America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History (28 page)

Much as Mexico is a part of Latin America located in North America, so too the Balkans constitute a fragment of the Islamic world within the confines of Europe. According to one of the prevailing shibboleths of the present age, this commingling of cultures is inherently good. It fosters pluralism, thereby enriching everyday life. Yet cultural interaction also induces friction, whether spontaneously generated or instigated by demagogues and provocateurs.

Until the middle of the last century, the U.S.-Mexican border neatly (if imperfectly) divided Ibero-America, then almost entirely Catholic, from the Anglo-Protestant sphere with which most citizens of the United States, including virtually the entire American elite, identified. In the Balkans, centuries of conflict between Islam and Christendom had long since erased any such line of separation, leaving in its wake a residue of unhappy minorities, unsettled scores, and frustrated ambitions.

For some Americans, even today, the breaching of the barrier that once separated the United States from Latin America remains a source of resentment, and for cynical politicians an opportunity ripe for exploitation. They want the barrier restored. In the Balkans at the end of the Cold War, comparable resentments and even more pronounced cynicism also produced demands for separation. A series of shooting wars resulted, four in all. On two occasions, those conflicts prompted the United States to intervene, first in Bosnia in 1995 and then in Kosovo four years later.

In both cases, the plight of beleaguered Muslims offered the pretext for U.S. military action. In America’s ongoing War for the Greater Middle East, the Bosnia and Kosovo campaigns qualified as sideshows. Yet even if soon superseded by larger events, they were hardly trivial. Indeed, of all the various military actions undertaken by the United States in the Islamic world since 1980, these two appear to have come closest to achieving real success. Yet appearances deceive, or at least do not tell the whole story.

That story begins in 1914, when Serbian terrorists assassinated the Austrian Archduke in Sarajevo, triggering a conflagration that, among other things, spelled the end of European global preeminence. In the wake of World War I, the victorious Allies, acting with the same insouciance that they demonstrated in redrawing the map of the Middle East, signed off on a new Balkan political order right out of Rube Goldberg. The result was Yugoslavia, an amalgam of Bosnians, Croats, Montenegrins, Serbs, Slovenes, and others destined to induce political migraines on a scale similar to those produced by other Allied creations such as Iraq and Palestine.
¹

This patchwork arrangement survived for seven decades. With the passing of the Cold War it came apart, as the people-formerly-known-as-Yugoslavs, abandoning multicultural socialism, embraced various forms of religiously and ethnically infused nationalism.

In June 1991, Slovenes and Croats became the first to break away. For Slovenia, which won its independence after a brief “Ten-Day War,” the break was relatively painless. For Croatia, things proved more difficult, as a large minority of ethnic Serbs, supported by the Serb-dominated Yugoslav army, resisted. Vicious fighting killed thousands and displaced far larger numbers of Croats and Serbs alike. The suspension of hostilities in January 1992 found Croatia independent but with wide swathes of its territory controlled by a self-declared Republic of Serbian Krajina. Under the auspices of the United Nations, which had already imposed an arms embargo on Yugoslavia, European peacekeepers arrived to maintain a precarious ceasefire.

Then, at the end of February, Bosnians voted to secede from what remained of the Yugoslav federation. Ethnic Serbs within Bosnia-Herzegovina boycotted the referendum and established their own Republika Srpska, aligned with Serbia proper. Soon thereafter, in April 1992, a third Balkan war erupted, as Serbs and Croats set out to dismember now predominantly Muslim Bosnia-Herzegovina. Serb forces laid siege to the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo, in Western eyes a symbol of secular pluralism, now transformed into a scene out of Dante’s
Inferno.
“For 400,000 Sarajevans,” war correspondent John Burns reported, the siege

meant living with sudden death every hour of every day. Children climbing a cherry tree in an orchard are blasted to oblivion by a tank shell. A young mother falls to the sidewalk, mortally wounded by a Serbian sniper, her baby cast from her arms with a leg so severely injured that doctors have to amputate. Mourners grieving over fresh graves in public parks scatter in panic, some falling dead themselves, as Serbian forces fire on them with antiaircraft shells and mortars. Sniper fire is so accurate that surgeons have detected the “personal signature” of individual gunmen in the wounds they inflict—some favoring shots to the head, others to the heart.
²

The cordoning off of the Bosnian capital formed just one part of a larger campaign to evict Muslims from territory earmarked for incorporation into a Greater Serbia.
³
UN peacekeepers dispatched to the scene were utterly inadequate to the task.

