To the blood-chilling names of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and other Nazi death camps there seem now to have been added the names of Omarska and Brcko. . . . Is it possible that fifty years after the Holocaust, the nations of the world, including our own, will stand by and do nothing, pretending we are helpless? . . . We must make it clear that we will take every necessary step, including the use of force, to put a stop to this madness and bloodshed.55
On August 10, 1992, President Bush met with Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, who also likened the camps to those of the Nazis. The same day thousands of Jewish American protesters marched on the White House.
The Holocaust analogy was also invoked with regard to the allies’ handling of the crisis. The interminable and seemingly fruitless Vance-Owen peace process caused many to draw comparisons between the Western “appeasers” of 1992 and those who had kowtowed to Hitler in Munich in 1938. For example, Time magazine wrote, “The ghastly images in newspapers and on television screens conjured up another discomfiting memory, the world sitting by, eager for peace at any price, as Adolf Hitler marched into Austria, carved up Czechoslovakia.”56 Anthony Lewis of the New York Times called President Bush a “veritable Neville Chamberlain.”57
This public commentary aided dissenters within the bureaucracy. They began filtering much of what they read and saw through the prism of the Holocaust. Fox recalls:
It was the shock of recognition of those images. It was the visual memory that most of us had through documentaries. It was the likeness of the thing. It didn’t add anything to our knowledge to know about the camps in August. There was much more death after they were revealed than before. . . . But we had all sat through 500 documentaries on the Holocaust. I had been to Auschwitz. We had all experienced the college curriculum. The Holocaust was part of the equipment that one brought to the job.
Jim Hooper had delved into the history of the State Department’s weak response to the Holocaust. He pressed his government colleagues to read British historian Martin Gilbert’s Auschwitz and the Allies and supplied them with a stream of facts about parallels with the Holocaust that they could use internally. Twining, Solarz, Galbraith, and other advocates of an interventionist, humanitarian policy had invoked the Holocaust before, but neither Cambodia nor Iraq had resonated like Bosnia. The Bosnian war brought both a coincidence of European geography and imagery.
“We Will Not Rest Until. . .”
The association of the television imagery with the Holocaust and the outrage of elite opinion-makers forced President Bush to speak out. Three months before an election, with Clinton snapping at his heels, he had to confront the possibility of intervening. Bush held a press conference on Friday, August 7. Fox vividly recalls the moment when Bush made his remarks: “I remember hearing Bush say, ‘We will not rest.’ And I thought to myself, ‘How on earth is he going to finish this sentence?’ Will he say, ‘We will not rest until we liberate the camps’? ‘We will not rest until we close the camps’? ‘We will not rest until we rest’? I knew he didn’t want to do anything, so I wondered what on earth he could say.” In fact, Bush himself made the Holocaust link:
The pictures of the prisoners rounded up by the Serbian forces and being held in these detention camps are stark evidence of the need to deal with this problem effectively. And the world cannot shed its horror at the prospect of concentration camps. The shocking brutality of genocide in World War II, in those concentration camps, are burning memories for all of us, and that can’t happen again. And we will not rest until the international community has gained access to any and all detention camps.58
Bush’s pledge not to rest until the international community gained access to the camps left the administration ample room for maneuver. Would the access demand be satisfied by a single international visit? Would it entail stationing foreign observers in or near the enclosed premises? Even if helped in the short term, would prisoners be punished more in the long term?
The camp story had sent shock waves through Foggy Bottom. But many of the midlevel officials within the State Department who lobbied for intervention were concerned that all the attention paid to the camps risked drowning out the larger truth: The Serbs were killing or expelling non-Serbs from any territory they controlled or conquered. Still, in a parallel to Peter Galbraith’s decision to tap American outrage over chemical weapons’ use in Iraq, the Bosnia hawks within the department opted to take what they could get. They reasoned that attention to the concentration camps and the Holocaust parallels might succeed in drawing attention to the wider campaign of genocide.
