Making War to Keep Peace (29 page)

In his first year as secretary of state, Warren Christopher sought allied cooperation in removing the arms embargo. He sought greater use of NATO airpower for a lift-and-strike strategy (lift the embargo and strike the aggressors) to remove the Serb sieges and open the way for humanitarian assistance to the people who were trapped without food, heating fuel, or medicine. But nothing came of his efforts, and soon the administration seemed to be backpedaling from its constructive stance. “We can't do it all,” Christopher said. “We have to save our power for those situations which threaten our deepest national interests….[Bosnia] is a humanitarian crisis a long way from home, in the middle of another continent. [So U.S. actions] are proportionate to…our responsibilities.”
⁸³
In a luncheon briefing with reporters, Peter Tarnoff, the undersecretary of state for political affairs, explained that Christopher had not failed to persuade European allies to join the United States in stronger action in Bosnia; rather, he had not really tried. He had gone to Europe “to consult,” not in a serious effort to rally the Europeans around U.S. recommendations to use air strikes and lift the arms embargo.
⁸⁴

This was one of several early signals of the Clinton administration's
retreat from global leadership—signals that came as a surprise to many. Who could have predicted that Clinton would not approve his own “Clinton doctrine” for Bosnia? When the story of Tarnoff's briefing on Christopher's trip hit the
Washington Post
, the administration realized that such a renunciation of U.S. leadership would reduce American influence and might be taken by potential aggressors as an invitation to action.
⁸⁵
The White House quickly distanced itself from Tarnoff's characterization: “That is not our foreign policy,” a high-level spokesman announced. And Christopher clarified, “There is no derogation of our powers and our responsibility to lead.”

But these denials did not dispel the signs of an American reluctance whose consequences were already being felt around the world. The Clinton team's intention to disengage were apparent in a series of developments: deep cuts in the defense budget; the inability of NATO defense ministers to agree on much of anything except to pass the Bosnian issue back to the UN Security Council; the concessions Clinton offered to North Korea in advance of negotiations on its nuclear intentions; the unconditional extension to China of most favored nation (MFN) status; the unconditional diplomatic recognition of the MPLA, the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola, government of Angola; and the unconditional release of financial assistance to the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. This same reluctance could be seen in the administration's lack of response to Iraq's provocations, and its inaction on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and related hemispheric matters.

In the face of such challenges, Christopher and other Clinton administration officials tended to shift ground, redefine goals, and, in the case of Bosnia, to claim impotence in the face of Serbia's escalating demands. As
New York Times
reporter John F. Burns wrote in July 1993, “For a while, Serbian political and military chiefs appeared ready to halt the seizure of territory and the raping, killing, and expulsions of Muslims that began when the Serbian military campaign began in April 1992…. Instead, United Nations officials say, Mr. Clinton's decision to bow to European nations like Britain and France in their reluctance to launch military strikes or lift an arms embargo against the outgunned Bosnian govern
ment caused the fighting and the suffering of civilians to worsen rapidly.”
⁸⁶

As candidate and president, Clinton expressed outrage over the Serbs' brutality. National Security Advisor Tony Lake and the U.S. ambassador to the UN, Madeleine Albright, also seemed to feel deeply about Bosnia. But Christopher had sounded a milder note in his testimony before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. Strictly speaking, he said, “some of the acts that have been committed by various parties in Bosnia, principally by the Serbs, could constitute genocide under the 1948 convention”; he spoke of “atrocities on all sides,” and said merely that the Bosnian Serbs were “most at fault of the three parties.”
⁸⁷
Christopher's testimony suggested that he and the administration were distancing themselves from what he described as “a multilateral problem [that] must have a multilateral response.” The United States must be wise, and “being wise means acting in ways that are consistent with our national interests.”
⁸⁸

But that was precisely the challenge—to know our national interests. The United States had fought two costly wars in Europe largely because American presidents had believed that our national interests were tied to the European continent. Now Christopher seemed to be suggesting that what was “at heart…a European problem” need be of little concern to the United States.

