Making War to Keep Peace

by Jeane J. Kirkpatrick

  After the second wave of bombing hit Sarajevo in February 1994, Christopher signaled to our associates that we would act only in conjunction with them, asserting “there are atrocities on all sides.” A new joint action plan was organized by the United States, Russia, France, the United Kingdom, and Spain as a containment plan; it called for sealing Bosnia’s borders and establishing Muslim safe areas. Clinton himself became active in the search for a settlement and was prepared to settle for a three-way partition with terms dictated by Serbs and Croats.

  The United States undertook the effort to negotiate peace and a unified state but was unable to do so. In fact, a war seemed likely between the Muslims and the Croats. For a while, Muslims permitted the Serb forces (JNA) to assume a number of policing functions. Then cooperation between Croats and Muslims broke down almost entirely, and the Croats, while still formally allied with the Muslims, effectively became allies of the Serbs; they were complicit in some of their most brutal attacks, including the siege of Srebrenica, and participated in creating more refugees and more misery for the Muslims. Croat militia members murdered dozens of Muslim civilians in Ahmici and other villages. Milošević and Croatian president Franjo Tudjman plotted settlements that would leave less and less land for Muslims and press them into smaller and smaller areas.

  In March 1994, under pressure from Washington, Bosnian Muslims and Croats stopped fighting and agreed to form a federation. Cooperation between these two republics of former Yugoslavia got under way after Tudjman transmitted a message that Iran was ready to ship arms to Bosnia. The Clinton administration quietly acquiesced, without informing its allies or Congress. Arms shipments began in April 1994, and from that point on, Bosnian forces received a steady supply. The U.S. government delivered no arms itself, but covert support was given by Islamic nations—including Iran. The arms were accompanied by small but increasing numbers of mujahideen.

  The Bosnians undertook offensives that opened roads to Tuzla and defeated Serbs in Bihac, which was under heavy shelling. Soon the newly armed Bosnian forces began to win battles and undertake more military initiatives. Croatia and Bosnia won battle after battle, and by 1995 controlled most of Krajina.

  Tension over the continued lack of a UN response to Serbian aggression had been building, with Americans calling for more vigorous use of airpower, implementation of the Security Council resolutions, and more determined use of force to punish and deter the attacks. Congress had made repeated calls to lift the arms embargo and permit Bosnia to defend itself.

  As 1994 drew to a close, it seemed clear that it would not be easy to heal the rift between the U.S. government and its NATO allies on the matter of Bosnia. The NATO military operation, which had been under way since April, revealed differences that were broader, deeper, more unpleasant, and more important than anticipated. Many Americans had been surprised by how passively the British and French greeted the carnage in Bosnia, and by Boutros-Ghali’s opposition to the use of force to stop the brutal aggression. These differences would not be easily overcome; nor would the differences between the United Nations and its critics in Congress.

  In November 1994, against European objections, the Clinton administration announced that it would no longer enforce the arms embargo. That same month, Republicans won control of Congress; Majority Leader Robert Dole and House Speaker Newt Gingrich announced their support for the lift-and-strike policy, and noted that a congressional majority supported their position.

  The following month, former president Jimmy Carter negotiated a four-month cease-fire. At its end, the Bosnian and Croatian governments undertook more military offensives after the Serbs attacked safe areas and took several hundred UNPROFOR troops hostage. UN negotiators struck a deal with the Serbs to release the hostages in exchange for a promise that there would be no more NATO air strikes against Serb forces.

  Each of the principals had his own priorities and goals. Radovan Karadzic, leader of the Bosnian Serbs, understood that his forces and resources were dangerously thin and that he was likely to be betrayed by Milošević, whom he accused of treason. “You have turned your back on the Serbs,” he charged, having concluded that Milošević would do nothing to help them. He was right. Milošević was ready to abandon the Bosnian Serbs as part of his plan to achieve the lifting of the sanctions on Serbia imposed since 1992. The Croatians were preoccupied with extending their control over Krajina, an area that Clinton’s national security advisor, Anthony Lake, had targeted as a center of a future state of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which he was eager to cobble together out of the Muslim-Croat federation and the Bosnian Serb ministate.

