yes, Minister" style, alerted the Foreign Office to the failings of the new Secretary of State. "She is not always good at accepting the need to apply to the United States the same standards and expectations she requires of others.... There is a mildly irritating tendency to create a fixed position and then to look around for others to save her from the detailed consequences of it.... Her reaction to being exposed or brought under pressure from sudden turns of events are sometimes tetchy, verging on the panicky." It is perhaps significant that Weston has retired from the Foreign Service. Most of the other diplomats who were privately so dismissive of her joined the fawning chorus of congratulations once she became Secretary of State. The same process has been obvious in the media, where her career has been written up as if she were some combination of Metternich and Mother Teresa. In fact, most of the press who covered Albright at the UN had as little time for her as she had for them. Her spinman would go straight to Washington to get the pliable coverage he wanted, bypassing the New York staff. From the time of her arrival at the UN, it was obvious where her ambitions lay, and her media effort was directed solely at the State Department. However, she had apparently been cautioned that it would not do to look too eager, so everyone was supposed to conspire in pretending that it was not so. I must confess an interest here. Not long after Albright took over, her spokesman, Jamie Rubin, bell, book and candled me from the US Mission in 1994 for writing a profile of Albright in the New York Observer that referred to her "barely concealed ambitions...to become Secretary of State." Rubin complained that I had not recorded his denial of any such ambition; she and her staff have a strong view of the proper role of journalists: as stenographers whose task is to write down every word. When the Washington Post's Michael Dobbs revealed his findings about Albright's family being massacred during World War II, Blackman records that Albright's response was to call Post publisher Katharine Graham, who wisely realized that it was too late to do anything about the story. Rubin's response was to spoil Dobbs's scoop by leaking his results to other outlets who could assure a more sympathetic, if not sycophantic, stance. Later, one press occasion in Belgrade was canceled simply because Dobbs was the pool reporter. Blackman says she asked Albright about the prevailing State Department doctrine that if someone writes something 99 percent positive and 1 percent negative about her, she will focus on the 1 percent. The champion of free speech and the American way of life told her chillingly, "So eliminate the 1 percent." It is to Blackman's credit that she has significantly exceeded the single percent. While most of her editorializations are in the traditional inside-the-Beltway mode of never attacking a possible source and the impressive negative percentage is always ascribed to others, I'd be surprised if Blackman ever got another exclusive interview. In Washington, access is given to stenographers, not investigators. Blackman's integrity and resourcefulness show through the pink cotton wool padding. I only wish she had adopted the persona of the little girl revealing the insubstantiality of Empress Albright's new clothes and dug a little deeper. She could have explained just why Albright is the perfect embodiment of this Administration's content-free foreign policy, in which one deranged Senator from North Carolina or a campaign donation from a banana magnate has more weight than all of America's allies put together, let alone the rest of the world.
Ian Williams, The Nation's UN correspondent, has reported extensively on Madeleine Albright. Send your letter to the editor to letters@thenation.com. Copyright ©1999 The Nation Company, L.P. All rights reserved. Unauthorized redistribution is prohibited. If you liked what you just read, you can subscribe to The Nation by calling 1-800-333-8536 or by following this link. The Nation encourages activists and friends of the magazine to share our articles with others. However, it is mandatory that academic institutions, publications and for-profit institutions seeking to reprint material for redistribution contact us for complete guidelines. Please attach this notice in its entirety when copying or redistributing material from The Nation. For further information regarding reprinting and syndication, please call The Nation at (212) 209-5426 or e-mail dveith@thenation.com. