After Mladic conquered Srebrenica on July 11, the pressure on Clinton to do more came from a number of sources, both domestic and foreign. First, congressional criticism, which had always been harsh but never overwhelming, rose to a fever pitch. With Dole’s leadership, it culminated in a decisive congressional vote for a unilateral lift of the arms embargo against Bosnia’s Muslims, which would likely necessitate a U.S. military role in withdrawing UN peacekeepers. Thus, for the first time in the three-year war, the maintenance of the status quo seemed destined to draw U.S. troops into the Balkan theater. Second, journalists, activists, former administration officials, and others who had likewise badgered administration officials on and off throughout the war erupted in unison, making life unbearable for those in the White House defending American nonintervention. Third, disgusted by America’s partial engagement, European leaders began publicly slamming the administration for its pusillanimity and hypocrisy. The Serb seizure of Srebrenica and the ongoing war in Bosnia gave rise to a crisis of American leadership.
Congressional Pressure
In early January 1995, nearly three years into the war, and two years after he had teamed with Senator Biden to try to get the Pentagon to arm the Muslims, Dole had introduced a bill to the U.S. Senate calling for the lifting of the arms embargo. He had spoken about it quite combatively throughout the spring of 1995. Even before the events of the summer, Dole had won the support of many Democrats on Capitol Hill who saw the bill as a way to voice their dissatisfaction with Clinton’s Bosnia policy. Tired of the administration’s delays, Dole was determined to bring the bill up for a vote in July.48
That it was Bob Dole who cared about Bosnia presented President Clinton with a problem. On the surface, Dole did not seem a particularly formidable presidential candidate. He had run twice before, both times when Yugoslavia was still a single country, and had fared abysmally. But now the combination of Dole’s own war experience, his apparently non-partisan commitment to the Balkans, and the ghastly images of Srebrenica’s petrified refugees gave his voice a heightened authority. With the UN mission in Bosnia collapsing, the American political establishment seemed ready to listen. Dole’s bid to lift the embargo against the Muslims did not just represent another clash between the executive and the legislature over foreign policy. It was a clash between a presidential incumbent and his challenger. Clinton did not want to appear weak in front of American voters.
Clinton made other arguments. Just as the Reagan White House had argued during Galbraith’s sanctions crusade against Iraq, Clinton insisted that foreign policy should not be made on Capitol Hill. But his real fear was that Dole’s initiative would force him to send U.S. troops to Bosnia. The president had publicly promised to deploy U.S. ground forces only if there was “a genuine peace with no shooting and no fighting” or in the “highly unlikely” event that British and French peacekeepers attempted to withdraw and were “stranded and could not get out of a particular place in Bosnia.”49 European governments had made it clear that they would withdraw if the U.S. Congress ever lifted the embargo. Thus, if Dole’s initiative passed, it would nearly guarantee that Clinton would have to follow through on the commitment he had made to his NATO allies to help extract their blue helmets. Clinton had been avoiding sending U.S. ground forces to the Balkans from his first day in the White House. He was certainly going to do all he could to avoid a humiliating extraction mission on the eve of his bid for reelection.
Clinton was haunted by the secret NATO withdrawal plan, known as operation 40–104. It committed the United States to deploying some 25,000 troops as part of a 60,000-troop NATO extraction force. As one senior administration official told the New York Times on July 8, three days before Srebrenica’s fall, “If you were to ask the President and his senior advisers what their greatest fear in Bosnia is, they would give the same answer: [Operation] 40–104.”50 This fear had caused Clinton to begin arguing ahead of Srebrenica’s collapse that the United States needed to “bust its rear” to get a peace deal settled. Otherwise, he feared, a U.S. deployment would be “dropped in during the middle of the campaign.”51
In drawing attention to Bosnia’s plight, Dole’s motives were not only humanitarian. Although the Senate majority leader knew he was not going to win many presidential votes because of Bosnia per se, he came to the same conclusion that Clinton had reached in 1992 when he began sniping at President Bush over the issue. He saw that the president’s policy toward Bosnia revealed larger defects. But if Dole might pick up a stray political point or two, his long track record of concern for the suffering of people in the Balkans indicated that the prime reason he hounded Clinton about his Bosnia policy was that he wanted to see it changed.52 And he was not alone.
