A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (52 page)

Exit

The State Department is difficult to leave. As with most hierarchical institutions, rituals entrench the solidarity of "members." Stiff"initiation costs" include fiercely competitive foreign service exams, tedious years of stamping visas in consular offices around the world, and dull desk jobs in the home office. Because of the association of service with "honor" and "country," exit is often seen as betrayal. Those few who depart on principle are excommunicated or labeled whistle-blowers. U.S. foreign policy lore is not laden with tales of the heroic resignee.

A further deterrent to exit is that the very people who care enough about a policy to contemplate resigning in protest often believe their departure will make it less likely that the policy will improve. Bureaucrats can easily fall into the "efficacy trap," overestimating the chances they will succeed in making change." Dropping out can feel like copping out.The perverse result is that officials may exhibit a greater tendency to stay in an institution the worse they deem its actions.

By August 1993, despite all of these factors weighing against exit, existence within the State Iepartment had become so insufferable for a small group of young officers that they took their leave.They found the U.S. policy so timid, so passive, and so doomed to fail that they chose to disassociate themselves from the administration and to go public with their discontent.

For Marshall Harris, the Bosnia desk officer and the lead author of the April 1993 dissent letter, there was nothing conscientious about objecting to a policy that would never change. In July Harris had drafted an "action memorandum" that outlined options for easing the siege of Sarajevo. By the time it had arrived on the seventh floor, however, the memo had been demoted to a "discussion paper" Christopher's "no national interests" pronouncement on July 21 was the last straw. On August 4, 1993, one year after the skeletal figures in the concentration camps had appeared on television and foreign service officer George Kenney had resigned, Harris followed suit. He quit only after he had lined up a job with Congressman McCloskey, who had turned criticizing the administration's Bosnia policy into a nearly full-time pursuit. "I was lucky," Harris recalls. "I could at least go straight to a job where I felt like I still had an official voice and might still influence policy." In a letter addressed to Secretary Christopher, Harris wrote, "I can no longer serve in a Department of State that accepts the forceful dismemberment of a European state and that will not act against genocide and the Serbian officials who perpetrate it""'

Harris was tired of the hypocrisy of Clinton's rhetoric. The administration refused to lead either the American people or its European allies and then complained that its policy was constrained by a lack of support from both. Speaking at a press conference the day after his resignation, Harris, thirty-two, delivered his first public verdict on the administration:

If I1'resident Clinton were to lead, that would bring the American public along, that would bring along the congressmen who are reluctant to do anything, and it could inspire our European allies to do more. . . . I think the administration would be surprised what it could accomplish if it confronts this issue head on. When it adopts a defeatist mode ... its going to get defeatist results."'

Like Kenney, Harris was quickly disparaged by his higher-ups. Some said he quit because he had been shut out of the policy loop. State Department spokesman Mike McCurry shrugged off the impact of the resignation, pointing out that Harris was easily replaceable and saying, "We will fill the position with someone who is interested in working on the Administration's more aggressive policy to save Sarajevo and Bosnia from demise."' But Harris's colleagues within the department congratulated him for his courage and thanked him for giving voice to their frustration.

Jon Western, the State Department intelligence analyst, was driving with his wife into work from their home in Alexandria, Virginia, when he learned the news. Glancing at the New York' Tia►es, he saw a front-page story on Harris's departure.Western was stunned. Beneath the morning paper, he happened to be carrying his own detailed letter of resignation. Christopher's declaration that carnage in Bosnia was not a national interest had pushed him over the edge as well.The thirty-year-old could no longer sleep at night, reading about fathers and sons orally castrating one another or preteen girls raped in front of their parents. This was not a civil war, as Christopher kept saying; it was genocide. Western had been mulling resignation for several months, as he knew the daily death beat was getting the best of him. A few weeks before the Christopher press conference, he had visited the Holocaust Museum and heard the narrator, television journalist Jim Lehrer, recite the words of the Department spokesmen from 1943 and 1944 saying they had information on concentration camps in Europe but had "no ability to confirm the reports." Immediately he found himself transported to August 1992, when Assistant Secretary Toni Niles had said the administration did not have "substantiated information that would confirm the existence of these camps."Western himself had supplied Niles with all the evidence he needed.

