Colossus

by Niall Ferguson

  TABLE 5. AMERICAN MILITARY PERSONNEL ON ACTIVE DUTY

  IN THE MIDDLE EAST: 1993 AND 2000

  Source: Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1995 and 2002.

  NEVER SAY “NEVER AGAIN”

  Bush the Elder could scarcely have been more rigorous in his commitment to the idea of a “new world order” under the aegis of the United Nations Security Council. Iraq was expelled and then contained according to the letter of its resolutions; Israel was to be forced to make peace with the Palestinians on the same basis. Yet events that were already unfolding by the time Bush left office in January 1993 were to force his successor to reexamine—albeit reluctantly and hesitantly—American attitudes toward the UN.

  One of the time bombs Bush bequeathed to Clinton was the American involvement in the Somali civil war. At least five distinct military factions had been engaged in an escalating struggle for control of the country for most of the 1980s, but it was not until the end of 1992, with famine looming, that the United States became involved. Once again it did so with a mandate from the UN Security Council (resolution 794); a joint army, marine and navy task force was sent not to end the fighting but simply to facilitate the delivery of aid to the areas of greatest need. One of the new president’s earliest foreign policy acts was to wind this force down, from twenty-six thousand men to just five thousand. However, when gunmen loyal to warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid, leader of the grandly named United Somali Congress, murdered twenty-four UN soldiers from Pakistan, the Security Council issued a new resolution (837) authorizing his arrest. Dutifully, the United States responded by sending a detachment of Army Rangers supported by the elite Delta Force.

  Like all Americans, William Jefferson Clinton had learned his lesson from the Vietnam War. But it was a different lesson from Colin Powell’s. Powell’s, as we have seen, was that American forces should never fight other than from a position of overwhelming strength, with limited goals that could be swiftly attained while commanding public support. Clinton’s was more simple. It was that presidents who presided over wars in which American soldiers died did not get reelected. The unspoken Clinton Doctrine was thus as simple and as radical as the Powell Doctrine: the United States should not engage in any military interventions that might endanger the lives of American service personnel. To this doctrine he was faithful throughout his eight years in office, as figure 10 shows: during the Clinton years, the chances of an American serviceman being killed by hostile action while on active duty were less than 1 in 160,000. He was six times more likely to be murdered by one of his comrades, nineteen times more likely to kill himself and fifty times more likely to die in an accident. Indeed, in 1999 a young American was almost as likely to be a victim of hostile fire if he stayed in high school than if he joined the army. Unfortunately for Clinton, almost the first military intervention he authorized resulted in a spectacular military debacle that left eighteen Americans dead. This was the now celebrated “Black Hawk Down” fiasco in Mogadishu.

  According to Mark Bowden, it was not good luck but calculation that led the Somali forces to shoot down two of the American helicopters that had rashly been sent on a daylight mission to “snatch” Aidid and his lieutenants. “Every enemy advertises his weakness in the way he fights,” Bowden has written: “To Aideed’s fighters, the Rangers’ weakness was apparent. They were not willing to die…. To kill Rangers, you had to make them stand and fight. The answer was to bring down a helicopter. Part of the Americans’ false superiority, unwillingness to die, meant they would do anything to protect each other, things that were courageous but also sometimes foolhardy.”23 To read his account, based on interviews with survivors of the abortive raid, is to be impressed not only by the truth of this—indeed, by its understatement, since the Americans appear to have been willing to risk their lives to rescue even the bodies of their dead comrades24—but also by an unmentioned corollary, the Rangers’ tremendous readiness to slaughter Somalis indiscriminately. The worst aspect of the Black Hawk Down episode was not that eighteen American soldiers died; it was that at least as many and probably more unarmed Somali men, women and children were indiscriminately mowed down by panicking Rangers.

  FIGURE 10

  Deaths of U.S. Service Personnel on Active Duty by Manner of Death, 1993–2000

  Source: U.S. Department of Defense.