The United States had made every effort to steer clear of these developments. Other priorities absorbed the attention of the George H. W. Bush administration. With the Cold War winding down, Yugoslavia no longer commanded Washington’s attention. The Balkans were Europe’s problem. Bush’s secretary of state, James Baker, put the matter succinctly: “We don’t have a dog in this fight.”
⁴

Three factors undermined this hands-off approach. The first was the ineptitude of those to whom Washington looked to handle the situation. Demanding an end to violence, European leaders proved incapable of enforcing that demand. To defer to dithering Europeans was, in effect, to become an accessory to murder.

A second factor was the moral framing imposed on the Yugoslav crackup. Among Western elites especially, the fate of Sarajevo and of the Bosnian people more generally assumed a significance reminiscent of the siege of Madrid in 1936–1939. In Bosnia, one of the great moral dramas of the age was being restaged. This contest between “the primitive and the cosmopolitan,” as one writer put it, offered Western governments that had failed to rescue the Spanish Republic from the clutches of fascism the chance to get it right this time.
⁵
Seen in this light, the Bush administration’s apparent indifference to the ongoing agony of Sarajevo seemed unconscionable.

Finally, and above all, there was American domestic politics, playing out in a presidential election year. Seeking to unseat an incumbent whose greatest strength lay in foreign policy, Bill Clinton needed some way to portray himself as tough-minded and forward-leaning. President Bush’s passivity on Bosnia in 1992 gave his brash young challenger just the opening he was looking for. The Clinton campaign chided Bush for failing to demonstrate “real leadership” in the Balkans. The odious Serb president Slobodan Milo
š
evi
ć
and his henchmen were made-to-order villains. The solution was obvious: an “economic blockade” to strangle “the renegade regime of Slobodan Milosevic” along with “air strikes against those who are attacking the [Bosnian] relief effort.”
⁶
The candidate himself forthrightly declared, “I would begin with airpower, against the Serbs, to restore the basic conditions of humanity.”
⁷

When Clinton won the election, however, bellicosity gave way to reticence. The new president’s aides postured. Imitating John Kennedy at Berlin, for example, Madeleine Albright flew into the Bosnian capital to announce “Ja sam Sarajevka” and assure her listeners that “America’s future and your future are inseparable.”
⁸
Yet such rhetoric notwithstanding, Clinton was no more eager than his predecessor to plunge into any Balkan quagmire. The collapse of the Somalia mission barely eight months into his presidency only reinforced that reluctance.

What ensued was intervention by inadvertence. Clintonites styled their approach “assertive multilateralism.” Practically speaking, however, the noun took precedence over the adjective. Assertive multilateralism emphasized consensus over action, process over outcomes. Assertiveness (of a sort) made its appearance only after the exhaustion of all the other alternatives.

Unwilling to proceed unilaterally and unable to persuade U.S. allies to undertake forceful collective action, Clinton found himself in a bind. In early May, European leaders had rejected his “lift and strike” proposal—lifting the arms embargo and using NATO air power to protect the Bosnians. This humiliating diplomatic setback effectively left the administration without a Balkan policy. “In view of your public posture,” Secretary of State Warren Christopher gently chided his boss, “what you may not be free to do is to follow the Bush strategy of doing nothing.”
⁹
To paper over their disunity and confusion, the United States and its European allies had at hand a placeholder of sorts. This was Operation Deny Flight, which just the month before had cracked open the door leading to a decades-long U.S. military involvement in the Balkans.

Deny Flight was another exercise in no-fly-zone enforcement, a low-risk way of offering a semblance of protection to Bosnian Muslims threatened by Serb depredations. It was a gesture pretending to be a serious military undertaking.

Acting pursuant to a UN Security Council resolution, twelve NATO nations provided aircraft to Deny Flight. Operating from bases in Italy or aircraft carriers in the Adriatic, U.S. forces contributed far and away the largest share.

