A Problem From Hell

by Samantha Power

  In the Washington Post and New York Times alone, the list of critics in the week after the fall of the enclave included Anthony Lewis, William Safire, Jim Hoagland, George Will, Margaret Thatcher, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Brent Scowcroft, Charles Gati, Robert Kagan, Charles Krauthammer, Anna Husarska, and George Soros. Lewis, a longtime critic, wrote that the fall “calls into question the future of the North Atlantic Alliance” and wrote that it pointed to “the vacuum of leadership in the White House.” Richard Cohen of the Washington Post described Clinton’s “big-mouth, no-stick” administration. Safire wrote that Clinton’s “failure of nerve” had turned “a superpower into a subpower.”68 In the pages of the New Republic, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the last national security adviser to a Democratic president, offered a presidential speech that he said could be given “if the post of Leader of the Free World were not currently vacant.” The New Republic devoted an entire issue to the fall of Srebrenica. The magazine’s inimitable literary editor Leon Wieseltier wrote:

  The United States seems to be taking a sabbatical from historical seriousness, blinding itself to genocide and its consequences, fleeing the moral and practical imperatives of its own power. . . . You Americanize the war or you Americanize the genocide. Since the United States is the only power in the world that can stop the ethnic cleansing, the United States is responsible if the ethnic cleansing continues. Well, not exactly the United States. The American president is an accomplice to genocide. Not so the American people. The president of the United States does not have the right to make the people of the United States seem as indecent as he is. He has the power, but he does not have the right.69

  Even onetime noninterventionists changed their tune. President Bush’s former national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, who had so opposed using force during 1992, said something different was now at stake: “Now we have a new element involved, and that is just a total collapse of confidence in both the capability and the will of the West, and we cannot afford to let that happen.” When asked whether it was worth some American casualties to stop the Serbs, Scowcroft did not hesitate. “Yes. Yes,” he said.70

  The determined press corps was merciless with the State Department and White House spokesmen Nicholas Burns and Mike McCurry. In the week after the safe area’s demise, they pounded Clinton’s defenders with spirited soliloquies and snide rebukes. Nearly every question posed was preceded by a long summation of U.S. moral failure. Just a few samples of the reporters’ questions follow.

  On July 12, a reporter to Burns:

  You speak of the U.N. as if it’s some distant operation on the moon. I mean, the State Department does. Doesn’t—number one—the U.S. have the authority to ask NATO to carry out bombing raids that the president of the United States proposed when he was running for office but dropped when he got elected? Number two, don’t you have the moral authority in the United Nations? Why are you going around polling the Europeans before you decide what your position is?

  On the 14th, to McCurry: “Is anybody at the White House the least bit ashamed of what’s happened to the Bosnians in Srebrenica who trusted U.N. and U.S. policy?”

  On the 14th, to Burns:

  Nick, you can filibuster all you want and spew out as many words as you want and talk about despicable and brutal, but the truth is words don’t matter in this case anymore, and they haven’t for a long time. So the question is, what action, if any, is the international community willing to take in order to do something about the situation which you, yourself, have gone on repeatedly describing in, you know, horrible terms?

  On the 14th, to Burns: “You say that you’re very considerate about the stability of the alliance and everything. But what happens to the NATO alliance if this genocide continues? Isn’t it totally discredited as an organ which can prevent these things from happening in the heart of Europe?”

  On the 17th to Burns:

  With all of the meetings you were describing earlier . . . the United States is sort of asking questions and waiting for somebody else to answer. . . . Doesn’t the United States have to take some kind of a leadership role in figuring out how to do it and—and, you know, let the others ask you questions? Why aren’t you giving out some answers and, in fact, taking the lead on this?

