Air War Accidents

A stark difference divides the atrocities deliberately committed, and still being committed, by the Serbs against the Kosovars from the accidents of NATO air power that have taken additional Kosovar lives. It is a difference of scale: the Serbs have taken thousands of lives and have either deported or uprooted and harassed more than a million Kosovars, practically all of them, while the NATO-inflicted toll is measured in the hundreds.

It is also a moral difference: The Serb depredations are vile and unjustified, a violation of fundamental human rights, while NATO’s airstrikes are necessary and justified to defend a people under continuing merciless attack. People who ignore these fundamental distinctions are lending themselves wittingly or not to Serbian propaganda and to a general moral obtuseness.

But that is not to say that NATO’s accidents are of no further consequence. To many citizens in the alliance countries, the deaths by friendly fire are becoming increasingly troubling. In the latest episode warplanes struck a column of Kosovar refugees camping for the night in the village of Korisa, killing a large number of them. One wonders how, in presumably a context of great caution about innocent civilian casualties, this particular accident happened. Did it have anything to do with the strategy of relentless escalating attack that NATO has adopted in what is now almost two months of bombing? Has enough experience not been accumulated in this campaign to reduce the likelihood, frequency and dimensions of such tragic mishaps? Is fatigue a factor?

The foreign secretaries of Britain and the United States describe these incidents as a regrettable but comprehensible falling away from “perfection.” They assure the NATO public that at “at each stage” procedures are reviewed. These responses are welcome but they do not address the whole problem.

Especially in Europe, and in some countries more than others, public opinion cannot be expected to sustain support for the bombing indefinitely, regardless of the repeated defenses of it offered by high officials. There is a real possibility that successive incidents will send successive tremors through the political society.
NATO’s air campaign is already being challenged to produce more results, both in the military arena and the political, than the alliance has been able to demonstrate persuasively to date. A further home-front slippage of backing for the air war for its occasional but deadly strikes on the wrong targets could put a damaging extra burden on the whole allied conduct of the war.