As was the case with the Iraqi no-fly zones, Deny Flight offered ample opportunity for boring holes in the sky. In all, between April 1993 and December 1995, NATO aviators flew more than 109,000 sorties. In prohibiting Serbian fixed-wing aircraft from entering Bosnian airspace, the operation did achieve notable success. The weak Serbian air force rarely challenged NATO. When it did, it paid a price. On February 28, 1994, for example, two pairs of U.S. Air Force F-16s encountered six small, subsonic Serbian bombers within the no-fly zone and proceeded to shoot down four without suffering a scratch.
¹⁰
In June 1995, the Bosnian Serbs partly evened the score, employing a surface-to-air missile to shoot down an F-16 piloted by air force Captain Scott O’Grady. After successfully ejecting from his aircraft, O’Grady evaded capture for six days until rescued by U.S. Marines in a daring and well-executed recovery operation.

In squadron ready rooms, air victories offered cause for celebration. Back home, O’Grady’s exploits made him an instant celebrity, book contracts and cinematic re-creations following in due course.
¹¹
Yet such episodes amounted to the military equivalent of tabloid journalism, diverting perhaps but thin on substance. The action that mattered was occurring not in the air but on the ground. There, unrelenting, primordial violence continued. Although Bosnians (and Croats) were not innocent of crimes, the better-armed Serbs were clearly the worst offenders. As NATO aircraft patrolled overhead, the signatures of the Serbian way of war—random shelling of populated areas, the confinement of military males to squalid concentration camps, and the use of rape as a weapon—all continued undisturbed.
¹²

Although authorized to use air strikes to protect peacekeepers—a grant of protection subsequently extended to Bosnians within certain designated “safe areas”—NATO rarely acted on this authority. Between June 1993 and August 1995, Deny Flight aircraft actually released ordnance on a grand total of only ten occasions. The United States and its European allies vaguely hoped that the prospect of more serious military action might induce the Serbs to relent and agree to a negotiated settlement. Yet in terms of impact, Deny Flight amounted to little more than an irritant. Certainly, it did not dissuade the Serbs from intimidating UN peacekeepers or making life hell for Bosnians. The NATO air campaign had become an exercise in military masturbation—a display of ostensibly superior power that served chiefly to reveal Western impotence.
¹³

The problem was twofold. On the one hand, procedures for approving air strikes were cumbersome. Under a “dual key” system, both UN and NATO authorities had to assent before a single aircraft could actually attack a single target. Wishing to preserve its nominally non-belligerent status, the UN rarely gave its okay. On the other hand, Serb threats (sometimes implemented) to take peacekeepers hostage dampened the enthusiasm for air strikes on the part of those NATO members—not including the United States—that had peacekeeping contingents at risk. So although American officers occupied most of the key posts in the NATO chain of command, they exercised limited actual authority.
¹⁴

As the war dragged on and the body count continued to rise, criticism of U.S. policy also intensified. To be sure, not everyone was eager for the United States to become more deeply embedded in the Balkans. Senator John McCain, for one, insisted that this was a problem without a military solution. “Tragic as Bosnia may be,” he said in a speech on the Senate floor, “it is a self-inflicted wound which we cannot heal with either airpower or ground troops.”
¹⁵

With the passing of time, McCain’s became very much the minority view, however. An increasingly energized, if informal, Bosnian Muslim lobby rejected the excuses offered up to explain Clinton’s fumbling effort. Already in July 1993,
The Washington Post
was deriding the administration’s defense of its Bosnia policy as “petty and embarrassing.”
¹⁶
That same month, in an amply publicized act of solidarity, Susan Sontag, doyenne of the American intelligentsia, had gone to Sarajevo. Recounting her experience in a widely read essay appearing in
The New York Review of Books,
Sontag denounced the United States and the West for “giving the victory to Serb fascism.” In the Bosnian capital, she had staged Beckett’s
Waiting for Godot,
even though Sarajevans, she acknowledged, were actually “waiting for Clinton.”
¹⁷
By early the following year,
The New Republic
was castigating the White House for “indifference” and “timidity” in the face of out-and-out genocide. “Poor Bosnia,” the editors wrote, “it should have found itself in a trade war. Trade wars we fight. Wars of genocide we watch.”
¹⁸