U.S. Policy Can Survive Brush With Danger

All last week, President Clinton took pains to warn Americans that his decision to intervene in the Kosovo conflict could send some U.S. pilots to their deaths.

“This action is not risk-free,” Clinton said Wednesday as U.S. and allied forces launched their first airstrikes against Yugoslavia. “However, I have concluded that the dangers of acting now are clearly outweighed by the risks of failing to act.”

Now, after a sobering brush with danger on only the fourth day of the campaign--the loss of an F-117A Stealth fighter, followed by the rapid rescue of its pilot--the nation has come chillingly closer to a real-world test of Clinton’s proposition: Is Kosovo worth risking more pilots?

And will public and congressional support for the air campaign against Yugoslavia--support that has been tentative and conditional so far--hold firm?

The initial prediction of foreign policy experts Saturday was: Clinton’s policy can survive this setback, but it may be an early sign of greater dangers that remain.

“Shooting down one airplane will not cause the policy to collapse,” said former State Department official Robert B. Oakley. “The administration can’t change course now anyway.”

“We need to take a deep breath,” said Jane Holl, executive director of the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Violence. “They landed a punch. Well, OK. . . . If we overreact to a single aircraft, our ability to put this in perspective is wildly distorted.”

Pentagon officials said Saturday night that they did not know whether the plane was shot down or crashed because of a malfunction. Still, the loss of the fighter comes as a shock to a U.S. government that believed its Stealth aircraft were largely invulnerable.

“This is our leading-edge capacity,” Holl said. “So it’s not like they shot down a lumbering cow.”

Stealth-Fighter Loss Is First in Combat

The $45-million, twin-engine F-117A, whose wreckage was shown on Yugoslav television Saturday, was the first Stealth fighter to be lost in combat. The boomerang-shaped plane, which carries a one-man crew, uses an unusual design and radar-absorbing material to elude detection.

If its loss turns out to be only the first of many, the NATO alliance’s offensive--casualty-free until now--could touch off political firestorms in the United States and the 13 other nations that are contributing forces.

“It depends on what happened: Was this a freak event--or have the Serbs discovered a way to deal with the Stealth?” said former Defense Department official Zalmay Khalilzad. “How do we react? How do we adjust? What if they capture a pilot? Do we escalate?

“If they’ve found a way to counter our air power, then it’s a whole new ballgame,” but he added: “It’s unlikely.”

Last week, some U.S. officials worried that Kosovo might turn into “another Iraq,” a long bombing campaign with little visible result. Now they must also worry that it could become “another Somalia,” a humanitarian intervention that was popular at first but became a headache as casualties mounted.

In Somalia in December 1992, then-President Bush sent troops to restore order in a nation that had descended into anarchy. But when 18 Americans died in a 1993 battle in the streets of Mogadishu, an alarmed U.S. public demanded that the Clinton administration withdraw them.

Oakley, who ran the Somalia policy at the time, said the administration is in better shape today than in 1993.

“People are more ready this time to understand that there will be casualties,” he said. “. . . The president has tried to explain there might well be some losses, so it doesn’t come as much of a surprise as it was in Somalia, where no one explained that it was going to be dangerous.”

Holl and others said the main domestic effect of the plane’s loss may be to intensify the U.S. debate over whether the NATO air campaign can accomplish the aims Clinton has set out: to force Yugoslavia either to accept a U.S.-brokered peace agreement in Kosovo province or to force the Yugoslav Serb forces to stop killing Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians.

“The American public is more concerned about how this bombing is supposed to make the [peace agreement] more acceptable to [Yugoslav President Slobodan] Milosevic,” she said. “The bombing can’t do that. What it can do is destroy the Serbian army’s ability to wage war against unarmed civilians, and it’s probably doing a pretty good job at that.”

“This may make people focus on the underlying problem,” agreed John Steinbruner of the Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington. “The administration . . . [is] saying that they’re trying to stop the murder of innocent civilians, but that’s not something you can do from the air. So they’ve precluded the one thing they want to do. . . . The only way to do it is through a ground operation.”

Khalilzad said: “[If] the Serbs are going to threaten our air power more, then the whole strategy will have to be reexamined. Do we look at the possibility of ground forces having to be involved? Or do we go toward arming the [ethnic Albanian] Kosovars as a longer-term solution?”

Pilot’s Rescue Could Bolster Support

The rescue of the Stealth fighter’s pilot, and the fact that Congress has left Washington for its Easter recess, means the administration won’t have to face an immediate political firestorm.

Clinton could even benefit from whatever derring-do was involved in extracting the pilot. In 1995, when Air Force Capt. Scott F. O’Grady was rescued after Bosnian Serb gunners shot down his F-16, Clinton reveled in the story of the pilot who eluded would-be captors for six days by living on rainwater and bugs.

Still, domestic support for this intervention has been notably lukewarm from the start.

Congress voted to endorse the administration’s policy but only by thin margins (219-191 in the House, 58-41 in the Senate) and only after rancorous debate. Most Republicans in both houses voted against the administration.

And opinion polls last week found weaker public support than usual. A Times Poll released Friday found that 53% of the public said they supported the airstrikes. When the Persian Gulf War against Iraq began in 1991, after a much longer preparation, 85% of the public supported the operation.

The domestic dangers, Oakley said, may not be immediate, but they lie down the road.

“Some Republicans may holler, but the administration will hang tough,” he said. “And Americans are unlikely to panic. They may ask questions later--but not now.”