A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (50 page)

On April 1, 1993, at a House International Operations Subcommittee hearing, McCloskey began the first of a memorable series of exchanges with Secretary Christopher on the use of what became known as the "gword":

Rep. McCloskey: Previously to the Congress in response to a question as to whether or not genocide has taken place in Bosnia, the reply from State was that acts tantamount to genocide have taken place. I think that's not a clear answer to a very important and policy-driving question.Would you order a clear, explicit determination, yes or no, if the outrageous Serb systematic barbarism amounts to genocide?

Sec. Christopher: With respect to the definition of the circumstances in Bosnia, we certainly will reply to that. That is a legal question that you've posed. I've said several times that the conduct there is an atrocity. The killing, the raping, the ethnic cleansing is definitely an atrocious set of acts. Whether it meets the technical legal definition of genocide is a matter that we'll look into and get back to you. "

Later that month outgoing department spokesman Richard Boucher asked Bosnia desk officer Harris to draft a statement that said that "the United States Government believes that the practice of `ethnic cleansing' in Bosnia includes actions that meet the international definition of genocide." But the statement was killed-according to Harris-by incoming spokesman Thomas Donilon after he consulted with Secretary Christopher.

A Healthy Exchange

As the policy horizon became clear, those who worked the issue day to day grew more, not less, uneasy. Harris, an eight-year veteran of the State Department, decided he had little to lose by openly challenging the administration's timidity. Soon after Christopher's appearance on Capitol Hill, just as the Serbs looked destined to overrun the Muslim-held town of Srebrenica, Harris drafted a letter to Christopher that noted that the United States was trying to stop a Serb "genocide" with political and economic pressures alone. "In effect," the letter said, "the result of this course has been Western capitulation to Serbian aggression. 11106 The policy had to change. Every State Department country officer that Harris approached agreed to sign the letter-desk officers for Serbia and Montenegro, Albania, Romania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Croatia, Slovenia, as well as several officials involved in East European affairs and U.S. policy at the United Nations-forming a group that became known as the "dirty dozen." Harris believes he could have got many more signatures if he had had the time to do so. "When you are in a bureaucracy, you can either put your head down and become cynical, tired and inured," Harris observes. "Or you can stick your head up and try to do something."

The junior and midlevel officials were aided by their influential allies outside the State Department. The "dirty dozen" dissent letter was leaked, and the message of the dissenters was reinforced by a chorus of appreciative cries from elite opinion-makers. The war was dragging on, and many prominent Americans were distressed by Clinton's passivity. Well-known hawks from across the Atlantic weighed in. In a television interview former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, who had admonished President Bush not to "go all wobbly" after Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, said of Bosnia: "I never thought I'd see another holocaust in my life again." She later wondered whether she should get into the "rent-a-spine business"`'

Senator Joseph Biden (D.-Del.) had partnered with Dole in a bipartisan Senate campaign to aid the beseiged Muslims. Under President Bush, the pair had introduced legislation that would have authorized the provision of up to $50 million in Defense Department stocks of military weapons and equipment to the Bosnian Muslims as soon as the embargo was lifted. Biden visited Sarajevo in April and, on his return, his rage intensified. Sounding a lot like Theodore Roosevelt three-quarters of a century earlier,

Biden accused the Clinton administration of placing relief workers and peacekeepers in circumstances in which they did not belong and then using their presence as an excuse for inaction. The new world order was in shambles, he declared, because the United States and its allies were giving a new meaning to collective security. "As defined by this generation of leaders," Biden said, "collective security means arranging to blame one another for inaction, so that everyone has an excuse. It does not mean standing together; it means hiding together.."10'

In May 1993, as a result of pressure from inside and outside, Clinton finally agreed to a new U.S. policy, known as "lift and strike."The president dispatched Secretary Christopher on a high-profile trip to Europe to "sell" America's allies on lifting the arms embargo against the Bosnian Muslims and bombing the Serbs, the two measures recommended by Hooper and Johnson in their twenty-seven-page dissent the previous year and by Holbrooke and countless others in the media.The Bosnian Muslim leadership continued to stress that it did not want U.S. troops, only an end to U.S. support for a UN sanction that tied their hands and left the Serbs with an overwhelmingly military advantage.

