Heather Conley began the session with a report regarding the current plans for US policy in the region. Generally NEI is considered a success story, thus the US is now retooling its policies by asking where the US should go in a post-enlargement world, and asking how to use this policy elsewhere.
As pressures mount to strike before summer weather forecloses military options for the year, the debate whether the United States should undertake a preventive war against Iraq moves inexorably toward the center of the American political stage, despite the understandable reluctance of many Americans to think about the difficult trade-offs and troubling questions such a war would raise. Proponents of the war focus on the dangers of leaving Saddam Hussein in power. Opponents focus on the morality, military risks, and international political costs of undertaking a preventive war, on the possibilities of containing Saddam Hussein's influence and deterring his use of weapons of mass destruction without resort to war, and on the difficulties of building stable political institutions in the region after a victory.
One year after NATO ended its bombing campaign against Yugoslavia, the Clinton administration's Kosovo policy is a conspicuous failure. Kosovo is now the scene of a brutal ethnic cleansing campaign carried out by NATO's erstwhile de facto ally, the Kosovo Liberation Army, an organization profoundly inimical to America's interests and professed values. The KLA is also currently fomenting an insurgency elsewhere in Serbia, which promises to destabilize the Balkans even further.
Topic:
Foreign Policy and Genocide
Political Geography:
United States, America, Eastern Europe, Kosovo, Yugoslavia, Serbia, and Balkans