Remembering the Kosovo War

The Wars of the Yugoslav Succession (1991-1999) are little remembered today in the United States, and this may seem to go especially for NATO's intervention in the Kosovo War, which began twenty years ago (on March 24, 1999). Part of it would seem to be that they did not fit in with the more general focus on the Middle East, the larger, more intense, more precedent-breaking conflicts in which overshadowed them (the 1991 Gulf War fought just a few years earlier, the near-continuous action against Iraq ever since, the wars that followed from 2001 on); did not involve the boots on the ground that raise the specter of high U.S. casualties and public questioning; did not ever command much enthusiasm among the American public.

Still, in hindsight, the conflicts seem a watershed, in ways extending far beyond the war's hugely important local consequences. The wars in the Balkans, along with the contemporaneous wars in Central Africa (Rwanda, and the two Congo Wars), sounded the death knell for those short-lived, early '90s, post-Cold War visions the mainstream held of multilateral humanitarian interventions setting the world to rights.

Looking back, the conflict between the West and Russia over the action, which entailed the denial to it of United Nations authorization, and a measure of nuclear saber-rattling many would seem to prefer not to remember, and the confrontation between their forces at Pristina airport that came so close to a shooting war (one of the odder legacies of which is the idea some have that singer James Blunt SAVED THE WORLD FROM WORLD WAR III), seem less a last gasp of the Cold War than a foreshadowing of NATO's disregard for Russian opinion bumping up against a renewed Russian assertiveness--of what we have since seen in Georgia (2008), in Ukraine (2014-), in Syria (2015-). Likewise, the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade by a B-2 bomber during the campaign was also far from the last worrisome incident in Sino-American relations, which have similarly become more adversarial.

It also seems that the manner in which the 1999 war was fought--that style of slow-motion, drawn-out, gradually escalating, all-aerial warfare campaign conducted in support of one side against another in another country's internal conflict without the American public paying much attention to it--has been routinized in the years since. Libya is perhaps the most obvious case, but one can say the same of Syria as well, and Somalia, and Pakistan, and wherever else the drones fly.

This past not even being the past, we overlook it at our peril.

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