President Clinton will today discuss a possible ground invasion of Kosovo with his military chiefs-of-staff, but he continues to believe that the present NATO air campaign will prevail, writes Joe Carroll.
Yesterday Mr Clinton announced that the US was sending an additional 68 aircraft to bolster the NATO air strikes. He also confirmed that the US would contribute some 7,000 troops to the 50,000-strong peacekeeping force now being prepared on the borders of Kosovo to escort the refugees to their homes if President Slobodan Milosevic agrees.
Addressing graduates of the Air Force Academy in Colorado while a joint EU-Russian delegation was in Belgrade, President Clinton strongly defended the NATO campaign as a moral imperative and said that President Milosevic had "a clear choice before him". "He can accept the basic requirements of a just peace or he can continue to force military failure and economic ruin on his people," he said. "We cannot grow weary of this campaign because Mr Milosevic did not capitulate when the first bombs fell". The Secretary of Defence, Mr William Cohen, told reporters at the Pentagon that at today's meeting between the President and the Joint Chiefs-of-Staff they would discuss "the whole range of issues . . . including considerations about whether there should or could be a ground option for a non-permissive environment" and whether NATO would support such a strategy.
The White House spokesman, Mr Joe Lockhart, said that the focus of Mr Clinton's meeting with the service chiefs would be "the air campaign and its effectiveness". This would not be a "decision meeting" but would discuss all the NATO options available.