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ian Williams 212 593 3407 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2. Subj: Article for Washington Post Date: 99-02-18 23:05:19 EST From: wdoric@hotmail.com (William Doric) Albright's Lullaby by William Dorich Madeleine Albright said she "remembered Serbian lullabies from her childhood in Belgrade." Serbs wonder what tune she sang while assigning collective guilt to 10 million Serbian people who wonder why there was no requiem played for their 40,000 dead in Bosnia. Goethe (1749-1832) one of Germany's most famous philosophers and poets, so loved the Serbian people he learned to speak their language and influenced numerous European composers to base their work on Serbian folk music and literature. Brahms based his famous lullaby on a Serbian folk poem. Albright's announcement to the world that she now remembers Belgrade "fondly" is indeed a ruse. I warn Serbia, buyer beware. Her reference that "if her father was not Czech first, he would have wanted to be a Serb," was like pouring salt on a wound. This sudden love affair with the Serbs reveals how really desperate her ideas are in solving these complex problems÷most of which she created through her open hostility toward everything Serbian. She was not in the peace making business, she was in the demonization business. The United States betrayed their Serbian allies twice in fifty years, turning Serbs over to Tito's communism after losing 1.5 million victims in WWII, and now by actively participating in Yugoslavia's dismemberment. Selling Albanian autonomy to the Serbs will be like selling ice in Alaska. Albright tells the world she wants to "create a moderate opposition to unseat Milosevic," but it was the State Department that turned their backs on the two million Serbs who marched for four months in the snow protesting against that Milosevic regime. Expecting the Serb to again step forward after their humiliating defeat reveals the arrogance of our State Department who seems to think if you drop enough bombs on someone anything is possible. They forget that Hitler gave the Serbs an ultimatum too, and when it failed he bombed Belgrade killing 17,000 Serbs in one day. That bombing gave birth to the greatest Serbian Chetnik guerrilla movement in modern history. In a 1993 article published in the Serbian press, I disclosed that Madeleine Albright was Jewish. At the time her office said they "would not dignify my accusation with a response." Nevertheless, I sent Albright a copy of the article. Then, four years later, the Washington Post revealed her Jewish background and suddenly Ms. Albright was "surprised that she was Jewish." I am surprised she had that much Chutzpah. The late Pavle Jankovic, a respected Serbian journalist with Politika, saved Albright's life in WWII. You won't find any reference to this fact in her biography. He arranged her successful escape from Czechoslovakia to Belgrade, from Belgrade to Cairo then on to London. When sanctions were placed on Serbia, Pavle Jankovic sent a stinging letter to Albright for her lack of gratitude to the Serbian people whom she owes an enormous debt. Serbs expect more from Albright than a lullaby. Let us take a closer look at her father, Josep Korbel, and his wish to be a Serb. A number of scholars associated with her father in Colorado, including Dr. Alex Dragnich, remember him saying to the group, "If the regime in Belgrade changed tomorrow, I would relish living once again among the Serbs." How quickly the media have forgotten that the last word Bismark said on his deathbed was ..."Serbia." They regularly remind us of the Serb who assassinated the Austrian Archduke before WWI, but can't seem to recall the name, Ante Pavelic, who assassinated King Alexander of Serbia in 1932, a crime that gave birth to the Croatian Ustashi hordes who slaughtered 700,000 Serbs, 60,000 Jews and 70,000 Gypsies in WWII that were so grotesque they even turned the stomachs of the German SS. Albright's alleged "unilateral revocation of Kosovo's autonomy by Milosevic in 1989" is one of the biggest pieces of disinformation to emanate from our State Department. The Yugoslav Constitution was amended in 1988 because of the political paralysis in Yugoslavia, created by individual republics like Kosovo and Vojvodina who could veto acts of the Yugoslav parliament. Vojvodina gave her consent for this constitutional change in February 1989, and Kosovo gave its consent in March. This pretext that someone has unilaterally taken something away from Kosovo Albanians is a ruse and the entire American public is being hoodwinked into war by this lie. Remember the Gulf of Tonkin? Remember the incubator babies story that got us into the Gulf War? The Racak massacre is another one of those lies. A hand full of spent shells at that crime scene could not possibly kill 45 victims. How compelling that brains from victims shot in the head at point blank range are nowhere to be found. William Walker said that Racak was the worst he had ever seen. I think not. During Walker's diplomatic tenure in El Salvador, death squads, trained in the US, decapitated thousands of victims. Their heads placed on pikes were used to dot the countryside, according to Father Daniel Santiago. Robin Cook, the British Foreign Minister, said last week that "Great Britain has always