  On the 18th, to McCurry: “A lot of people in this country seem to think your policy is nutty and a charade. . . . So my point is, are you going to continue this alleged policy of neutrality when people are being slaughtered?”71

  Many journalists had developed a personal interest in Bosnia when the Bush administration had backtracked over the August 1992 camp revelations. Now, three years later, their anger seeped into their reporting. ABC news anchor Peter Jennings had just completed his third hour-long documentary on the West’s failure in Bosnia. He had been just blocks from the Sarajevo market in February 1994 when sixty-eight Bosnians had been massacred. He was disgusted. “Once again Bosnian civilians are forced to flee their homes in terror,” Jennings said, introducing a story that led the news, “while the Western European nations and the United States do nothing about it.”72

  The Holocaust was invoked almost immediately after the UN collapse. The State Department press correspondents made the argument that foreign service officers Hooper, Fox, Johnson, Harris, and Western had long made: The United States was again allowing genocide to proceed. One reporter asked, “You realize the historical precedent for that, when, of course, the State Department also didn’t act 60 years ago?” Another reporter accused the administration of a “business as usual” response, which was exactly “how the United States government reacted in 1939 to a totally parallel situation.”73

  William Safire lamented the triumph of “Nazi-style ethnic cleansing” and said that in the face of the “central moral-military challenge of his Presidency,” Clinton will be remembered as a man who “feared, flinched and failed.”74 Charles Gati, a former State Department official and Holocaust survivor, scolded the Clinton administration in the July 13 Washington Post:

  President Clinton, please go to see the people of Srebrenica. Tell them “never again” was meant for domestic consumption. . . . Secretary Perry, please go to see the people of Srebrenica. Tell them our defense budget will increase, and we’ll make sure our military remains second to none. We are, and will be, ready to fight two regional wars at the same time. But tell them that you can’t tell them which two wars we’re waiting to fight—it’s top secret—but neither of the two is for Srebrenica. Surely the people of Srebrenica will understand that our generals want another bomber, not another quagmire. Sorry, our vital interests are not at stake. . . . Wherever they may be and however many of them are still alive, the people of Srebrenica will appreciate such a candid exposition.75

  House Speaker Newt Gingrich echoed Dole’s charges in the Senate, calling Bosnia “the worst humiliation for the western democracies since the 1930s.”76 French president Chirac commented endlessly on the crisis, likening the world’s reaction to the fall of Srebrenica to British and French appeasement of Hitler in Munich. Appearing on Nightline, Holbrooke, an in-house bombing advocate, called it “the greatest collective failure of the West since the 1930s.” Soros repeated the appeasement charge and said the Serbs had manipulated the UN “much as Nazi Germany used Kapos in the concentration camps.”77 Anthony Lewis scorned the notion that the Europeans could leave their troops in Bosnia and attempt to negotiate a peace. “You can’t do business with Hitler. So the world learned when Neville Chamberlain boasted that cringing to Adolf Hitler at Munich in 1938 had brought ‘peace in our time.’ To Hitler, diplomacy was just an interlude on the way to military victory.”78 The same was true, Lewis and others insisted, with the Serbs.

  In response to White House claims that NATO military action might “reignite the war” and jeopardize the cruelly misnamed “safe areas,” George Will asked how one could “reignite a conflagration” and reminded readers: “This fatuity calls to mind the 1944 letter in which the U.S. assistant secretary of war, John J.
McCloy, said that one reason for not bombing Auschwitz and railroad lines leading to it was that doing so ‘might provoke even more vindictive action by the Germans.’ Wouldn’t have wanted to anger the operators of the crematoriums.”79

  National Public Radio’s Scott Simon worried that the Holocaust comparisons, though apt, may have given onlookers additional excuses to do nothing. The Holocaust and the Cambodian and Rwandan genocides had set too high (or low) a standard for American concern or action. “We can watch the murder, rape and plunder of Bosnia’s Muslims, but then reassure ourselves that the numbers don’t compare yet with the efficient cruelty of Auschwitz or the acres of skulls that made a grisly mosaic across the killing fields of Cambodia,” Simon said on Weekend Edition:

  Intelligent and informed people have learned to reason themselves out of action. We know the news now well enough to observe that more people have been slaughtered more quickly in Rwanda than in Bosnia. Or even that Sarajevo, a city besieged by war, can suffer as many sniper deaths over a weekend as the number of gun shot [sic] deaths in New York or other American cities beset by crime. No war crime short of Hitler seems to impress us. How close do such atrocities have to resemble the Holocaust for reasonable people to feel that there is only so much genocide they will accept?80

