WASHINGTON — As its air campaign against Yugoslavia dragged on, NATO looked less like the military alliance that won the Cold War than like a dysfunctional family, its members smiling for the camera but kicking each other under the table.
The British were ready to force their way into Kosovo with a massive ground attack. The Greeks, just an artillery shell away from the Serbian province, wanted no part of any kind of war. The American president was hearing conflicting messages from his own divided advisors. The Germans would fight in the air but not on the ground.
And in its search for a diplomatic solution, the allies reached out to a country (Russia) that fancied itself a great power but in fact was all but bankrupt, one that was uniquely suspicious of NATO's expansion on its western flank.
No wonder Slobodan Milosevic, the poker-faced Yugoslav dictator, thought he could outlast the North Atlantic Treaty Organization on the battlefield. Surely, this unruly 19-nation coalition would eventually splinter.
Milosevic guessed wrong, but so did NATO.
When the airstrikes started in March, the prevailing opinion at alliance headquarters in Brussels was that the strongest military alliance on the planet would bring Milosevic to his knees in a week or two--at most.
The allies underestimated Milosevic's capacity to endure months of "precision" bombing. No one predicted that a war designed to stop the Serbs' campaign of "ethnic cleansing" in Kosovo would instead push Milosevic to order an even greater humanitarian disaster.
Or that the alliance's credibility would be stained by television images of streaming refugees and civilian victims of NATO bombs.
Or that America's vital relationship with the world's most populous country would be jeopardized by its mistaken attack on the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade.
Yet for all NATO's miscalculations, the ultimate--and apparently fatal--error of judgment was made not in Brussels but in Belgrade.
Milosevic bet that he could turn public opinion in NATO countries against their leaders, that Western governments would falter before he would.
That proved to be the most costly miscalculation, the one that left Milosevic's little empire a shambles and his army in retreat.
The effort to hold NATO together through more than 70 agonizing days is the story of pleading and cajoling and hand-holding by the leaders of the world's strongest nations, of a determination to put an optimistic public face on even the most disastrous events, of a willingness to compromise on matters of vital self-interest.