supported Kosovo independence," another lie. Why has Robin Cook and his government not supported the reunification of Ireland? Why has he not insisted on a free Wales, a free Scotland or for that matter a free Kurdistan? In a recent interview on 60 Minutes, Leslie Stahl asked Madeleine Albright: "I understand that 500,000 Iraqi children have died due to our sanctions ... was it worth it?" Madeleine Albright replied, "It was worth it." Our government insists that we have an aversion for assassinating foreign tyrants. Apparently we have no aversion for starving a half million Arab children to death. The Serbian people are now asking how many of their children must die in this bizarre foreign policy of US-imposed genocide by sanctions. There will never be peace in the Balkans by prosecuting low-life camp guards, common criminals and Serbian generals while President Milosevic, President Tudjman and President Izetbegovic, the 'Commanders and Chiefs' of the armies responsible for this carnage go free. The Kosovo Liberation Army has stated that they have no intention of giving up their weapons. Serbs in Kosovo will see the writing on the wall and like Sarajevo they will vote for Albanian autonomy with their feet. Like the legend of Nero fiddling while Rome burned, Albright will be standing at the gates of an ethnically pure Kosovo proclaiming the virtues of a multi-ethnic society, just like she did in Bosnia that does not have a prayer of achieving those goals. The shroud being covered over Yugoslavia hides the $17 trillion in mineral assets of Yugoslavia being picked over by vultures from the outside world.. Kosovo has one of the largest coal reserves in Europe and a major reserve of lignite from which petroleum is derived. We seem to forget that 33 people were killed in Ron Brown's plane crash. Multi-national executives who were whetting their appetite on the spoils of Yugoslavia. Those mines in Kosovo were once pledged to France for billions in loans, they were also captured by Hitler during the war who ran them with slave labor to keep his war machine going. In 1991 the State Department said Albanians were 1.2 million in Kosovo. In 1994 they said 1.4 million. In 1996 they said 1.6 million. Now they insist that Albanians represent "90% of 2 million" as though we are all to stupid to calculate this means 1.8 million another magic increase of 200,000. In 1991 the State Department said Serbs were 14%, did 4% of the Serbian population flee, were they murdered, or just made invisible? This same government agency said Gypsies are 7% in Kosovo, Greeks 2.3%, Turks 1.5%, Montenegrins 2% and other 1%. By my calculations the Albanians can't possible represent more than 50% considering that 400,000 are illegal aliens and more than 300,000 have fled to Switzerland, Italy and Germany, most of whom have no desire to return to the poverty of Kosovo. The United States and our allies could stop this carnage tomorrow by placing sanctions of Albania for fomenting war against her neighbor, for providing Osama bin Laden with terrorists training camps and for allowing Albania to ferry guns and mercenaries into Serbia, the mark of a true aggressor. Put 20,000 NATO troops in Albania if we want to stop this conflict from spreading. Madeleine Albright exhibits a repugnant lust for vengeance÷an ugly personality defect from a mother and the first woman Secretary of State. END The writer is an author of numerous books on Balkan subjects, including his 1992 book, Kosovo and his current book, Hilandar's Octocentenary Arianna Online Madeleine Albright: The Spiritual Patron Of The Disaster In Kosovo Syndicated Column, Filed April 1, 1999 If victory has a hundred fathers but defeat is an orphan, it is now time to trace the lineage of the humanitarian and strategic catastrophe in Serbia to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. `She is the spiritual patron of this,'' Michael Dobbs told me. Dobbs, whose book on Albright will be released later this month, attributes her foreign policy thinking to her memories of the dismemberment of her homeland, Czechoslovakia, by the Nazis. ``My mindset is Munich,'' he quotes her saying. ``Most of my generation's is Vietnam. I saw what happened when a dictator was allowed to take over a piece of a country and the country went down the tubes.'' Twice during her childhood her family was forced to flee Czechoslovakia, once in 1939 following Hitler's annexation of the country and again in 1948 after the Communist government stripped her father -- who had been the Czech ambassador in Belgrade -- of his citizenship. ``Her personal history has taken over in Kosovo,'' a close former associate of Albright told me. ``She has been waiting to get into this fight for a long time.'' The Balkans have always been Albright's special project. ``Sandy Berger handled China,'' said another associate. ``Strobe Talbott handled Russia, Dick Holbrooke handled Eastern Europe. In fact, one of the