CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY DAREN BOWYER JUST WAR DOCTRINE

it’s a political decision in Washington that there should be no American deaths
in Bosnia,” one American official, …., said.
Western officials doubt US troops will be ordered to act, because of the
so-called “Somalia syndrome” that stemmed from the death of 18 soldiers in
Mogadishu in 1993.
The watchword of American troops in the NATO-led Stabilisation Force
is “force protection” – a focus on avoiding casualties. 53
The same article accused French troops, stationed around Visegrad for five years, of
routinely ignoring opportunities to arrest indicted war criminals.
In 1999 when NATO took action to end Serb oppression of the ethnically-Albanian
majority population in the Serbian province of Kosovo, the preference for an air
campaign over the insertion of land forces was widely blamed on casualty aversion.
The preference for an air campaign allowed the Serbs to accelerate a ruthless campaign
of ethnic cleansing leading to a major refugee crisis in neighbouring Macedonia – for
which NATO was ill-prepared – and subsequently left NATO forces on the ground too
few to effectively control the border. It also raised questions over the proportionality
and discrimination in NATO’s attacks. Although recommending that there were
insufficient grounds for the Office of the Prosecutor to investigate further, the
International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY) committee of investigation was
less than whole-hearted in clearing NATO’s actions. 54
Nicholas Wheeler is less ambiguous in his criticism, arguing that the choice of strategy,
necessary to secure alliance unity in the face of casualty predictions for a land
campaign, put at risk the declared objective of the campaign:
… the character of the means employed by NATO undermined the humanitarian
ends of the intervention. Far from preventing a humanitarian catastrophe – the
stated aim of the intervention – NATO’s action led to an acceleration of Serb
ethnic cleansing, leading to the deaths of several thousand Kosovar Albanians.
By targeting a range of civilian facilities that were claimed to constitute
legitimate military targets, such as oil refineries, bridges and electricity
generating plants, the bombing produced civilian casualties among the Serbs.
Given the low risk run by NATO air-crews, and the failure of the air campaign
to stop the ethnic cleansing by Serb army and police forces, the unsettling
conclusion can be drawn that NATO’s desire to undertake casualty-free
intervention was achieved at the expense of inflicting great suffering on Kosovar
Albanians and Serb civilians. 55
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