We devastated the environment, bombed the Chinese embassy, came very close to engaging in armed combat against Russian forces, and in general, pursued a horrific and inhumane strategy to rain misery on the civilian population of Belgrade in order to pressure Milosevic into surrendering.
Why did we do all that? The US did not even have an arguable interest in the Balkans, and no one ever tried to claim that Serbia represented any kind of threat to our nation or our interests.
But for months the Clinton administration had told us that Milosevic was waging a vicious genocide against Albanian Muslims, and needed to be stopped. The New York Times called it a humanitarian war. In March 1999 the same month that the bombing started Clintons State Department publicly suggested that as many as 500,000 Albanian Kosovars had been murdered by Milosevics regime. In May of that year, as the bombing campaign was drawing to a close, Secretary of Defense William Cohen lowered that estimate 100,000.
Five years after the bombing, after all the forensic investigations had been completed, the prosecutors at Milosevics War Crimes trial in the Hague were barely been able to document a questionable figure of perhaps 5,000 bodies and body parts. During the war, the American people were told that Kosovo was full of mass graves filled with the bodies of murdered Albanian Muslims. But none were ever found.
Bump
Because they kept telling us that civilian misery didn't matter to Milosevic, which would make that a weird strategy
That was the same State Department that said this.