  Clinton’s response took a form that has been characteristic of many American interventions before and since. He increased the number of troops, but at the same time he specified a date for their departure, just six months later. The plan to capture Aidid was quietly abandoned. Indeed, he was flown in a U.S. transport plane to a peace conference in Ethiopia just a few weeks later.25 The problem with this approach hardly needs to be spelled out: the certainty that American forces would soon be gone removed any incentive on the part of the Somali warlords to mend their ways. Something very similar happened in September 1994, when the Clinton administration—once again acting under a UNSC resolution (940)—sent twenty thousand troops to Haiti to restore the elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who had been ousted by the military three years before. Six months later the United States handed over responsibility to a UN mission, leaving only a few hundred men on the island and allowing Aristide to resume the normal routine of Haitian politics: theft, murder, intimidation, corruption.

  In ethnically homogeneous Haiti, where 95 percent of the population are the descendants of African slaves, there can never be such a thing as genocide; there can be only mass homicide. Yet genocide, meaning the murder of a tribe or people, loomed ever larger than plain murder in the course of the 1990s. The term is itself a neologism dating back to 1944, when it was coined by Raphael Lemkin in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. Lemkin was a Polish-Jewish refugee from nazism, whose family was all but obliterated in the Holocaust (forty-nine of his relatives died, including his parents; only his brother and his brother’s wife and children survived). It was his single-handed campaign that turned a made-up word into one of the foundations of postwar international law. By the end of 1948 it seemed that Lemkin had triumphed. Not only had the UN General Assembly unanimously passed a resolution condemning genocide in 1946, but by 1948 it had passed—again nem con—a Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.26

  Yet there proved to be a nearly fatal flaw in Lemkin’s project. The country that had granted him asylum, the United States—in other words, the country best placed to do something to stop genocide, whether by economic pressure or military intervention—refused to ratify the convention. Indeed, it was not until 1985 that opposition in the Senate was finally overcome (in an attempt by the Reagan administration to repair the damage done by the president’s ill-judged visit to the Bitburg War Cemetery in West Germany, where forty-nine Waffen SS officers turned out to be buried). Hardbitten realists still argued that the UN convention ought not to be ratified since it would tend to enhance the standing of the International Court of Justice. Indeed, Senator Jesse Helms sought to water down the terms of ratification with a number of so-called reservations, understandings and declarations. Nevertheless, as the study and memorializing of the Holocaust came to occupy an ever more important place in American cultural life, such realism grew less respectable. Democratic and Republican presidents alike took their turns to insist that genocide must never be allowed to happen again. Thus Jimmy Carter in 1979: “We must forge an unshakable oath with all civilized people that never again will the world fail to act in time to prevent this terrible crime of genocide.” Thus Ronald Reagan in 1984: “Like you, I say in a forthright voice, ‘Never again!’ ” And thus Bill Clinton in 1993, opening the Holocaust Museum in Washington: “We must not permit that to happen again.” Unfortunately, “never again” turned out in the 1990s to mean “no more than once or twice a decade.”

  There is no need here to detail the events that led to the disintegration of the multiethnic Yugoslav federation into twelve territorial fragments. The crucial point is that where this
disintegration was violent—notably though not exclusively in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Krajina and Kosovo— it posed a profound challenge to all those who had pledged never to permit another genocide (least of all in Europe). The deal struck between the Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic and the Croatian leader Franjo Tudjman in March 1991 to partition Bosnia was always intended to lead to “cleansing of the ground” (ciscenje terena) of Muslims (hence “ethnic cleansing”); as Tudjman later remarked, there was intended to be “no Muslim part,” despite the fact that Muslims accounted for two-fifths of the population. From the moment the Bosnian Serbs proclaimed their own independent republic centered on Pale and began their attacks on Sarejevo (April 1992) the world was faced with an unmistakable case of genocide as defined in the UN convention.27 What is more, although atrocities against civilians were perpetrated by all the three sides in the conflict, there was from an early stage evidence that most of the genocidal acts were the responsibility of the Serbian authorities in Pale and their masters in Belgrade. According to the State Department, only 8 percent of recorded atrocities during the war were the responsibility of Bosnian Muslims. And of all the crimes perpetrated during the war, none came close in its premeditated savagery to the massacre of more than seven thousand Bosnian Muslim men in Srebrenica by Serbian forces.

