[tomder55]

March 11 1999 Poland ,Czech Republic ,Hungary all join NATO .
The same day the House of Representatives, by a vote of 219-191, passed a resolution to support Bubba's plan to send U.S. troops to Kosovo. Most Republican legislators opposed the resolution .

A couple weeks later ;March 24 ,1999 ,NATO launches a massive air bombing campaign against Russian ally Serbia that lasts 78 days . (oxymoron..... we called the bombings a humanitarian intervention) This NATO action was undertaken without UN Security Council approval .
Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milosevic turned down a NATO demand that he allow 30,000 NATO troops into the country to effectively occupy the then Kosovo region of Yugoslavia .
The campaign 1,000 aircraft operating from air bases in Italy and Germany, as well as the USS Theodore Roosevelt launching aircraft from the Adriatic Sea. NATO aircraft flew more than 38,000 combat missions during the conflict. Cruise missiles were fired from American ships and submarines. Specifically targeted was Serbia Capitol Belgrade. To avoid anti aircraft targeting ,NATO planes flew higher than the batteries could reach . That also decreased the accuracy of their weapons .Collateral damage included multiple Serbian civilians ,Albanian refugees ;and the accidental bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade . 16 media workers were killed when a TV station was bombed, and cluster bombs were used, including on a crowded market. In all 450 civilians died .(Serbia says the toll was much higher )




Yevgeny Primakov, the Russian Prime Minister was over the Atlantic Ocean on his way to the US when the campaign began. He called VP the Goracle to try to stop the bombing . Gore told him the attack was going to happen and Russia could do nothing about it . Primakov had his plane turn around to return to Moscow . That officially ended a period when there was cooperation between Russia and the US. The wave of nationalism that swept Russia helped bring Putin into power . In Russian POV ,the idea that NATO was only a defensive alliance was a lie disproven by the campaign. Becoming surrounded by NATO nations became an existential threat . Keep that in mind when Russia speaks of using nukes .

What role did Clueless Joe have ? Well as a Senator he was one of the leading war hawks . Throughout 1998-1999, he waged a tenacious campaign to sell Bubba and his Senate colleagues on a preemptive bombing of Serbia. He navigated the resolution through the Senate.

For Clueless the bombing was not enough . He said “I’ve been saying, we should go into the — on the ground; we should announce there’s going to be American casualties. We should go to Belgrade, and we should have a Japanese-German-style occupation of that country,”
Joe Biden: "We should go to Belgrade and we should have a Japanese-German style occupation." - YouTube

Kosovo broke away and declared independence in 2008 while American peacekeeping forces still occupied the region .


Required reading :
The Russia Trap: How Our Shadow War with Russia Could Spiral into Nuclear Catastrophe: Beebe, George: 9781250316622: Books (amazon.com)