The notion that aggression must not be rewarded, lest it invite further aggression, had been the core concept of U.S. foreign policy at least since World War II. That was why Harry Truman signed and the Senate ratified the UN Charter, with its clear-cut prohibition on the use of force and equally clear-cut provision of self-defense in Article 51. It was the reason Truman sent U.S. troops to South Korea when North Korea attacked. It was why George H.W. Bush provided U.S. leadership for action on Kuwait. In the Bosnian conflict, however, the United States sometimes acted as though a greater national interest lay in preserving consensus with its allies rather than in discouraging aggression. And the search for consensus in the Security Council seemed to take priority over protecting a people from destruction.

Even as Christopher spoke, Karadzic was making radical new demands for more territory, more ethnic cleansing, and a Serbian state
whose realization would require expelling tens of thousands more Bosnian Muslims from their homes. Karadzic said, “There will be a Serbian republic once and for good, and anybody who wants to deal with us has to take that into account.” Serbian General Ratko Mladic echoed the sentiment: “We are a…unified people living in the land of our grandfathers.” That was not true. The Bosnian Serb state was founded on nationalism and violence, consisted of bombed cities and burned villages, and included many largely Muslim towns and tens of thousands of Muslim and Croat refugees.

Many Americans—myself among them—believed that President Clinton and some of his predecessors had been right to urge air strikes; right to support the lift-and-strike option; right to refuse to sign the Vance-Owen plan because it rewarded aggression; and right to promise that no U.S. ground troops would be committed to combat in Bosnia under UN command; but wrong to announce that we would not use airpower unilaterally. By July 1993, it seemed obvious that the Clinton administration was deferring to the British, the French, and the UN on these critical issues.

As John Burns reported in the
New York Times
, senior UN officials felt powerless to mitigate the suffering; the last hope of halting the killing and slow starvation of Muslims seemed to have disappeared, they said, when Clinton decided not to commit American military forces.
⁸⁹
Peter Kessler, spokesman for the UN High Commissioner on Refugees, observed that the Serbs and Croats were behaving as though they “can do anything that they want.”
⁹⁰
In Europe, it was said that the U.S. president had turned his attention back to domestic affairs.

But some in the Clinton administration understood that abandoning an effort in which the human stakes were so high was certain to diminish the administration's credibility, its capacity to influence events elsewhere, and, above all, its reputation for leadership. Some understood that taking this path would diminish Bill Clinton's standing in the world. Some members of the administration understood that, more than anything, Bosnians needed arms.

In July 1993, approximately 315 American soldiers were deployed with a UN peacekeeping force on the border between Macedonia and Serbia. The UNPROFOR troops were concerned that the Americans
might be too heavily armed and might violate the spirit of peacekeeping. Scandinavian commanders moved quickly to teach the American soldiers to surrender on demand, fire only in self-defense, and travel in small, light, personnel carriers instead of large, intimidating vehicles. The commanders were determined that the U.S. forces would respect the UN rules of engagement, which called for strict neutrality, minimal weaponry, and nonconfrontational behavior. Unfortunately, the Serbs were not operating under the same rules—as three American peacekeepers learned when they were kidnapped and held for several days.

ARMS SUPPLIERS

One thing the Bosnian Muslims and the Croatians shared was a need for arms to defend themselves against the relentless attacks of the Serbs. In 1992, a group of three Croatians, a Pole, and two Germans were arrested for smuggling $45 million worth of arms, mainly Kalashnikov rifles and U.S. Stinger missiles, into Croatia. A second shipment included a complete Soviet anti-aerial system that was carried in by way of bogus end-user certificates from Poland. (End-user certificates name the selling and recipient countries, but may be used to send the arms to a third country.) Soon Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, and Turkey were sending weapons to the Bosnian Muslims, with end-user certificates saying they were going to Africa. Once at sea, freighters said to be headed for Africa, Asia, or the Middle East changed course and headed to Bosnia. Unfortunately, many of the arms intended for Bosnia were unloaded on Croatia's Dalmatian coast. Croatia had less difficulty than Bosnia in recruiting Western military advisers and buying Western arms. Germany was ready to help, as were Italians and some American freelance military trainers. When they had arms, Croatians and Bosnians fought well, but the arms were slow in arriving.