Richard Holbrooke, who had served as assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs under President Carter, was a board member of the International Rescue Committee, America’s largest nongovernmental relief organization. He decided to visit Bosnia just after the camp story broke. There he encountered an angry British aid worker, Tony Land, who expressed his amazement at the sudden attention to the camps. “For six months, we have seen Sarajevo systematically being destroyed without the world getting very upset,” Land told Holbrooke. “Now a few pictures of people being held behind barbed wire, and the world goes crazy.”59 Holbrooke videotaped the results of Serb ethnic cleansing, filming house upon house that had been blown up by Serb soldiers and militia. He saw petrified Muslims handing over their property deeds to the local Serb authorities in exchange for bus passage out of the country. And he interviewed refugees who recounted the abduction and disappearance of Muslim men. When he returned to the United States, Holbrooke wrote an article in Newsweek that urged lifting the arms embargo against the Muslims and bombing Serb bridges and military facilities. He also asked rhetorically, “What would the West be doing now if the religious convictions of the combatants were reversed, and a Muslim force was now trying to destroy two million beleaguered Christians and/or Jews?”60 Knowing that Clinton had spoken out on Bosnia and sensing an opening, Holbrooke wrote a memo to Clinton and vice presidential candidate Al Gore in which he stressed: “This is not a choice between Vietnam and doing nothing, as the Bush Administration has portrayed it. . . . Doing nothing now risks a far greater and more costly involvement later.”61
Although President Bush’s statement resolved little on the ground in Bosnia, it did require U.S. bureaucrats to begin a high-level intelligence scramble to gather all available data on the camps.62 Within six weeks of Bush’s pledge, the intelligence community had compiled a list of more than 200 camps that included the names of commanders. Because of America’s top-flight technical intelligence-gathering capabilities, this information had been available to any interested party all along. But before the August public “shaming,” senior Bush administration officials had placed no premium on knowing. There was no point in receiving details about crimes that they did not intend to confront. When Jon Western had conducted his investigation, he had done so juggling a portfolio that included Poland, Croatia, and Bosnia. Nobody above him had ordered—or much welcomed—his July 4 weekend intelligence scramble. But now the president had commissioned a well-staffed search. The sequencing was quite typical. As Fox notes: “The intelligence community is responsive to what the bosses want to know. You could say ‘I’m deeply interested in a green-eyed abominable snowman,’ and you’d get all the briefings you could ever want. But when the higher-ups are blaming the killings on the victims, you aren’t going to get much intelligence.”
U.S. Policy: Diplomacy, Charity, Futility, Perversity, Jeopardy
The United States did not couple its new public commitment to document Serb aggression with a plan to stop it. As a way of defusing the pressure stirred up by the camp images, U.S. and European officials pointed optimistically to a UN-EU peace conference scheduled for late August in London. There “the parties” would be convinced to stop fighting. Eagleburger pledged $40 million of U.S. humanitarian aid and said he expected the London agreements to produce “a substantial diminution” in the shelling of Sarajevo.
Under public fire the Bush adminis
tration made another move that seemed more consequential. On August 13, 1992, the United States and its allies passed a Security Council resolution authorizing “all necessary measures” to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid. Many believed that this was a precursor to military intervention against the Serbs. But in fact it only paved the way for reinforcing a small UN contingent that had been positioned in Bosnia since the beginning of the war in April 1992. On top of 100 UN monitors already on the ground, an additional 6,000 peace-keepers, including some 1,800 British troops, deployed. U.S. public support for contributing its share of peacekeepers was high (80 percent), and the U.S. Senate even approved money for U.S. participation in a UN military force. But the Bush team refused requests for troops, choosing instead to finance relief and transport missions carried out by others.63 The Security Council resolution, which implied a willingness to use force, was intended to frighten the Serbs into ceasing the slaughter. But even the deterrent value of the threat was undermined when assistant secretary Niles admitted, “The hope is that the adoption of the resolution would obviate the need for force.”64 When asked about the concentration camps, President Bush said the United States would use relief to address “these tremendous humanitarian problems.”65 Events, Americans were told, constituted civil war or a humanitarian “nightmare,” but not a genocide.
