A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (51 page)

Many senior officials found it difficult to argue with their junior officers about the magnitude of the moral stakes at play in Bosnia. But as had happened with regard to the Holocaust, Cambodia, and northern Iraq, they resolved their internal conflicts by telling themselves that other interests and indeed other values trumped those involved in the Balkans. Intervention in Bosnia might have perverse consequences for the very people the United States sought to help.The more peacekeepers who were present in Bosnia helping deliver relief or deterring attacks against safe areas, the more Western policy became hostage to concerns about the peacekeepers' welfare. If the arms embargo were lifted or the Serbs bombed, humanitarian aid would be suspended, UN peacekeepers withdrawn, negotiations canceled, and the intended beneficiaries, Bosnia's Muslims, made far worse off.

Some very cherished goods at home would also be jeopardized. After more than a decade of Republican rule in the White House, leading Democrats spoke about the importance of carrying out domestic reforms. Jimmy Carter had squandered his opportunity by getting mired in a hostage crisis in Iran, people said; Clinton could not forfeit this historic moment. Dick Morris, Clinton's erstwhile pollster who liked to dabble in foreign policy decisonmaking, made noninvolvement in Bosnia a "central element" of his advice. "You don't want to be Lyndon Johnson," he said to Clinton early on,"s,.crificing your potential for doing good on the domestic front by a destructive, never-ending foreign involvement. It's the Democrats' disease to take the same compassion that motivates their domestic policies and let it lure them into heroic but ill-considered foreign wars."121 Sure, the moral stakes were high, but the moral stakes at home were even higher.122

Atrocities "on All Sides"

To quell the unease that lurked in the halls of Foggy Bottom, senior officials drifted into the familiar "blame-the-victim" approach invoked whenever one's morals collide with one's actions. No genocide since the Holocaust has been completely black and white, and policymakers have been able to accentuate the grayness and moral ambiguity of each crisis. The Armenians and Kurds were not loyal to the state. In Bosnia the Muslim army carried out abuses, too. "All sides" were again said to be guilty. President Clinton said, "Until these folks get tired of killing each other, bad things will continue to happen." In the New Republic Anna Husarska noted the illogic of Clinton's position. "I guess if President Clinton had been around during the 1943 uprising in the Warsaw ghetto, he would also have called it `those folks out there killing each other,"' she wrote. "How would he describe the brief armed rebellion in the Treblinka concentration camp?"123

Bosnia desk officer Harris remembers his supervisor Mike Habib's questioning reports on Serb shelling:

He didn't want us to be seen pointing the finger when we weren't going to do anything. So he'd say, "How do you know it's the Serbs?" I would say that the Serbs were positioned outside the town with heavy weapons and the town was being shelled, so the Serbs were shelling the town. That wasn't good enough. I had to write, "There was shelling" or "There were reports of shelling." It was as if there was spontaneous combustion across Bosnia.

It is probably no coincidence that the less-experienced U.S. officials were likelier to let their human response to the carnage bubble over. These low-ranking officials did not allow their understanding of the slim odds of American intervention to cloud or alter their assessments of the problem. But their internal analysis and ongoing appeals met silence. They sent reports daily from intelligence officers, embassy staff, and journalists in the field up the chain of command and watched them become more sanitized at each rung of the ladder. By the time the analysis reached the secretary of state-when it did-the reports would have been unrecognizable to their original drafters. "The Clinton policy was unrealistic, but nobody wanted to change it," says Harris. "So those who defended it consciously and unconsciously contorted the reality on the ground in Bosnia to make the chosen policy seem sensible." Unwilling to alter the policy, officials in the Clinton administration had to reinterpret the facts.

On May 18, 1993, Christopher delivered unfathomable remarks to the House Foreign Affairs Committee in which he stunned listeners by insinuating that the Bosnian Muslims themselves had committed genocide:

First, with respect to the moral case that you make, one of the just absolutely bewildering parts of this problem is that the moral case is devastating and clear that there are atrocities, but there are atrocities on all sides. As I said in my statement, the most-perhaps the most serious recent fighting has been between the Croats and the Muslims ... you'll find indication of atrocities by all three of the major parties against each other.The level of hatred is just incredible. So, you know, it's somewhat different than the holocaust. It's been easy to analogize this to the holocaust, but I never heard of any genocide by the Jews against the German people.''-'

Before this testimony, according to one State Department official, Christopher had sent an urgent appeal to the department's Human Rights Bureau, requesting evidence of Bosnian Muslim atrocities. 121

In Bosnia, as time passed, the conflict did take on more and more of the appearances of a civil war. During the Bush era, Serb paramilitaries, police, and regular armies had rounded up unarmed civilians and hauled them into camps; they hid shelled city centers, looted homes, raped women, and expelled nearly 2 million Muslims and Croats from their homes. By the time Clinton took office, the Serbs had completed much of their ethnic cleansing and occupied almost three-quarters of the country. The Muslims had gradually assembled a ragtag army. They had also developed a smuggling network that enabled them to endure the Serbs' frequent suspensions of humanitarian aid and to begin equipping their defenders with light arms. A Serbo-Croatian expression says, "It takes two spoons to make noise." Although the Muslims had begun to make noise by meeting Serb attacks, they mustered only a teaspoon against a shovel, and only in certain areas of the country. By the time Clinton's cabinet began rummaging to prove parity, the Muslims had lost additional favor by going to war with Croats in central Bosnia (largely on the Croats' instigation). This complicated the picture by creating multiple aggressors. When the Muslims had no arms, no army, and no chance against the high-powered Serbs in 1992, the Bush administration had been careful to stress there were "no good guys" By mid-1993, when those same Muslims had acquired arms, an army, and a second front, it is not surprising that the language of "factions" and "warring parties" predominated.