But Clinton's support for the plan proved shallow and Christopher's salesmanship nonexistent. According to journalist Elizabeth Drew, Hillary Clinton gave her husband a copy of Robert Kaplan's Balkan Ghosts, a deftly written travel book that portrays people in the Balkans as if they were destined to hate and kill."" Fearful of a quagmire in an unmendable region, Clinton reportedly "went south" on lift and strike. One NATO official who was present at the meeting between Secretary Christopher and NATO secretary-general Manfred Woerner remembers Christopher's singular lack of enthusiasm for the policy. He never lifted his nose from his notes. "Christopher started talking about the proposed U.S. policy of lift and strike, but doing it in a way that emphasized the disadvantages rather than the advantages," the official recalls. "There was a moment when Woerner realized what was going on: He was being invited to think the policy was a bad idea. The problem was he didn't think it was a bad idea at all." Christopher returned to the United States saying he had enjoyed a healthy "exchange of ideas," with his European counterparts. There had indeed been a healthy exchange. As Richard Perle, a former Bush administration Defense Department official put it, "Christopher went over to Europe with an American policy and he came back with a European one." The lift and strike policy was abandoned.

In the wake of Christopher's visit, the United States and the other powers on the UN Security Council settled upon a compromise policy. Instead of lifting the embargo and bombing the Serbs, they agreed to create "safe areas" in the Muslim-held eastern enclave of Srebrenica, in the capital city of Sarajevo, and in four other heavily populated civilian centers that were under Serb siege. UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali told the Security Council that 30,000 troops would be needed to protect them. Thanks largely to the American refusal to contribute soldiers and fatigue among European states with troops already in Bosnia, only a tiny fraction of the forces needed to man, monitor, and defend these pockets arrived. President Clinton himself called the safe areas "shooting galleries." The problem remained unsolved, the Serbs remained virtually unimpeded, and the outrage that had briefly focused Clinton's attention on the tragedy gradually subsided. The world's gaze shifted. And the safe areas were left lightly tended and extremely vulnerable.

When the lift and strike plan surfaced, the young foreign service officers had believed that the system might reward them for their dissent. They were devastated by the safe-area compromise. They had seen the Christopher trip as the last, best hope to change the policy and save the shrinking country of Bosnia. Senator Dole, the Senate minority leader, took to the editorial pages, criticizing Clinton for finally coming up with a "realistic" Bosnia policy and then dropping it "when consensus did not magically appear on his doorstep." Dole warned that even if it seemed that only humanitarian interests were at stake in Bosnia, in fact American interests were under siege as well. If Clinton stood by in the face of Serb atrocities in Bosnia, Milosevic would soon turn on Albanians in Kosovo, provoking a regional war. Islamic fundamentalists were using Western indifference to Muslim suffering as a recruiting device. And global instability was on the rise because the United States and its allies had signaled that borders could be changed by force with no international consequence. "The United States, instead of leading, has publicly hesitated and waffled," Dole wrote. "This shirking and shrinking American presence on the global stage is exactly the type of invitation dictators and aggressors dream of." He urged Clinton to summon his NATO allies and issue an ultimatum: The Serbs must adhere to the latest cease-fire accord, permit the free passage of all humanitarian convoys, place its fearsome heavy weapons under UN control, and disband its paramilitary forces. If they failed to meet the U.S. demands, air strikes should begin and the arms embargo against the Bosnian Muslims should be lifted so that the Muslims themselves could protect the vulnerable safe areas.""

Dole was ignored right along with the State Department's in-house hawks.

"A Long Way from Home"

The Clinton White House deplored the suffering of Bosnians far more than had the Bush White House, but a number of factors caused Clinton to back off from using force. First, the U.S. military advised against intervention. Clinton and his senior political advisers had little personal experience with military matters. The Democrats had not occupied the White House since 1980. General Colin Powell, who remained chairman of the joint Chiefs until the end of September 1993, was still guided by a deep hostility to humanitarian missions that implicated no vital U.S. interests. Clinton was particularly deferential to Powell because the president had been publicly derided as a "draft dodger" in the campaign and because he had bungled an early effort to allow gay soldiers to serve in the U.S. armed forces.