reasons for her animosity toward Holbrooke is territorial. He was meddling in her area.'' Ann Blackman, author of ``Seasons of Her Life,'' the first biography of Albright, writes that, as far back as 1993, Albright was asserting in a tough memo to President Clinton that ``America's stewardship of foreign policy would be measured by its success in the Balkans.'' Even the president commented on her persistence: ``She pushed, and she pushed, and she pushed,'' he said in 1998. ``She was always out there, and that made a big difference to me.'' By all accounts, that same doggedness carried the day with the administration when it decided to bomb Serbia. Albright first threatened Milosevic with bombs more than a year ago, saying the United States would not ``stand by and watch the Serbian authorities do in Kosovo what they can no longer get away with doing in Bosnia.'' This was starkly at odds with the role she played in 1994 when she urged the Security Council not to send U.N. reinforcements to Rwanda, even though more than half a million people were being massacred. On Kosovo, so determined was she that nothing would get in the way of military action that she asked Congress to cancel its March 11 debate on the subject, claiming that it could cause divisions within NATO. Everyone in Albright's circle is very conscious of how anxious she has been to have a victory to call her own. Instead, she now has a calamity to call her own. ``She has never been a strategic thinker,'' Blackman told me. ``She cannot see six moves ahead. She can only see the next move.'' So blinkered was her vision that all warnings by the CIA about Serbian retaliations were ignored. In fact, when the Italian prime minister asked the president what he would do if Milosevic countered the bombings by intensifying his attacks on the Kosovo Albanians, Clinton, flummoxed, turned to Sandy Berger. ``We will continue the bombing,'' the National Security Advisor replied. This is, of course, the Albright Doctrine -- not only in Kosovo, but in Iraq, where intermittent bombings are still going on while the arms inspection system has collapsed and Saddam Hussein builds up his nuclear and chemical stockpiles. Undaunted by the failure of unsupported air campaigns, both in Iraq and throughout modern history, Albright seemed convinced that she could bomb Milosevic into signing her Rambouillet agreement. And now, she seems unwilling to acknowledge that the accord that NATO went to war to impose has been rendered obsolete by the fact that the Kosovo it intended to protect no longer exists. ``Over 580,000 people have been either internally displaced or forced to flee,'' said Albright's spokesman James Rubin, contradicting his boss' delusional statement on ``Face the Nation'' last Sunday: ``To say that this has now backfired is just dead wrong.'' This obstinacy is one of Albright's weaknesses that former British Ambassador to the U.N. Sir John Weston addressed in a cable to London when she was nominated for Secretary of State: ``She is not good at devising a detailed game plan for pursuing broad objectives .... There is a mildly irritating tendency to create a fixed position and then to look around for others to save her from the detailed consequences of it .... Her reactions to being exposed or brought under pressure from sudden turns of events are sometimes tetchy, verging on the panicky.'' If Albright is panicking right about now, is she looking to ground troops to save her from the consequences of admitting defeat? Two years and two months have passed between the glowing ``A Star Is Born'' headlines that greeted the confirmation of the first woman secretary of State and the hell on Earth she helped unleash in Kosovo. The lesson Albright should have taken from Munich is that tragedies spring not only from unadulterated evil but also from honorable intentions coupled with terrible misjudgments. ARIANNA ONLINE 4. State Dept. Miscalculated on Kosovo In an address at the Brookings Institution on Tuesday, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright warned that NATO must be ready for an extended fight. (AP Photo) By Thomas W. Lippman As the clouds of violence darkened over Kosovo throughout 1998, Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright argued repeatedly that Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic would respond to the threat of force. That conviction underlay U.S. negotiating tactics last fall, when Milosevic appeared to back down from a campaign of repression in the province of Kosovo under the threat of NATO bombing. It was a basic assumption driving the peace conference at Rambouillet, France, in February, when Albright and her colleagues expected Milosevic to accept a U.S.