"The Clinton administration has diligently put everything in place
for intervention. In fact, by mid-July US-NATO planners had
completed contingency plans for intervention, including air strikes
and the deployment of ground troops. All that was missing was a
sufficiently brutal or tragic event to trigger the process. As a
senior Defence Department official told reporters on July 15, 'If
some levels of atrocities were reached that would be intolerable,
that would probably be a trigger.'" - wrote Gary Dempsey from the
Cato Institute in October 1998. The author of this article published
another one in the "Middle East Times" in August 1998 in which the
Kosovo conflict was delineated in reasonably accurate detail ("The
Plight of the Kosovar"). The article was written in April 1998 - by
which time the outline of things to come was plain.
All along, the KLA prepared itself to be a provisional government
in-waiting. It occupied regions of Kosovo, established roadblocks,
administration, welfare offices. Its members operated nocturnally.
The Serb reaction got ever harsher until finally it threatened not
only to wipe the KLA out of existence but also to depopulate the
parts of the province controlled by it. In September 1998, NATO
threatened air strikes against Serbia, following reports of a
massacre of women and children in the village of Gornje Obrinje.
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