  For the first time in their history, a number of human rights groups overcame their opposition to using force and called for military intervention to stop the Serb genocide. Two weeks in advance of the fall of the safe area, Holly Burkhalter, advocacy director at Human Rights Watch, had urged her organization to ask the UN to bus the Muslims out of Srebrenica. It was clear the enclave could not be defended by so few peacekeepers. Her colleagues, defenders of the Muslim cause, had declined, saying it was “the UN’s job” to defend Srebrenica’s civilians. On July 20, with the safe area overrun, Burkhalter published an op-ed in the Washington Post entitled “What We Can Do to Stop This Genocide.” She noted that the Bosnian Serb effort to eliminate the non-Serb population “in whole or in part” constituted a “textbook case of genocide” that the United States was legally obligated to stop. “Every American who has visited the Holocaust Museum leaves thinking, ‘I wish we could have helped before so many died.’” Burkhalter wrote. “This time we can.” She appealed to Clinton to call for U.S. army volunteers to join the Europeans protecting the remaining safe areas, to turn over U.S. intelligence to the UN war crimes tribunal, and more immediately, to do everything possible to locate the missing men. “The detention sites should be identified and opened and those people still alive within them released,” Burkhalter urged.81

  A coalition of twenty-seven organizations, most of which had not previously supported the use of military force anywhere, issued a press release demanding military intervention: “Force must be used to stop genocide, not simply to retreat from it. American leadership, in particular, is required. . . . Nothing else has worked.” Among the signatories were the American Jewish Committee, the American Nurses Association, the Anti-Defamation League, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, Refugees International, World Vision, Physicians for Human Rights, and Human Rights Watch.82 “You cannot imagine what a big deal this was for some of these groups,” Burkhalter recalls. “I mean, never in history had many of us argued for military force. Even the Quakers signed on.” Human Rights Watch director Kenneth Roth used the opportunity to go before the HRW board and urge it to settle upon a standard of killing that would trigger calls for military intervention in the future. After heated debate, Human Rights Watch decided that henceforth anytime that “genocide or mass slaughter” could be diagnosed around the world, the group would have to put aside its mistrust of military power and recommend armed intervention. In the Cambodia era, human rights groups had assumed that the U.S. government could do no right. Now, two decades later, after Rwanda and Srebrenica, many were urging the United States to do right with bombs.

  European Pressure

  A third influence on the administration fell into the class of what even strict constructionists of the U.S. national interest might categorize as “vital”: U.S. relations with its European allies had decayed to their lowest point since NATO was founded after World War II.

  Before July, when the Clinton administration had rejected a complete partition of Bosnia, the Europeans had muttered under their breaths about American meddling. After the fall of Srebrenica, they aired their displeasure publicly. Chirac had been inaugurated as French president on May 17. When he called for the United States and France to team up to reconquer Srebrenica, Clinton was caught off-guard. Chirac’s proposal made it difficult for the United States to continue blaming its European allies for inaction. This time Clinton was the one who appeared to be declining a European proposal for military confrontation. Holbrooke remembers, “Chirac basically said, ‘If you’re not getting in, we’re getting out.’ This was a dramatic change in the dynamic.”

  Senior officials in London, Paris, and Bonn described their mounting exasperation with Washington’s refusal to live up to its traditional role as leader of the Atlantic alliance. Chirac was asked whether America’s reluctance to send troops into Bosnia was undermining U.S. leadership. The Washington Post quoted his response: “There is no leader of the Atlantic alliance.” Similar frustrations were voiced in London as well. “I don’t remember a time where there was so much scorn for American policy,” Lawrence Freedman, professor of war studies at Kings College, University of London, told the Post. “You don’t find anyone here who thinks the U.S. is acting properly. We’re told that what we’re doing isn’t good enough, but there’s no attempt to help us.”83 The Europeans were fed up with what Harold Nicolson described in his account of President Woodrow Wilson’s failure at Versailles in 1919: “America, eternally protected by the Atlantic, desired to satisfy her self-righteousness while disengaging her responsibility.”84