-brokered deal rather than face a NATO bombardment. And it was reflected in the belief at the State Department that when airstrikes began Milosevic would probably back down after a few visible targets were hit. These miscalculations about the efficacy of the threat, and a collective underestimation of Milosevic's defiance, have led the United States and its allies into an air war in Europe that has produced some of the same negative consequences they said they were trying to head off, and forced the NATO alliance to modify its political goals. State Department officials dispute the notion that Kosovo is "Albright's war," as one said it has been called. Nevertheless, the NATO pounding of Yugoslavia embodies bedrock principles of Albright's view of the world. Born in Czechoslovakia and twice a refugee as a child, Albright believes that the United States and its allies must unite to check aggression, especially in Europe, because they will be drawn into wider conflicts if they do not. She also has said many times Milosevic represents a last vestige of a nondemocratic Europe that was plagued by war for much of this century, and that his record shows he will destabilize a large swath of the continent unless bottled up. That view has been embraced by the alliance and has framed NATO's deliberations about Kosovo. At the same time, the Yugoslav leader's defiance, and the mass deportation of Kosovo's ethnic Albanian population by Serb security forces, represent the response to NATO bombing that Albright and her advisers had calculated as least likely. Albright and her closest aides expected Milosevic to behave like a "schoolyard bully," as one senior official put it, backing down after a few punches were thrown. They admit they were unprepared for the scope and speed of the deportation campaign. By contrast, senior Pentagon officials expressed doubts before the war that Milosevic could be moved by air power, and CIA Director George J. Tenet warned that the Serbs might respond with a campaign of ethnic cleansing. While administration officials have argued that the bombing was necessary to try to stop a campaign of ethnic cleansing that began a year ago, they also said that nobody predicted that Milosevic would respond by forcing civilians onto trains and deporting them, a scene not witnessed in Europe since the depths of World War II. "As we contemplated the use of force over the past 14 months, we constructed four different models," one senior official said. "One was that the whiff of gunpowder, just the threat of force, would make [Milosevic] back down. Another was that he needed to take some hit to justify acquiescence. Another was that he was a playground bully who would fight but back off after a punch in the nose. And the fourth was that he would react like Saddam Hussein," the president of Iraq, who hunkered down through Operation Desert Storm in 1991 and still holds power. "On any given day people would pick one or the other," this official said. "We thought the Saddam Hussein option was always the least likely, but we knew it was out there, and now we're looking at it." Albright's thinking about Milosevic, aides close to her said, has been driven in large part by events of half a century ago in Europe. "Madeleine Albright, more than anyone else in this administration, is driven by her own biography," said one senior U.S. diplomat. "Time and again, she raises the sights to the moral and historic issues." She believes deeply that Adolf Hitler and other tyrants could have been deterred if confronted early, and has applied that view to her diplomacy in Yugoslavia. Albright's conviction that Milosevic could be persuaded by the threat of force was strengthened by his initially promising partial compliance with a cease-fire agreement brokered in October by special U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke ö an agreement Milosevic accepted after NATO's initial decision to use force if necessary. "Today," she said on Oct. 27, "the alliance is able to report that the President Milosevic is in very substantial compliance [with U.N. Security Council resolutions on Kosovo] . . . and that this compliance is sufficient to justify not launching airstrikes at this time. This is an important and welcome development. It would not have happened if we had not combined diplomacy with the threat by NATO to use force." That experience, combined with the memory of how NATO airstrikes and a ground offensive by Croatian troops had induced Milosevic to accept a peace agreement in Bosnia, reinforced the belief that Milosevic would back down rather than fight, or at least retreat after a few missile strikes, officials said. "What happened in Bosnia and in October showed that the threat of force can work, not that it will work, and therefore it was worth trying," an aide to Albright said. Given the outcomes of those earlier confrontations, administration officials said they are still baffled by Milosevic's refusal to accept the U.S.