Second, Clinton's foreign policy architects were committed multilateralists. They would act only with the consent and active participation of their European partners. France and Britain had deployed a combined 5,000 peacekeepers to Bosnia to aid the UN delivery of humanitarian aid, and they feared Serb retaliation against the troops. They also trusted that the Vance-Owen negotiation process would eventually pay dividends.With the Serbs controlling some 70 percent of the country by 1993, many European leaders privately urged ethnic partition. Clinton was also worried about offending the Russians, who sympathized with their fellow Orthodox Christian Serbs.

Third, Clinton was worried about American public opinion. As the Bush team had done, the Clinton administration kept one eye on the ground in Bosnia and one eye fixed on the polls. Although a plurality in the American public supported U.S. intervention, the percentages tended to vary with slight shifts in the questions asked. And U.S. officials did not trust that public support would withstand U.S. casualties. The more pollconscious officials were criticized for adopting a "Snow White approach" to foreign policy. In effect, they asked, "Mirror, mirror on the wall, how can we get the highest poll numbers of them all?"And they worked to dampen moral outrage, steering senior officials to adopt the imagery and wording of"tragedy" over that of "terror." "Many people, while sympathizing with the Bosnian Muslims, find the situation too confusing, too complicated and too frustrating," said Defense Secretary William Perry. "They say that Bosnia is a tragedy, but not our tragedy. They say that we should wash our hands of the whole situation." According to Perry, there was "no support, either in the public or in the Congress, for taking sides in this war as a combatant, so we will not

Americans have historically opposed military campaigns abroad except in cases where the United States or its citizens have been attacked or in instances where the United States has intervened and then appealed to the public afterward, when it has benefited from the "rally-around-the-flag" effect. In the absence of American leadership, the public is usually ambivalent at best. Six months before Pearl Harbor, 76 percent of Americans polled favored supplying aid to Britain, but 79 percent opposed actually entering World War II."' Once the United States was involved, of course, support soared.Two months before the invasion of Panama in 1989, just 26 percent of Americans supported committing troops to overthrow military strongman Manuel Noriega, but once it came, 80 percent backed the decision to invade."' A week after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August 1990, before President Bush had mobilized support for U.S. combat, a majority of Americans opposed invading Iraq or even staging air strikes against Iraqi military bases. Four out of ten went so far as to say that the United States "should not get involved in a land war in the Middle East even if Iraq's invasion means that Iraq permanently controls Kuwait.""' Even after the president had deployed troops to the Gulf and demonized Hussein as "Hitler,"Americans preferred to stick with economic and diplomatic sanctions. Asked directly in November 1990 if the United States should go to war, 58 percent said no. Some 62 percent considered it likely that the crisis could "bog down and become another Vietnam situation"15 When the prospect of U.S. casualties was raised, support dropped further."' Yet when U.S. troops battled the Iraqi Republican Guard, more than 80 percent backed Bush's decision to fight."'

Instead of leading the American people to support humanitarian intervention, Clinton adopted a policy of nonconfrontation.The administration would not confront the Serbs, and just as fundamentally, they would not confront opponents of intervention within the U.S. military or the Western alliance. Clinton's foreign policy team awaited consensus and drifted into the habits of its predecessor. Clinton himself testified to what would be his deep ambivalence about a U.S. role in the Balkans: "The U.S. should always seek an opportunity to stand up against--at least speak out against-inhu- inanity," he said.' 18

Thus, the administration's language shifted from that of moral imperative to that of an amoral mess. The "futility" imagery of tribal hatreds returned. Secretary of State Christopher said, "The hatred between all three groups ... is almost unbelievable. It's almost terrifying, and it's centuries old. That really is a problem from hell. And I think that the United States is doing all we can to try to deal with that problem."'"' British foreign secretary Neville Chamberlain once called the strife over Czechoslovakia "a quarrel in a foreign country between people of whom we know nothing." In May 1993 Secretary Christopher described the war in Bosnia as "a humanitarian crisis a long way from home, in the middle of another continent"'"'