  Here was genocide. Where was the United Nations? The answer is that it was right there; indeed, with grotesque irony, its forces effectively presided over the worst of the genocidal atrocities.

  The initial efforts to avoid a conflict in Yugoslavia had in fact been left to an ad hoc international conference under the former British foreign secretary Lord Carrington. But in 1991 the United Nations turned to an American, the former secretary of state Cyrus Vance, to negotiate the deployment of peacekeeping forces (UNPROFOR), which were duly sent to Croatia and later Bosnia. Specified towns were designated as “safe areas,” which UNPROFOR was charged with protecting. At the same time, the UN imposed sanctions on the whole of Yugoslavia, including Bosnia, a circumstance that greatly handicapped the Bosnian Muslims, who had no significant internal source of arms and other supplies; the Bosnian Serbs, by contrast, received substantial assistance from Belgrade.

  It is important to recollect that much of the responsibility for this woefully ill-conceived response lay with the European powers that had pro- claimed their ability to cope with the Yugoslav crisis without American assistance. Supposedly, this was to be “the hour of Europe.” But Europe, as usual, spoke with multiple voices. It had been the German foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, euphoric after the ease with which his country’s reunification had been achieved in 1990, who had accelerated the disintegration of the Yugoslav federation by his precipitate recognition of Slovenian and Croatian independence in the autumn of the following year. By contrast, the British government adopted a posture of studious, not to say shameless, neutrality, insisting as the conflict escalated that it was a civil war between morally equivalent foes, obsessed with their own “ancient hatreds.” Successive British foreign secretaries willfully ignored the evidence of the sustained campaign by Milosevic to whip up murderous nationalism among the Serbs and instead concentrated on blocking any effective intervention—by anyone.

  In fact, the Bush administration had contemplated “a sort of mini-Iraq thing” as early as the winter of 1991, drawing up contingency plans for a military strike against the Serbs. It was decided instead to take the Europeans at their word. “They will screw it up,” argued Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, “and this will teach them a lesson.”28 Eagleburger’s successor, Warren Christopher, was also inclined to keep out of what he called “a problem from hell.” And during the 1992 presidential campaign, Clinton himself had argued that American troops should not be sent “into a quagmire that is essentially a civil war.”29 This was a line echoed on numerous occasions by key figures, not least Colin Powell, still chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (“No American President could defend to the American people the heavy sacrifice of lives it would cost to resolve this baffling conflict”) and Defense Secretary William Cohen, who unwittingly gave a “green light” to Serbian attacks on Gorazde when he declared that the United States would not enter the war to avert its fall.30 Nevertheless, the arguments for intervention never went away in Washington.31 And with every harrowing news report from Bosnia, they grew stronger.

  American indignation took time to overcome European appeasement, however. In May 1993 the British government smothered American proposals to lift sanctions and launch air strikes against the Serbs (“lift and strike”). In November the following year the Foreign Office protested indignantly when the United States unilaterally ceased to enforce the arms embargo.32 American planes flew supplies of medicine to Sarajevo and enforced a UN-authorized no-fly zone (as if ethnic cleansing were being carried out from fighter planes). But air strikes against Serb positions were opposed by the British on the ground that they would leave UNPROFOR forces vulnerable to Serb reprisals. It took an atrocity on the scale of the massacre at Srebrenica—a town supposedly under the protection of Dutch blue helmets—to tip the balance belatedly in favor of American intervention. Now the United States insisted that NATO bomb the Serbs in earnest. Sure enough, Operation Deliberate Force, coinciding as it did with a major Croatian offensive and a rift between Milešović and the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadjić, forced the Serbs to retreat.