As Dole campaigned for ending the embargo, he put to use the same acerbic streak that American voters would complain about the following year when they reelected Clinton. On July 10, the eve of the Serb seizure of Srebrenica, Dole dramatized the perils of the status quo in an angry speech on the Hill. He said that the notion that UN peacekeepers could be relied upon to protect the Bosnian Muslims required a game of “multilateral make-believe”:
In order to believe that the United States and European approach in Bosnia is working, one simply has to play a game I call “let’s pretend.” The rules are simple. It goes like this:
Pretend that the U.N. forces are delivering humanitarian aid to those in need;
Pretend that the U.N. forces control Sarajevo airport;
Pretend that the U.N. forces are protecting safe havens such as Sarajevo and Srebrenica and that no Bosnians are dying from artillery assaults and shelling;
Pretend that there is a credible threat of serious NATO air strikes;
Pretend that the no-fly zone is being enforced;
Pretend that Serbian President Milosevic is not supporting Bosnian Serb forces; . . .
Pretend that U.N. forces can stay in Bosnia forever and that we will never have to contemplate U.N. withdrawal.53
Noting that several UN observation posts had been overrun and Serb tanks were within a mile of the town of Srebrenica, Dole argued that despite the UN presence, “Bosnians are still being slaughtered, safe areas are under siege, and the United Nations continues to accommodate Serb . . . brutal aggression and genocide.”54
That evening, as Serb gunners inched toward Srebrenica’s downtown, Clinton and his national security team dined with the congressional leaders of both parties at the White House in an effort to persuade them of the dangers of lifting the embargo. Dole declined the dinner invitation.
Dole had of course earned his right to speak out about war and suffering fifty years before the fall of Srebrenica. After returning from Europe in a cast from head to toe, he had been forced to relearn walking, eating, and dressing. Although his Armenian American doctor in Chicago had performed masterful reconstructive surgery, Dole had remained unable to use his right arm. The mere acts of buttoning his shirt, donning his laceless shoes, and brushing his teeth became challenges. At the Senate Dole was known for awkwardly toting a pen in his right hand to remind handshakers that they would have to make do with the left. Dole’s motto had always been, “There are doers, and there are stewers,” and the gritty senator believed that the UN, Europe, and the United States had done nothing but stew over Bosnia.
With the fall of the Srebrenica enclave on July 11, Dole went berserk. For the next three weeks, he focused on virtually nothing besides getting his arms embargo bill, which was cosponsored by Joseph Lieberman (D.–Conn.), through both houses of Congress. He spoke on the Senate floor six times and made endless television appearances, shuttling from one studio to another. Like Lemkin, Dole became a one-man lobby. All the arguments that the Clinton team had been making to defend the embargo had proven hollow with the Serb conquest and UN humiliation. On the day of Mladic’s victory, Dole declared:
The main argument made by the administration in opposition to withdrawing the U.N. forces and lifting the arms embargo on Bosnia was
that such action would result in the enclaves falling and would lead to a humanitarian disaster. Well, that disaster has occurred today—on the U.N.’s watch, with NATO planes overhead. . . . Mr. President, . . . what will it take for the administration and others to declare this U.N. mission a failure? Will all six safe areas have to be overrun first?55
Clinton defenders, too, took to the airwaves, complaining that Dole’s bill would force the withdrawal of UN peacekeepers and thus create a void that American troops would have to fill. Dole said the stakes were sufficiently high in Bosnia that, if it came to that, he would support carefully planned U.S. military involvement. He also rewrote the legislation so that the lifting of the embargo would follow and not itself force a UN exodus. Yet administration officials continued to charge him with taking measures that would irresponsibly “Americanize” the Bosnian war. Dole methodically rebutted each of their claims. On This Week with David Brinkley, for instance, he pointed out that it was President Clinton who was Americanizing the problem:
My view is President Clinton [has] already made two promises to send American troops. If there’s peace, he’ll send 25,000 to keep the peace. He’ll send 25,000 to help extricate the French and the British and the Dutch and others who have forces on the ground. That would be Americanization. We’re talking about lifting the embargo with no American involvement—it would seem to me a big difference. . . . The Serbs have been the aggressors. We’ve known it. We’ve done nothing for 2½ years, and that’s why Congress—not Bob Dole—that’s why Congress, Democrats and Republicans, say, “Enough is enough.”56
