Virtual War : Kosovo And Beyond

The notion of an American way of war informs how scholars, policymakers, and strategists understand how Americans fight. A way of war—defined as a society’s cultural preferences for waging war—is not static. Change can occur as a result of important cultural events, often in the form of traumatic experiences or major social transformations. A way of war is therefore the malleable product of culturally significant past experiences. Reflecting several underlying cultural ideals, the current American way of war consists of three primary tenets—the desire for moral clarity, the primacy of technology, and the centrality of scientific management systems—which combine to create a preference for decisive, large-scale conventional wars with clear objectives and an aversion to morally ambiguous low-intensity conflicts that is relevant to planners because it helps them address American strategic vulnerabilities.

War is a human endeavor. Humanity continually pursues solutions to counter evolving threats with the end of preserving power while also enabling peace. Civilizations resort to war to maintain their perception of this equilibrium. Defined threats and adversaries have changed throughout history, however, the essence of human nature and the base concept of conflict itself have not. Carl von Clausewitz’s theories on warfare capture the relationship between humanity and its application of war, remaining relevant in today’s era through their pensive explanations of timeless philosophical principles regarding the concept of war. These theories regarding war in politics, the key factors affecting war, and the extent that war is applied are inherently interconnected, providing insight on the relationships between humanity and its application of war.

American foreign policy has forever been a controversial topic in international discussions. Questions regarding America’s military presence, intent and use of force have long been centers of controversy and debate. Recent American involvements in the Syrian Civil War and the conflict with ISIS have raised questions about the ethics of US involvement and her justifications for force. As ISIS began to grow stronger and the list of crimes it committed began to augment, America began to use force to combat ISIS’s growth citing legal American precedents and humanitarian urgency as the major justifications for involvement. However, critics of American involvement contend that America’s involvement violates both American and international law,

Generations of Americans have watched our military engage in conflicts abroad. For mine, it’s Afghanistan and Iraq. Whether or not all of these crusades were born of integrity and the pursuit of democracy is questionable. In 2011, we watched as the United States and allied forces entered yet another conflict, in Libya, to aid protesters in their ousting of Muammar Gaddafi. This conflict was supposed to go uphill from Gaddafi’s death. However, we know that Libya today is a place connected to chaos and division. President Obama even describes the handling of the Libyan intervention as his “worst mistake” (Tierney “The Legacy of Obama’s ‘Worst Mistake’”). Why? “[W]e [and] our European partners underestimated the need to come in full force if you’re going to do this…the day after Gaddafi is gone…at that moment, there has to be a much more aggressive effort to rebuild societies that didn’t have any civic traditions.” (Tierney “The Legacy of Obama’s ‘Worst Mistake’”) Many agree that our conflicts in the Middle East, recently in Afghanistan and Iraq, have shown us intervening operations are complicated

Threats of communism and the bipolarity of the Cold War spurred the United States to develop a global foreign policy. These threats from the Soviet Union caused the United States to consider new policies and national interests in countries that it had not previously had strong interests in or policies towards, like the Republic of Kosovo. Kosovo has always been a controversial territory within the nation of Serbia. Throughout history, the region has consistently been populated by Kosovars whom ethnically identify more with Albania than Serbia. This has led to much strife between the people in the region and neighboring governments like Serbia.

In Somalia, the U.S. withdrew its forces after losing eighteen Rangers. In Rwanda, genocidal Hutus deterred Western intervention by killing ten Belgian soldiers. In Bosnia, compellence clearly failed against Milosovic, who continued his policy of ethnic cleansing of Albanians in Bosnia despite Western threats. Pushed by Western public opinion, NATO finally screwed up its courage to intervene, but then failed to go after known war criminals because of the vulnerability of its lightly armed forces, whose primary mission was the distribution of aid (Freedman:124-25). There is an important lesson here, and one that has been consistently ignored by theorists of threat-based strategies. It has to do with the ability to inflict pain versus the willingness to suffer it. As we observed, Schelling and American policymakers ignored the latter in Indochina, concentrating only on how much damage they could inflict on North Vietnam and the Viet Cong. The U.S. lost the war because its Vietnamese opponents were willing to accept far more suffering than the American people. This phenomenon is equally pronounced today. Self-deterrence, in effect, prevented intervention in Rwanda and stalled it for a long time in the former Yugoslavia. It did not have this effect in Afghanistan and Iraq, where the Bush administration grossly underestimated its costs and

Given the fact that the US-led NATO alliance was far superior in virtually every way to Slobodan Milosevic’s military force, why was NATO unable to achieve a quick, decisive end to the conflict, and avoid the engineered mass migration of immigrants out of Kosovo? Because Milosevic’s strategy in the areas of intelligence gathering and targeting of alliances to defeat the enemy, were masterful employments of military theory as described by Sun Tzu, Carl Von Clausewitz and others.