On August 6, 1993, after reading the story about Harris's departure, Western went ahead and submitted his resignation letter." I am personally and professionally heartsick by the unwillingness of the United States to make resolution of the conflict in the formerYugoslavia a top foreign policy priority," Western wrote. He took the elevator from his office on the fourth floor up to the seventh floor and handed the letter to the secretary of state's secretary. Word traveled so fast that by the time he had returned to his office minutes later, his phone had begun ringing off the hook. Harris was in Geneva when he heard about his colleague's exit and was surprised and pleased. Western was simply exhausted. In his journal entry that day, he described himself as "thoroughly demoralized and depressed."

Two weeks later Steven Walker, the Croatia desk officer, became the third diplomat to depart :he State Department that month. On August 23, 1993, Walker wrote," I can no longer countenance U.S. support for a diplomatic process that legitimizes aggression and genocide.""' Criticized for his testy response to the earlier exits, Christopher had convened a meeting with Balkan officials on August 13 to clear the air. Now with yet another exit, the secretary had begun to wonder whether the cascade of resignations would ever subside. This time he was far more conciliatory. His spokesman McCurry described Walker's exit as "an honorable form of protest" and said the Bosnian war was "just as frustrating for the secretary as it is for people at the country-desk-officer level who work on the problem.""

Nothing like this had happened before. It was the largest wave of resignations in State Department history. The departure of so many promising young officers reflected a degree of despair but also a capacity for disappointment among officials not evident in the previous genocides. In the past, U.S. officials had internalized the policy constraints and the top-level indifference. There were few feuds. But Bosnia caused an enormous policy rift that played itself out in the morning papers, which in turn bolstered the confidence and legitimated the outrage of officials who opposed U.S. policy from within.

After the three resignations, the State Department tried to improve morale by redecorating the offices, putting in new furniture and carpet, and shortening the tours of duty. As Harris remembers, "I guess they thought if they gave us soothing blue walls, people wouldn't be prone to fly off the handle and leave." But it was the policy, not the interior design, that was the problem.

National Security Adviser Lake, who had himself once resigned in protest, was now architect of a policy that was causing others to flee. In his Foreign Policy article "The Human Reality of Realpolitik," written in 1971, two decades before he became national security adviser, Lake had complained that the human dimensions of a policy were rarely discussed. "It simply is not done," Lake wrote. "Policy-good, steady policy-is made by the `tough-minded:... To talk of suffering is to lose `effectiveness,' almost to lose one's grip. It is seen as a sign that one's rational arguments are weak" He had urged that policymakers elevate human costs and benefits to the category of"one of the principal and unashamedly legitimate considerations in any decision." In the 1990s, nearly a half century after the Holocaust and two decades since Vietnam, many believed that under Lake's leadership the U.S. foreign policy establishment would be more sensitive to human consequences. Yet at the State Department, officials say, to talk of human suffering remained something that was "not done." Those who complained about the human consequences of American decisions (or here, nondecisions) were still branded emotional, soft, and irrational. The language of national interest was Washington's lingua franca, and so it would remain.

Lake says he was torn when he heard of the departures:

On the one hand, I agreed with them.They realized that the United States needed to do more, and they were willing to put their careers on the line on behalf of principle. If I had completely disagreed with them, then I could have just dismissed them as grandstanders. But I didn't have that option. On the other hand, I thought they were making it sound easier than it was to change course. There was no unanimity within the government on the issue, never mind with our European allies.