  Richard Holbrooke, the assistant secretary of state for Europe, understood that the task of dealing with Milošević was his, and he relied principally on American airpower and tough talk. Milošević was furious with the Bosnian Serbs and warned them that he was ready to cut them off. Finally, and very reluctantly, the Bosnian Serbs agreed that Milošević could negotiate for them. NATO began heavy bombing on August 31, 1995, flying thirty-four sorties against the Bosnian Serbs over a period of two weeks.

  Milošević asked the Contact Group to stop the bombing. In return, Holbrooke asked Milošević to accept a division of Bosnia-Herzegovina into two parts, with the Muslim-Croat Federation taking 51 percent and the Bosnian Serbs 49 percent. When Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladic and Karadzic rejected the idea, Holbrooke walked out. Milošević told Mladic and Karadzic that NATO would destroy their forces if they continued to hold out against Holbrooke’s proposal. Then, just as it appeared that the conference was about to break up, leaving Croatia and Bosnia in a stronger position, Washington applied more pressure, this time leaving Mladic and Karadzic to face the prospect of fighting alone.

  In November 1995, when the United States and the other Contact Group members finally brought the warring factions together for peace talks, the Croats’ top priority was eastern Slovenia. The Bosnian Serbs were determined to split Sarajevo. Silajdzic refused to meet with them and told Milošević he wanted Gorazde as a symbol of Bosnian presence on the Serbian border. Milošević capitulated. There would be three states: one Serb, one Croat, and one Muslim.

  The four-month-long truce helped, but it did not prevent repeated attacks on Bosnian safe areas. The next month, another NATO bombing led to Serb withdrawal from Gorazde and marked the end of the total vulnerability of the Bosnian Muslims.

  In Bosnia, clashes continued between the Americans and the secretary-general’s special representative. One incident concerned Gorazde. NATO had declared a deadline of April 23 for the Bosnian Serbs to pull back their troops, but when the Serbs failed to comply, Akashi blocked the promised NATO air strikes. The United States complained that Akashi allowed Bosnian Serb tanks through to Sarajevo in clear violation of an understanding that no tanks would be permitted in the city.

  CLINTON’S DISTASTE FOR U.S. UNILATERAL FORCE

  The long-awaited NATO air strikes on Serb positions around Gorazde, which began on April 10, 1994, demonstrated that the White House was ready to use limited airpower to achieve limited objectives. But President Clinton’s comments on the strikes sounded more like a disclaimer than a statement of purpose: “This is a clear expression of the will of NATO and the will of the United Nations,” he said, as if the United States had no voice or responsibility in these decisions. “We have said we would act if we were requested to do so. We have now done so and we will do so again if we are requested.”114 One can only wonder why Clinton chose these words. Did he regard the American pilots’ mission in Gorazde as more legitimate if it was specifically authorized by the UN? Was he trying to suggest that attacks by American pilots in American planes should be seen not as Americans but as representatives of a multinational force acting on behalf of a multinational body? Clinton’s language was a clear reminder that many of his key advisers had a longstanding distaste for unilateral American use of force, and put their faith instead in a policy of active global multilateralism.

  Among the most prominen
t statements of this policy was the 1992 essay “Military Action: When to Use It and How to Ensure Its Effectiveness” by William Perry, soon to become Clinton’s secretary of defense. In the essay, which developed themes from an earlier article he coauthored with Ashton Carter (then assistant secretary of defense for policy) and John Steinbruner of the Brookings Institution, Perry advocated renouncing the use of American force in favor of a policy of “global engagement” through an international police force. Perry’s recommendations were straightforward: all nations should reduce their military forces to those required for defense of their own territory, except for the United States and a few other major states, who would maintain some additional forces to supplement multinational forces as needed. Any new international aggression would then be deterred by those multinational forces, rather than any individual state. Though a Pentagon spokesman denied that Perry would follow its prescriptions as secretary of defense, their relevance to his performance was obvious.

