Making War to Keep Peace

by Jeane J. Kirkpatrick

  The treatment of General Morillon was an exercise in cynicism, like sending NATO planes to patrol the no-fly zone and then not permitting them to enforce it. Though Boutros-Ghali insisted on his policy of neutrality, the events in Bosnia dramatized the need to rethink the theory and practice of UN peacekeeping—indeed, of UN military involvement in international conflicts and in the provision of humanitarian assistance.

  It was not clear, for example, that peacekeeping forces should ever have been committed to Croatia, where their presence protected Serbian conquests, or to Bosnia, where a major war of aggression had been under way for a year and the presence of UN peacekeeping forces was repeatedly used as an excuse for inaction. The arms embargo was the clearest example of a UN action that made the situation worse. By the time Clinton was inaugurated in January 1993, the homes, families, communities, and lives of Bosnia’s Muslim population had been largely destroyed.

  Yet no wave of outrage swept the world at this genocide in the heart of Europe. The Serb offensive had destroyed the existing Bosnian society in less time than it took the international community to pass resolutions promising to use necessary force to deliver food and medicine. It was difficult not to conclude that the indecision and inaction of Western governments, which chose not to act effectively—either unilaterally or through the UN, NATO, the WEU, the EC, or the Contact Group—constituted passive acquiescence in Serb aggression.

  It was not the first time in the twentieth century that the West had been faced with organized brutality—and not the first time Western leaders had equivocated and procrastinated and offered only the most measured and detached response. Their busy nonresponse to Serb aggression recalled the inaction of the Western leaders who confronted Adolf Hitler at the outset of World War II.

  But this time the West had several activist leaders: Margaret Thatcher, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, EC president Jacques Delors, and, a bit later, Bill Clinton used the media to draw attention to the problems and raise the stakes. These leaders spoke boldly about alternatives that John Major, François Mitterrand, and George H. W. Bush had preferred not to consider. Thatcher, the former prime minister, insisted that Bosnia was a defining moment, and she was right. The world’s response to Serbian genocide defined its lack of seriousness about a new world order and collective security from aggression. It illustrated the ineptitude of the elaborate international institutions constructed to deal with just such crises.

  In this first test of the post–cold war period, the WEU was partially incapacitated by the EC’s “dangerous lack of resolve,” against which Delors had warned. NATO was partially incapacitated by French opposition to its participation. The UN was partially incapacitated by the reluctance and indifference of its member states, and by Boutros-Ghali’s resistance to involvement in what he called “a rich people’s war.”79 The Red Cross was partially incapacitated by the Serbs’ denial of access to prison camps and by its own lack of a sense of urgency. The United States was partially incapacitated by a lack of empathy among some of the people in the administration and in Congress who were responsible for foreign policy. The UN response also was distorted by its pose of neutrality. For years, some UN officials and Security Council members clung to its contention that this war of aggression was a civil war.

  The Serbs’ systematic destruction of Bosnia was an ugly model for fanatical nationalists and would-be aggressors and dictators in other parts of Central and Eastern Europe. It trivialized efforts to establish collective security, and it sapped the intellectual and moral foundations of collective action anywhere.

  Thatcher advised European and American leaders to issue a series of ultimatums to the government of Slobodan Milošević: cease military action and the flow of weapons into Bosnia, or else. Tell Serb forces in Bosnia to turn over their heavy weapons to an international body, or else. Permit Muslims to return to their devastated homes under international protection, or else. She advised the United States and the EC to tell Milošević that failure to do these things would result in the destruction of Serb military assets and the encouragement, by all means, of opposition groups.80 Serbia, she noted dryly, was not a world power. It was a savage, racist regime for which there was no room in any new world order worth preserving.81

  Yet Boutros Boutros-Ghali raised objections against these proposals for effective action, as he had more than once before. In July 1992, he had opposed implementation of the London Agreement, which called for Serbia to deliver its heavy artillery to UN forces. In September, he had opposed enforcing the no-fly zone. A few months later, out of fear of offending the Serbs, he had resisted airdropping food to towns filled with starving people.

  The news that four Bosnian residents of a home for the aged had frozen to death in a single night a block from UN headquarters in Sarajevo did not help the UN’s reputation for humanitarian concern and efficacy. Cyrus Vance’s personal efforts to prevent U.S. officials from meeting with Bosnian president Alija Izetbegovíc in Washington, where he met with President Clinton in the fall of 1993,82 did not help Vance’s reputation as an evenhanded, humane mediator. Many Bosnians, Croa-tians, Africans, and Cambodians began to see the UN as part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

  The UN Secretariat functioned like many other bureaucracies. It took action only by consensus, which was hard to build and harder to maintain. Responsibility was so widely shared and so depersonalized that ordinary moral and social disciplines disappeared. Where everyone is responsible, no one is responsible. If it is difficult to hold governments responsible for their actions, holding international institutions is even more difficult.

  At the same time, the EC, the Security Council, and the member states did not challenge Boutros-Ghali’s unprecedented assertions of authority. Although he was described as an activist secretary-general, he resisted all but the most limited peacekeeping in Bosnia. When the Security Council considered enforcing the no-fly zone or the delivery of humanitarian assistance, Boutros-Ghali appealed for more time to find a political solution. The result was continued Serb aggression against a background of endless negotiation. Although the UN Charter vests executive power in the Security Council, its member states accepted the secretary-general’s priorities and programs as if he were the chief executive in a presidential system and the Security Council a rubber-stamp legislature.

  By May 1993, the already-disastrous human situation had worsened, as Serb forces launched successive attacks on the region’s remaining Muslim towns, which had grown more swollen with refugees. Despite the powerful moral argument for using American airpower to save Bosnians, all sides ventured further counterarguments on both moral and practical grounds. Britain, France, Belgium, and other countries with troops on the ground feared that air strikes would endanger their troops. Many Americans feared that air strikes would constitute an openended U.S. commitment that could end in a Balkan quagmire; others believed that a unilateral U.S. decision in favor of air strikes would violate international norms and endanger peacekeeping forces; still others argued that American national interests were not involved in the Balkans, and the U.S. government should not commit military forces. This left President Clinton with a critical decision: whether to commit American power, under UN command, in the pursuit of purely altruistic goals.

  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 lunch
eon 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 government 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 countr
ies, 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