As pressure picked up, the Bush administration also developed a spin on events in the Balkans that helped temper public enthusiasm for involvement. Three portrayals emerged in the daily press guidance and in the statements of administration officials. The language muddied the facts and quenched some of the moral outrage sparked by the camp photos. Because the American public and the Washington elite began with no prior understanding of the region and because the conflict was indeed complicated, the administration was able to inscribe its version of events onto a virtually blank slate.
First, senior officials viewed and spun the violence as an insoluble “tragedy” rather than a mitigatable, deliberate atrocity carried out by an identifiable set of perpetrators. The war, they said, was fueled by bottom-up, ancient, ethnic or tribal hatreds (not by the top-down political machinations of a nationalistic or opportunistic elite), hatreds that had raged for centuries (and, by implication, would rage for centuries more). This of course invited a version of Hirschman’s futility justification for inaction.66 Defense Secretary Cheney told CNN, “It’s tragic, but the Balkans have been a hotbed of conflict . . . for centuries.”67 Bush said the war was “a complex, convoluted conflict that grows out of age-old animosities [and] century-old feuds.”68 Eagleburger noted, “It is difficult to explain, but this war is not rational. There is no rationality at all about ethnic conflict. It is gut, it is hatred; it’s not for any common set of values or purposes; it just goes on. And that kind of warfare is most difficult to bring to a halt.”69
Bosnia was racked by a “civil war” (not a war of aggression) in which “all sides” committed atrocities against the others. “I have said this 38,000 times,” said Eagleburger, “and I have to say this to the people of this country as well. . . . The tragedy is not something that can be settled from outside and it’s about damn well time that everybody understood that. Until the Bosnians, Serbs, and Croats decide to stop killing each other, there is nothing the outside world can do about it.”70
Second, administration officials argued there would be perverse consequences to confronting the Serbs. Military engagement or the lifting of the arms embargo could endanger the delivery of humanitarian aid. It could cause the Serbs to retaliate against Muslim civilians or European peace-keepers. And thus such well-meaning steps would in fact do more harm than good.
Third, owing to the ancient hatreds and to the particular topography of the region, military intervention would bring about a Vietnam-like quagmire, putting U.S. soldiers in jeopardy. Reporters pressed Bush on whether the United States would use force, and the president downplayed the possibility:
Everyone has been reluctant, for very understandable reasons, to use force. There is a lot of voices out there in the United States today that say “use force,” but they don’t have the responsibility for sending somebody else’s son or somebody else’s daughter into harm’s way. And I do. I do not want to see the United States bogged down in any way into some guerrilla warfare—we lived through that.71
One deterrent to U.S. involvement was the estimated steep cost of intervening. The U.S. military’s authoritative monopoly on estimating likely casualties lowered the prospects for intervention. Since Vietnam, U.S. generals had opposed U.S. military involvement in virtually all wars and had never favored intervention on mere humanitarian grounds. In the summer of 1992, the Bush administration debated whether or not to contribute U.S. military aircraft to a humanitarian airlift for Sarajevo. Military planners said that some 50,000 U.S. ground troops would be needed to secure a thirty-mile perimeter around the airport.72 In fact, the airlift eventually was managed with a light UN force of some 1,000 Canadian and French forces at Sarajevo airport. At an August 11 Senate hearing, Lieutenant General Barry McCaffrey, assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell, told Congress 400,000 troops would be needed to enforce a cease-fire.73 Scowcroft concedes that the military’s analysis was “probably” inflated but says that “armchair strategists” could not very well challenge the Joint Chiefs.74 Ambassador Zimmerman remembers his frustration at the military trump card that the Joint Chiefs played time and again. “They never said, ‘No, we won’t,’ or ‘No, we can’t,’” he recalls. “They just tossed around figures on what it would take that were both unacceptable and, because of who was supplying them, uncontestable.”
