A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (47 page)

As pressure picked up, the Bush administration also developed a spin on events in the Balkans that helped temper public enthusiasm for involvement. Three portrayals emerged in the daily press guidance and in the statements of administration officials. The language muddied the facts and quenched some of tie moral outrage sparked by the camp photos. Because the American public and the Washington elite began with no prior understanding of the region and because the conflict was indeed complicated, the administration was able to inscribe its version of events onto a virtually blank slate.

First, senior officials viewed and spun the violence as an insoluble "tragedy" rather than a mitigatable, deliberate atrocity carried out by an identifiable set of perpetrators.The war, they said, was fueled by bottomup, ancient, ethnic or tribal hatreds (not by the top-down political machinations of a nationalistic or opportunistic elite), hatreds that had raged for centuries (and, by implication, would rage for centuries more). This of course invited a version of Hirschman's futility justification for inaction.''" Defense Secretary Cheney told CNN, "It's tragic, but the Balkans have been a hotbed of conflict ... for centuries"Bush said the war was "a complex, convoluted conflict that grows out of age-old animosities [and] century-old feuds.""' Eagleburger noted, "It is difficult to explain, but this war is not rational.There is no rationality at all about ethnic conflict. It is gut, it is hatred; it's not for any common set of values or purposes; it just goes on. And that kind of warfare is most difficult to bring to a halt""

Bosnia was racked by a "civil war" (not a war of aggression) in which "all sides" committed atrocities against the others. "I have said this 38,000 times," said Eagleburger, "and I have to say this to the people of this coun try as well.... The tragedy is not something that can be settled from outside and it's about damn well time that everybody understood that. Until the Bosnians, Serbs, and Croats decide to stop killing each other, there is nothing the outside world can do about it."7°

Second, administration officials argued there would be perverse consequences to confronting the Serbs. Military engagement or the lifting of the arms embargo could endanger the delivery of humanitarian aid. It could cause the Serbs to retaliate against Muslim civilians or European peacekeepers. And thus such well-meaning steps would in fact do more harm than good.

Third, owing to the ancient hatreds and to the particular topography of the region, military intervention would bring about a Vietnam-like quagmire, putting U.S. soldiers in jeopardy. Reporters pressed Bush on whether the United States would use force, and the president downplayed the possibility:

Everyone has been reluctant, for very understandable reasons, to use force.There is a lot of voices out there in the United States today that say "use force," but they don't have the responsibility for sending somebody else's son or somebody else's daughter into harm's way. And I do. I do not want to see the United States bogged down in any way into some guerrilla warfare-we lived through that."

One deterrent to U.S. involvement was the estimated steep cost of intervening. The U.S. military's authoritative monopoly on estimating likely casualties lowered the prospects for intervention. Since Vietnam, U.S. generals had opposed U.S. military involvement in virtually all wars and had never favored intervention on mere humanitarian grounds. In the summer of 1992, the Bush administration debated whether or not to contribute U.S. military aircraft to a humanitarian airlift for Sarajevo. Military planners said that some 50,000 U.S. ground troops would be needed to secure a thirty-mile perimeter around the airport.72 In fact, the airlift eventually was managed with a light UN force of some 1,000 Canadian and French forces at Sarajevo airport. At an August 11 Senate hearing, Lieutenant General Barry McCaffrey, assistant to the chairman of the joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell, told Congress 400,000 troops would be needed to enforce a cease-fire.' Scowcroft concedes that the military's analysis was "probably" inflated but says that "armchair strategists" could not very well challenge the joint Chiefs." Ambassador Zimmerman remembers his frustration at the military trump card that the joint Chiefs played time and again. "They never said, `No, we won't,' or `No, we can't,"' he recalls. "They just tossed around figures on what it would take that. were both unacceptable and, because of who was supplying them, uncontestable."

When humanitarian land corridors were proposed, according to Scowcroft, the "troops-to-task" estimate came back at 300,000. This was a daunting figure that many independent observers deemed utterly disproportionate to the quality and commitment of the Serb troops attacking unarmed civilians in Bosnia. But military experts proliferated and pontificated, repeatedly citing the impenetrability of the mountainous landscape and the heroic fortitude of Tito's Partisans in World War II, who tied down the Nazis in pitched battle for months. Powell and Defense Secretary Cheney convinced the President that the risks of military engagement were far too high--even to use U.S. airpower to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid to Bosnia's hungry civilians.