The Clinton administration went into overdrive to quash what White House spokesman McCurry called the “nutty” Dole-Lieberman initiative. John Shalikashvili, Colin Powell’s successor as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Secretary Christopher visited Capitol Hill in order to press senators to delay their vote. In response to the administration’s complaints about Dole’s timing, the Kansas senator said he had been told that all along. “It is always a bad time,” he said. “We have waited and waited and waited, hoping something good might happen. But nothing good has happened.”57
On July 19, 1995, Clinton telephoned Dole to ask him to postpone the vote until after the allied leaders had met in London. The president insisted the meeting would yield a more assertive Western policy. Dole reluctantly agreed. But when Dole heard the London declaration write off Srebrenica, Zepa, and Bihac, he condemned what he called “another dazzling display of ducking the problem” and rejected further delay.58 “Today there are reports of more NATO military planning,” Dole said on July 24. “But planning was never the problem. Executing those plans was and still is the problem. This debate has never been about policy options, but about political will.”59 Dole, and not the president, had become America’s spokesman about the outrages inflicted by the Serbs.60
Dole had always been a master of the barb, but the sardonic senator was also skilled at going it alone, an approach that was not well suited to rallying enough votes on Capitol Hill to override Clinton’s inevitable veto. It was not that Dole was unliked. Despite a faltering beginning in the Senate in which a Republican colleague had described him as “so unpopular, he couldn’t sell beer on a troop ship,” his twenty-seven years on Capitol Hill had earned him wide respect.61 But if Dole had become an effective Senate majority leader, he was not always good at asking for help, whether with his coat buttons or with legislation. Once, when Dole had been scheduled to appear on Face the Nation, an aide realized that the senator had gotten lost somewhere in the studio. After searching the premises, he finally found Dole standing alone facing a heavy set of double doors. Dole could not open the doors himself and did not dream of asking for assistance. Instead the senator looked up and noted, “Got some doors here.”62
When it came to the arms embargo issue, though, Dole’s stubbornness proved more virtue than vice. He did not take to the Senate floor to wax in grandiloquent, romantic prose about honor, liberty, or the right of self-defense. Instead, he let the television images of thousands of frantic Muslim refugees do the convincing. He earned by repetition what he forfeited in style. In his characteristically choppy, guileless manner, he delivered on a nearly daily basis a simple set of arguments about the administration’s failed policy and its consequences both for the Muslims of Bosnia and for the United States.
Dole was not without help. In February 1994 a handful of the State Department dissenters, including Marshall Harris and Steve Walker, who had resigned, and Jim Hooper and John Menzies, who had remained, had met with George Soros, a Hungarian Jew who had come to the United States as a teenager, made his fortune, and recently begun devoting some of his earnings to humanitarian causes. Soros called the meeting because he felt that those who opposed the Clinton policy were protesting in a diffuse manner. They needed to combine their efforts. Soros’s chief advisers were Aryeh Neier, who had left Human Rights Watch and become president of Soros’s philanthropic organization, and Morton Abramowitz, the career diplomat who had departed the State Department in 1992 and become president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he began pushing for U.S. military intervention in Bosnia. With Soros’s backing, the group formed a new organization, the Action Council on Peace in the Balkans. The council would build a concerted grassroots and elite lobby for intervention in Bosnia. Hooper remembers, “It had long become clear that lobbying from the inside was not going to work. The only way we would change the policy would be to change the climate outside the building.” Between its founding in 1994 and the fall of Srebrenica, the group had published press releases and op-eds, built a formidable, bipartisan letterhead of notables, and helped gather a number of Jewish and other grassroots groups together in an Action Committee to Save Bosnia.
