Shadowland: War By The Numbers

I remember, just a few years back, Wes Clark was feeling pretty good about his war. This was in July 1999, just after he'd commanded the victorious NATO fight for Kosovo, just before he was fired by the Pentagon, and way before anyone thought about him as a presidential candidate. I had been in Belgrade when the allied air forces were attacking, and General Clark wanted to hear, firsthand, what it was like. "Pretty low-key for a bombed city, wasn't it?" he suggested over coffee.

"Well, yeah," I said, trying to explain just how strange the sensation had been. "You know, people came to have a lot of faith, in fact, in the accuracy of NATO bombs."

"Yeah," chortled Clark. "I know."

If Clark was feeling cocky, it was because thanks to the Air Force (and despite his own frustrated desire to send in ground troops), he'd just fought the cleanest, most efficient war in history, without a single allied casualty. The bombing campaign went on for 78 days, 38,000 sorties, yet by the end, people in Belgrade's sidewalk cafes barely looked up from their espressos when the air-raid sirens wailed. One of the city's main streets was known as the Boulevard of Ashes, because the government buildings on it had been destroyed systematically and repeatedly. But the buildings right next to them were mostly unscathed.

Gosh, that seems like a long time ago. It was before 9/11, of course. Before Afghanistan. Before Iraq. It was at a time when the entire West was mobilized to fight a war on moral grounds, to stop the suffering of the Muslims in Kosovo at the hands of the Serbian tyrant Slobodan Milosevic. The issue wasn't muddled by fear-mongering. Nobody claimed Milosevic was about to attack America with weapons of mass destruction. And it was at a time when the lives of American soldiers were held very dear, as were those of the people they were attacking.

Yet even then, the war wasn't as clean as Clark and other U.S. officials would claim. The Pentagon acknowledged only 20 or 30 incidents of "collateral damage" in the whole conflict. Human Rights Watch, after meticulous research, counted "about 500 civilians" killed in "90 separate incidents as a result of NATO bombing."