The one-word bogey "Vietnam" became the ubiquitous shorthand for all that could go wrong in the Balkans if the United States became militarily engaged." For some, the war in Vietnam offered a cause for genuine concern, as they feared any operation that lacked strong public support, implicated no "vital interests," and occurred on mountainous terrain. But many opponents of.intervention proffered theVietnam analogy less because they saw a likeness between the two scenarios than because they knew of no argument more likely to chill public enthusiasm for intervention.

The Bosnian Serbs took their cue, taunting the Americans whenever the prospect of intervention was raised. They warned of casualties and "mission creep." Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic exploited allied anxiety, threatening to retaliate against UN peacekeepers in Bosnia if NATO bombed from the air: "We'll determine the time and the targets, doing our best to make it very painful," Karadzic warned, daring the United States to act.' "The United States sends 2,000 marines, then they have to send 10,000 more to save the 2,000," he said. "That is the best way to have another Vietnam"" The same message was delivered by nationalists in Serbia itself. After ringing the bells of the Serb Orthodox churches and raising black flags emblazoned with skulls, Serb Radical Party leader Vojislav Seselj jeered at the Americans, saying, "We would have tens of thousands of volunteers, and we would score a glorious victory. The Americans would have to send thousands of body bags. It would be a new Vietnam..""

The fact that one of the handful of senior officials that opposed intervention was General Colin Powell was especially important. Powell, who had won a Bronze Star and Purple Heart in Vietnam, was fresh off his Gulf War blitz. It is usually forgotten, but when the Bush administration had debated going to war with Iraq, Powell had lobbied against it. Because he could not pinpoint an exit strategy for U.S. forces ahead of time, he argued, it was better to stay home. After the United States won the Gulf War, however, Powell's dominance was undisputed. Those who argued that Bosnia would not deteriorate into Vietnam could not compete with the highly respected veteran. Many of the "Balkan hawks" had not served in Vietnam. Their recent experience in the Balkans counted for little. Zimmerman remembers: "I hadn't served in Vietnam, but I knew the Serbs. And they bore no resemblance to the Vietnamese Communists.They didn't have the commitment to the cause ofBosnia.Theirs wasn't a holy crusade. Theirs was a land-grab. They weren't the same quality of soldiers. They were weekend warriors, and many of them were drunk a lot of the time. It was just very, very different."

General Powell, who opposed any U.S. role in delivering humanitarian aid or enforcing a no-fly zone over Bosnia, made an unusually public pitch to keep U.S. troops and airplanes grounded. He first called Michael Gordon of the New York Times into his office to deliver a lecture on why an intervention in Bosnia would not work. "As soon as they tell me it is limited," Powell told Gordon, "it means they do not care whether you achieve a result or not. As soon as they tell me `surgical,' I head for the bunker."" Then, when a New York Times editorial criticized the U.S. military's "nocan-do" attitude, Powell fired back, himself publishing an op-ed in the paper that argued against deploying U.S. troops in harm's way "for unclear purposes" in a conflict "with deep ethnic and religious roots that go back a thousand years"""

With the November 1992 election approaching, Powell did not have to win many converts within the administration. Bush was unwilling to risk American lives in Bosnia in any capacity. Senior U.S. officials in the Administration said they viewed Bosnia as a "tar baby" on which nobody wanted their fingerprints."

One way the administration deflected attention away from Bosnia was to focus on another humanitarian crisis, in Somalia. President Bush learned of the famine not from international media coverage, which was initially belated and thin, but from the personal appeals of U.S. ambassador Smith Hempstone in Kenya and those of Senators Paul Simon (D.-Ill.) and Nancy Kassebaum (R.-Kans.)."Z The Joint Chiefs instinctively opposed sending U.S. troops to Somalia. But on August 14, 1992, Bush abruptly altered course, ordering a very limited intervention. U.S. C-130 cargo planes, not ground troops, were deployed to aid in the relief effort. Bush also pledged to help transport 500 Pakistani peacekeepers to the embattled country. According to senior officials involved in the planning, the White House saw an opportunity to demonstrate it had a heart, to respond to domestic criticisms on the eve of the Republican Party's national convention, and to do it relatively cheaply. The nightly news coverage of Bosnia from the middle to the end of August dropped to one-third of what it had been earlier in the month." Even though U.S. troops would not deploy to Africa for several months, the Somalia famine had already begun drawing attention away from the Balkans.