When Dole launched his crusade to lift the embargo in July 1995, the council offered its support. Harris, unemployed since Congressman McCloskey’s defeat, was hired to codirect the council with fellow State Department resignee Steve Walker. Harris thus found himself back on Capitol Hill, this time in his new role as a lobbyist. “This was not a pleasant experience,” Harris remembers. “Going up to people and asking, ‘I know you don’t want to, but would you do this?’ It was quite awkward, awful really.” In addition to generalized lobbying, the council commissioned military analyses in order to combat Pentagon claims that neither using NATO airpower nor lifting the embargo would affect the situation on the ground. “Suddenly, we had military people on our side, saying, ‘Yes, it can be done,’” remembers Baratta, Dole’s chief foreign policy adviser. “They spelled out in detail which weapons would be effective against Serb hardware, and how the Muslims could supply themselves.”
Administration officials fought back, mustering a familiar set of arguments they hoped would quash enthusiasm for the Dole-Lieberman bill. UN peacekeepers and, soon, U.S. soldiers would be jeopardized, they argued. Lifting the embargo would be futile because the Muslims would not know how to use the weapons, and it was unclear who would supply them. And worst of all, the measure would have perverse consequences because, as Undersecretary of State Peter Tarnoff noted, despite Dole’s claims that the situation could not get any worse, “That senator is wrong. It can get a lot worse.”63 But the limits of the imagination now came in handy. It was impossible to conceive of a worse predicament for Bosnia’s Muslims. The futility, perversity, and jeopardy arguments that held sway for so long were no longer persuasive. The consequences of America’ nonintervention had become too visible and too dire.
On July 26, 1995, the Senate voted 69–29 to require the United States to stop enforcing the arms embargo. The bill authorized a breaking of the arms ban only after the United Nations troops had departed Bosnia or twelve weeks after the Muslim-led Bosnian government requested their withdrawal. President Clinton could also request unlimited thirty-day waivers. Still, it was the most stinging repudiation of U.S. policy yet. Virtually all the Senate’s Republicans (forty-eight senators) and almost half the Senate Democr
ats (twenty-one senators) voted for the bill. Dole declared after the vote, “This is not just a vote about Bosnia. It’s a vote about America. It’s a vote about what we stand for. About our humanity and our principles.”64
For the Democrats who broke ranks with President Clinton and joined Republicans in serving up a challenge to the president’s foreign policy, Srebrenica had been the key. “For me the turning point was the attack on Srebrenica, that weekend with all the missing people,” said Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, who had previously opposed lifting the embargo. “One image punched through to me: that young woman hanging from a tree. That to me said it all.”65
At a news conference with President Kim Young-sam of South Korea the day after the vote, Clinton attempted to deny he had a leadership problem, shifting the blame for the Senate vote to the United Nations and former president George Bush. “You can’t go about the world saying you’re going to do something and then not do it,” Clinton said, reproaching the United Nations for failing to call for NATO air strikes. He said his leadership was not at fault. “This distribution of responsibility all grew out of a decision made prior to my Presidency—which I am not criticizing, I say again—to try to say: ‘O.K., here’s a problem in Europe. The Europeans ought to take the lead.’”66 While publicly Clinton was dodging responsibility, privately the president of the United States was in a panic.
Media/NGO Pressure
With the fall of Srebrenica, the Clinton administration began to experience a hint of what life might be like under siege. Op-ed writers, human rights activists, former diplomats, and journalists had spoken out quite forcefully throughout the war in opposition to Clinton’s policy, but nothing ignited their fury quite like the fall of the so-called safe area. The events of mid-July provoked a rare degree of unanimity on the editorial pages in the United States, and those in Paris and London as well. Indeed, as Charles Trueheart of the Washington Post pointed out, “Such is the outrage at western impotence, and at the particular failures of leaders, that sometimes the atrocities of the combatants in Bosnia are given short shrift.”67
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