When humanitarian land corridors were proposed, according to Scowcroft, the “troops-to-task” estimate came back at 300,000. This was a daunting figure that many independent observers deemed utterly disproportionate to the quality and commitment of the Serb troops attacking unarmed civilians in Bosnia. But military experts proliferated and pontificated, repeatedly citing the impenetrability of the mountainous landscape and the heroic fortitude of Tito’s Partisans in World War II, who tied down the Nazis in pitched battle for months. Powell and Defense Secretary Cheney convinced the President that the risks of military engagement were far too high—even to use U.S. airpower to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid to Bosnia’s hungry civilians.
The one-word bogey “Vietnam” became the ubiquitous shorthand for all that could go wrong in the Balkans if the United States became militarily engaged.75 For some, the war in Vietnam offered a cause for genuine concern, as they feared any operation that lacked strong public support, implicated no “vital interests,” and occurred on mountainous terrain. But many opponents of intervention proffered the Vietnam analogy less because they saw a likeness between the two scenarios than because they knew of no argument more likely to chill public enthusiasm for intervention.
The Bosnian Serbs took their cue, taunting the Americans whenever the prospect of intervention was raised. They warned of casualties and “mission creep.” Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic exploited allied anxiety, threatening to retaliate against UN peacekeepers in Bosnia if NATO bombed from the air: “We’ll determine the time and the targets, doing our best to make it very painful,” Karadzic warned, daring the United States to act.76 “The United States sends 2,000 marines, then they have to send 10,000 more to save the 2,000,” he said. “That is the best way to have another Vietnam.”77 The same message was delivered by nationalists in Serbia itself. After ringing the bells of the Serb Orthodox churches and raising black flags emblazoned with skulls, Serb Radical Party leader Vojislav Seselj jeered at the Americans, saying, “We would have tens of thousands of volunteers, and we would score a glorious victory. The Americans would have to send thousands of body bags. It would be a new Vietnam.”78
The fact that one of the handful of senior officials that opposed intervention was General Colin Powell was especially important. Powell, who had won a Bronze Star and Pur
ple Heart in Vietnam, was fresh off his Gulf War blitz. It is usually forgotten, but when the Bush administration had debated going to war with Iraq, Powell had lobbied against it. Because he could not pinpoint an exit strategy for U.S. forces ahead of time, he argued, it was better to stay home. After the United States won the Gulf War, however, Powell’s dominance was undisputed. Those who argued that Bosnia would not deteriorate into Vietnam could not compete with the highly respected veteran. Many of the “Balkan hawks” had not served in Vietnam. Their recent experience in the Balkans counted for little. Zimmerman remembers: “I hadn’t served in Vietnam, but I knew the Serbs. And they bore no resemblance to the Vietnamese Communists. They didn’t have the commitment to the cause of Bosnia. Theirs wasn’t a holy crusade. Theirs was a land-grab. They weren’t the same quality of soldiers. They were weekend warriors, and many of them were drunk a lot of the time. It was just very, very different.”
General Powell, who opposed any U.S. role in delivering humanitarian aid or enforcing a no-fly zone over Bosnia, made an unusually public pitch to keep U.S. troops and airplanes grounded. He first called Michael Gordon of the New York Times into his office to deliver a lecture on why an intervention in Bosnia would not work. “As soon as they tell me it is limited,” Powell told Gordon, “it means they do not care whether you achieve a result or not. As soon as they tell me ‘surgical,’ I head for the bunker.”79 Then, when a New York Times editorial criticized the U.S. military’s “no-can-do” attitude, Powell fired back, himself publishing an op-ed in the paper that argued against deploying U.S. troops in harm’s way “for unclear purposes” in a conflict “with deep ethnic and religious roots that go back a thousand years.”80
A Problem From Hell Page 37