  The humiliation associated with the fall of Srebrenica ate at Clinton. The occurrence of such savagery in the heart of Europe made him look weak. For the first time, he believed that events in Bosnia might impede other coveted aims. One of Clinton’s senior advisers remembers, “This issue had become a cancer on our foreign policy and on his administration’s leadership. It had become clear that continued failure in Bosnia was going to spill over and damage the rest of our domestic and foreign policy.” Clinton saw that the United States had to make its own decisions. Passivity in the face of Bosnian Serb aggression was no longer a viable policy option.

  In these turbulent July days, Clinton often sounded more moved by the damage the fall of Srebrenica was doing to his presidency than by its effect on the lives of defenseless Muslims. On the evening of July 14, the president, who was on the White House putting green, received a briefing from Sandy Berger and Nancy Soderberg, his numbers two and three on the National Security Council. He recognized that he was finally in danger of paying a political price for nonintervention. In a forty-five-minute rant strewn with profanities, Clinton said, “This can’t continue. . . . We have to seize control of this. . . . I’m getting creamed!”85

  At the July 18 meeting where Vice President Gore alluded to the young woman who had hanged herself, Clinton said he backed the use of robust airpower, declaring, “The United States can’t be a punching bag in the world anymore.”86 The discussion, though influenced by an awareness of genocide, was rooted in politics first and foremost. Srebrenica was gone; Zepa would soon follow. Clinton had to stop the cycle of humiliation.

  U.S. inaction reflected so poorly on the president that even Dick Morris, Clinton’s pollster, lobbied for bombing. Morris later recalled that “Bosnia had become a metaphor for Clintonian weakness.” He was surprised by Clinton’s attitude. “I found that every time I discussed Bosnia with the president, we ran into this word can’t over and over again,” Morris remembered. “‘What do you mean can’t?’ I said in one meeting. ‘You’re the commander in chief; where does can’t come from?’”87

  Endgame

  With the Clinton pres
idency implicated, the Bosnian war had to be stopped. Back in June, National Security Adviser Lake had urged Clinton’s cabinet members to decide what they wanted a reconstituted Bosnia to look like and work backward. Lake had been trying to get the foreign policy team to think strategically so they did not get perpetually bogged down in crisis management. On July 17 Lake finally unveiled his “endgame strategy” at a breakfast meeting of the foreign policy team. The United States would take over the diplomatic show and back its diplomacy by threatening to bomb the Serbs and lift the embargo.88 President Clinton took the unusual step of dropping in on the meeting. Clinton said he opposed the status quo. “The policy is doing enormous damage to the United States and our standing in the world. We look weak,” he said, predicting it would only get worse. “The only time we’ve ever made progress is when we geared up NATO to pose a real threat to the Serbs.”89

  Time was short. On July 26, 1995, the U.S. Senate had passed the Dole-Lieberman bill to end U.S. compliance with the embargo. On August 1 the House of Representatives followed suit, authorizing the lift by a veto-proof margin. The Serbs had begun amassing troops around the safe area of Bihac. Clinton and Lake agreed the time had come to inform the Europeans of the new U.S. policy. They were able to use Dole’s embargo legislation as leverage in order to “lay out the marching orders.” In a marked contrast with earlier periods in the war and with their complete neglect of the Rwanda genocide, the president’s national security advisers met twenty-one times between July 17 and Lake’s August 8 departure for Europe. The president joined them in meetings on August 2, 7, and 8.90 With the clock ticking, they recognized it was time for a “full-court press.” Unlike Secretary Christopher’s May 1993 trip, in which he offered a tepid sales pitch on behalf of Clinton’s “lift and strike” policy, Lake laid out a version of that policy by saying to the Europeans, in effect, “This is what we’re prepared to do if there is no settlement. This is what we intend to do. We hope you’ll come with us.”91