WASHINGTON -- Of all the times that Richard Holbrooke, the Clinton administration's envoy, has finished negotiating with Slobodan Milosevic, the Yugoslav leader, the room for maneuvering was probably never so restricted nor the options so unpalatable as now.
Three days after President Clinton announced that Milosevic had gone over "the threshhold," Holbrooke left Belgrade, leaving NATO no choice but to launch airstrikes. Clinton administration officials acknowledge going to war is not their favored option.As long as Serbian forces march across Kosovo, torching villages, sending refugees fleeing and bringing retaliation from the guerrillas of the Kosovo Liberation Army, Holbrooke has made it plain the West can no longer tolerate such action.
Administration officials said Monday that they had set a rough deadline of 24 hours for Holbrooke to get a cease-fire agreement or stop negotiating and leave.
It was too embarrassing, they suggested, for Holbrooke to be talking to Milosevic while his forces are battering ethnic Albanian civilians, actions that the threatened NATO airstrikes are supposed to stop.
Now that Holbrooke has left Belgrade without an agreement, he is heading to NATO headquarters in Brussels, where the secretary general of NATO, Javier Solana, has the authority to tell NATO commanders to go ahead with airstrikes.
Privately, administration policymakers acknowledge that bombing is "not a good option," as one expressed it Monday night before Holbrooke's mission failed. "It creates all kinds of problems."
Airstrikes against Serbian forces would embolden the Kosovo Liberation Army, a guerrilla group that has been fighting for the past year for the independence of the province.
Dozens of Kosovo Albanians trying to flee into neighboring Macedonia were stranded at the border Tuesday, carrying their belongings in bundles, after being turned back by Macedonian authorities.
By strengthening the guerrillas, the NATO bombing would also strengthen the clamor within Kosovo for independence. Thus, very quickly, Kosovo could change from being the autonomous region envisioned in the Paris peace agreement to a quasi-independent statelet, on the border of Albania and Macedonia where restive Albanian populations would be eager to redraw their borders.