Almost as soon as the UN peacekeeping troops arrived in Croatia in 1992 (the first place they were deployed), the Croatian government had complained that the fourteen thousand UNPROFOR troops were not acting with sufficient force to compel compliance with the negotiated truce. The Croatians promised to “liberate every inch of Croatia” with their modern army, 91 and quite soon they demonstrated they could and
would do just that. The Croatians had money, foreign connections, and help in training their forces. They had financial backers abroad, mainly Germans and Croatian émigrés. Croatia's long Dalmatian coastline enabled them to receive diverse weapons, including those intended for landlocked Bosnia. A tacit agreement among some nations (presumably including the United States, as well as Iran and other Muslim states) allowed $1.3 billion of weapons to be smuggled into the country. They were also helped by the presence in Zagreb of a number of employees of a private American military consulting firm who trained Croatian officers. Croatian officers attended a course offered by private companies and headed by former U.S. Army general Harry Soyster. The course, called “Military Professional Resources,” was conducted by fifteen former U.S. Army generals, colonels, and master sergeants; it prepared the Croatians for the offensive in the summer of 1995 that wrested Krajina from the Serbs. This left an impression that the United States supported the building of Croatian strength.
⁹²

Lieutenant-General Jean Cot, the French UN commander, who served from June 1993 to March 1994, spoke harshly of the “Pontius Pilate solution”—peacekeepers bound by UN rules of engagement that demanded that they remain neutral in the face of starvation and mass murder.
⁹³
These rules, Cot said, rendered peacekeepers impotent, “like goats tethered to a stake”—unable to keep peace, protect unarmed victims, or prevent the spread of conflict.
⁹⁴

Why, then, did the French and British so ardently oppose lifting the arms embargo that denied Bosnians the capacity to defend themselves? Why did French defense minister François Leotard oppose NATO air strikes even in the face of Sarajevo's agonies, saying (as if there were no urgency), “With regard to any eventual action on security zones, it should be preceded by a political consultation, first among Europeans, then with Americans, with the then commander of the UN forces directly involved”? Why did the Clinton administration wait so long before mobilizing NATO and urging air strikes? NATO had already agreed to support the Security Council if it voted to enforce the ban on Serbian flights over Bosnia and Herzegovina (which would have marked the first time NATO forces defended a country outside the alliance).

Although he was personally committed to effective action, Clinton
appointed two secretaries of defense who were nearly as uncomfortable with the use of force as the UN Secretariat. The first, Les Aspin, declined to provide requested heavy armor for U. S. Rangers in Somalia. The second, William Perry, said that in 1994 although “air strikes are among the options being considered now…I can state categorically that we will not unilaterally conduct air strikes. We may not conduct them at all.” Perry said that he and General John M. Shalikashvili, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, took “very seriously the limitations of air strikes against, first of all, artillery-type targets and, second, any targets that are embedded in a civilian population.”
⁹⁵

The secretary-general, too, continued to oppose the use of airpower. Why did the secretary-general oppose the use of force in Bosnia so firmly, even after the Security Council had repeatedly authorized its use? Why did he guard so jealously his power to call in air strikes, and use it so infrequently? In a confidential letter to Christopher, Boutros-Ghali offered to “spell out the reasons for [my] misgivings…about the U.S. plan for air strikes…at a time and place of NATO's choosing.” His argument was simple: The “first use of airpower in the theater should be initiated by the secretary-general,” he claimed, “who alone has the right to initiate the use of force.”