  The institutional framework within which American policy over Bosnia evolved was bewildering in its complexity. Not only the UN but also NATO, to say nothing of the Conference on (later Organization for) Security and Cooperation in Europe, the Council of Europe and the West European Union; all, it seemed, had to have their say.33 Yet the overwhelming impression remains that if one institution got it completely wrong in Bosnia, it was the United Nations. And its failures were in large measure a result of the conduct of two permanent members of the Security Council: Britain and, to a lesser extent, France. (Significantly, it had been at Jacques Chirac’s insistence that the UN troops in charge of the so-called safe areas were commanded by a French general.) 34 In the end, the Dayton Accords drawn up and forced upon the recalcitrant Serbs—after the Croats and Muslims had struck a deal of their own—were the work of none of these august bodies but of an informal Contact Group, composed of the United States, Britain, France, Germany and Russia, the nineteenth-century great powers doing business as of old, but now under firm American leadership in the person of Richard Holbrooke.35 With sublime insouciance, the French foreign minister still insisted: “One cannot call it an American peace,” even requesting that the Dayton agreement be referred to as the “Treaty of the Élysée.”36 The reality was very different. It was the threat of American air strikes that forced the Serbs to accept a smaller share of the partitioned Bosnia. It was the presence of twenty thousand American troops—a third of the Implementation Force (IFOR)—that ensured they did not renege on the agreement.

  The disintegration of Yugoslavia had begun in Kosovo; it also ended there. It had been at a rally in Kosovo in 1989—to mark the 600th anniversary of the battle of Kosovo Polje—that Milošević had first revealed his mutation from Communist to radical nationalist. In one respect the case of Kosovo was clear-cut: unlike in Bosnia, there was a large ethnic majority, since Albanians accounted for more than three-quarters of the population, a proportion that had risen during the 1980s owing to the higher Albanian birthrate. But although Tito had granted its inhabitants a measure of autonomy in 1974, Kosovo had remained a province of Serbia. Whereas both the European Union and the United States had not hesitated to recognize Bosnian independence, which amounted to the secession of one of the republics from the Yugoslav federation, they felt unable to do the same for Kosovo. The trouble was that even as the Serbs were forced to compromise in Bosnia, so they stepped up their long-running campaign of violence and intimidation against the Albanian majority in Kosovo. Ethnic cleansing resumed: at Drenica in March 1998 eighty-five Kosovar Albanians were killed; at Raca
k ten months later, another forty-five. Support for the militant Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) grew. Peaceable Albanians began to seek refuge across the border.

  The compromise that emerged at Rambouillet from the mediating efforts of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe was designed to stop the violence simply by postponing a decision on Kosovo’s constitutional status: for three years the province would come under NATO control, after which a referendum would determine its future.37 The Serbs rejected this. The United States knew how to change their minds. Yet three things were different about the decision to unleash the full might of the U.S. Air Force against not just the Serbian forces in Kosovo but Serbia as a whole. First, the Clinton administration did not seek the approval of the United Nations Security Council; it was NATO, not the UN, that went to war. Secondly, this was an intervention that very clearly violated the sovereignty of Serbia, precisely why approval from the UNSC was not sought. At the time a number of commentators (this author among them) worried that the war violated not only Article 2 of the UN Charter but also the Helsinki Accords Final Act and indeed NATO’s own defensive rationale.38 There was a plausible ground for intervention—to avert genocide—but it required a UN resolution to be legitimate. Thirdly, the air strikes had the unanticipated effect of worsening the situation of those on whose behalf they were launched. Altogether between December 1998 and May 1999 an estimated thirty thousand Albanians were killed and nearly a million people were forced from their homes. Most of this happened after the bombing began on March 24, 1999. With war declared, Milošević felt able to pursue ethnic cleansing with almost Hitlerian ruthlessness. He underestimated American resolve, however, and after seventy-eight days of bombing was forced to capitulate. Once again airpower sufficed to eliminate Serb resistance; American troops could be deployed— as seven thousand of a fifty-five-thousand-strong Kosovo Force (KFOR)— without a shot’s needing to be fired, though it may be that Milošević gave in only to avert an assault by U.S. land forces in support of the KLA.39