The reality of the Bosnian "resistance" was far more pathetic.The heavily armed Serb forces donned crisp uniforms donated by the Yugoslav National Army from which they descended, whereas the Bosnian Muslim forces looked as though they had pieced together their uniforms by touring a host of garage sales, plucking garments of all shapes, sizes, and colors from a variety of different neighborhoods. Nothing fit or matched. Their efforts seemed so amateur that they evoked George Or-well's descriptions of the antifascists' attempt to defend the town of Barcelona against an attack by Franco's forces.The motley group in Spain had sought to shore up their positions by stacking sandbags outside their defenses and uprooting heavy cobblestones from the central plaza.Yet lacking the required mercenary instinct, they had patiently stopped to number each cobblestone with chalk so that they could return the stones to their rightful slots after the fighting had subsided.

One reason Western negotiators and U.S. policymakers succumbed to the temptation to equate all sides might be that they were equally frustrated by all sides. Diplomats quickly discerned that none of the Balkan leaders-Muslim, Serb, or Croat-were particularly concerned about the fate of their own people. With few exceptions, the political leaders did not seem moved by the ways their intransigence in negotiations doomed those on the battlefield or in the streets.This divide between warmakers and war casualties was not new. In 1917 when Siegfried Sassoon refused to return to the French front, he prepared a "A Soldier's Declaration," arguing that politicians who did not themselves suffer the conflict would deliberately prolong it. In the letter, printed in the Times, Sassoon said he hoped he might "help to destroy the callous complaisance with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of the agonies which they do not share and have not sufficient imagination to realize..""' The callousness and lack of imagination that characterized Bosnia's wartime Serb, Croat, and Muslim leaders gave Western diplomats legitimate grounds for despair.

But American and European frustration stemmed mainly from the foreigners' impatience with the Muslim refusal to quit. The cherished but churlish "peace process" hinged upon the Muslims' agreeing to surrender much of the territory from which they had been brutally expelled. Many diplomats felt that the Muslims should sign away the country in the interest of peace. Because the Serbs took so much territory so quickly, they were able to portray themselves as positively pacifist, whereas the Muslims wanted to take back their homes.

A subsequent CIA study found that Serbs were "responsible for the vast majority of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia." Croats and Muslims had committed "discrete" atrocities, the CIA found, but theirs lacked "the sustained intensity, orchestration, and scale of the Bosnian Serbs' efforts "'2' Hardly a partisan of U.S. intervention, the CIA concluded that "90 percent" of the atrocities committed during the three-and-a-half-year war were the handiwork of Serb paramilitary and military forces.

"No National Interest"

In July 1993 the Olympic city of Sarajevo came under fierce artillery fire and looked poised to fall. The U.S. press abounded with stories on the human toll of the carnage. As the world looked to the United States for leadership and solutions, Secretary Christopher came clean with the thinking that had come to inform and justify Clinton policy. When a reporter asked what the United States would do to stop what seemed to be the imminent fall of Sarajevo, Christopher responded: "That's a tragic, tragic situation in Bosnia, make no mistake about that. It's the world's most difficult diplomatic problem I believe. It defies any simple solution.The United States is doing all that it can consistent with our national interest.""' Christopher was a veteran of the Carter foreign policy team that had helped introduce the rhetoric of human rights into foreign policy. But here only national interests, narrowly defined, would count, and Bosnia was not one. The United States would do what it could to help provide humanitarian relief, to maintain economic sanctions against Serbia, and to support diplomatic efforts. When the journalist continued to press him, Christopher bristled:" I would ask you to go back and either look at what I said or I'll say it again. What I said was the United States is doing all that it can consistent with its national interest, and I've discussed before at some length what our national interest is in this situation"

A few of the State Department junior officials who worked daily on the formerYugoslavia were watching Christopher on television in their offices. While their boss foundered under the reporters' continued grilling, they joked that the secretary seemed to be "scouring the room for a black or Asian face" so that he could call on somebody who might steer the discussion away from the "problem from hell." The following day, the Bosnian Serbs fired 3,777 shells into Sarajevo in a sixteen-hour period, one of the highest counts ever recorded.'"'

Between the outbreak of war in April 1992 and July 1993, America's new breed of "conscientious objectors" had continued to believe in the possibility of changing policy from inside the U.S. govermnent. The interventionists within the ranks were not told to their faces that their ideas were off the wall. Bureaucratic ritual had become better at incorporating dissent, and they were shrewdly "domesticated" or assigned the role of "official dissenters." They argued positions that were predictable and thus easier to dismiss. Former National Security Council official James C. Thomson Jr., who resigned the NSC over Vietnam, described the ways the Johnson administration had once "warmly institutionalized" Undersecretary of State George Ball as the "inhouse devil's advocate" on Vietnam. Ball had been urged to speak his piece.Thomson remembered,

Ball felt good, I assume (he had fought for righteousness); the others felt good (they had given a full hearing to the dovish option); and there was minimal unpleasantness. The club remained intact; and it is of course possible that matters would have gotten worse faster if Mr. Ball had kept silent, or left before his final departure in the fall of 1966.

According to Thomson, the president greeted the arrival at meetings of Bill Moyers, his dissenting press secretary, with an affectionate, "Well, here comes Mr. Stop-the-Bombing."""

By the summer of 1993 the Bosnia dissenters in the State Department and on Capitol Hill, too, had been "heard" and discounted. In this case Clinton and his senior officials might well have greeted a hawk like McCloskey and Dole on Capitol Hill or Harris, Hooper, and Western in the State Department as "Mr. Start-the-Bombing"