-sponsored peace agreement that was offered to him at Rambouillet. While it would have required an end to repression of the Kosovo Albanians and promised them wide-ranging political and administrative autonomy, it would also have allowed some Serb troops and security forces to remain in the province, maintained Serb sovereignty for at least three years ö guaranteed by NATO ö and provided security for the province's minority Serb population. It also would have required the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army to disarm, and U.S. officials said Milosevic was promised that the United States would take steps against the ethnic Albanian group, such as freezing its bank accounts, if he accepted the agreement and the KLA refused. "We walked right up to the edge of appeasement" at Rambouillet to craft a peace plan Milosevic could accept, one senior official said. The only conceivable reason Milosevic would have rejected that deal ö even after a last-minute effort by Holbrooke to convince him that force was imminent unless he signed ö is that "he's detached from reality. His mind just can't process new inputs," another official said. "He never even asked Holbrooke for any changes in the text." The Kosovo rebels and representatives of Milosevic participated at Rambouillet because they were, in effect, ordered to do so by Albright and the foreign ministers of the five other countries in the so-called Contact Group: Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Russia. Milosevic and the rebels were not to arrive at Rambouillet with delaying tactics or plans for drawn-out negotiations, according to Albright's scheme. They were to arrive prepared to accept the peace plan within two weeks, subject only to minor modifications. "Showing up is not going to be good enough," Albright said. State Department officials now say they had to have a detailed peace plan because the European allies said they would carry out the threat of force only if the Serbs were clearly refusing a reasonable offer that the Kosovo representatives had accepted. At the time, though, Albright's aides offered a different reason for the ultimatum and the tight timetable: They said she was tired of fighting the same fires over and over again, and wanted the Kosovo issue resolved well before NATO's 50th anniversary celebration this month. In an appearance at the Brookings Institution yesterday, Albright declined to reflect on what she might have done differently in the past few months. "We will have plenty of time to go back and look at what we did or did not do," she said. "I am completely focused on what we are doing now and what we have to do in the future." © Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company Subj: ALBRIGHT'S HEAD WILL ROLL Date: 99-04-08 19:47:17 EDT 5. To some Washington critics, it is ``Albright's War'' By Carol Giacomo WASHINGTON, April 7 (Reuters) - Following a time-honoured tradition, Washington is looking for someone to blame for the Kosovo crisis -- and right now, most fingers are pointing at Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Some have even dubbed the latest Balkans conflict ``Albright's War,'' after the Clinton administration's leading advocate of backing diplomacy with force. It is an ironic turn of events for the first woman to be America's chief diplomat. Born in the former Czechoslovakia, she was twice made a refugee by the Second World War, once took refuge in Belgrade with her diplomat father and speaks some Serbian. It is a history that Albright has regularly invoked as she championed the case for using U.S. political and military might as an instrument for peace and freedom. Since her days as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations from 1993 to 1997, she has been closely identified with U.S. policy toward the Balkans, often prodding a reluctant administration to take more muscular action. With Yugoslav forces still on the move after 15 days of NATO air strikes and 500,000 Kosovo Albanian refugees creating the worst humanitarian disaster in Europe since the Second World War, second-guessing is rife among officials and experts horrified by the unintended consequences of allied action. ``If there was one person who completely miscalculated, it was Albright and (State Department spokesman James) Rubin,'' one expert who helped shape U.S. Balkan policy said. ``They were the ones who pushed the notion that a bit of bombing would bring (Yugoslav President Slobodan) Milosevic around,'' the expert told Reuters. Albright and her aides have been faulted for underestimating Milosevic's readiness to move ruthlessly against the Kosovo Albanians and overestimating the ability of NATO air power to bring him to heel. In recent days, much has been written about how senior Pentagon officials expressed doubts before the war that air power would move Milosevic and how CIA Director George Tenet warned that the Serbs would respond with ethnic cleansing. Albright, in an interview on Wednesday on the CNN television programme ``Larry King Live,'' referred to those reports as part of ``a strange game'' commonly played in