  Perry’s proposals resembled those of other members of the Clinton team, including Morton Halperin (then at the National Security Council) who recommended that U.S. armed forces be drastically reduced and the unilateral use of force renounced. Like Perry, he looked to multinational forces to meet the occasional challenges created by outlaw states. Halperin emphasized that the United States should act in the world through the UN, and he expected that national defense would become the defense of world peace. Peace, he anticipated, would be protected mainly by the moral force of a united world community. “The threat of military force should be sufficient to obviate the need to use it if the right military and political conditions are met,” Perry wrote.115

  The vision of investing less in national defense and more in international peacekeeping was emphasized in the pronouncements of various Clinton officials. In a June 15, 1995, speech before the Philadelphia Bar Association, Madeleine Albright emphasized (and, I think, exaggerated) the diverse tasks that could be performed by a UN peacekeeping operation, which, she said, could “separate adversaries, maintain cease-fires; facilitate the delivery of humanitarian relief; enable refugees and displaced persons to find homes; demobilize combatants and create conditions under which political reconciliation may occur and free elections may be held. It can help to nurture new democracies; lower the global tide of refugees; reduce the likelihood of unwelcome interventions by regional powers; prevent small wars from growing into larger conflict.”116

  Spurred on by this vision, American participation in peacekeeping had spread rapidly into all the areas where the Clinton administration found cause to use force to achieve a goal.

  In the meantime, the costs of these missions were mounting. On March 8, 1995, the General Accounting Office (GAO) reported to the House of Representatives that United States had deployed the following troops:

  26,000 troops to the peacekeeping mission in Somalia

  14,000 troops to monitor repression of the population in southern Iraq

  11,700 troops to enforce the arms embargo in former Yugoslavia

  20,000 troops on what the Clinton team called “returning Haiti to democracy”

  2,000 troops to enforce the no-fly zone in Bosnia-Herzegovina

  1,000 troops to help provide humanitarian assistance in Bosnia

  1,500 troops for the security of safe havens for the population in northern Iraq

  “[A]s the number, size, and scope of peace operations have increased dramatically in the past several years,” the GAO report observed, “the nature and extent of U.S. participation have changed markedly. Recently, the United States has used much larger numbers of combat and support forces to respond to events in a number of locations.” The title of the report: “PEACE OPERATIONS: Heavy Use of Key Capabilities May Affect Response to Regional Conflicts.”117

  More Busy Nonresponse

  For all the expenditures the U.S. government was making around the world, however, the international response to Bosnia was still anemic compared to the challenges it faced. It takes a strong stomach to watch a town encircled; its population—swollen with refugees—bombed, strafed, and picked off by snipers; its crowded hospitals targeted; its water and electricity cut; and its inhabitants denied the food and medicine waiting for them just beyond the big guns. Yet, time and again, this is exactly what the UN and NATO forces managed to do: stand by and wait while the Serbs surrounded Bosnian towns.

  As embodied in 1993’s PDD-13, the Clinton administration’s policy committed the United States to broader participation in global peacekeeping. The discussions regarding this participation raised many questions, because in Bosnia, for example, peacekeepers had repeatedly inhibited efforts to protect Bosnians rather than inhibiting Serbian attackers.

  Only determined action could have stopped the spread of violence in the former Yugoslavia and restored credibility to the UN. It was clear that continuation of the feckless policies applied thus far in Bosnia would negate the idea of collective security for another generation. But NATO’s belated decision to resist Serb violations of UN-declared “safe areas,” including Sarajevo, provoked a violent Serb reaction.

  For months, the UN forces had tolerated Serbs blocking the delivery of food and medicine and reclaiming their heavy weapons from UN custody. But eventually the situation of UN peacekeepers and the civilian Bosnian population had deteriorated so badly that action was required. On May 25–26, 1995, NATO planes dropped bombs on Serb ammunition dumps near Pale. Although the targets had no military importance, the bombing enraged Bosnian Serb leaders, who responded with rocket attacks on downtown Tuzla that killed seventy civilians. Serb shelling of Sarajevo was stepped up, and serious hostage taking began.