The first battle of the Kosovo war which was meticulously planned with stomach revolting malice was less than a mile from my house and it resulted in the death of over 50 members of the Jashari family. As the Serbian Army surrounded the three homes the Jashari’s began to prepare for the onslaught that was to come. Although less than 20 men had arms they valiantly defended their house, their land, and most importantly their family from a determined and well organize Army. These men, farmers by trade, equipped with simple Kalashnikov rifles defended their homes and lives for hours and didn’t allow for their bloodthirsty enemies to advance even one step towards their precious brothers, sisters, mothers, and fathers. The amount of power

After the end of the Cold War there has been an increase in the use of force for humanitarian purposes around the world in places such as, Liberia, Somalia, Afghanistan, and Iraq. On February 2001, the Foreign Policy Research Institute hosted a major conference on the question of humanitarian intervention and its implications for American foreign policy. The conference focused on examining the recent history of humanitarian intervention and its prospects in the new century (Wheeler, 2000, 128). Thus, this paper is going to review the existing literature of humanitarian intervention. Firstly, it will define the notion of humanitarian interventions and analyze the dilemma between intervention and the concept of sovereignty. Secondly, it will question if the United States has the legitimate right to intervene as a third party responding to humanitarian crises.

UK Prime Minister Tony Blair stated that ‘Serbia caused the Kosovo War.’ 3, p.318 How valid is this claim?

To speak of deterrence and strike capacity is to see war as a game; to speak of legal murder is to identify war as a murder of human beings; to speak of a struggle for social equality is to see war as an unclearly defined instrument for achieving an intensely sought objective. Thus, each war metaphor increases selected views and ignores others, thereby helping one to concentrate upon desired values of favored public policies and helping one to ignore their unwanted, unthinkable, or irrelevant sites and aftermaths. Each war metaphor can be a subtle way of highlighting what one wants to believe and avoiding what one does not wish to face (p.

In judging one side just or unjust, no matter the epistemic difficultly of the task, one contributes or detracts from a particular side within a conflict. Given this, there emerges a second tier of collective international liability. Are spectators in the international community who support an unjust war accomplices or co-conspirators by virtue of their contributions to an unjust war effort? And if they are, how would victor’s justice operate in this second tier of collective international moral liability? To answer these questions I will provide a series of arguments broken up into three sections: foundations, applications, and implications. First, in section I: foundations, I will outline why exploring an asymmetrical approach is a productive

The 1999 Kosovan War is a controversial event, usually used as a shining example of when humanitarian intervention has worked; unfortunately, when examined, it is unclear whether the international campaign for peace was an actual success or not. NATO justified their involvement by labelling Kosovo a ‘humanitarian war’ after diplomatic negotiations ground to a halt in March 1999 (Wood, 2007). A wide range of sources supported the war in Kosovo, such as David Clark in 2009, with ‘Every member of NATO, every EU country, and most of Yugoslavia's neighbours, supported military action’ (Clark, 2009). Leaders from the US and the UK respectively also stated ‘upholding our values, protecting our interests, and advancing the cause of peace’ (Clinton, 1999), and ‘to avert what would otherwise be a humanitarian disaster in Kosovo’ (Blair, 1999). However, it was not only ambassadors and high-profile politicians that took this stance; scholars and intellectuals were also vocal about their support for the war (Mellon, 2001). This implies that not only did the foreign western powers believe that a

NATO’s 11-week bombing campaign against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) in March 1999 was a challenge in the history of the North Atlantic alliance. For the first time, NATO launched an armed intervention outside its borders in order to avert a humanitarian crisis (Solana 1999: 114). The bombing campaign was intended to stop Belgrade’s repression of Kosovo’s Albanian population and to oblige the Milosevic regime to accept NATO’s demands regarding the future political status of Kosovo (Wippman 2001: 129).

The Bosnian War was a brutal and inhumane conflict that featured genocide and the advent of ethnic cleansing and mass rape as instruments of modern warfare. The case study “War in Bosnia” recounts the tragic events of that war. Specifically, the article emphasizes the numerous and systematic atrocities perpetrated by the Serb forces upon the Bosnian Muslim and Croat civilian populations throughout the country during the course of the conflict, specifically emphasizing the genocide the Serbs committed against the Muslim population. The article points out the international outcry that ensued against the Serbs and their genocidal tactics was what spurred the United States to intervene militarily in Bosnia against the Serbs under President Bill Clinton. The article notes that the atrocities and violence did not subside until the NATO bombing campaign weakened the Serbian position in the conflict and forced the Serbian leader Milosevic to enter peace talks.