WASHINGTON -- The United States is ready to continue a sustained bombing campaign in Yugoslavia indefinitely, top U.S. defense officials said Thursday, and there was no sign that Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic would do the one thing that could end it quickly: return to the peace table.
"There will be more to follow, unless Mr. Milosevic chooses peace," Defense Secretary William Cohen told Associated Press Radio in an interview Thursday. "This is going to be a long effort."Senior defense officials said a second round of airstrikes would begin within hours.
At the White House, President Clinton began another round of briefings by national security adviser Sandy Berger. Presidential spokesman Joe Lockhart said Berger called Clinton after 10:30 p.m. Wednesday to report that all U.S. pilots had returned safely.
Lockhart said "ample diplomatic channels" remain open to Milosevic if he wishes to signal a readiness to discuss peace. Removing Milosevic from power, Lockhart said, "is not one of the objectives of the campaign right now."
"He knows what he needs to do, which is stop the offensive actions against the Kosovar Albanians and sign onto a durable political settlement," Lockhart said. "It's now up to him to decide."
Nebojsa Vujovic, charge d'affaires for the Yugoslav Embassy in Washington, said the allied strikes had caused no serious damage to Yugoslavia's military. "But we have civilian casualties," he said on NBC's "Today" show, with 10 dead and more than 60 wounded.
Cohen said those reports were unconfirmed and questioned the reliability of information out of Yugoslavia. He added, though, that civilian casualties were difficult to avoid.
Despite a near-unanimous vote by the House in support of U.S. forces participating in the mission, Republican lawmakers voiced concern about the U.S. strategy.
Rep. J.C. Watts of Oklahoma, a member of the House Republican leadership, said Thursday on Fox News that lawmakers of both parties "are quite concerned not knowing when we're going to get out of there, how we're going to get out of there. I'm not as concerned about a time-frame as I am about us being committed to winning."
Former Republican Sen. Bob Dole, who has served President Clinton as an envoy in the Yugoslav crisis, said the United States and NATO must be in for the long haul. If Yugoslavia refuses to yield, Dole told ABC News in a phone interview, "I think we continue, we make it more intense," and he added that ground forces "have to be somewhere on the table" if airstrikes don't work.
In a nationally televised address Wednesday night, Clinton warned that U.S. forces faced grave risks but indicated the assault would include no ground troops. "I do not intend to put our troops in Kosovo to fight a war," he said.
"Kosovo is a small place, but it sits on a major fault line between Europe, Asia and the Middle East," Clinton said. "All the ingredients for a major war are there."
Clinton said he was "convinced that the dangers of acting are far outweighed by the dangers of not acting."
He dwelt mainly on what he said would be the hazards of not acting: greater repression by the Yugoslav government against the ethnic Albanian minority in Kosovo, a widening conflict as refugees streamed into unstable neighboring countries, and the possibility of a complete loss of Western credibility if threats made by NATO were not carried out.
Across the country, Americans seemed largely unengaged in the campaign that involved hundreds of U.S. and allied warplanes and warships in cruise missile and bomb attacks that set Yugoslav targets afire.
"What is it, the Serbs and who?" businessman Mike Rahn, 25, said during his lunch break in a Phoenix shopping mall.
Clinton struggled to answer such questions, referring to maps of the region that showed the patchwork of national and subnational boundaries, and a measleslike field of red dots showing the scores of Kosovo villages already ravaged by Serb forces.