Kosovo: Press On

War in the heart of Europe now rattles governments grown confident and prosperous since the flames of World War II swept across their continent. Two nights of NATO air raids to punish Yugoslavia’s brutal assault on its own citizens in Kosovo province have politicians asking hard questions about the U.S.-led alliance and their own exposure in a rising conflict.

In Moscow, drawn closer to NATO by years of careful diplomacy, Foreign Minister Igor S. Ivanov said, “for the first time since World War II an act of aggression against a sovereign state took place in Europe,” conveniently omitting Hungary and Czechoslovakia, where incipient independence movements were crushed by Soviet invasions.

Russia was not the only country upset by the NATO assault on Yugoslavia. Italian Prime Minister Massimo D’Alema called for a return to diplomacy, though exhaustive diplomacy had failed to achieve a peaceful solution. Greek Prime Minister Costas Simitis offered his opinion that military strikes would not resolve the Kosovo conflict. Both Italy and Greece are NATO members. In Macedonia, a neighbor of Yugoslavia, a mob demonstrated outside the U.S. Embassy.

All this noise will not and should not dent the immediate NATO effort to crush the Yugoslav central government’s repression in Kosovo and damage its military power. But it does raise questions about the aims of the Clinton administration and its key NATO allies. The stated NATO goal is to pressure Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to do a deal to give the largely ethnic Albanian majority in Kosovo broad autonomy and to allow 28,000 NATO troops, including 4,000 Americans, into the province while political structures are established.

There is no chance of Kosovo independence, the goal of some hotheaded Kosovar leaders. But none of them are as dangerous as Milosevic himself. Diplomats who know the president call him a crude bully; he is obviously no statesman, having bumblingly presided over the breakup of the Yugoslav federation a decade ago, an event that led to the atrocities of “ethnic cleansing” and bloody conflicts with Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina.

The endgame of this crisis is not yet clear. The Times supported President Clinton and NATO in their ultimately failed diplomatic efforts to achieve a settlement on Kosovo. The events of the past two days show the dangerous road ahead. With the risks of the current bombing campaign clear now to all Americans, we call again on the administration to use only the force needed to achieve the pragmatic political goal: a Yugoslavia that does not further fragment and a Kosovo with broad autonomy.

The administration and its NATO allies believe the current air campaign can help achieve that goal. We agree, and the U.S. and other NATO forces in the air over Yugoslavia should have America’s full support.