Within the bureaucracy the State Department's cold exterior continued to be hotly contested. On August 25, 1992, George Kenney, the acting Yugoslav desk officer, stunned the Beltway by resigning from the State Department. Neves of Kenney's departure made the front page of the Washington Post. "I can no longer in clear conscience support the Administration's ineffective, indeed counterproductive, handling of the Yugoslav crisis," the foreign service officer wrote in his letter of resignation, which the newspaper quoted. "I am therefore resigning in order to help develop a stronger public consensus that the U.S. must act immediately to stop the genocide""° Kenney, like so many, favored lifting the arms embargo and bombing the Bosnian Serbs. In London for the UN-EU peace conference, Eagleburger asked, "Who knows Kenney?" He then publicly dismissed the act of the junior official, saying, "To my mind that young man has never set foot in the former Yugoslavia."" But Kenney's exit gave the public its first taste of the battle raging inside the department. And U.S. officials who remained disgruntled by the U.S. policy were introduced to a new option. "When you're in the foreign service," Kenney's counterpart on Bosnia, Marshall Harris, notes, "every part of the institution and the culture frowns on leaving. It just isn't seen as an option. The fact that George had done it awakened us to thinking of resignation as a real possibility."

With the November 1992 election nearing, foreign policy had been demoted. James Baker and a few of his top foreign policy advisers had been transferred to the White House, where they managed the president's reelection campaign. Eagleburger had been promoted to acting secretary of state. Many U.S. officials thought Eagleburger had long been making the Bosnia policy; now his title reflected his influence.

Hooper requested a meeting with the new secretary and surprised his colleagues by being granted one. At a half-hour session in mid-September, Eagleburger appeared willing to listen. At the end of the meeting, he asked Hooper to prepare a memo that explicitly spelled out his recommendations for a new policy. Hooper and his colleague Richard Johnson, another career foreign service officer, prepared a twenty-seven-page memo and employed the dissent channel to be sure it reached Eagleburger's desk.The State Department had introduced the channel at the end of the Vietnam War so that those who disagreed with policy could make their views known to senior officials without having to clear them with their immediate bosses. "This was the one thing we could do that didn't have to be cleared," recalls Hooper. "Nobody could stop you from sending it-not your boss, not the secretary of state, not anybody." Eagleburger did not respond until after the election, but on Veteran's Day, November 11, 1992, he summoned Hooper and Johnson to his office. After a two-and-a-halfhour session in which Eagleburger peppered the men with questions, he escorted them out of his office and commended them for their critique. "Thanks for telling me my policy is full of horseshit," a grinning Eagleburger said. The normally lugubrious Hooper was speechless. Johnson said wearily," I see you were listening."

Both dissenters were surprised that their message had not been delivered by other sources. Bill Montgomery, Eagleburger's office director, told Hooper, "You're the only ones. Nobody else in the bureaucracy is telling him this."The department's officials who cared about America's Bosnia policy could be divided into three groups-the dissenters who favored U.S. intervention (mainly in the form of air strikes), the senior policymakers who actively opposed it, and most numerous, the officials who supported bombing but assumed it would not happen so did nothing.

President Bush himself never paid much attention to the conflict in Bosnia. National Security Adviser Scowcroft remembers that about once a week Bush would turn to him and say, "Now tell me again what this is all about?"This was at a time when some 70,000 Bosnians had been killed in seven months.

Scowcroft speaks very candidly about the formulation of the Bush administration's response, expressing no regret. If he had to formulate poli cy all over again, the calculus would yield the same outcome. The atrocities were awful, but they occurred in a country whose welfare was simply not in the U.S. national interest: