"…German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer said Friday that "talks are urgently needed" among NATO members regarding the selection of targets for the NATO air campaign. Clarifying Fischer’s remarks, German Foreign Ministry spokesman Martin Erdmann said that NATO needed to plan its bombing campaign to "more effectively avoid damaging civilian targets." The German statements follow similar appeals on Thursday from Canada and Italy for NATO to reassess its target choices. They also echo concerns expressed by German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder on Wednesday, when he suggested that NATO target selection was being monopolized by the U.S. and the UK.

Disaffection with both the strategic and tactical conduct of NATO’s air campaign is spreading within the organization. Debate has deepened from a general argument about whether the air war is proving effective at achieving NATO’s goals, to a substantive issue of whether, by damaging an increasing number of civilian and diplomatic facilities, the campaign is doing more harm than good. An increasing number of NATO members are expressing their unwillingness to take the fall for what they consider U.S. errors and their irritation at being frozen out of the decision-making process. As collateral damage mounts, and Washington must defend not only the bombing campaign in general but its tactical execution, Washington will find it increasingly hard to maintain support within NATO for the campaign. Having ruled out escalation to a ground war, and with time running out on the air campaign, we wonder how long U.S. intransigence at the Moscow and G-8 negotiations can last.

1810 GMT 990521 - NATO officials said that they have no intention of changing their targeting policy. "No government has asked NATO to change is strategy, including its targeting policy," spokesman Jamie Shea said. "Military commanders will continue to take every precaution to hit the targets accurately."