After the Vultures: Holbrooke's Bosnia Peace Came Too Late

In May 1995, after more than three years of bloodshed in Bosnia, Richard Holbrooke finally lost it. An ineffectual flurry of NATO bombing against Bosnian Serb positions had led to the Serb seizure of more than 300 U.N. peacekeepers and predictable diplomatic paralysis. Holbrooke's recommendation to the White House was blunt: bombard Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic's self-styled capital in Pale if his men did not release their hostages within 48 hours. The suggestion -- made from Budapest, where Holbrooke was about to wed the writer Kati Marton -- was met with incredulity in Washington. But as Holbrooke, the Clinton administration's Bosnia envoy, relates in To End a War, he was not joking. "I'm serious," Holbrooke told the State Department, "but now I have to get married."

The incident -- at once grotesque, tragic, and faintly comical -- says much about the former assistant secretary of state for Europe, whose rage for peace helped bring an end to the war, and about the cautious administration he served. It also touches on this memoir's fundamental but generally understated tension: between Holbrooke's espousal of forceful solutions and the hesitations of an American military establishment haunted by "mission creep."

Holbrooke has Bosnia in his blood. Early visits in 1992 to Banja Luka and Sarajevo ensured that the genocidal Serb rampage against the Muslims that year -- the central event of the war -- was no abstraction to him. Unlike the mealy-mouthed majority, he had a memory. So armed, he understood that negotiation was useless without the credible threat of force. The West, he warned, "could not expect the Serbs to be conciliatory at the negotiating table as long as they had experienced nothing but success on the battlefield." Moreover, Holbrooke was comfortable with the sort of improvised theatrics that sometimes makes To End a War a study in Balkan diplomacy as the art of the burlesque. In many respects, Holbrooke's achievement was peace-by-tantrum, and in every respect, he was an unusual figure in Bill Clinton's Washington.

By now, Holbrooke is a familiar personality. His bulldozing bluntness, voracious appetites, demanding ego, infectious warmth, impatience with mediocrity, patriotic belief in American power, and oddly guileless sensitivity have been much pored over. The attraction is mutual; Holbrooke's obsession with the press is overwhelming. (Full disclosure: I am described as "one of the most knowledgeable journalists to cover the war.") A lot of compliments are handed out -- the late Pamela Harriman is "remarkable," the former ambassador to London, Admiral William Crowe, is "powerful," and, most bizarrely, Dayton, Ohio, is "charming."

But it is a deeply serious Holbrooke who stands at the heart of To End a War. This is the story of the struggle of a dedicated public servant driven by an almost frenzied passion to wrest from the wreckage of Bosnia a peace worthy of America's name and values, and thereby shore up the deeply divided NATO on which America's future in Europe depended. His appointment as peace emissary came only after a Western failure so protracted, so shot through with hypocrisy, that Bosnia's mottled, multiethnic fabric, NATO's unity, and the optimism of the Cold War's end had already been shredded. To the last, Holbrooke had to deal with officials for whom "quagmires," "body bags," and other specters of Vietnam and Somalia were far more real and relevant than what, by 1995, was the ritual agony of Bosnia.

From these inauspicious elements, the Dayton peace agreement of November 1995 emerged. Concluded after 21 days of pizza-littered talks at an unlovely Air Force base in Ohio, the accord was imperfect, as Holbrooke himself concedes here. At once an ambitious blueprint for a single Bosnian state and a desperate compromise containing the lineaments of a potential partition, Dayton stopped the fighting but has thus far failed to lay a lasting foundation for peace that would allow American troops to come home. Thus the agreement's place in history, and by extension Holbrooke's, hangs in the balance. This book has the impassioned, sometimes indignant tone of a man still fighting a battle.

Despite its title, To End a War is no how-to manual. Holbrooke throws in several reflections on the peacemaker's craft -- "negotiating requires flexibility on tactics but a constant vision of the ultimate goal" -- and is at his hard-nosed best designing negotiating tables small enough to ensure that the unwanted (especially lowly Bosnian Serb functionaries and pouty Europeans) have no place at them. He also offers some telling thoughts on Balkan diplomacy as a particular art form: "The best way to confuse someone in the Balkans, we often said, was to accept his initial proposal without change, at which point he would change his own position!" This observation was particularly true of Alija Izetbegovic, Bosnia's president, who drove Holbrooke to distraction at Dayton. But Holbrooke -- a man of action and instinct, a man once appalled by Robert S. McNamara's suppression of the emotional -- is little inclined to offer pat conflict-resolution formulas. As he writes, "We're inventing peace as we go." The going is rambunctious and fascinating. Holbrooke provides a roller-coaster ride, from the driver's seat, through the decisive months when the United States was reluctantly compelled to reassert its leadership in a wounded Europe.

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