Washington. ``It's called cover-your-you-know-what, and I don't want to engage in that,'' she said. ``The Monday-morning quarterbacks are criticising a game when it's still in the first quarter.'' Albright noted that she was ``a product of Central Europe'' and said she had seen what happens ``when you don't stand up to evil early.'' She agreed that some critics were deliberately personalizing the Kosovo crisis. But she added, ``This is not my war. ... This is America's fight for our values.'' Rubin, one of Albright's closest advisers and a person who was deeply involved in the formation of U.S. Kosovo policy, defended his boss at Wednesday's State Department briefing. ``It is inaccurate to suggest that she expected the Serbs to accept the Rambouillet accords (a last-gasp effort at achieving a Kosovo peace settlement before the NATO bombardment began) or to back down shortly after the air campaign,'' he said. ``You know, we all wanted to see this problem solved peacefully. That was our goal. We tried every possible avenue, and we've tried everything we could to deal with this peacefully, but at the end of the day, President Milosevic wasn't prepared to act,'' Rubin said. Critics say if Albright and President Bill Clinton were serious about winning a confrontation with Milosevic and saving Kosovo Albanians from ethnic cleansing, they should have deployed ground troops in Yugoslavia. It is an option Clinton continues to reject. A U.S. official said the administration feared such a move would shatter the NATO consensus in support of air strikes as well as stir fierce opposition in the United States. Kurt Bassuener of the Balkan Action Council, which backs strong action against Milosevic, including ground troops, said Albright had been unfairly targeted. ``If anybody miscalculated, it was President Clinton. I don't think Albright thought we should forswear the use of ground troops, and I don't think she thought we should do that two weeks into the air campaign,'' he said. He said that many people, including those in his own group, did not expect the ferocity and speed with which Milosevic moved against the Kosovo Albanians. Many also believed the Yugoslav leader would sue for peace soon after air strikes began, but ``obviously, that's been proven wrong,'' he said. 22:03 04-07-99 Copyright 1999 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. 6. THE WASHINGTON TIMES April 9, 1999 WHO SHOULD PAY? BILL GERTZ The State Department is trying to get the Pentagon to pick up the millions of dollars in costs for helping the 1.3 million displaced Kosovar Albanians being forced from their homes and out of the country. The Pentagon is adamant: No. State officials say the refugees are covered by the Geneva Convention, but the Pentagon says the laws of war do not cover these refugees. State is organizing the scheduled flight of some 20,000 refugees from the Balkans to the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, aboard U.S. military and commercially chartered aircraft. State also tried to get the Pentagon to pick up the costs of Haitian refugees who fled that island and also were resettled for a time at Guantanamo. "Once again the State Department and Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright created a mess and they want the Pentagon to pick up the pieces," said one official. According to Pentagon officials, it was Mrs. Albright who was the driving force within the Clinton administration for launching air strikes against Serbia, a strategy that the military went along with. Inside the Pentagon, the secretary of state's minions have been dubbed "Albright's Raiders" for their penchant to advocate military power with little thought for the consequences or costs. 7. Madeleine Albright vs. Madeleine Albright By JAY AMBROSE (April 9, 1999 4:00 a.m. EDT http://www.nandotimes.com) - On one side of the debate about the anticipated length of NATO's combat involvement in Yugoslavia, we have Madeleine Albright. And on the other side of the debate about what the administration was predicting in the early going, we have, well, Madeleine Albright. As enlarged quotes in a Washington newspaper remind us, the secretary of state has been disagreeing with herself, beginning on March 24, when she said: "I don't see this as a long-term operation. I think that this is ... achievable within a relatively short period of time." That was on PBS. On NBC on April 4, she said: "We never expected this to be over quickly. The president himself has said, 'This is not a 30-second commercial.' We are in there for a long time." The fact is, the administration has contradicted itself a number of times about various aspects of the NATO air campaign, apparently because candor would make its miscalculations obvious. Albright has had a reputation for forthrightness, though. She has had credibility. Now is not the time to lose it. BACK TO: Where am I? PATH:
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