  In June 1995, a group of Bosnian Serbs—dressed in stolen French uniforms and the blue berets of UN peacekeepers—infiltrated UN lines, seized a bridge in Sarajevo, and stole a half dozen UN tanks, two dozen armored personnel carriers, and assorted other vehicles and supplies. By week’s end, the Serbs held four hundred hostages, mainly British and French UN peacekeepers. Many of the hostages were chained in exposed positions as human shields to prevent another NATO raid.118 The foreign ministers of France, Germany, Great Britain, the United States, and Russia, who happened to be meeting, called this an “outrageous act.” The French proposed an international rapid reaction force to reinforce the peacekeepers. The British dispatched another fifteen hundred troops and put additional troops on alert. Clinton spoke of sending American ground forces to help evacuate or reposition UN troops. Defense Secretary Perry said that U.S. ground forces might be sent only as “part of a NATO operation in order to extract UN forces that are in danger.” Such an operation, he said, would have to be under NATO command and authorized by Congress.

  A few days earlier, on May 26, NATO secretary-general Willy Claes had made clear that air strikes would come only at the request of the UN and for the purpose of helping peacekeepers. “NATO has no intention to take sides in the conflict,” he said, “but will continue to act within the framework of the UN Security Council resolutions and the ongoing efforts of the international community to achieve a negotiated solution.” It was another ludicrous invocation of “NATO neutrality.” Claes also said that NATO’s actions were precipitated by “persistent and flagrant violations of the safe areas by the Bosnian Serbs…and represent a threat to the viability of the UN mission and a challenge to the will and the credibility of the international community.”

  Finally, after forty-eight hours of delay, the Security Council passed a resolution, authorizing NATO to take “necessary measures” to enforce the no-fly zone, “subject to close coordination” with the secretary-general and the UN peacekeeping forces. With the UN resolution in hand, the permission of the president of Croatia, and a resolution passed by the sixteen ambassadors to NATO, Claes instructed General Bertrand I. Lapresle, the military commander of UN forces in Bosnia, to take appropriate military action. After consultation with the secretary-general’s special representative, NATO authorized a limited attack o
n the Serb airstrip in Croatia, taking care not to destroy Serbian planes, hangars, or vehicles. This was not exactly decisive force. Admiral Leighton W. Smith, NATO commander in Southern Europe, said of the raid: “If I wanted to put that airfield out of commission, and to make sure nothing ever took off from it again, we would have taken out all the aircraft…. We would have hit their ammunition dumps and we would have taken out all the buildings anywhere around that airfield.”

  The halfhearted attack only emboldened the Serbs. Concluding that NATO was incapable of acting forcefully, Serb forces resumed their attacks, bombarding Bihac and the surrounding villages again with tanks and a helicopter gunship. Surface-to-air missiles were fired at British planes, and no significant NATO response was forthcoming. Bihac was soon completely surrounded. French foreign minister Alain Juppé said the events in Bosnia raised serious doubts about whether NATO could ensure European security in the post–cold war world. “Never has NATO appeared so little capable of maintaining security on the old Continent. Never have events in Bosnia shown it in so bad a light.”

  Spring and summer of 1995

  By the spring of 1995, three Muslim towns that had been declared safe zones in 1993 remained outside the control of the Bosnian Serbs: Srebrenica, Zepa, and Gorazde. They had been shelled and starved and were full of refugees from the surrounding towns. Each had given up its weapons as the price for becoming a safe area under UN protection. They were “protected” by a skeleton crew of two dozen Dutch soldiers, who were themselves surrounded by well-armed Serb troops.

  The events that followed, in the spring and summer of 1995, have been investigated by the Dutch and French parliaments, various journalists, and scholars seeking to understand what led to the mass murder of some eight thousand men and boys in Srebrenica, and the rape and brutalization of many of the girls and women. The details of the massacre of Srebrenica are so horrific that in 2002, after reviewing a report on the incident, the entire Dutch cabinet resigned in shame.119 “Someone must take responsibility” for the thousands killed in the massacre, one official said, “and no one else was willing to do so.”