Lake devoted much of his time at the White House to managing the U.S. response to the crisis in the Balkans. Although he chaired a lot of meetings and generated a dense paper trail, he coordinated more than he led. "If you want to take ownership of an issue," one senior U.S. official says, "you have to do more than hold meetings and express your moral convictions. You have to make risky decisions and prove you have the courage of your convictions." Lake personally favored intervention, but did not recommend it to the president because he could not get consensus within the cabinet. With Secretaries Christopher and Perry as well as the chairman of the joint Chiefs opposed to NATO air strikes, Lake opted for diplomacy and humanitarian relief, all the while attempting to reconcile these tame measures with the president's public promises never to tolerate ethnic cleansing. The endless, seemingly fruitless meetings led another high-level U.S. official to reflect, "It wasn't policy-making. It was group therapy-an existential debate over what is the role of America."'" Lake did not go toe-to-toe against Pentagon officers and civilians who argued that airpower alone could not halt Serb terror. "When our senior military guys were saying, `This mission can't be done,"' Lake explains, "it's hard to say, `Listen, you professionals, here's an amateur's view of how and why it can be done."'

Clinton's always awkward relations with the military were deteriorating further because the U.S. intervention in Somalia staged by Bush before he left the White House had begun spiraling out of control. In March 1993 the time had seemed ripe for U.S. troops deployed in December 1992 to slip away. UN peacekeeping forces would remain to preserve the peace and continue the relief operation. But just as the bulk of U.S. forces were withdrawing, the Security Council, at the urging of the United States, expanded the peacekeepers' mandate to include disarming the militias and restoring law and order. On June 5 the faction headed by Mohammed Farah Aideed ambushed lightly armed Pakistani peacekeepers, killing two dozen of them. The Americans lobbied for and U.S. special forces carried out a manhunt aimed at tracking down and punishing the Pakistanis' assailants. On October 3, 1993, U.S. Army rangers and Delta special forces attempted to seize several of Aideed's top advisers. Somali militia retaliated, killing eighteen U.S. Soldiers, wounding seventy-three, and kidnapping one Black Hawk helicopter pilot."" The American networks broadcast a video interview with the trembling, disoriented pilot and a gory procession in which the naked corpse of a U.S. ranger was dragged through a Mogadishu street.

On receiving word of these events, President Clinton cut short a trip to California and convened an urgent crisis-management meeting at the White House.When an aide began recapping the situation, an angry president interrupted him. "Cut the bullshit," Clinton snapped. "Let's work this out." "Work it out" meant walk out. Republican congressional pressure was intense. Clinton appeared on television the next day, called off the manhunt for Aideed, and announced that all U.S. forces would be home within six months. Bosnian Serb television gleefully replayed the footage of the U.S. humiliation, knowing that it made U.S. intervention in Bosnia even less likely. A week after the Mogadishu firelight, U.S. forces suffered further humiliation in Haiti, as angry anti-American demonstrators deterred the USS Harlan County from landing troops to join a UN mission there. The Pentagon concluded that the president would not stand by them when U.S. forces got into trouble. Multilateral humanitarian missions seemed to bring all risk and no gain.

Although a U.S. ground invasion of the Balkans was never proposed even by the most hawkish Bosnia defenders, the Pentagon feared that what began as a limited U.S. involvement in Bosnia would end up as a large, messy one. The "active measures" proposed to punish ethnic cleansing would send the United States "headlong down a slippery slope," Defense Secretary Perry said. "At the bottom of that slope will be American troops in ground combat.."`

The combination of the departures of three internal (if junior) advocates and the persistence of the ineffectual U.S. policy left the department far more hopeless and cynical than it had been before. The junior officers who replaced the resignees worked around the clock as their predecessors had done, but in the words of one, they were not "emotionally involved, only morally involved." It is hard to know what this distinction means exactly, except that it hints at the way the three resignees were branded after they took their leave.They were publicly hailed as honorable men, but a whisper campaign blasphemed them for their unprofessional stands.

The State Department quieted down.The longer Clinton served in office, the greater the distance that grew between him and his campaign promises and the less sensible it seemed to continue to contest what appeared to be an entrenched policy of noninvolvement. The use of the Holocaust analogy diminished. "The State Department wanted professionals who would not think what Warren Christopher was doing was the equivalent of not bombing the railroads to Auschwitz," says one Balkan desk officer. The State Department Balkan team was there to do "damage control" for the administration. They were not there to kick up a fuss.